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  “Did you beat him with the stock of that rifle?” Burgwyn asked. “His skull was fractured, Roger,” the prosecutor added. “You say you were standing above him with a rifle. Did you hit him with it?”

  “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” Oakley said once more in the same distant monotone.

  “Who told you to say that, Roger?” the prosecutor demanded. “Who told you to plead the Fifth Amendment?”

  “My lawyers,” Oakley whispered. “Frank Banzet and Mr. Watkins.” At this point, the court reporter remembered, the young man began to cry softly.

  “You know, of course, that neither your wife nor your attorney can testify against you, don’t you? They told you that, too, didn’t they? And they told you that all the witnesses had testified that Larry was holding the gun, didn’t they?” Burgwyn continued. “And they told you that if you said you’d shot the rifle, but that it was an accident, your brother and father might not have to go to prison, didn’t they? And they told you that it would be hard to convict you of something you didn’t do, when all the witnesses had already testified that your brother had done it, didn’t they? Isn’t that more or less what they told you, Roger?”

  “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” the young man said weakly.

  “Your brother shot that boy, didn’t he?” Burgwyn said. “And you and your daddy helped kill him, didn’t you? They let you stay home with your wife and the baby, isn’t that right? And now you’re supposed to help them get out of jail by saying that you had the gun the whole time, when you know there isn’t a witness anywhere that can testify to that effect, aren’t you? Nobody but your wife and your attorney, and neither one of them can testify against you. Tell the truth.”

  “No, sir,” Roger Oakley sobbed softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “No further questions,” Burgwyn told the judge. The defense rested its case before lunch. The attorneys for both sides would begin offering summations that afternoon at three.

  During the recess, Lieutenant J. C. Williams of the Oxford Police Department and Bill Burgwyn fielded questions from reporters who wanted to know why Roger Oakley had not been charged in the case. “There was a third party mentioned from time to time during the investigation as a participant in the slaying,” Lieutenant Williams stammered. “But none of my five witnesses could make a positive identification of the third person. And none of the five witnesses told investigating officers that the third party was the one who pulled the trigger. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it, either.” Burgwyn told the reporters that Roger Oakley would have been charged in the original indictment with first-degree murder, since he had clearly helped Larry and Robert Teel kill Henry Marrow, but that the prosecution “could never positively identify the other man” who had been standing with the pair over the body. The prosecutor denied any implication that the investigators had charged the wrong man: all of them had participated in the killing, he said, which was true, and it made little difference who had pulled the last trigger. Every witness for the defense was a member of the Teel family, and he did not see any reason to take Roger’s confession, which could not be verified, over the testimony of five witnesses for the state, all of whom agreed that Larry Teel had fired the fatal shot.

  The trial resumed at three, at which time attorneys for both sides prepared to make their final addresses to the jury. James Ferguson gave a striking and memorable summation for the prosecution that Friday afternoon. “From the first day of this trial,” Ferguson told the jury, “we have heard ‘self-defense, self-defense, self-defense.’ When every one of you and the other prospective jurors was questioned from this side of the table,” the seasoned civil rights lawyer said, gesturing toward Billy Watkins and Frank Banzet, “you were asked again and again whether you believed in the right of a man to defend himself. This was the central issue, the defense told us. It was a question of ‘self-defense.’ ” His eyes swept up and down the row of five white women and seven white men who sat impassively in the jury box before him. “Henry Marrow was running away just as fast as his legs would carry him when they shot him the first time,” Ferguson said. “They had to shoot him to stop him from leaving. And then he was flat on his back, bleeding, begging for his life, and then unconscious, after they beat him half to death, more than a hundred feet off the Teel property, when they shot him in the head. And yet Mr. Watkins and his colleagues tried their best to persuade you that it was a question of ‘self-defense.’

  “And now, after the state has proven beyond any doubt that this killing was by no stretch of the imagination an act of self-defense,” continued James Ferguson, “they have come up with this story of an ‘accidental shooting.’ It was an accident, they tell you now.” He looked up and down the jury once more, and then delivered the hook. “I guess we might say this is what you’d call accidental self-defense. I don’t know about y’all, but I have never heard of ‘accidental self-defense,’ myself. This may be the first instance of ‘accidental self-defense’ in recorded history.”

  Of course, Ferguson told the jurors, most of whom stared at the floor, there was no such category as “accidental self-defense,” and nothing remotely like that had happened. They all knew what had happened, and five witnesses for the state had made it clear what had happened. All of the witnesses for the defense, Ferguson reminded them, were members of the Teel family. No one could blame them for trying to keep their family together, but a man had been killed and justice must be done. “If you turn these men loose,” Ferguson told the jury, “you may as well hang a wreath on the courthouse door on your way out, because justice is dead in Granville County.” At that, Judge Martin ended court for the day, and announced that court would continue to meet through the weekend.

  Saturday morning, Watkins and Burgwyn presented a dramatic clashing of styles. Watkins made a professional presentation that all the observers agreed was long and dry. “Watkins spoke to the jury for an hour and 30 minutes,” the Raleigh News and Observer noted. He explained that the prosecution had decided to charge Larry Teel with firing the fatal shot but actually had not known whether or not that was true; the prosecution’s case was “a shot in the dark,” he said.

  The other point that Watkins made again and again was that the jury could not rely upon the word of the prosecution’s witnesses, especially Boo Chavis, who not only had a significant criminal record but had practically grown up in the same house with the deceased. “Most of [Watkins’s] time was spent in an attempt to discredit the testimony of the state’s witnesses,” the newspaper reported, “particularly William Augustus Chavis, [the] young Oxford Negro who testified he had seen Larry Teel place a rifle muzzle against Marrow’s forehead and pull the trigger.”

  “This is one of the most serious cases ever to be tried in this state,” Burgwyn noted, opening his brief summation. “The outcome will affect events in this community, the entire state of North Carolina, and across the nation.” The murder of Henry Marrow was “a useless, senseless death,” he said, but it occurred “at a moment of great upheaval on the subject of race. We cannot tell the world that we have one system of justice for Negroes and another for whites,” Burgwyn advised the jury. The grizzled prosecutor, weary from lack of sleep, rubbed his eyes and squinted as he reminded jurors of the brief testimony of Page Hudson, the state’s chief medical examiner, on the first day of the trial. “As Dr. Hudson told you, Henry Marrow had two serious fractures of the skull, one on the top of his head and another on the back of his head,” Burgwyn stated. “He might well have died even if that last bullet had never blasted through his brain, but it did.” Who fired the shot really didn’t matter, he said, since they had all intended to kill him. Burgwyn asked the jury to recall the bruises and abrasions all over Marrow’s body, including the shotgun wounds on his buttocks and the back of his legs, “wounds that immobilized him,” said Burgwyn.

  “After they shot him down, and while he was laying there, flat on his back, unable to get up
,” the prosecutor continued, “they kicked him and stomped him and hit him in the head with a shotgun butt over and over again. They beat him while he begged for his life, beat him until he was probably unconscious. And then they shot him in the head like you or I would kill a snake.” Burgwyn turned and walked slowly toward the prosecution table, apparently overcome with emotion.

  “Right at that moment,” recalled the court reporter who had been taking notes during the trial, “when it was quiet, we all heard a baby crying outside the courtroom. The window was open, and you could hear it all through the room. We could all hear it. And I just started crying.” Two decades after the trial, as I interviewed her, her eyes filled with tears again. “I was thinking about that little baby, the one whose father had been killed, and the little baby that had just been born in the Teel family, Roger’s little girl. And how none of this was their fault, none of it. All of this was our fault, not theirs. It was all our fault.”

  Seizing the moment, Burgwyn turned around to face the jury once more. “When I hear that little baby cry,” he said, “I think about a little girl that is going to grow up without knowing her father. And I can’t help but hear that cry as a cry from the deceased from his grave, saying, ‘vindicate my death. vindicate my death. Don’t let them kill me and just tell the world, “It was an accident.” Don’t let them do that to me. Please don’t let them do that to me.’ ” And then he went back to the table.

  After Burgwyn sat down, Judge Martin gave instructions to the jury. They could bring in one of five verdicts, he explained. They could find the defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. They could rule the defendants guilty of murder in the first degree with a recommendation of life. They were also free to decide that the defendants were guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter. If they believed that the defendants were not guilty of anything, Martin told the jurors, they could find the defendants not guilty. In North Carolina, he added, a verdict of first-degree murder without a recommendation of life imprisonment meant an automatic death sentence. If they found the defendants guilty of first-degree murder, they would need to decide whether they felt the death penalty was appropriate. With that, he sent them out to determine the fate of Robert and Larry Teel and left the court in session but “at ease” until six-thirty that evening.

  All afternoon the town waited on the jury. “We were scared to death,” Gene Edmundson, one of the defense lawyers, remembered. “You just don’t know.” Forty or fifty young black men and women stood around outside the courthouse, doing their best to look militant and disdainful of it all, as if they knew that the white men would be acquitted. Many of them, however, still managed to hope for a conviction. Klansmen stood around brooding. Two dozen armed white men, the “auxillary police,” some of whom reportedly belonged to the Klan, too, stood at ten-foot intervals up and down the sidewalk outside the courthouse, helmets on and riot clubs at the ready. Highway patrol units with tear gas and shotguns were on full alert nearby. When the judge called the trial back into session at six-thirty, hundreds of people filed quietly back into the courthouse, state troopers patting everyone down for weapons at the door. Judge Martin brought the twelve white jurors back in after six long hours of deliberation and asked the foreman if a verdict had been reached. Charles M. Shaw, an elevator inspector from Raleigh and the foreman of the jury, said that they had not come to a verdict yet. The judge then ordered the jury sequestered for the night, and the spectators filed out again.

  The next morning, many people went to the courthouse instead of church. A courtroom packed with more than four hundred people, about three hundred of them African Americans, waited for the verdict. Deliberations had begun in a locked chamber adjacent to the courtroom at nine-thirty, and it was just an hour and a half later when foreman Shaw notified the judge that they were ready to report. As it happened, churches all over town were starting their eleven o’clock services. “The jury came out at eleven o’clock in the morning,” defense attorney Edmundson recalled, “and when they knocked on the door to the courtroom, the church bells all over town started ringing.” The twelve jurors filed out and took their seats. Judge Martin asked the foreman, Shaw, to stand. “Have you reached a unanimous verdict?” he entoned.

  “We have, Your Honor,” Shaw replied, handing the signed verdict to the bailiff, who passed it to the judge. After Judge Martin silently scanned the verdict, he handed it to the clerk to announce: “We, the members of the jury, unanimously find Robert Larry Teel not guilty of murder in the first degree.” The room erupted into wailing and yelling. “Everybody jumped up yelling and crying,” recalled Carolyn Thorpe, one of the young black women in the courtroom that morning. “Everybody was totally shocked, furious. It was something like reading a fiction book. I just couldn’t believe it was happening like this. It was like a cartoon.”

  “Order in this court! There will be order in this courtroom!” Judge Martin exclaimed, pounding his gavel. “This court will tolerate no further outbursts.” The judge ordered the bailiff to arrest anyone else who said anything out of order on charges of contempt of court. The second and third verdicts found Robert Teel not guilty of first-degree murder and not guilty of aiding and abetting first-degree murder, and the announcements were greeted with silence and tears. Larry Teel threw his head into his hands and wept. Prosecutor Burgwyn insisted on polling the jury, forcing each juror, one by one, to pronounce the words “not guilty.” After the jury left the room, Judge Martin ordered the spectators to depart one row at a time, in orderly fashion, alternating between the black and white sides of the courtroom. Deputies enforced the edict. As the young blacks filed out, most of them crying or fuming, they spread the word that everyone should go to a mass meeting at the First Baptist Church to decide what would happen next.

  The Raleigh News and Observer’s lead editorial the next morning was entitled “Sham and Mockery.” The jury was “doubly conned,” the editors wrote, if it believed “the incredible testimony of a surprise witness who surfaced on the last day of the trial and said he had fired the fatal shot into Marrow’s brain accidentally.” The newspaper’s editors noted all the irregularities in the case and pointed out the obvious: that even the testimony of the defense witnesses themselves would have supported a conviction of manslaughter. It was as though the jurors had decided to give Robert and Larry Teel a medal. The whole affair, the News and Observer said, “has been a sham and a mockery of justice.”

  Decades later, prosecutor Burgwyn remained philosophical about losing the case, but shook his head in disgust. “I thought it was absolutely the worst miscarriage of justice I had ever seen,” he said, “and I still do. They should have convicted, but they didn’t.” Billy Watkins and Gene Edmundson of the defense team both denied that politics outside the courtroom had affected the trial’s outcome. They simply thought they had done a better job than the prosecution, although Edmundson was not sure that the verdict would have been the same with what he called “modern methods of investigation.” Teel himself agreed that Billy Watkins’s legal representation was decisive. “I’m pretty sure if he hadn’t been a smart attorney they would have gotten me,” Teel told me. “I think he was a very, very smart man by keeping our mouths shut and letting the prosecution go on and hang themselves.” But the most eloquent analysis came from one of the young black men who had been sitting under the shed at the Tidewater Seafood Market that night. Jimmy Chavis had held Henry Marrow’s head in his lap on the way to the hospital. “That court,” Chavis told me years later, “that court won’t nothing but a shoeshine parlor.”

  CHAPTER 11

  WE ALL HAvE OUR OWN STORIES

  IN THE ONLY published local history of Granville County, sponsored by the chamber of commerce, the authors offer the story that my hometown of Oxford undertook a “voluntary desegregation” program in 1964. That is one big white lie, and anybody who actually believes that mess, my grandmama Rene-Rene might say, don’t even have a bucket to carry it in, bless their heart. Even if Oxford had
abandoned racial segregation that year, which it certainly did not, a decision to obey federal law stretches the meaning of the word “voluntary.”

  But truth and falsehood keep house on both sides of the color line, and we all have our own stories to tell. In the 1980s, when Eddie McCoy would talk about how murder, marches, and mayhem had— and had not—changed everything back in 1970, local black folks would sometimes dismiss the movement with a wave of the hand. “Y’all didn’t do nothing,” they would say. “Y’all didn’t even have to do that stuff. President Kennedy and them done all that. They had all that stuff planned out up in Washington. Y’all didn’t do nothing.” The people who dismissed local organizing, of course, had not participated in the movement. The majority of African Americans in Oxford and elsewhere had stayed on the sidelines, paralyzed by fear, indifference, or their inability to imagine a better world. The black middle class— hardly a middle class at all, since many of them were only a few pay-checks away from poverty—was especially reluctant. Having missed the freedom train in the 1960s and 1970s, the bystanders now told the story that the train had never come, that freedom had been an easy walk, or that the tracks had been laid by a federal grant.

  That last narrative had a grain of truth in it—the role of the federal government in the black freedom struggle was considerable— and yet added up to less than a half truth, offered at least in part to defend the storytellers against the fact that many of them were freed by a movement they had been afraid to support. Years later, McCoy would try to tell his stories to young black men who’d grown up on hip-hop and Ronald Reagan, taking both the gains of the movement and the contempt of their fellow Americans for granted, and they would scowl and mutter, “Ain’t nothing changed.” Sometimes McCoy was tempted to agree with the young bloods of the hip-hop nation, who disdained what they had been told about the civil rights movement; their stories resonated with some bitter realities about black America in the late twentieth century. But their dismissal of the movement was not the whole story, either.