Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  Sanford, North Carolina, was no exception. As in Birmingham, violence and nonviolence lived side by side, working in tension and in tandem with each other; the jails filled with nonviolent demonstrators, but riots in the streets left many people injured and one man shot through the leg. The tension in the streets made its way into the pages of my parents’ diaries, which they let me read almost forty years later. “I returned from Biscoe,” my father wrote in his diary, “to find that racial demonstrations had been held on our streets and 52 Negro youths had been arrested. I visited the jail and talked and prayed with some of those who had demonstrated.” On December 28, 1963, Mama noted tersely in her own diary, “Much stir over Negro demonstrations.”

  The next day, Daddy wrote a letter to the editor of the Sanford Herald, not from jail but from the confines of his conscience in a community of white Christians that did not want to hear him. His letter clearly drew on the tone of King’s Birmingham missive. “Last night, a 14-year-old boy spent his first night in jail,” Daddy wrote. “He was one of the more than 50 young people who were arrested yesterday in our city. His only real crime is that he had the wrong mother.

  “A moment of truth has arrived for Sanford,” he asserted. “Our Negro neighbors are no longer able to accept indignities imposed upon them. They are asking for centuries-long delayed justice. They have been charged with ‘trespassing.’ Indeed, they have trespassed, not so much upon our restaurants as upon our consciences.” Daddy went on to make some specific proposals for negotiation and reconciliation, employing King’s own phrasing to suggest that “our churches ought to open their doors to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and thus become the headlights of our community rather than the tail-lights,” and advocating “that our School Board ought to make plans now to voluntarily desegregate our schools next fall.” He saw no reason “to force our Negro neighbors to haul us into court.”

  “That 14-year-old boy who spent last night in our jail is going to win,” Daddy declared. “The highest we know of Democracy and Christianity is on his side. He wants to be free. Our community now has the opportunity finally to become true sons and daughters of one who once said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ ” He signed the letter “A fellow sinner, Vernon Tyson.”

  The newspaper editor wrote my father a scolding reply, reminding him that leaders who went “too far, too fast” ended up without any followers, and maybe without a job, too. Other people signaled their disapproval with lowered eyes, resentful stares, or anonymous hate mail. The editor was right that people in the pews at most white churches resisted the news that God called them to love their black neighbors as themselves—and to accept them as civic and social equals. My father needed no reminder that he was walking through a minefield. The editor had no way of knowing, of course, that my father drew on a deep well of spiritual strength, and was a Tyson from eastern North Carolina and therefore half crazy besides. It was not a bad trait for a man facing what was about to happen to my father in the perilous historical moment of 1963 and 1964.

  In the months after the Birmingham crusade, the fixed stars and immovable pillars of American history began to reel and rock. On June 11, 1963, fearing that Birmingham might soon ignite a local race war, President Kennedy made a historic address on national television, describing civil rights as “a moral issue” that was “as old as the Scriptures” and “as clear as the American Constitution” and calling for new civil rights legislation. Later that night, a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson, Mississippi, took a high-powered rifle and assassinated NAACP leader Medgar Evers. On August 28, Dr. King spoke to 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech; this brought him wide admiration but caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.” On September 16, Klan members in Birmingham bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four little black girls and maiming many others. And before Thanksgiving, sniper fire in Dallas took the life of President Kennedy, a death that seemed inextricably bound up with the momentous racial challenges confronting the nation.

  Amid these perilous hopes and agonizing tragedies, my father met Dr. Samuel Proctor at a statewide meeting of the North Carolina Council of Churches. Dr. Proctor was the president of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, where the sit-ins had been born, and one of the leading black preachers of his generation. Proctor gave a majestic speech at the council meeting, and Daddy stood patiently in line to speak to him afterward. Without thinking about it much, Daddy asked Dr. Proctor to come preach on February 2, 1964, Race Relations Sunday. Dr. Proctor accepted immediately, smiled warmly as he shook my father’s hand, and said, “Yes, and we’ll get run out of town together.”

  Proctor probably knew just how close to the bone of truth he was cutting with that prediction. As Dr. King liked to remind people, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, and our all-white churches did not welcome black preachers to the pulpit. Daddy had extended the invitation in the fall of 1963, when things were fairly calm in Sanford, but when we came back from my grandmother’s house in Biscoe after Christmas, the jails in Sanford were filled with black teenagers, the police had shot one of them, the Klan was on the rampage, and the whole community was in an uproar. Daddy’s timing could have been better. And he had neglected to tell anyone, even his allies, that he had invited a black preacher to come only a month later.

  Dr. Proctor was not just any black preacher, either; he was one of the leading black educators in the country and one of the most prominent African American ministers of his generation. In the decades to come, Ivy League universities would pay thousands of dollars to have Dr. Samuel Proctor deliver their commencement addresses. In late 1963 and early 1964, however, Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church rocked on its foundations at the thought of having a black man in their pulpit. When church members began to hear about Dr. Proctor’s proposed visit, the telephone started to ring incessantly. Fifty church members called a protest meeting in the fellowship hall and insisted that my father rescind the invitation. He was shocked at the outcry. “We are really having fireworks in our church concerning Dr. Proctor’s coming,” Mama scrawled in her diary. “I have hardly slept at all.”

  As the word filtered out into the community, Daddy began to receive a steady stream of death threats on the telephone. “I called the police station and told them that I wouldn’t mind a bit if they would bring a squad car by the house every once in a while,” my father recalled. “I really thought they were going to kill him,” Mama said later.

  My father found himself under enormous pressure from within and without. Not only was he afraid that someone might make good on the threats and dynamite the house; he was also afraid that he would lose his job. “I had badly miscalculated my position with the congregation,” he admitted years later. “If I had known how upset people were going to get, I might not have invited Dr. Proctor in the first place.” His own feelings were even harder to confront. He was an ambitious man of immense talents, a handsome preacher with gifts of eloquence. He had grown up poor and married a rich man’s daughter, and he had always wanted to give her things that he could not afford. Daddy’s generation was not given to admiration for noble failures; they wanted nice cars, brick houses, and all the accoutrements of success. One suspects, too, that he felt his in-laws looking over his shoulder; Martha’s younger sister had married a surgeon, and her brother now owned a textile mill. Being a preacher carried some small status, but it did not pay much. And being an unemployed preacher was a different matter altogether.

  The paycheck must have felt nearly as important as the pulpit that winter. Mama was pregnant again and money was tight. “Went to fit maternity dresses and get groceries,” Mama wrote in January. “We are very hungry these days.” But even though she was “kinda blue abo
ut finances,” as she noted, Mama kept on taking care of people. “I have been in kitchen most all day,” she wrote a few days later. “Mr. Caddell died. Made chicken tetrazzinni and baked cake. I fried chicken and made pimento cheese to carry to his family.” The next day she noted, “Vernon had two weddings tonight. He got $20. We certainly can use it!”

  Daddy was not much interested in money, but he had a driving need to succeed as a minister. “I was overly ambitious,” he admitted. “I don’t know where I got such ambition, but I had it bad. Ambition was one of those demons in the dark that came to me again and again. I was wanting people to like me and wanting to succeed, but knowing that I needed to stand in the fire, too.” Daddy’s closest friend in those days, Jack Crum, was a maverick Methodist preacher who had been run out of a church in Raleigh over the race issue and worked in constant threat of losing his job. But Crum kept on pushing, though not always gracefully. “Jack and I were different,” Daddy laughed. “He was a social prophet—a social firebug, some might say. He put it on the line. I was a politician, trying to lead people and preserve my influence and do my job as best I could. Jack was one of the farmers of my soul. He was my conscience. But I didn’t want to be like him, exactly. I wanted to do the right thing, but I didn’t want to pay that kind of price. I never wanted to lose.” And now Daddy felt like the mob was upon him.

  The day his parishioners held the protest meeting to oppose Daddy’s invitation to Dr. Proctor was the worst day of all. He strode into the fellowship hall, all shoeshine and handshakes, confident that he could win them over and carry the day, and found instead that he’d walked into a hornet’s nest. Daddy was stunned by the hostile reception and disappointed in his own performance. “Our faith is really being stretched,” Mama wrote in her diary on January 31. “At the meeting tonight Vernon was hurt to the core. Several made terribly cutting remarks to him. He just took it, but afterwards shed tears.” When Daddy came back to the house, there was more bad news.

  “Things were just about as bad as they were going to get,” Daddy recalled, thinking about that awful day, “and when I got home, someone had just called and said they were going to blow up my house and do harm to my children, and Martha was very much afraid.” Daddy walked quickly upstairs, tears welling in his eyes, wondering what on earth he would do.

  “Truth is,” he told me later, “I might have backed down if it hadn’t been for your mother. I didn’t want to lose. I just could not think about losing.” The main thing he did not want to do was to disappoint Mama. But she followed him upstairs. “Martha grabbed me from behind and squeezed me tight, and said she had rather live on a fivepoint circuit on minimum salary for the rest of her life than to see me sell my soul. She gave me permission to fail. If she hadn’t done that, our marriage could have fallen apart, or I might have turned tail and run. But she grabbed me from behind and told me to stand my ground.”

  The segregationists put their own kind of squeeze on Daddy, though, and some of my father’s supporters began to back off. The weak tea of moderation flowed freely and went like this: “Vernon might be right, but it isn’t worth tearing the church apart over.” At six o’clock the night before Dr. Proctor was scheduled to preach, Daddy called an emergency meeting of the church’s administrative board in an effort to ease the controversy. It may have been a tactical error. Some of the board members angrily demanded that my father cancel Dr. Proctor’s appearance the next morning. One of his adversaries kept pushing the telephone on the desk toward him, saying, “You can end all this with one phone call.” Others began to ask Daddy why he thought this one service was really worth the painful breach that loomed in front of them. “This thing is going to tear this church apart,” one man insisted. Just as the meeting threatened to dissolve in an uproar, a quiet, dignified older woman rose to speak.

  “Miss Amy” Womble was sixty, an “old-maid schoolteacher,” her neighbors would have said in those days. She walked with a limp. Miss Womble had been a first-grade teacher to most of the people in that room. The community honored her, but nobody had any idea what she thought about the burning social issues of the day. “I’ve been just sitting here sort of listening,” Miss Amy said. “And I hear one of us saying this is going to tear this church apart.” She looked directly at the man who had said it. “Now, I don’t know the man who is coming very much. I know he is the president of A & T, that’s all I know. But I know our pastor, and you know him, too, and he’s not going to tear anything apart. And I don’t suppose Dr. Proctor is going to tear anything apart, either. If there is going to be any tearing done, we’re going to do the tearing apart ourselves.”

  Miss Amy slowly hobbled to the front of the room and told the silent group of her former students a story. “There was a case up near Chapel Hill recently,” she said, “where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed in a car crash. So they thought. He was down there by the side of the road and they were just waiting for the ambulance to come and take him to the funeral home. There wasn’t any signs of life.

  “But then an airman from Pope Air Force Base stopped. He was home on furlough, and he saw the boy lying down there and he scrambled down the embankment and opened that boy’s mouth,” she continued. “And he saw the boy’s tongue stuck back in his throat, and he ran his finger back there and pulled out that tongue, and then gave that boy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By the time that ambulance got there,” Miss Amy said, “that boy was walking around alive as you or me. And the next week they had a big dinner up at the fire station out in Orange County for that airman, celebrating how he had saved that boy’s life.” She paused once more.

  “What I haven’t told you is that the boy who had the wreck was white, and that airman that saved him was a black man. But that’s the truth,” she said, “and I want all of you fathers to tell me something.” She looked searchingly around the room. “Now, which one of you fathers would have said to that airman, ‘Now, don’t you run your black fingers down my boy’s white throat’? Which of y’all would have told that airman, ‘Don’t you dare put your black lips on my boy’s mouth’?”

  My father, who retold the story in later years, including the day he preached Miss Amy Womble’s funeral, said, “I have never heard the voice of the Lord with such thunder, such wisdom, such love.” And something slightly miraculous occurred. “The board voted 25 to 14 to stand with Vernon and welcome Dr. Proctor,” my mother wrote in her diary. “We feel so blessed.” Afterward, several of my father’s friends and allies took him out for a quiet steak dinner. It was the fourth anniversary of the first sit-ins at Woolworth’s in Greensboro. Blood was still flowing but barriers were still falling, although Dr. Proctor could not have joined them at the restaurant even if he had been present. And that was just the beginning.

  When Daddy got home, my mother met him at the door with a bemused expression on her face. “Grayson Bryan came by,” she said, “and he was crying.” Bryan was from South Carolina and had come to Sanford to work in the local textile mill and live with what my daddy generously called “his poor sainted mother,” whom my father visited regularly. But Bryan had been one of my father’s most ardent adversaries on the issue of race, and had angrily condemned Daddy for inviting “that nigger preacher” to our church. My father did not even come in the house, just turned around and drove straight to Grayson Bryan’s place.

  Mr. Bryan, his face still wet with tears, met Daddy at the door, welcomed him inside, and poured him a glass of iced tea. “I want to tell you, Preacher, something happened to me tonight. When Miss Amy was talking, something happened that ain’t ever happened before. Old Love just come up in my heart,” Bryan sobbed, “and I want to tell you that I love you, I love Dr. Proctor, I love everybody.” And then Mr. Bryan fell to his knees beside his chair, and Daddy knelt beside him and said a short prayer, and went on home.

  It wasn’t over yet. When Daddy got back to the house, Mama met him at the door again. “I don’t know what you are doing,” she said with a smile, �
��but you must be serving liquor up there at the church because James Stephens came by here, and he was crying, too.” By that time, it was ten o’clock at night, but Daddy turned around again and got back into his old gray Pontiac and headed out to the Stephens place. Stephens was a member of the board, a man of some wealth, and profoundly conservative.

  “I went up there ready to vote against you tonight,” Stephens told my father, “but after Miss Amy talked I gave it some more thought, and I want you to know that it’s all right with me. I will be there in the morning and I will be glad to welcome Dr. Proctor as our guest.”

  The next morning was a beautiful sunny day, the kind of harbinger of spring that can come to the Carolinas in late winter. We looked out the windows and saw bumper-to-bumper traffic pouring into the church parking lot. Dr. Proctor turned out to be a tall, handsome man who radiated warmth and dignity. Though I was only five years old, I can still remember his soaring sermon, though I don’t know what he said, exactly. “We sang Fosdick’s great hymn, ‘God of grace and God of glory / On Thy people pour Thy power,’ ” Daddy recalled, quoting the old classic. “ ‘Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour.’ I looked up and the sanctuary was slam full, no visitors that I could see—these were our people. The ushers had flat run out of bulletins. It was our folks who had come.”

  Everyone probably expected Dr. Proctor to deliver nostrums on race relations, but he didn’t preach on race at all. Instead, he preached on Jacob wrestling with the angel. The only mention of race was in an opening story that Dr. Proctor deftly deployed in order to cross the chasm that lay before him that morning. He was the president of North Carolina A & T, he reminded them, and he faced a problem of enormous magnitude this morning. Everyone knew that, of course, and steeled themselves for an integrationist harangue.