Though the Klan that supported Robert Teel made a bid for mainstream acceptance, they remained openly committed to terrorism and launched a statewide campaign of violence in 1965. Klansmen tried to assassinate attorney James Ferguson, who would later help prosecute Teel for the death of Henry Marrow. They bombed a black-owned funeral home in New Bern and a black migrant labor camp near Swansboro, and they dynamited the cars of several New Bern civil rights activists. Klansmen torched two barns owned by the white mayor of vanceboro, Royce Jordan, because he also directed a job training program that helped poor blacks. Night riders fired dozens of shotgun blasts into a house where ten college student volunteers were sleeping as part of an antipoverty program in Craven County. In Harnett County, two Klan terrorists held a white man and a black man at gunpoint and tortured them with knives for being friends too conspicuously and “frequenting Negro houses and drinking whisky together,” the Klan’s attorney explained. Klan terrorists burned a black school in Mars Hill and another in Johnston County. On May 28, 1965, the Klan burned a cross on the courthouse lawn in Oxford, and also on the grounds of courthouses or city halls in Currie, Ward’s Corner, Burgaw, Roxboro, Salisbury, Henderson, Statesville, Tarboro, Whiteville, Elizabethtown, Southport, and Wilmington, all on the same day.
Judge Pretlow Winborne of Raleigh won my daddy’s heart on November 2, 1965, with his response to a Klan cross burning at his home. The white jurist had lashed out at the KKK and at “bigots” generally when he sentenced a seventeen-year-old Klan member to jail for a random assault on an elderly black man. A few nights later, Judge Winborne said, “I had gone to take the maid home that night, and when I returned I saw a fire on my lawn. The least they could have done was burn the damn thing while I was home and could enjoy the full effect.” But the judge’s family responded quickly and effectively. Winborne and his brother-in-law invited several neighbors over, and they all roasted wieners over the dying flames of the cross in their yard. “We just had a good old time,” the undaunted Judge Winborne laughed. But he knew as well as anyone that the Klan’s rampage was no laughing matter.
The Klan revival of the mid-1960s was actually the third since World War II. In the late 1940s, a cigar-chomping wholesale grocer named Thomas Hamilton had become Grand Dragon in the Carolinas and launched a reign of terror aimed at stamping out the gains that black Carolinians had made during the war and its aftermath. According to the Southern Regional Council, white terrorists bombed the homes of more than forty black families in eastern North Carolina in 1951 and 1952, and dozens of similar attacks were not reported. In one notorious incident near Tabor City, fifty Klansmen fired more than one hundred shots into the home of a black family and dragged the woman of the house outside and whipped her. More than five thousand people attended a rally halfway between Tabor City and Whiteville in 1951, hearing Hamilton bellow, “Do you want some burr-headed nigra to come up on your porch and ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage?” The Grand Dragon, who claimed to be a devout Christian above all else, warned especially against white ministers like my father, whom he said advocated “mongrelization, which God never intended. If your preacher is telling you that,” the Grand Dragon ranted, “then he needs a special thermometer in hell to burn him with.”
Though the first postwar Klan faded somewhat in the early 1950s, white reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision injected the bedsheet brigade with new life. Reverend James “Catfish” Cole, a former carnival barker and Free Will Baptist tent evangelist from Marion, South Carolina, tried to bring together all the splinter Klan groups and disaffected whites in the Carolinas under his charismatic leadership. The Reverend Dr. Cole, as the rabble-rousing racist billed himself, hosted the Free Will Hour radio show on WFMO in Kinston, peddled spurious diplomas from “Southern Bible College,” and whipped crowds into a frenzy with his diatribes against “race mixing” and communism. Like my daddy, who’d grown up in the same mudhole, ol’ Catfish had formidable oratorical gifts, and did well for himself; newspaper accounts report as many as fifteen thousand people at some of his rallies in 1956 and 1957.
Cole’s rabid rhetoric was not just empty talk. On November 18, 1957, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Clay, an African American couple in East Flat Rock, North Carolina, were found shot and slashed to death in their home after a series of telephone threats from callers claiming to represent the Klan; neighbors found a cross smoldering in their yard. A few days after the Clays were murdered, Klan terrorists hurled what the local chief of police called “enough dynamite to blow the place to Kingdom Come” into the Temple Beth-El synagogue in Charlotte. The only thing that spared the lives of the forty Jewish clubwomen inside was that the lighted fuse fell out of the bomb.
When Cole’s Klan attacked blacks in Monroe, North Carolina, a local NAACP president named Robert F. Williams organized black military veterans to meet Klan gunfire with gunfire of their own. After Williams began to pressure city officials to let African Americans use the tax-supported municipal swimming pool, Catfish Cole came to town with his Klan organizers. “A nigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath,” Cole told a crowd of two thousand local whites. “He is looking for a funeral.” On October 7, 1957, Cole led a heavily armed Klan motorcade in an attack on the home of Dr. A. E. Perry, the vice president of the NAACP. Firing their guns into Dr. Perry’s house and howling at the top of their lungs, the Klansmen ran head-on into a hail of disciplined gunfire. Williams and his friends fired from behind earthen entrenchments and sandbag fortifications, and sent the Klan fleeing for their lives. “When we started firing, they run,” one of the black men recalled. “Them Klans hauled it and never did come back to our place.”
His manly honor in tatters, Reverend Cole retreated to south-eastern North Carolina to rebuild his following. In Robeson County, which had a history of strong support for the Klan, the evangelist of hate hoped to rally his forces among a population divided almost evenly among African Americans, whites, and Lumbee Indians. On January 13, 1959, the Klan burned a cross on the lawn of an Indian woman in the town of St. Pauls as “a warning” because, Cole claimed, she was “having an affair” with a white man. The cross burnings continued, with Reverend Cole ranting at each gathering about the terrible evils of “mongrelization,” the loose morals of Lumbee women, and the manly duties of white men “to fight [America’s] enemies anywhere, anytime.” Cole’s favorite subject at the time was Ava Gardner, eastern North Carolina’s own homegrown movie star, born in Grabtown, near Smithfield, and in the late 1950s said to be having a Hollywood affair with Sammy Davis Jr., whom Cole contemptuously referred to as “that one-eyed nigger.”
The climax of the Klan’s Robeson County campaign was to be a heavily armed rally on January 18 near Maxton, North Carolina, at which, Cole predicted, five thousand Klansmen would remind Indians of “their place” in the racial order. “He said that, did he?” asked Simeon Oxendine, who had flown more than thirty missions against the Germans in World War II and now headed the Lumbee chapter of the veterans of Foreign Wars. “Well, we’ll just wait and see.”
That Friday night, as a few dozen Klansmen gathered in a roadside field in darkness lit only by a single hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, more than five hundred Lumbee men assembled across the road with rifles and shotguns. The Lumbees fanned out across the highway to encircle the Klansmen. When Cole began to speak, a Lumbee dashed up and smashed the light with his rifle barrel; then hundreds of Indians let out a thunderous whoop and fired their weapons repeatedly into the air. Only four people were injured, none seriously, all but one apparently hit by falling bullets. The Klansmen dropped their guns and scrambled for their cars, abandoning the unlit cross, their public address system, and an array of KKK paraphernalia. Magnanimous in victory, the Lumbees even helped push Cole’s Cadillac out of the ditch where his wife, Carolyn, had driven in her panic; the Grand Wizard himself had abandoned “white womanhood” and fled on foot into the swamps. Laughing, the Lumbees set fire to the
cross, hanged Catfish Cole in effigy, and had a rollicking victory bash. Draped in captured Klan regalia, they celebrated into the night. The cover of Life magazine featured a playful photograph of a beaming Simeon Oxendine wrapped in a confiscated Ku Klux Klan banner.
Faced with escalating terrorism, black Southerners who remained politically active in those days generally armed themselves. Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader from Jackson, Mississippi, who was assassinated in 1963, seriously pondered the possibility of launching a guerrilla war in the Delta. The Eagle Eye: The Woman’s voice, a black women’s newsletter in Jackson, argued in 1955 that “the Negro must protect himself” because “no law enforcement body in ignorant Miss. will protect any Negro who is a member of the NAACP” and warned “the white hoodlums who are now parading around the premises” of the publisher that the editors were “protected by armed guard.” Daisy Bates, the black heroine of Little Rock, Arkansas, wrote to Thurgood Marshall in 1959 that she and her husband were under constant attack and “keep ‘Old Betsy’ well-oiled and the guards are always on the alert.” Even Martin Luther King Jr. relied on guns and guards in the late 1950s. Reverend Glenn Smiley, who visited Dr. King’s home in 1956, reported back to his employer, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, that “the place is an arsenal.” If nonviolence now seems the inevitable or even the most likely strategy for black Southerners, no one could be sure of that in the late 1950s.
The Klan’s resurgence in the mid-1960s, when Robert Teel seems to have joined, gave white Southerners a voice for their fears and resentments about the gains of the civil rights movement. The Klan in North Carolina “had long lived in shadows,” historian David Cecelski writes, “but between 1964 and 1967 it rose out of its obscurity and walked in broad daylight.” The Democratic Party, which had once called itself “the party of white supremacy” and which still included people like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, seemed to have deserted their South. President Johnson, a white Southerner himself, had signed the Civil Rights Act and the voting Rights Act, and the entire North Carolina congressional delegation opposed the voting Rights Act. Many white people in eastern North Carolina felt that they had nowhere to go—and so they ran to the Klan. A few years later, Helms and Thurmond helped Richard Nixon push his “Southern strategy” and led white Southerners into a new, Southern-based Republican Party that railed against “forced bussing” and the intrusions of the “feddle gubment,” and the Klan faded again. But Robert Teel had no patience with just talk. Though he claimed to have harbored no resentments against blacks, he ruled his little empire in Grab-all with an iron hand, and black people who crossed him usually regretted it.
The worst incident at Four Corners came in late April 1970, only about two weeks before the killing and the conflagrations of that fateful summer. Clyde Harding, a local black schoolteacher, was washing his car at the self-service car wash that Teel had built across the street from his store and his barbershop. “Jerry Oakley, my stepson,” Teel recounted, “came out there on his lunch hour and wanted to vacuum out his car, and he came running in and said he’d had some trouble with a black guy over there.” According to witnesses, Jerry Oakley had roared up in his car and demanded that Mr. Harding move his vehicle immediately. Harding continued to wash his car, and Oakley ran across the street and into the barbershop. A few seconds later, Robert Teel emerged from his place with a pistol tucked into the front of his belt and stomped across to the car wash. Teel told me, “I pulled out the gun with one hand and slapped him upside the head with the other hand.” Medical and court records, however, indicated that Teel pointed the gun at the black schoolteacher and then pistol-whipped him, breaking several teeth and cutting his face.
The magistrate in the Harding case, J. C. Wheeler, charged Teel with assault by pointing a gun and assault and battery. Despite the fact that Teel was already serving two suspended sentences for crimes of violence—in both instances, beating up police officers— Billy Watkins was able to persuade the judge to acquit Teel on the first count and issue a prayer-for-judgment continuance on the second charge. The court did require Teel to pay the schoolteacher’s hefty medical and dental bills. Lacking any semblance of equal justice, young blacks in Grab-all went to Clyde Harding and offered to avenge the beating; the black schoolteacher firmly discouraged them. “If Clyde had wanted us to do something,” Boo Chavis speculated, “we would have burned Teel up, ain’t no probably about it. But Clyde didn’t want to push the issue.”
The Clyde Harding incident and the court’s apparent lack of concern about it hardened resentments toward the Teel family in Grab-all and smoothed a pathway for the destruction soon to follow. Blacks began to boycott the little shopping center, which infuriated Teel. Some black parents forbade their children to go to the store because it was a dangerous place, while other local blacks organized an informal protest boycott. Teel complained later that his business dropped by half almost immediately. “This is when my windows started getting knocked out,” he added. “They were boycotting my place. I had other people in here washing and then people come in there and help people get their clothes out the washers, get them off the yard, and cross the road hollering, ‘Don’t trade with him, he’s a black hater!’ ” Years later, Teel resisted the description: “I’ve had colored people come in and brag on what a nice place I had put up for them to shop, and how much they liked me, and things like that. Eightyfive percent of my business was black.”
Teel had always kept a pistol handy, but after the Harding incident, the black boycott, and the breaking of his store windows, he and his sons moved two more guns to the barbershop: a 12-gauge pump shotgun and a .410-gauge shotgun with a .22-caliber rifle barrel attached in the over-and-under style. Teel and his boys began to spend nights in the barbershop with their guns, hoping to catch whoever had shattered the windows. There was an atmosphere of war around the place. It remains a matter of curiosity for some people in Oxford as to why Teel, a man known to dislike black people and widely rumored to be a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, would set up shop in Grab-all. His attorney, Billy Watkins, wondered the same thing. “It was bound to happen,” he said, referring to the imminent racial tragedy. “With his temper and his attitudes, it was like two naked electrical wires, that if they ever touched, all hell would break loose—and they were too close not to touch.”
CHAPTER 4
MISS AMY’S WITNESS
I DON’T KNOW WHEN or how I first became infected with white supremacy. But when I was no more than six years old, I discovered within myself both that monstrous lie and the moral cowardice necessary to its preservation. Though only a first grader, I was forced to confront what James Baldwin called “the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.” I wished then and I wish now that this was not the truth, and that I had no part in it, but it is and I did.
At that time, we were living in Sanford, North Carolina, a little town where my father served as minister of Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church. My mother had stopped teaching when I was born, but she had taken up her chalkboards and construction paper again as soon as I started kindergarten. Mama had hired a black woman, Mrs. Fanny Mae McIver, to keep house and tend to my brother and me. “She got her right out of the cotton field,” Sarah Godfrey, our neighbor and friend, told me later. “That was Fanny Mae’s first job working indoors, working in white people’s houses. She was a fine woman,” Sarah continued. “All three of her boys ended up with good jobs in New York and bought her a new home here, and were always good to her. They all turned out real nice.”
Ironically, perhaps typically, my spineless act of cruelty was rooted in love. That first year in kindergarten, when I was not quite six, I befriended David Barrett, a towheaded boy with a crooked grin, a zany laugh, and a big heart. We quickly became infatuated in the way of preadolescent boys, organizing the “Rat Fink Club” together, playing Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in the woods, and taking turns sleeping over at e
ach other’s houses. I especially loved to stay at David’s house on Saturdays, when his father grilled steaks and his mother made blueberry pie.
At bedtime, we developed a ritual that David dubbed “Tim’s Tall Tales.” We would lie there in the dark in the twin beds, and I would tell him stories, making them up as I went. His fierce and unfeigned enthusiasm for these rambling odysseys was like a drug to me. I loved him unreservedly, and preferred his company to anything else in the world. The year I turned seven, when my family moved to Oxford, David and I pledged to meet at the Washington Monument when we turned twenty-one. That we did not keep the appointment takes nothing away from the depth of our attachment.
One day David and I were playing at my house, and Mrs. McIver brought her little boy to work with her. I can’t remember his name, though I recall that he was smaller than David and me, and perfectly nice. But no one could penetrate the fog of infatuation that enveloped David and me in those days, and anyone else’s presence would have constituted an intrusion. The little black boy was a pest, we concluded, and we shunned him. He followed us from room to room, imploring our acceptance, no doubt adhering to his mother’s instructions to be nice to her employers’ children. But we shut him out, quite literally, closing a door in his face. And when we were safely on the other side of that door, holding it closed, David began to taunt him in the singsong rebuke that children around the world still sling at one another. You can hear the tune in your own mind’s ear, where it may sting even now: “nah-nah-nah-nah-naaaaaah-nah.” But the words to David’s rendition must have burned in that boy’s brain: “Nigger-nigger-niiiiiii-ger, nigger-nigger-niiiiii-ger.” And the blood ran hot to my face, as it must have run much hotter to the face on the other side of the door.
Blood Done Sign My Name Page 7
