Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  After the fatal shot, there was silence. And then Robert Teel quickly locked up the businesses and went home with his family. After the Teels left Four Corners, Boo Chavis knelt in the dirt behind the Tidewater Seafood Market, holding the battered body of Dickie Marrow in his arms. Through his own blood and tears, Boo could see that Marrow was only semiconscious. “Dickie wasn’t right, he was all messed up and couldn’t talk,” Jimmy Chavis recalled. Jimmy and the others had fled down the road and dived under porches or hidden under cars when the Teels had run out with the rifle and shotgun. But slowly they’d returned to the place where Dickie lay bleeding into the dust and gravel. Sobbing convulsively, Boo called out to Jimmy and to Edward Webb when he saw them trotting warily back up Highway 158. It was roughly nine o’clock in the evening.

  “Jimmy and Bab-bro”—Webb’s nickname, short for baby brother—“was coming back. It took all of us to pick him up,” said Boo. “His brains was hanging out—I didn’t know what it was at the time—and it looked like scrambled eggs.” The young men gently lifted Marrow into the back seat of Willie T. Harris’s car. Bab-bro and Boo sped to Granville Hospital, which was only about a mile and a half away. Boo wept as Marrow made hoarse, half-conscious gasping noises. When they got to the hospital, doctors whisked Marrow into one operating room and Boo Chavis into another. Though Marrow was far more badly wounded, Chavis was such a bloody mess that it was hard to tell. “Boo looked terrible,” Fannie Chavis recalled.

  Fannie, who had sent Dickie Marrow to get her a big Pepsi-Cola a few hours earlier, was lying on a sofa in the Chavis home on West College Street when Jimmy Chavis ran breathlessly into the house. “Bee,” he cried, “Bee, get up, get up—Dickie, Dickie—Teel done shot Dickie and I believe he dead.” Fannie, who was recuperating from surgery and confined to the couch, sprang to her feet like a sprinter.

  “Go over there and get Clyde or somebody to run me to the hospital,” she snapped at Jimmy. “Roberta! Roberta! Dickie’s been shot! Come on!” Fannie and Roberta Chavis raced to the hospital in a neighbor’s car. When they arrived, they were told that they could not see either of the young men, whom doctors were treating in adjacent rooms with swinging doors. “I just pushed that door open anyway,” said Fannie Chavis, “and there was Boo. He was just bleeding, bleeding, and it scared me so bad. I heard Roberta, she kicked open the other door, and we could just hear groaning, and that was Dickie.” The surgeons never had much hope for Marrow but, after their failed attempts to stabilize him, an ambulance sped him toward Duke University Medical Center in Durham, forty miles away. Marrow died before he got out of the county.

  Boo Chavis stayed at the hospital for less than an hour. The doctors picked the shotgun pellets from his face and neck, cleaned his wounds, wiped the blood from his forehead, gave him a tetanus shot, and sent him home. There were, however, much deeper and less visible wounds.

  Back at the house on West College Street, the Chavis women asked a family friend, Mr. Yancey, to drive Boo to the police station to tell the investigators about the murder. “I told them I won’t going to the damn police station, they won’t gon’ listen to a word I said,” Boo recalled. All he could think about was the empty malice in Robert Teel’s eyes as the white man had tried to kill him. Yancey, a deeply religious man, had been a kind of surrogate father to Boo for some years. “They got him ’cause I used to listen to him, so I listened to him. ‘Come on, Boo, I’ll take you,’ he told me, and I just said, ‘Naw, man. I ain’t going up there.’ ”

  Seeing the terror in Boo’s eyes, Yancey pulled the young man aside and opened a paper sack he had brought with him. A heavy .357 magnum revolver rested at the bottom of the bag. “Come on, Boo,” said the older black man, “ain’t nobody gonna mess with us.”

  Yancey drove Boo Chavis to the police station shortly after ten o’clock. As they turned onto Williamsboro Street and headed past the Confederate monument and the courthouse, Yancey and Chavis could see that the streets downtown were lined with cars. “Along beside the movie [theater] and where the jail at, too,” Boo Chavis recalled. Teel must have made some phone calls, and the people he called must have made some phone calls; less than an hour after Marrow had been killed, crowds of white people had begun to gather, anticipating violence, some of them Ku Klux Klan members from Granville County and elsewhere. “Tallyho was really where the klavern was in Granville County,” said Mayor Currin, “out at Tallyho and Shoo-fly and Providence. And we had people from outside the county who came in to provide protection for [Teel], so I understand. I’ve been told that certain people who were thought to be Klansmen from Johnston County went to his house and protected him.”

  “As we were getting to the police station,” recalled Boo Chavis, “you should have seen the white people lined up on the sidewalk. It was at least a good two hundred of them—Klansmen, I guess.” Yancey walked the young man through the mob and into the police station, where they told the officer at the desk why they had come. And then they huddled in the waiting room for roughly four hours, waiting for the Oxford Police Department to interview Boo. Several other blacks who had seen at least part of what happened also went to the police station but, surprisingly, the police interviewed none of them that night. “We went down there and sat down there—we stayed until two in the morning,” Chavis recalled. “Mr. Yancey stayed with me the whole time. They didn’t even try to talk to me, they didn’t try to do nothing.” Finally, Mr. Yancey picked up his paper sack and beckoned to young Chavis, and they drove back to the house on West College. Boo Chavis was angry and devastated, but he was not surprised. “I didn’t think they was gon’ listen to me no way,” he concluded, perhaps thinking about how Teel had pistol-whipped the black schoolteacher two weeks earlier and barely even been punished. “I was thinking about revenge.”

  Word raced through black Oxford the next morning that Teel and his boys had killed Henry Marrow in front of several people and that the police had neither arrested Teel nor shown any interest in talking to the witnesses; it was several days later before the police finally got around to talking to Boo Chavis. If black folks in Oxford were talking about little else except the killing, my parents avoided the topic, at least with their children. That Tuesday evening was when Gerald told me about the murder, and when the strange silence fell over our dinner, and when my sister and I saw armed men all over the porches at the Teel house.

  Boo Chavis and many of his friends joined the hundreds of young blacks who ran through the streets of downtown Oxford that night, leaving the wreckage that my sister and I witnessed the next morning on our way to school and leaving white people in Oxford reeling. Blacks and whites had fought in the streets of Oxford in the summer of 1963—scuffles and fistfights during civil rights demonstrations, mostly. The riot that Tuesday night went far beyond the scale of those conflicts. Oxford police sat helpless as bricks shattered plate glass, bottles smashed windshields, and flames crackled in storefronts. Much of the damage was to white property in or near the black neighborhoods. Here “you could hide, you know,” Carolyn Thorpe, one of the rioters recalled. “Like if a police car come down Granville Street, we could duck into an alley or anybody’s house, ’cause they gon’ let us in.”

  The anger in the black community that Tuesday night reflected a common belief that Teel and his sons were literally going to get away with murder. “It was Wednesday before anyone even knew that they had been arrested,” city attorney Dan Finch told newspaper reporters. Many did not believe it even Thursday or Friday. It speaks volumes about the racial situation in the United States in 1970 that virtually every African American in the county believed that white men could butcher a black man in public and not even face arrest and prosecution, let alone conviction. And, in fact, the police had not jailed the Teels immediately; the arrest warrant showed a time of 8:30 the morning after the murder, but even that much information was not public knowledge. Herman Cozart, the stocky black truck driver who knew Teel from his own experiences at the store, learned about the killing
late that week in another store in the black community. “They said, ‘He ran and the man killed him up by the oil tanks.’ Said, ‘They ain’t locked him up yet, ’cause they say it was on his property.’ And I said, ‘That ain’t his property all the way down 158.’ ” Cozart felt cold, bitter anger rising in his massive chest. “I told them, ‘They ought to locked him up for something.’ ”

  Faced with the riot of the night before and a mounting sense of black rage, Mayor Currin dispatched a telegram on Wednesday morning to Governor Robert Scott, a white “law and order” moderate, informing the governor’s office of his intention to declare a curfew and requesting state troopers to help enforce it. In a telephone conversation around lunchtime, David Murray, an aide to Governor Scott, told Mayor Currin that the governor was in Europe but assured him that the state would provide all the manpower necessary to keep the peace. Lieutenant Governor Pat Taylor ordered fifty highway patrol officers and a large contingent of State Bureau of Investigation agents into Oxford that afternoon. Mayor Currin called an emergency session of the city council, which immediately passed “an ordinance authorizing the mayor to proclaim the existence of a state of emergency and impose a curfew during same.” Currin then immediately announced a curfew for all citizens from 7:30 in the evening until 6:00 in the morning. The SBI agents who arrived Wednesday afternoon assessed the situation in Oxford as “extremely tense.” Noting that District Court Judge Linwood Peoples had announced a preliminary hearing in the Teel case for that afternoon, the agents suggested that the outcome of that proceeding might determine the extent of the violence in Oxford.

  While they waited for the hearing, local authorities decided to keep the schools in session. In May 1970, only a handful of black kids attended the previously all-white schools, and no white kids were enrolled in the black schools. So the Granville County schools conducted classes as usual, and our teachers and principals said nothing about the murder or the riot. Given that many of the rioters had been school age, I suppose that the authorities felt that calling off classes would simply leave the young people free to fight in the streets. In an aside that reflected the mind-set of most white officials, the SBI report stated that, regardless of what happened at the hearing, “young blacks are likely to be looking for trouble anyway.”

  That description was perhaps only a negative phrasing of something positively true, which was that Dickie Marrow’s close family friend twenty-two-year-old Ben Chavis was already plotting a massive revolt of young black people in Granville County. There would have been upheavals in the streets of Oxford in any case. And Chavis, a charismatic firebrand and a gifted leader, would have been battling white supremacy in some fashion even if the Teels hadn’t killed anyone at all. But Ben Chavis was a relative of Boo Chavis, Jimmy Chavis, and Mary Catherine, Roberta, and Fannie Chavis. When the bullet tore through Dickie Marrow’s brain, it killed a young man whom Ben Chavis had known for years. And although Ben Chavis was already a bright young radical, that bullet also launched a political career that would take him to national notoriety in the waning days of the African American freedom struggle.

  One of the first telephones that rang in Granville County after that gunshot was in the Satterwhite home of Mrs. Elizabeth Ridley Chavis, Ben’s mother and the widowed matron of the county’s most illustrious African American family. As Golden Frinks, an activist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, put it, “They didn’t even know who they was killing.”

  Ben Chavis, a teacher at all-black Mary Potter High School when that telephone rang, was said to be the great-great-grandson of John Chavis, during his lifetime probably the most learned black man in the United States. “In my family,” Helen Chavis Othow, Ben’s sister, writes, “the tradition that we are descendants of John Chavis has been passed down from generation to generation. My father and many of our elders informed us at an early age of this revered connection.”

  Born free in 1763, John Chavis is said to have begun his education as part of a wager between two wealthy white men about the innate capacities of the sons of Africa. Though that debate would persist, whoever bet against Chavis lost badly. Chavis studied to become a minister under John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the president of what would become Princeton University. He completed his training at Washington Academy in Lexington, Virginia. During the American Revolution, Chavis fought against the British for three years with the Fifth Regiment of Virginia. After the war ended, the Presbyterian Church licensed him “to preach the Gospel of Christ as a probationer for the holy ministry within the bounds of this Presbytery wherever he shall be orderly called, hoping as he is a man of colour, he may be peculiarly useful to those of his complexion.” Chavis became a missionary and stumped Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina on horseback for several years, becoming one of the leading preachers in the South, preaching to enslaved blacks and white congregations alike.

  An educator as well as a minister, John Chavis founded a school in Raleigh in the early 1800s, where he taught Latin and Greek to the sons of the state’s most influential white families. This was a most unusual achievement. His pupils included two sons of a Supreme Court justice, a future United States senator, and a future governor of the state. Chavis was determined to educate African Americans and early in his enterprise apparently taught black and white pupils together, a practice that offended some whites; in 1809, he advertised that he would “open an EvENING SCHOOL for the purpose of educating Children of Colour, as he intends, for the accommodation of some of his Employers, to exclude all Children of Colour from his Day School.” For twenty years Chavis taught the children of North Carolina’s landed gentry by day and “when the white children leave the house,” the clergyman wrote, “those of colour will take their places, and continue until ten o’clock.” He became prosperous and well respected, buying several choice lots in Raleigh, a large house outside of town, and one hundred acres of land in northern Wake County. Historian John Hope Franklin has called John Chavis “the most prominent free black in North Carolina.”

  In 1831, however, Nat Turner and his band of slave rebels cut a swath through the southern Virginia countryside, coming very close to Oxford and slaughtering fifty-seven white men, women, and children in their messianic march against slavery. Whites put down the rebellion, killing hundreds of blacks and impaling the severed heads of suspected rebels on pikes as a warning. Across the South, white authorities moved to strengthen the racial caste system. The North Carolina legislature voted in 1832 to outlaw preaching and teaching by African Americans, free or slave, and took the vote from free blacks soon afterward. The state’s “Act for the better regulation of the conduct of Negroes, slaves and free persons of colour” barred blacks from preaching or exhorting in public “under any pretense.” The legislation prohibited blacks from “acting in any manner as preacher or teacher,” under penalty of public whipping “not to exceed 39 lashes on his bare back.” Three years later, when the legislature took the vote from free blacks, John Chavis was no longer even a citizen.

  Despite his political connections, John Chavis was forced to sell his property, close his illustrious academy in Raleigh, and move to the Mangum farm in Granville County. Though the new law pressed Chavis into poverty, he quietly persisted in teaching black children, and his posture remained defiant. After he was “charged with going to Raleigh to teach the children of free people of colour,” Chavis wrote to a prominent former pupil to complain about his treatment. “Tell them that if I am black,” he wrote to Senator Willie P. Mangum in 1837, “that I am free born American & a revolutionary soldier & therefore ought not be thrown entirely out of the scale of notice.” The following summer, when John Chavis was seventy-five, legend has it that somebody clubbed the old man to death at his home in Granville County. According to Helen Chavis Othow, his biographer, it is possible that “he was killed because he didn’t stop teaching or preaching.” The Chavis children grew up hearing that white opponents bashed in his skull because he r
efused to stop educating black children.

  The legacy of John Chavis was a controlling influence in the life of succeeding generations of the Chavis family. Both of Ben Chavis’s parents, Benjamin Chavis Sr. and Elizabeth Ridley Chavis, taught school in the county and served the local branch of the NAACP. “Major Chavis,” as the senior Benjamin Chavis was known around town, had fought in World War I, then traveled home on a segregated troopship, bitterly angry at how little the war to “make the world safe for democracy” had done to free black Americans. Racial politics and African American history were mainstays of the dinner-table conversation at the Chavis home. The younger Ben recalled lengthy family discussions of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy butchered by two white men in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white cashier. After the Till murder, the seven-year-old Chavis “didn’t want to go out of the house for two weeks,” he remembered. The Chavis family taught their children to read the newspaper every day and imposed high standards of academic performance. One of Ben’s sisters, Helen Chavis Othow, received her doctorate, chaired the English Department at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, and published a biography of Reverend John Chavis. June Chavis Davenport became a supervisor in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. Another sister, Francine Chavis, graduated from medical school and came home to practice medicine in Oxford.