Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  Born in 1948, Ben Chavis was an intensely aware and articulate young man who had led an effort to desegregate Oxford’s public library while still a student at Mary Potter High School. Chestnut skinned and small of frame, Chavis attended St. Augustine’s College for a year but transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1966 after the death of his father, becoming one of the first African American students to enroll there. Active in student politics, Chavis won election as president of the UNCC Student Union, campaigning against the Vietnam War and inviting renowned black militant Stokely Carmichael to campus. He worked in the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, switching to Eugene McCarthy’s crusade after Kennedy was assassinated.

  The searing events of the spring and summer of 1968 radicalized Ben Chavis as they did thousands of other young Americans. A natural leader, Chavis helped create the Black Cultural Association, whose “Black House” in Charlotte became a local center for black radical politics. Chavis and his associates sought to organize a Charlotte chapter of the Black Panther Party, modeling their approach on the Panthers’ “Ten Point Program” and setting up a free breakfast program for poor black children. The national Panther organization, however, was in a period of turmoil that would not permit them to charter new groups, and was beset from coast to coast with paid infiltrators and assorted idiots who called themselves Panthers and acted in ways that embarrassed the party. Factional disputes among the would-be Panthers in Charlotte earned Chavis and his accomplices denunciation from the Black Panther, the official newspaper of the Oakland-based Black Panthers. Two of Chavis’s Black Cultural Association colleagues in Charlotte, Theodore Hood and David Washington, tallied long police records and were suspected of a number of violent crimes. Chavis was also close to James Grant, a radical chemistry professor at UNCC and a black Vietnam veteran turned full-time revolutionary.

  Having earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry, Chavis came home to Oxford and reopened the old Ridley Drive-In, a defunct restaurant owned by his family and adjacent to their family homeplace, renaming it the Soul Kitchen. The establishment became a focal point for young blacks in the county, providing space for both partying and politics. Soon after opening the Soul Kitchen, Ben Chavis accepted a substitute-teaching position at Mary Potter High School. He taught the last classes of students to attend the all-black high school; in the fall of 1970, several months after the murder and the conflagration that followed, Granville County would finally integrate its school system. But among the last students at Mary Potter High, Chavis quickly put his organizing experience to good use. “I was trying to raise the black consciousness of the students,” he explained. “In the English class I was teaching, I had them write black poetry. In the journalism class I totally transformed the school paper in terms of articles—they had articles against the Vietnam War, raising political consciousness.”

  Chavis also helped form a group called the Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress, composed largely of students from Mary Potter, which built upon earlier activist efforts and focused largely on the lack of recreational facilities for young people. In early 1970, Chavis addressed the city council with a recreation proposal that would have forced the recreation committee to hold meetings and open all existing recreational facilities to the public; six years earlier, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the city’s white leadership had secretly committed itself to providing no public recreational facilities so that they would not have to integrate them. The main impact of these organizing efforts was that, as Chavis said, “We already had a sense of a communications network, but it was mainly on the issue of recreation—nobody knew that a tragedy like this was going to happen.”

  After the murder, despite Mayor Currin’s curfew and the presence of dozens of state troopers, Oxford was a tinderbox and matches were not in short supply. A bomb threat interrupted classes at predominantly white D. N. Hix School that Wednesday morning; a similar threat disrupted all-black Orange Street Elementary. The schools were not that far apart. After classes let out for the day, groups of white and black young people engaged in rock-throwing battles and group fistfights. “We’d catch ’em coming up that hill by D. N. Hix,” one young black woman recalled, “and we used to flat kick their ass. It was like that for a long time.” Despite the presence of local police and state troopers, these clashes continued for months after the murder. Young blacks would gather at one end of Hillsboro Street, near the poolroom and the corner of Granville Street, and white teenagers would assemble at a gas station near Hix School. “Literally, around ten o’clock at night,” one recalled, “the two groups would march toward one another and there would be fighting all up and down the street.” The street battles became an almost nightly occurrence. “We was throwing bricks at car windows, all like that,” one black woman confessed, “but they be doing the same thing to us.”

  Oxford was not the only place where street battles raged; in fact, dozens of communities in the United States saw violent racial clashes in May. That same Tuesday of the riots in Oxford, a sixteen-year-old black boy named Charles Oatman was beaten to death in a jail cell in Augusta, Georgia. Oatman was mentally retarded and weighed only 104 pounds. “He had been beaten something awful,” said the wife of the undertaker who prepared his body. “There were cigarette burns on his hands and feet and—well, there were burns on his buttocks, too.” Sheriff E. F. Atkins in Augusta told black leaders that the frail boy had fallen out of his bed and struck his head on the concrete. But few black people believed that Oatman could have fallen out of his bed twenty or thirty times, sometimes onto burning cigarettes, and the white coroner refused to issue a report. Young blacks began to burn white-owned businesses in the black community. Governor Lester Maddox blamed the violence on “a Communist conspiracy” and ordered state troopers into the city, warning the rioters that they had “better prepare to meet their maker.” The troopers fired into the crowds, killing six blacks and wounding dozens more. According to national wire service reports, all six of the dead had been hit multiple times in the back at close range.

  Four days later, on May 16, eighty Mississippi state troopers fired at least 350 rounds into a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University, killing two students and wounding at least twelve more. In the presence of a national wire service reporter, one of the troopers radioed back to headquarters, “You’d better send some ambulances. We’ve killed some niggers out here.” Governor John Bell Williams claimed that snipers inside had fired hundreds of shots at police, but a Justice Department investigation revealed no evidence of any shots fired from the dorm whatsoever—not a shell casing, not a bullet hole, not one witness. Local black leaders announced the formation of a black self-defense organization. “We are determined,” Dr. Aaron Shirley, a prominent black physician, told reporters, “that from now on when we suspect that law enforcement officers are hell bent on killing some black folks, they’ll be doing it at their own risk.”

  In Oxford, at least, the police held their fire. But the firebombing, which had damaged seventeen downtown stores during the first night of rioting, persisted on Wednesday night. At about ten-thirty, someone hurled a small, ineffectual gasoline bomb through the window of the Tiny Tote, a convenience grocery store on Lanier Street; this appears to have been a diversionary attack. Ten minutes later, three firebombs landed on the roof of James Rudder’s house in a quiet, all-white, middle-class housing development called Green Acres. Two of the bottle bombs, failing to shatter, bounced onto the lawn and flamed out. The third burned out on the asphalt shingles, but failed to ignite the roof and caused only minor damage. Perhaps the arsonists had selected the home at random, wishing only to take the battle to a white suburban area; perhaps Rudder was a target for some specific reason. Though the physical destruction was slight, the psychological effect of a bombing attempt in a white residential area heightened many white people’s sense that this was a war in which they could choose only one side. Many whites, and not just Klan mem
bers, began muttering about retaliatory violence. Granville County had become an armed camp. “People didn’t know when something might happen out their way,” Mayor Currin explained. “Folks were just scared half to death.”

  Heavily armed state troopers ringed Oxford with roadblocks. In their gray uniforms and military-style hats, pump shotguns at the ready, backed up at many of the checkpoints by local police, the highway patrol garrison presented an imposing presence—one that blacks saw as a militia for white political power. The highway patrol had not employed its first black officer until 1967; most people in the state had never seen one of the handful of black troopers. Even black North Carolinians who wanted no part of radical politics tended to view the patrolmen as storm troopers for white supremacy. On May 30, two weeks after the murder, the Carolina Times, a fairly conservative black newspaper at the time, warned African American drivers in North Carolina “to be on their guard and take care not to encounter a member of the North Carolina Highway Patrol.” The editors, noting several beatings and killings by state troopers, reported dozens of complaints about “brutality committed against blacks by Highway patrolmen.” Middle-class white people, on the other hand, generally regarded the highway patrol as nice men who issued traffic tickets, which could be thrown out if you knew the right lawyer.

  The emergency curfew ordinance under which they operated gave law enforcement officers tremendous leeway; it forbade anyone to “travel upon public roads, streets, alleys, or any public property” during the hours stipulated by the mayor, “unless in search of medical assistance, food, or other commodity or service necessary to sustain the well-being of himself or his family or some member thereof.” In practice, this large loophole permitted the white authorities to allow anyone they deemed trustworthy to move freely and to arrest anyone on the streets whom they deemed untrustworthy.

  Children may not fully understand the social order, but they learn it easily enough when it gets acted out in front of them. I remember riding in Chief Pontiac with my father at the wheel, and how terrified I was when the men with guns stopped our car at the roadblock. But Daddy pulled up to the blockades of troopers and smiled fearlessly. I recall feeling as though Daddy must be important, a man well known to the troopers, since they simply waved him right on through the barriers. I realized years later that the state troopers were not even from Oxford and had no idea who he was, beyond the crucial fact that he was a white man wearing a tie. Blacks had a completely different experience at the roadblocks.

  Herman Cozart, who was easily as large as my father but many shades darker, found out about the curfew by driving up to a roadblock manned by the state troopers. “They didn’t just look in there and say, ‘Get out of the car,’ ” Cozart recalled. “They snatched the driver right out.” No one snatched Herman Cozart easily; the pulpwood hauler had arms like legs and legs like tree stumps. “And I said, ‘Hold it, now, I ain’t handicapped,’ ” he recounted, and he lumbered down from the cab of his truck. The troopers leveled their shotguns at his chest. “I said, ‘What the hell—did somebody done hold up a bank or something?’ And they said, ‘No, it’s a curfew,’ and that was the first I heard of the damn thing.” Cozart, who rarely went anywhere without a gun, became one of twenty black men arrested on the first night of the curfew, charged both with violating the emergency statute and with carrying a concealed weapon. “I didn’t really think it was concealed,” said Cozart. “It was laying right there on the seat.”

  Despite the almost nightly Ku Klux Klan gatherings that summer, every one of the roughly one hundred persons arrested for violation of the curfew was black. Young blacks derided the curfew measure as “the No-Niggers-after-Nightfall Act.” Mayor Currin, who did not approve of the Klan, nonetheless found the highway patrol’s immense display of force comforting: “The pistol on the belt, that’s one thing, but the big shotgun, that’s something else.”

  NO AMOUNT OF military force could have made the district court preliminary hearing on Wednesday afternoon a soothing experience for Mayor Currin or the rest of the white power structure in Oxford. Ben Chavis led Mary Potter High School in a massive walkout and herded black students into the courthouse by the dozens. “When it came time for the preliminary hearing,” Chavis said, “I took the class I had to court, and when my class left the school, the whole school walked out behind us. I looked around and saw the whole school coming. I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will be good for everybody.’ ” Walking several blocks to the courthouse without a permit, the large group filed into the courtroom, filling nearly every available seat. “We had all four grades, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelth grades, in the Granville County courthouse. Even the teachers came. Of course, the judge and everybody was shocked.” Judge Linwood Peoples kept strict order, but the presence of two hundred young blacks clearly unnerved the white people who worked in the courtroom.

  The young blacks listened quietly as Boo Chavis told the court how he had watched the Teels kill Henry Marrow. According to a report in the Pittsburgh Courier, Chavis testified that three white men stood over the fallen Marrow: Robert Teel with a shotgun, Larry Teel with a rifle, and a third man with a stick. Only the first two sat before the court charged in the killing; it is not clear why the third man was not identified and arrested. The third man had been Roger Oakley, of course—the fact that this seems not to have occurred to the police is beyond explanation. That Boo Chavis and the others who hung around near the store did not recognize Roger immediately is less mysterious; Roger worked at the Bandag rubber plant, not at his father’s store, and was not a familiar figure at Four Corners the way Teel and Larry were.

  Some of the confusion about who stood over Henry Marrow’s body may have been by design. According to local courthouse legend, Billy Watkins instructed Larry to put on Roger’s clothes before Larry and Teel went to the police station, in order to confuse the witnesses. None of the Teel family had said anything about Roger’s presence whatsoever. His wife, Betsey, was pregnant and had reportedly suffered a series of miscarriages, and the family is said to have thought that he should stay out of the legal proceedings if possible. Whether the rumored clothing swap occurred or whether it influenced the accounts of the witnesses is hard to say.

  All of them had partaken in the violence against Marrow, Boo Chavis testified, but he identified Larry Teel, now sitting at the defense table, as the one who’d fired the fatal shot, after his father had ordered him to “shoot the son of a bitch.” Of course, all three of them had been engaged in the killing of Henry Marrow—stomping him, kicking him, smashing his skull with the stocks of the guns. In both moral and legal terms, the specific one who fired the final shot through his brain seems almost beside the point.

  Despite some fogginess about the details of the killing, one thing became crystal clear to the blacks who attended the preliminary hearing: there were powerful white people who did not want to see Robert and Larry Teel go to jail. Lonnie Breedlove, a city commissioner, attested to the good character of the defendants. Basil N. Hart, a wealthy landowner, offered to put his property up to ensure that the Teels would appear for trial. vassar Surratt, a prosperous lumberman, offered to post bond and swore that Robert Teel was a reliable and civic-minded citizen of excellent repute, as did a number of other prominent whites. “It was shocking,” recalled Ben Chavis, “to see some of the presidents of local banks getting up and testifying as character witnesses for [Teel].” Judge Peoples found probable cause to charge each of the two defendants with firstdegree murder in the death of Henry Marrow. He also charged Robert Teel with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily harm, for having shot Boo Chavis. Persuaded that no amount of money would be enough to keep Teel and his son in jail, given the combined wealth of their backers, the judge ordered them held without bond. Wednesday night, sheriff’s deputies whisked the two men to Raleigh for safekeeping in the Wake County jail at Central Prison.

  The following morning, the Human Relations Council, set up in Oxfor
d several years earlier, met at the courthouse. My father and Thad Stem, who had both joined the committee recently, walked to the meeting together. “I was just trying to get the young man buried without having a race war,” Daddy told me later. “I didn’t worry much about the trial, because it seemed to me that the murder had been committed in a public place, and there wasn’t much mystery about who had done it. And so my immediate concern was that people of goodwill on both sides come together and try to prevent further violence. And I wasn’t sure that most of the whites knew how dangerous the situation was. I mean, I had church members sleeping in their stores downtown with guns. And I knew that the blacks were fed up, especially some of the young people. I worried that many white people didn’t comprehend the level of anger and mistrust, and of course there were many others who didn’t much care how black people felt.”

  Dan Finch, the white liberal attorney who chaired the committee, called the meeting to order, describing it as “an open forum for discussion in an atmosphere of mutual respect.” According to newspaper accounts of the meeting, roughly 120 people came to discuss the racial situation, only fourteen of whom were African Americans. The black people who did come to the meeting were “respectable Negroes”—teachers, ministers, and businesspersons. They were angry at the racial injustice in Oxford, but they were not the same people rioting in the streets and making firebombs. Their critique of the problem and their anger at what had happened, however, were much the same. Sam Cox, the principal spokesperson for the African American contingent, charged that “there is no justice in the judicial system in Granville County.” Authorities had to act to change things, Cox said. “I’m not going to call names,” he continued, referring to Magistrate J. C. Wheeler, “but there is a magistrate who refuses to serve a warrant against whites who commit crimes against blacks.” The black schoolteacher also reminded the group that the courts in Oxford had recently convicted a young black woman of first-degree murder after a white salesman had driven her, against her will, to a remote wooded area and had been shot with his own pistol. “We have not had justice,” Cox declared, “and we are trying to do something about it.”