Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  In the 1890s, however, when black and white North Carolinians managed to set aside some of their differences, their combined forces routed corporate domination, returned power to local governments, reformed election laws, and regulated some of the worst excesses of monopoly capitalism. Though whites kept most of the higher offices for themselves, the coalition elected a number of African Americans, especially in sixteen eastern North Carolina counties where blacks held a majority. And they won, despite the fact that they confronted the entrenched power of wealth and privilege. Whatever the limits of their racial egalitarianism, in 1896 the Fusionists captured the governorship, the state legislature, every single statewide race, and helped refashion race relations at the street level.

  In 1898, however, white conservatives, unwilling to live with the consequences of universal male suffrage, overthrew the state government, employing violence, fraud, and demagoguery. White Democrats in Granville County joined Red Shirt clubs, whose leaders urged them to “defend white womanhood” by killing any black man who insisted on voting—and any white man who advocated equal citizenship. White solidarity, when lashed together with the powerful language of sex and manhood, proved stronger than philosophical commitments to democracy. In Oxford, clashes between vindictive white Democrats and the Fusionists saw widespread arson, violence, and upheaval. After the Democratic Party seized power in the white supremacy campaigns of 1898, black men lost the vote. The whites that had been their allies were forced to slink back into the Democratic Party.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, after black disfranchisement was an established fact and the race and class conflicts died down, Oxford’s erection of the monument To Our Confederate Dead buried the bitter divisions of the 1890s among whites in a glow of nostalgia for the Lost Cause. Only two generations later, the fact that the Confederacy itself had divided whites was now lost to popular memory, as were the interracial political movements of the decades after the Civil War. In North Carolina as elsewhere, black and white farmers had fitfully but repeatedly sought to make alliance with each other. It was not until the violent overthrow of their democratically elected coalition government in the last years of the nineteenth century that Confederate monuments rose in every Southern town.

  This was the point when white supremacy, formerly the slogan of one faction of whites in the county, became the insoluble glue of civic life, and inseparable from the legacy of the Confederacy. In 1909, the Granville Grays chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy purchased the thirty-foot bronze statue of a Confederate soldier and planted his feet atop a high pedestal of local granite in the center of Oxford. City officials placed it in the middle of the town’s busiest intersection, even though some critics pronounced it an inconvenience and an eyesore. The monument faced forever north, the majority of whites believed, because the boys who’d worn the gray had never run from the damn Yankees. Elderly Confederate veterans, cadets from the local white-only military academy, children from the segregated Oxford orphanage, and young women from Oxford Seminary were among the thousands who gathered to hear Governor W. W. Kitchen render a high-flown paean to the Lost Cause, which “brought tears to many an eye,” reported the Oxford Public Ledger. This tall bronze figure testified to the entrenched power of the new social order, standing guard in front of the courthouse for the next sixty-five years—until the next revolution in racial politics came to town.

  That latest revolution marched with Golden Frinks from the graveyard to the courthouse in 1970 on that sunny Saturday afternoon after Henry Marrow’s burial. “I saw that Confederate monument,” Frinks said, “and I thought it was a good time for this. There was something in the core of these black people’s psyche that carried a little racism that is still there, but they can’t see it.” To confront white supremacy was not just about confronting white people, Frinks believed, but also a matter of stamping out internalized feelings of inferiority among blacks. “I looked out at all the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks, and I knew we needed to go down to that Confederate monument.” For hundreds of black citizens in Granville County, this was a moment of healing, a moment when they stood up for themselves, defying subjugation with such force that centuries of fear evaporated like spilled lemonade on hot pavement. Freedom pounded in their hearts. Several hundred black citizens marched silently to the courthouse, spirits soaring with possibility despite the sadness of the occasion. “We was drinkin’ that freedom wine,” Frinks liked to say.

  The crowd came together all around the much-loathed monument and heard Ben Chavis, the leader of the young folks and grieving for his slain contemporary, address the crowd in the fiery style of a new generation of Black Power militants. Frinks, the veteran SCLC warrior, spoke about the meaning of the old Confederate’s vigil in the center of town. The monument needed to be moved, he said, “because it’s a stigma, because it stands for hundreds of years of a repressive period—slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, bigotry, and all of that complicity of keeping a people down. But we ain’t staying down no more,” he declared. Years later, Frinks told me how he had waved his broad hands to the assemblage and leavened the fiery rhetoric with humor: “I talked about that man, this old Confederate soldier, how he hadn’t been to the bathroom since 1865, and it was time for him to come on down now and get some relief.” But Frinks ended the rally by reminding his listeners of the unconscionable brutality of the murder, how Robert Teel and his sons had butchered Henry Marrow as he lay helpless and pleading for his life. He closed his speech with a bitter attack on the white power structure in Oxford: “To them it’s just another nigger dead,” he said, “but it ain’t gonna stay that way. What’s going to be dead here soon is old Jim Crow.”

  Frinks, with his cross and his dashiki, looked like neither an old civil rights veteran nor like a candidate for membership in the Black Panthers. Younger black insurgents, sometimes quick to play “blacker than thou” politics, could not dismiss Frinks as an Uncle Tom. For one thing, they had a fair amount of common ground. Although “Black Power” was a murky slogan that seemed to invite clashing interpretations, most of the elements that have become associated with Black Power—black self-affirmation, international analyses of white supremacy, an interest in Africa and things African, independent black political action, a willingness to employ armed self-defense when necessary—were already present in the small towns and rural communities where the freedom movement was born. A distinct strain of homegrown African American radicalism can be traced back to slave revolts and Reconstruction-era militants. The Black Power generation, often portrayed as a sharp break with the past, drew on long-standing political traditions in the black South.

  “I didn’t need the sixties or the civil rights movement to make me angry,” Eddie McCoy, one of the most forceful of the young African American militants in Oxford, explained to my father and a roomful of students during a class we taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. “I didn’t need that.”

  McCoy was a graceful, broad-shouldered man, born in 1942 in a shotgun house across from the jail. His mother, Lucille McCoy, labored as a maid and cook in white people’s houses to support six children. James McCoy, Eddie’s father, worked three jobs as a janitor until he saved up enough money to open a pool hall in 1960. “The floor in our house had gaps in it, you could feed the chickens through the cracks in the floor,” Eddie recalled bitterly. “And it snowed in the house and it rained in the house. And it was hot—you didn’t have no fans. There was one plug in the whole house, you run everything off a drop-cord.”

  McCoy traced his rage in 1970 to the ordinary, day-to-day humiliations that white supremacy imposed on his childhood. “When my grandmother used to take us to the five-and-ten-cent store, we would want water, and she would say wait until you get home. Because you can’t drink out of that water fountain, we couldn’t read, and she’d say it was for white people and we couldn’t have any.” Until he and his brothers and sisters got old enoug
h to read, McCoy recalled, laughing softly, “We thought the water was white. And we wanted some of that white water because we never had white water. The things we couldn’t do, I always thought ‘Why can’t we do this?’ and the things white people had that we didn’t have, I always wanted to know why I couldn’t have those things.”

  The signs that whites relegated black people to a separate, inferior caste were glaringly obvious, as they were intended to be. “You had to go to the back of a restaurant to get food,” McCoy said. “The blacks called the restaurant downtown ‘hole in the wall’ because you couldn’t go in the door, you had to go down the alley. The restaurant had a real name on the front, but they had a hole in the wall in the alleyway where the blacks would go pick up their food.”

  When black children walked to school, school buses filled with white children often passed them by. “When you saw a bus of white kids coming you had to get back,” recounted McCoy. “You get back as far from that bus as you can, because they gon’ spit at you or throw something at you, because they’re in a bus and you can’t get at ’em.”

  And when they got to school, said McCoy, all they had to do was open a book to be reminded of their status. “We never got new books,” he told me. “All our ratty old books came from the white schools, after they were done with them. When I got a book it was four or five years old, you had three or four more spellers by the time I got your old one. And everybody didn’t get one, we had to share. You’d share it with someone else and if they took it home and forgot it, you’d be out of luck for the next two or three days until that kid remembered to bring it back.”

  The black children whose parents managed to provide them something like a middle-class existence, McCoy explained to my father and the college students, might embrace nonviolence. But the poor, to whom the system had been brutally indifferent, were faster to grab a brick or a fire bomb. “It was always poor children,” McCoy observed, “people that didn’t have nothing to lose, and their parents were poor and didn’t have nothing to lose, so do I paint the picture? We was dispensable, we could see that. I was a write-off kid from the time I was born. I won’t gon’ be nothing, won’t nothing gon’ become of me, I won’t gon’ finish school, I was supposed to go to jail, am I right, Reverend Tyson?”

  “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard,” Dr. King told America, but it was far easier for people like my father to hear Dr. King’s words about love than to heed his counsel about the young people rioting in the streets. The Black Power insurgents of the late 1960s, disillusioned by the assassination of Dr. King, and keenly aware of themselves as a new generation, rejected interracial approaches and nonviolent direct action. “We wanted the whole system to change,” Eddie McCoy explained. “Those civil rights Negroes, the professional people, they was nice, they talked to white people. I didn’t think that would work. Martin Luther King was never my favorite. I admired him, I liked what he stood for,” McCoy said, “but I didn’t think it would work. When nonviolence did work, mostly it was because white people were afraid we was gon’ burn the place down.”

  In the years since the freedom movement ended, the memory of what had been required of people faded, McCoy explained to me, and people no longer appreciated the sacrifices that had been made regardless of methods. “I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowdays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, ‘Y’all come on in now, integration done come.’ But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn’t no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around—you better believe it. You didn’t get it for free.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a good thing, McCoy conceded, but it was the determination of local citizens, not the legislation itself, that made the new law meaningful. “Law or no law,” McCoy spat, “somebody still had to go in there and get kicked in the ass. And by the time they killed Dickie Marrow nobody was having that shit anymore. We was about ready to kick some ass our own selves.”

  CHAPTER 8

  OUR “OTHER SOUTH”

  NOTHING IN MY family’s history—nothing in American history, for that matter—prepared my father for Black Power in the manner of Eddie McCoy. In that regard, Daddy was like most white liberals of his generation. His family background did, in fact, make him unusually receptive to certain aspects of the African American freedom struggle; to the redemptive rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., for example. His independent cast of mind allowed him to defy conventional wisdoms of various kinds, and he admired, if he did not always emulate, iconoclastic Southerners like Thad Stem and Charlotte Hawkins Brown who chopped with a big ax and cut their own path. He probably had enough Christian millennialism in him to imagine a whole new social order, though his theologically conservative view of human nature made him doubt that one was on the way. Daddy was a Methodist preacher first and foremost, tending to the living and burying the dead, and he saw his civil rights duties as a matter of persuading the fearful folks in the pew to accept all human beings as children of God and equal in His eyes. But even if Daddy had not been a preacher above all else, he was not hard-edged enough to make sense to someone like Eddie McCoy.

  Where Eddie McCoy simply demanded respect—and back in 1970, at least, really saw little reason to talk to white people at all—Daddy wanted a new heaven and a new earth, where the lion would lie down with the lamb. Daddy liked to joke that the lion had always been willing, especially around lunchtime, but the lamb needed more assurance that the Kingdom was at hand. The Black Power generation’s vision of social change, though it was often portrayed as radical, and thought of itself as radical, was actually in some ways a deeply traditional and even conservative assessment: you could have whatever you could take, and you could keep whatever you could hold. Power conceded nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass had pointed out a century earlier; it never had and it never would. But my daddy longed for justice to roll down like waters, for the crooked places to be made straight and the rough places to be made smooth, and for all flesh to see it together. Neither his view nor McCoy’s involved a pragmatic understanding of coalition politics—how we would get there from here. But both Daddy’s committed Christian faith and his Eleanor Roosevelt liberalism led him to yearn that white people would concede power rather than black people merely seize it.

  There were other white Southerners with broader visions, I realize now, but few of them had the ear of any appreciable white congregation. I now know that there was a Southern left populated by radicals and prophets, people like Myles Horton, who founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932, where a generation later Rosa Parks became acquainted with other people like herself from across the South, whose defiant stories inspired her famous one-woman sit-in on the bus in Montgomery; Anne and Carl Braden, called “dedicated Communists” by Kentucky’s attorney general, whose Southern Patriot kept dissidents in Dixie informed of one another’s existence in the 1950s and 1960s; Virginia Durr, an Alabama belle whose antiracist activism over the decades placed her Outside the Magic Circle, as she titled her autobiography; and Lillian Smith, the Georgia-born lesbian writer whose Killers of the Dream inspired generations of Southern dissidents, including my father. But while Daddy had stumbled upon Smith’s classic in a course that he took at Guilford College, most of the Tysons had never heard of her or these other radical folks. I came to know their stories much later, as a historian, and wished that I had grown up knowing them. Southerners like the Tysons did not write for radical magazines or get investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, though we sometimes got run out of town all by ourselves. The truth is that neither ideology nor sociology moved my family; instead, we found our footing in the Scriptures we were raised on and in the church that sometimes broke our hearts.

  Some people criticized my father and some of his brot
hers for being “fanatics,” and it would be soothing and self-congratulatory now, after the fact, to accept that critique and portray my kinfolks as the kind of saints and heroes that populate many conventional narratives about the civil rights movement. But the truth is that the Tysons got embroiled in this mess out of decidedly mixed motives. It was not that they were crusading heroes or political leaders so much as that they were passionate, willful, stubborn Christians responding to the world around them. They heard the Spirit of God within them and tried to obey—that was part of it. But they also drank deeply from that uncompromising and rebellious pride that moves in the hearts of both ruthless tyrants and saintly visionaries.

  As the Lord had revealed it to the Tyson boys, they were smarter than you were and better looking than you were, and they could preach rings around anybody you knew, and could not only stomp a mudhole in you and kick it dry, if it came to that, but had their finger on the pulse of the Holy Spirit besides. They took their orders directly from the Lord, and lesser authorities could kiss their asses. Consequently, nobody had any business telling them what to do or say, nor did any of the principalities and powers of this world. In fact, the more power you had, the less likely the Tysons were to take dictation from you. That isn’t a saintly orientation toward the world, exactly, but saints who share it probably swim farther upstream than the timorous angels my daddy derided as “little tailor-made Jesus boys.” If, as one of the better-known humorists of my granddaddy’s day speculated, a fanatic is a person who does just what the Lord would do if He knew the actual facts of the case, then the Tysons probably were fanatics. But before we give them credit as social prophets, we do well to remember that they rebelled not only against an unjust social order but sometimes against their own best lights, too.