Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  Lying in bed alone at the parsonage a few nights later, Earl heard a knock at his back door. He thought it might be the Klan coming to make good on their threats, but saw what appeared to be a white woman standing near the back porch. It was too dark to tell who it was, and the figure had moved back away from the house after knocking. Earl opened the door and reached for the light switch. “Please don’t turn on the light,” a female voice stammered. “I just wanted you to know how proud I am that you are my preacher. I just wanted you to know that.” And then she hurried away into the darkness.

  The bishop, who was somewhat less proud of Earl, called to tell him that the local churches had stopped his salary, and that the Eastern North Carolina Conference had no funds to pay him. He was sympathetic to Earl’s situation, though, and there was a three-point circuit up in Virginia that he knew about. He’d make some calls and get back to Earl right away. “But don’t do anything like this again,” the bishop told him. “If you do, it will mark you.” Less than a month after he had refused to move out of the “colored” section, Earl and his family were unpacking boxes in a ratty old farmhouse in the Virginia tidewater at a tiny place called Surry Courthouse. “I didn’t know a soul in Virginia,” he recalled years later, “and I had only been out of North Carolina a couple of times in my life.” Earl had been banished.

  On his first day in Surry Courthouse, Earl recalled, one of his new members dropped by the house in an old pickup truck and offered to take Earl into town and introduce him to some people. Earl was glad to go with the quiet, warm, and unassuming farmer. On their way into town, however, they stopped behind a yellow school bus. This must have jarred something in the farmer’s mind, because he said very softly, without looking at Earl, “Preacher, I don’t know what you think about this integration business. But the less you say about it, the better.”

  Exile hurt Uncle Earl deeply, and it also furnished a double-edged lesson to his brothers, who had seen their father forced from a pulpit for advocating racial equality. My own father’s diary from those days reads, “Earl has had a difficult time. He moved from the Louisburg Circuit because of a racial incident. I glory in his spunk and I appreciate his being a faithful witness to the truth of God.” But the incident at Louisburg earned him some support, too, and not just from his family. When Earl applied to Union Theological Seminary in nearby Richmond later that year, the dean looked over his application and asked him two questions. First, he asked Earl what he thought about the race issue. Earl swallowed hard. “I am called to treat every person as my brother or sister in Christ,” he replied, “regardless of color.”

  The dean’s second question cut straight to the heart of the matter. “Earl, you’re a North Carolina boy,” the dean said. “Your whole family lives down there, and all your folks are preachers down there. What on earth are you doing up here in Virginia?” Earl swallowed hard again, and then told him the whole story of what had happened in the courtroom in Louisburg, and how the churches had responded to him. The dean listened to the whole story, then smiled warmly at Earl.

  “Your academic record is a little spotty,” the dean said, “but that whole courtroom episode alone qualifies you to enter this seminary, even if you weren’t obviously a fine preacher already.” Within a couple of days, Earl learned that Union Theological Seminary had granted him a full scholarship. And his thoughts could not help but go back to his brother in Christ, whom he had met in the courtroom that morning in Louisburg. “Don’t you worry,” Judson King had told him, “you give the man that forty dollars and the Lord will give it back to you. The Lord will take care of you if you’ll let Him.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE CASH REGISTER AT THE POOL HALL

  WHILE MY CRAZY uncle Earl believed that the Lord would take care of you if you’d let Him, the Black Power generation took the more conventional view that the Lord helps those who help themselves. Even though the new movement in Oxford had been launched from the steps of the First Baptist Church, the Black Power crowd attended services, you might say, at the Soul Kitchen, the old Ridley Drive-In on the Chavis homeplace, which Ben Chavis had reopened when he’d moved back to town in 1969. “It was a nice little spot that everyone would go to,” Carolyn Thorpe, a young black activist, recalled. “Because of course there were no activities for young black people in Oxford—it was a nightspot where everyone gathered.” The Soul Kitchen was a simple setup with booths, a bar, a meeting room, and a dance floor. Its kitchen poured forth steaming platters of fried chicken that remain legendary. The jukebox pounded out “Otis, Marvin, the Temptations, a lot of James Brown,” according to Thorpe. Another regular, Linda Ball, bragged, “Honey, we could dance!” Junior Walker’s “Shotgun” and James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Payback, Part 1” were favorite hymns.

  The tone of the Black Power crowd disturbed some of the older, more traditionally minded African Americans in Oxford. A lot of the uneasiness was nothing more than the shopworn worries of an older generation. More thoughtful observers, however, fretted that the young people hadn’t experienced enough to understand the battle before them, and that their rhetoric sometimes served psychological needs rather than political goals. Some thought the militants were not rooted enough in the gospel vision that had helped black folk survive for four centuries. Even those uneasy with Black Power, though, knew something decisively important was afoot.

  When Aretha Franklin demanded “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” the dance floor at the Soul Kitchen pounded out the rhythms of a new black sense of self. Like the Soul Kitchen itself, which had been a black-owned business in earlier incarnations, and had always been owned by a political family bent on black uplift, Black Power was not entirely new. Its communal and defiant ethos drew on African American traditions and echoed the spirit of the sanctified church, even if it expressed itself in an angry new voice. But nonviolent direct action held little promise for these young people. They had little appreciation for mere “civil rights” if it meant that black people could buy an Orangeade at the drugstore but were still regarded as a class of untouchables by whites and apparently could be shot down with impunity.

  The assassination of Dr. King sealed the death of nonviolence, even as a tactical approach. In short, virtually nobody believed anymore, as Dr. King had, that “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” And in Oxford, the murder of Henry Marrow “made us look again at every aspect of our situation here,” Ben Chavis explained. “The fact that there were no blacks working downtown. Not one in City Hall, not even a secretary. The highest-ranking black officer in the police department was a patrol officer. None in the fire department. And lots of Oxford still segregated. I mean, we just decided enough is enough.”

  “Them young folks was mad as hell,” Golden Frinks said, “but they was on a high. They had drank the intoxication of that desired freedom and it was really the best kind. They had breathed that aroma of the seeking, the seeking of that freedom wine.” At the Soul Kitchen, a movement culture emerged that was cool and defiant, seething and analytical. If the “civil rights” generation found their vision in the uplifting strains of gospel music, the Black Power generation leaned more toward the improvisational genius of jazz and the blues-inflected rhythms of soul. Though the jukebox at the Soul Kitchen pounded out soul music day and night, the young insurgents around the tables pieced together their revolution like jazz musicians, improvising on their traditions in order to imagine a new world. Black militants from across the state and sometimes from across the country gathered in the booths to brainstorm and banter. “That’s where I met Frank Ballance, at the Soul Kitchen,” Eddie McCoy recalled, referring to a prominent civil rights attorney who was later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives after many years in the state legislature. “G. K. Butterfield, Henry Morris, Milton Fitch and his dad, all those guys,” he said, naming only a few of the statewide organizers. “That’s where we met, at the Soul Kitchen. What we was doing was strategy—how
to work it.”

  Part of both the style and the strategy of Black Power was scaring local white people and keeping white authorities off balance. In a Southern town as small as Oxford, any outsider became the object of suspicion, and a steady stream of movement visitors offered the perfect opportunity to terrify white folks. “Every time a new fellow would come to town,” Eddie McCoy recounted, “Ben would send him downtown. And what we would do is get ’em to walk through downtown like they was casing the town out. You had some of them with bald heads, some of them with bushy beards, lots of them with big old Afros on their heads, and they were strangers. That was worrying them white people all day long.” This may have been more political theater than physical threat, but it cannot be denied that the Black Power style scared whites half to death. There was some satisfaction in that, even if the results were not always politically productive.

  Richard Wright once observed that a black man in the Jim Crow South had three options with respect to white people, none of them politically promising. He could adopt a docile and religious posture, accepting his racial subordination. He could play the part of the “respectable Negro,” superior to the poor blacks beneath him, and thereby become complicit in the racial caste system. Or the final— and frequently suicidal—option was to adopt the “criminal attitude” of the black desperado, the “bad nigger” who haunted the fearful imagination of the white South. This almost nihilistic figure affirmed white terrors that what lay behind black masks of servility was a boiling black rage that had few other outlets.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, these desperadoes, or those who acted the part, often ended up twitching at the end of a rope or wrapped in a logging chain at the bottom of a river, where their tragic fate warned other blacks that resistance was suicide. In the Black Power era, when it became possible to terrify white people without necessarily dying, this “bad nigger” posture became a kind of irresistible pose. When the scary-looking strangers walked through Oxford, Eddie McCoy explained, “We’d go through town and say to white people, ‘Man, did you see the Black Panthers is in town? Ain’t those some baaaad dudes?’ All through town the word would get out. The white folks would say, ‘Lord have mercy, we got them Black Panthers in town.’ We kept them all upset.”

  Though white people tended to see the black community as monolithic, the movement that emerged in Oxford after the murder of Henry Marrow was fragmented from the very beginning. Ironically, the movement reached its crescendo of energy and effectiveness at the same moment that it began to fracture from within. The younger radicals had a magnificent ferocity that fueled the movement, but they did not always remember that they had inherited as well as energized the struggle. With greater patience, they might have been able to keep things together more. But as the movement grew, the divisions grew, too, many of them along generational lines.

  The issue of violent protest was perhaps the best litmus test for the political, social, generational, and philosophical fissures. Older, middle-class blacks like Sam Cox, who frequently negotiated with city officials, definitely supported the movement and recognized that the moment to push forward had arrived. Cox and his peers were not necessarily prepared to countenance violence. “He was the ideal person to be the spokesperson for ’em,” Mayor Currin said. “Sam was trying to get everything quiet just like I was. I am satisfied that Sam never had anything to do with any rioting or burning or any suggestion of anything like that.”

  The incongruous result, of course, was that white city officials tried to negotiate an end to the rioting and the arson with people who could not have done anything to stop it. “The top people couldn’t negotiate,” Eddie McCoy jeered, “because if they did negotiate it was just bullshit, because they couldn’t control nobody because they didn’t even associate with ’em. The white people didn’t want to negotiate with nobody but the middle-class blacks, but the street people was the ones that was organizing and doing everything and keeping [the violence] going.” The “street people,” too, included people who were so angry at the racial caste system that the idea of “negotiations” meant little. “We just wanted to burn the motherfucker down,” one of them told me years afterward. “It didn’t make no difference who said what, they would have changed all this shit after the fucking Civil War if they gave a damn about us. It was straight-up payback time.”

  Ben Chavis, though hardly among the “street people,” stood at the center of the organizing but was not a wholehearted party to the violence that angry young blacks committed in the name of freedom. “I have an objection, in principle, to violence,” he explained. But if he did not endorse or organize violence, Chavis was more than willing to use the violence committed by others as negotiating leverage. The heart of Chavis’s political strategy was economic pressure against the most wealthy and powerful whites. Though he did not counsel firebombing, he rationalized black violence against white property by placing it in the context from which it had emerged. “What we were protesting against was racial violence,” he explained later. “What Teel did was an act of racial violence. And what the police and the courts did was to sustain this racial violence. What the white business community did, excluding blacks from employment and stigmatizing them with segregation, was a different kind of racial violence. And violence begat violence.”

  Whites would blame Ben Chavis for nearly all the destruction that occurred in Oxford after the murder, but the African Americans who committed much of it actually held Ben Chavis in a curious mixture of respect and disdain. “He could talk and make them speeches,” one of them reported. “But he wasn’t down with no violence.” By all reports, Chavis sought to diminish acts of arson and vandalism, even though his conversations with city officials occasionally contained what amounted to veiled threats. His ability to control the chaos in the streets was never clear. “Shit, he wouldn’t let us do a lot of things that we just did anyway,” Boo Chavis recalled. “If Ben knew that we had did something in a violent manner, he would say, ‘Well, we’re not going to gain anything by this,’ but we didn’t care, you know, because we wasn’t gaining nothing noway.”

  While Ben Chavis sought with mixed success to curb the angrier impulses of a movement he had organized in large measure from high school students, he may have been unaware of a small, separate movement within the movement. On the other hand, he may have known a fair amount about this cabal; it is not a subject that lends itself to easy candor, even decades later. In the weeks after the murder, and for the rest of that summer, about a dozen men, most of them black veterans who had recently returned from Vietnam, met after hours to make their own plans—and to make firebombs. Nearly all of them were veterans in their mid-twenties or older. They had learned well the lessons of their years in the Mekong Delta, the Dominican Republic, and in various military training camps. They were not the only blacks in Oxford who were angry enough to burn it down. But they laughed at the high school students who sometimes hurled Coca-Cola bottles full of gasoline at buildings and who were occasionally caught by the police. “That way they kept thinking it was some prank or some shit,” one of the vets recalled, “and that way we knowed we wasn’t going to get caught. Because this was a military operation.”

  The arson and vandalism perpetrated against white-owned property was a curious mixture of carefully planned, politically calibrated “military operations” and spontaneous, uncontrollable expressions of rage and vengeance. “We said, the onliest way this is going to work is that we gonna have to burn somebody’s buildings down and break somebody’s windows out,” one of the men explained to me years afterward. “And we would sit around and discuss it, have a meeting.” But nobody wanted to propose in a roomful of people, even these close friends, exactly what should go up in flames, and so the operations were never explicitly planned at these so-called meetings. “Somebody would say something,” the man continued, “and something might get burned up, and we knew it had to come out of our group but didn’t nobody say nothing in the group.” Th
e street violence remained decentralized “in territories” another veteran explained. “You know, it won’t no use trying to tell ’em, tell somebody what they was gon’ do or not do.” At the same time, Mayor Currin pointed out, “we had some forty-odd firebombs thrown or lit,” and the black veterans who ignited most of those bombs knew one another and frequently cooperated on planning in private. “I had a lot of common sense or brains, you know,” one of them recalled, “and I used to draw the maps, when we would set around talking, and say, well, about the time the cops come around, we gon’ do this here and we gon’ hit that place over there, we gon’ do it like that.”

  The way whites often viewed the black community as an undifferentiated mass made it harder for white authorities to get a fix on the violence. The sophisticated efforts of the black Vietnam veterans were one thing; the spontaneous street violence, most of it perpetrated by black teenagers, was quite another. And both kinds of attacks were hard to stop. “When we’d walk home,” Boo Chavis recounted, “we would take the furniture off white people’s porches, put it in the middle of the street, and burn it up.” Plate-glass windows furnished irresistible targets. “We knew the paths and shortcuts all through Grab-all,” another one of the young vandals explained. “Once we got up in there, that was it, you could go anywhere. I used to get up in a tree and look at [the police] and laugh at ’em. It was dark up in there.”