Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  Both the unplanned outbursts of the young street toughs and the “military operations” of the black veterans generally took place without prior knowledge by Ben Chavis or the more mainstream movement leadership. “Ben Chavis didn’t know shit,” one of the black veterans spat. “We didn’t give a damn about his Martin Luther King bullshit.” Eddie McCoy agreed that Chavis didn’t advocate violence. “When Ben found out about the shit it was already done,” McCoy recalled, “and he never advised anybody to do anything that wasn’t within the law. He was very careful about what he said.” Carolyn Thorpe, one of the Soul Kitchen insurgents, complained that Ben Chavis would not let the young people dynamite the Confederate monument—and they had dynamite. “You know, I have never wanted to blow up anything in my life,” she said, “but I begged him, pleaded with all of them to just take the dynamite and blow it up. He would not let us do it. A lot of stuff we just did anyway. But he was not for the violence. He really wasn’t.”

  The young people raising hell in the streets were confident, however, that the force of fear was their most powerful weapon. The liberal Raleigh News and Observer condemned “the tossing of rocks and bottles and firebombs” in Oxford as “the most fruitless form of protest imaginable,” arguing that “discussion is a more promising way to racial accommodation than destruction.” But the indisputable fact was that whites in Oxford did not even consider altering the racial caste system until rocks began to fly and buildings began to burn. Chavis may not have approved of the firebombers but, apart from the gasoline and the matches, their logic was not distant from his own strategy of economic pressure. “It was like we had a cash register up there at the pool hall,” one of the arsonists recalled years later, “just ringing up how much money we done cost these white people. We knew if we cost ’em enough goddamn money they was gon’ start doing something.”

  Of course, firebombs are not “democratic” in any meaningful sense; no organization representing the people decided to burn buildings and smash windows. No vote was taken, and those too young or too old to participate, those who did not approve of the violence or those who were terrified by it had no voice. violence that did not represent a broad community consensus could hardly be ended at the negotiating table, especially when no one who approved of the violence had a seat at that table. The negotiators did not speak for the rioters, so they could not promise to stop the riots in exchange for concessions. Not everyone cared. “They just killing us off like it was nothing,” one street fighter insisted, “and the judge just as well have on his Ku Klux Klan suit.” One young black woman made the point that property destruction forced the white power structure to abandon its intransigent posture: “They had to give us some respect,” she insisted. “They might not like it but they damn sure had to do that. We was getting ready to tear this motherfucker all to hell, and all of a sudden [white people] decided to listen.”

  Of course, one might argue that they did “tear this motherfucker all to hell,” given the level of destruction, but clearly some young African Americans considered burning only white business property—warehouses, for example—a moderate half measure. After all, the white folks had killed a man and then barely even gotten around to arresting the murderers. The whites “were lucky we didn’t do what we could have done, what we had every right to do,” one of the young Black Power folks told me. In her view, the Black Power generation in Oxford had been very moderate.

  In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who’s twice as crazy as they are. The man who blockades abortion clinics considers himself a model of restraint because he does not bomb them; the fellow who bombs them after hours thinks he’s a moderate because he didn’t bomb them at rush hour like his cousin Elmer wanted to do; the White Citizens Council member who assassinated Medgar Evers in Mississippi undoubtedly regarded himself as a moderate, since he didn’t kill the whole family. Nixon felt that a lesser man might have used atomic weapons on North Vietnam, but he displayed the statesmanlike restraint to use only conventional ordnance—albeit by the time Nixon signed a ceasefire agreement in 1973, America had dropped three times the tonnage unleashed on Europe, Africa, and Asia during World War II—all of it on a country the size of Texas. And in the fire of the black freedom struggle, there were always people on both sides who were willing to crank it up another notch, claiming moral authority over the cowards who wouldn’t go that far, and thinking of themselves as “moderate” for not taking it still further.

  Even though the black community was not of one mind on questions of tactics and strategy, violence or nonviolence, “civil rights” or “Black Power,” nearly all African Americans agreed that the murder of Henry Marrow indicated a need for unified action. On Sunday, May 17, the day after Marrow’s funeral, Golden Frinks, Ben Chavis, Sam Cox, Eddie McCoy, and the black churchwomen who had traditionally supported the movement organized the first in a series of Sunday afternoon marches. Announced from black church pulpits, through black businesses, and by word of mouth, the first mass meeting convened that Sunday afternoon at four o’clock in the large sanctuary at First Baptist. Ben Chavis spoke briefly, and there were some songs to get the Spirit moving. The large crowd, led by Chavis and Frinks, then retraced the path of the previous day’s funeral march downtown. Along the way, three white men armed with knives and pistols menaced the marchers but did not attack. “We had our shit with us, too,” Eddie McCoy explained. “They just couldn’t see it. If they had hurt somebody, they would have flat gone down.” Golden Frinks estimated the crowd at roughly two thousand; the Oxford Police Department claimed that only 250 people marched. The Oxford Public Ledger echoed the police figure, but printed the number beneath a photograph in which nearly twice that many persons were visible, and the camera had not captured the entire line of marchers.

  At the Confederate monument, Frinks addressed the crowd in his customary golden dashiki, raising roars of applause as he called for action and announced a march from Oxford to the state capital in Raleigh that would begin five days later, on Friday. Acknowledging that the marchers might face Klan violence or police crackdown, Frinks lightened the moment by joking that “last time I went jail I took three hundred and fourteen peoples with me and the only ones that got hurt was white people having heart attacks.” As they lifted up the anthems of the movement, some of the young people singing with the raised fist of the Black Power revolt, it was clear that the “freedom wine” remained in good supply.

  In the months ahead, the “Sunday march” would furnish one much-needed expression of black unity. Granville County’s black community had long been divided, not merely by class, religion, generation, and political orientation, but by geography; blacks lived in a few small communities and tended to stay within those boundaries. After the murder of Henry Marrow, Ben Chavis said, “it was like everybody lived on the same street.” These Sunday marches continued to be the best glue of the local movement, which tended to move in a variety of different directions the rest of the week. “The onliest time everybody got together was on Sunday for the Sunday march,” Eddie McCoy recalled. “Every Sunday, everybody after church would meet up at First Baptist Church, and we would march downtown about four o’clock and have a speaker, come back and let ’em know we won’t gon’ take it.” And every Sunday afternoon, that “same street” to which Chavis referred led from First Baptist Church to the Confederate monument downtown.

  Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning continued to be, as Dr. King liked to point out, the most segregated hour in American life, and the only whites visible after church at the Sunday marches were newspaper reporters and camera crews. The single white person visible in news photographs of the marches may as well have worn a sign saying MARXIST GRADUATE STUDENT FROM CHAPEL HILL. Apart from Henry Marrow’s funeral, neither my father nor any other local white people marched with the movement in Oxford. By 1970, the level of white involvement in the freedom movement anywhere was small; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating C
ommittee, probably the most integrated organization in the movement in the early 1960s, had expelled its handful of remaining white members in 1965. With the shift toward racial separatism that came afterward, many whites felt alienated, as my father had, and many African Americans were no longer willing to be seen with whites. “My black minister friends just disappeared,” my father said mournfully. “One or two of them explained that we just couldn’t be friends anymore, but I never quite accepted it, though I kept leading my folks as best I could. It hurt my feelings.” Whites dedicated to racial justice worked the white side of the color line, where they knew the terrain; they wrote small checks and pushed people as far as they felt they could, winning few battles and little applause. The mistakes that brought about this state of affairs had been made long before, and Oxford’s handful of white believers in racial equality literally had nowhere to go politically.

  I have often pondered whether or not my father and his handful of allies could have done more to preserve the ties between blacks and whites. By 1970, it was clearly too late. But even a decade earlier, when the sit-ins began, my father and his middle-aged white liberal friends had left the demonstrations to black Southerners and the handful of young white idealists who had nothing to lose. Signing a petition here, writing a letter to the editor there—it did not amount to much. Those whom Martin Luther King Jr. termed “people of goodwill” were rarely willing to consider more than piecemeal measures that were insufficient to the evils of the day. And the rank-andfile white churchfolks did even less than that, though the moral distance between Dr. King and George Wallace could not have been clearer. Daddy tried hard to live his convictions; he acted on his faith and risked his safety and his livelihood trying to persuade his white congregations to do the right thing. But the fear that he’d expressed in his diary in 1962—“I hope it is not too late”—turned out to be prophetic. And in the late 1960s, when Black Power hit them from one side and the white backlash hit them from the other, white liberals like my father were left with few options. “It was obviously a very racially divided community,” Daddy explained. “There was only so much we could do.” The American racial problem has never yielded much ground to moderate solutions.

  It was a little frightening that Graham Wright, a white banker, thought he was a moderate, too. “I haven’t reached the point myself where I think some kind of retaliatory action is necessary,” he said, “but I hear an increasing amount of talk about it from my friends.” Mayor Currin told reporters, “Oxford’s no different from most any town. Things were going along real well until the shooting,” he said, “and that could have happened anywhere. There is an element anywhere that will take advantage of something like that to become violent and destructive.” In an assessment that managed to be both factual and meaningless, the mayor called the troubles in Oxford “part of a general trend toward lawlessness spreading across the country.” The Raleigh News and Observer wondered. “The view that things in Oxford were going along fine until the Marrow killing and its ‘exploitation’ by a few ‘outside agitators’ prevails,” a reporter noted. “But it is not unanimous.” Black businessman James Gregory told the reporter that “even some black folks want to believe we’ve made a lot of ‘progress’ in race relations, but deep down they know that things are bad.”

  White citizens, Mayor Currin told me later, “did not think the killing was sufficient to excuse the violence we had.” John K. Nelms, the head of the city planning commission, acknowledged white reluctance to accept change but stated publicly that “blacks have been trivial, unreasonable, and uncompromising in their demands.” Black residents, however, felt that it was hardly trivial to ask for equality before the law and acceptance in the public sphere. According to the News and Observer, however, city officials willingly talked off the record about striking back violently against the black community. “Many whites feel as though they’ve been betrayed,” Nelms explained. “Either that, or they’re afraid they might be burned out next.”

  The upheavals in Oxford were the best thing that had ever happened to the local Ku Klux Klan, which quickly held a series of rallies in Granville County, seeking to exploit the polarized racial climate. “They had rallies,” Ben Chavis recalled, “major rallies. There were Ku Klux Klan rallies all over Granville County after the murder. Some of them were held out at Stem, and one in Wilton. They were advertised in the Oxford Ledger. We couldn’t get them to take our advertising for mass meetings, but they advertised Klan rallies. ” Robert Teel most likely had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And as my sister Boo and I had observed, the men in what my uncle Bobby always called “those reversible choir robes” had arrived quickly to protect the Teel family in the hours and days after the murder. “There were people stayed at my house there for weeks,” Robert Teel told me later, “twenty-four hours a day, guarding the place.”

  Teel recalled hearing that the Klan had rallied at crossroads communities in Providence, Stem, Wilton, and Bell Town. Their headquarters was on the Hazel Averett farm near Providence, about five miles from Oxford. These rallies attracted hundreds of white people, who stood around the huge flaming crosses and heard the angry racial diatribes. Mayor Currin, in keeping with long-standing Southern traditions, always insisted that “people from outside the county” were responsible for the Klan rallies and downplayed their importance. “That was just the way some people got their jollies,” he explained to me later. “These people parading with the flag and the uniforms, if it had really gotten down to it and somebody had wanted to fight—if a ‘jig’ had jumped out in front of them with a switch-blade—you’d see a whole lot of running. For a certain type of people, it was just a way to get together.”

  The increasingly large crowds at local Klan rallies and the support for the murderers of Henry Marrow among an even larger segment of white people in Granville County spurred black activists to take their protests to a higher level. As the murder trial loomed, Teel had little trouble raising an enormous defense fund. Some of the wealthiest people in the county contributed to his war chest. In a quiet way, the defense of Robert Teel and his family became a symbolic cause, a way local whites could express their resentment of the changes that were being forced upon them, especially school integration, which was scheduled for that fall. Although few people were willing to stand up for Teel in the newspapers, plenty of them were happy to give money. The court proceedings did not look promising. “After it became clear, in the preliminary hearing stage, that all of white Oxford was backing Teel,” Ben Chavis recalled, “we decided that we needed to raise this issue statewide and nationwide. That’s when we decided to march to Raleigh.”

  An ad hoc committee to plan the proposed fifty-mile march to the state capitol began meeting in the basement of First Baptist Church, led by Ben Chavis. Golden Frinks, who helped plan the march, obtained funding from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I had the money, see,” Frinks recalled, “and I would say, ‘Well, what we gon’ do is, we gon’ march from here to Raleigh, and we gonna get a mule cart’—I had all this in mind.” Frinks negotiated with the highway patrol, letting them know that he was willing either to cooperate with them or to defy them. Two students from Shaw University in Raleigh, John Mendez and Janet McCoy, obtained a city permit for the march, which said that the marchers would assemble on the capitol grounds on Sunday, May 24, at noon. Frinks sent Governor Robert Scott a telegram asking to meet with him at two o’clock. “We got that mule hitched up, we put that lady and a makeshift coffin up there and took off.”

  There were both official and unofficial efforts by local whites to stop the march. Mayor Currin drove out to the Chavis homeplace to persuade Ben not to hold the trek to Raleigh. “He said, ‘Please don’t march. Can’t we work this thing out? Don’t you know the highway is dangerous? Some of y’all might get hurt out there on the highway,’ ” Chavis recalled.

  “I did warn them that I didn’t think they ought to march,” Mayor Currin confirmed. “The only thing I was concerne
d about was that it be a peaceful thing. I didn’t want folks to get hurt, anybody to get hurt.” The Ku Klux Klan had announced that they would not allow the march to leave Granville County, so the mayor’s fears were not groundless. The town’s Human Relations Council called an emergency meeting. The black leaders they talked to, however, were in no position to call off the protest even in the unlikely event that they wanted to do so. In a concession that suggests their impoverished understanding of what the black insurgents wanted, Mayor Currin and City Manager Tom Ragland announced on the day of the march that six basketball goals would be built on city property. That’s just how clueless local white authorities were—they thought that black people might stop complaining if the town simply built enough basketball courts.

  Other whites in Oxford tried to deter the march in their own ways. “My daddy was living down on Charles Adcock’s farm,” Carolyn Thorpe, an activist and a sharecropper’s daughter, remembered. “Adcock told him that if he did not stop [his daughters] from marching, he was going to fire him.” On the morning of the march, Carolyn Thorpe and her sister saw their father’s landlord at a local service station. “I went up and told him, ‘Fire my father if you want to, but I am going to march and my sisters are going to march, and if you get in my way or mess with my family, you will have to deal with me.’ He could not stop us from marching.” Thorpe’s father kept his job.

  About seventy marchers left Oxford on Friday, May 22, walking down the Jefferson Davis Highway behind a mule-drawn wagon. Atop the wagon sat Willie Mae Marrow, the bereaved widow, visibly pregnant with the dead man’s third child, wearing a dark veil and holding one young daughter on her lap while comforting another. “That was the symbolic part,” Frinks explained. The mule cart echoed the one that had hauled Dr. King’s coffin through the streets of Atlanta two years earlier. The mule was a Southern-inflected symbol of the fact that the humble Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, and also of the menial labor that white supremacy had imposed upon black people; the black woman was “de mule uh de world,” as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. The protestors draped the coffin in black to mourn not only Henry Marrow but the deaths of many others across the country that month. Signs noted the four students killed and eleven wounded at Kent State on May 4; the six killed and dozens wounded in Augusta, Georgia, on May 12; and the two students killed and twelve wounded at Jackson State on May 16. A placard around the neck of the mule listed black uprisings that sounded the threat of retaliation: REMEMBER WATTS, DETROIT, NEWARK, OXFORD.