Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  Despite the sweltering heat that afternoon, hundreds of young blacks joined the march as it made its way down the Jefferson Davis Highway toward Creedmoor, where the marchers planned to sleep at a black church that night. Eddie McCoy had raised money and rented two trucks to carry supplies from Oxford. Buck Peace, a black man who had recently run unsuccessfully for sheriff in Granville County, used his own truck to ferry cold drinks out to the thirsty marchers. “We would go back to the pool room and take up money for all the sodas,” McCoy said, “and people would give you like five, ten, fifteen, or twenty dollars, and we’d buy ’em by the case, ice ’em down good, and Buck Peace or I would bring them back on a truck.” Though it was a serious occasion, people enjoyed themselves. “We bought hot dogs, sandwiches, people carried food like going on a picnic,” chuckled McCoy. “They would cook up chicken, make up boxes of food. There was no problem about food and things to drink.”

  The march was no picnic, though. The Ku Klux Klan had sworn to stop it, and they showed up at various points along the route. The highway patrol had no choice but to protect the marchers. “Our first interruption,” Frinks remembered, “was when we got on the Creedmoor Road, and Captain Jenkins got out of the car and told us that the Ku Klux Klan was gathering up by this store up ahead on our right hand.” The state troopers lined their cars up in the right lane, forming a protective line between the openly armed Klansmen and the less visibly armed marchers. “There were quite a few of them,” Frinks said, but no one fired their weapons.

  Despite the traditional songs and chants of the movement, which balanced the new Black Power anthems, the marchers were well armed. No one carried a weapon in plain view, but people like Herman Cozart, selected to serve as a marshal, kept their guns close at hand and out of sight. Eddie McCoy literally stuck to his guns, too. “Ben and them said it had to be nonviolent,” McCoy recounted, “but we all had our shit with us. That wagon with the mule had more guns on it than a damn army tank. A lot of ’em like me had been in the army, combat veterans, and we told Ben and them, ‘All nonviolent ever got Martin Luther King was dead, or else he’d be out here with us.’ We wasn’t gonna start nothing but we was ready. We wasn’t going out there without our guns, no way.” That night in Creedmoor, hundreds of local blacks brought food and joined the marchers for supper and singing. Armed sentries protected those who slept at the church. Carloads of whites fired two or three shots at blacks standing around outside, but screeched off into the night when the guards returned the fire.

  Golden Frinks arranged for a busload of young blacks from Hyde County, way down in the state’s eastern swamps, where the movement was still boiling hard, to join the march in Creedmoor Saturday morning “to get the numbers right,” he said. Other activists trickled in from all over the state. The mule-drawn wagon creaked out of Creedmoor full of guns and grape soda at about ten o’clock that morning, with Willie Mae Marrow and the coffin once again perched on top. “She stood up very bravely,” Ben Chavis said later. “She was getting death threats all the time at home, and there she was up there on the wagon where everybody could see her.”

  The atmosphere on the highway heated up on the second day. Carloads of whites would drive by and shout obscenities. “We got a lot of threats, especially after we left Creedmoor,” Herman Cozart recalled. “You got some of everything throwed at you—‘Hey, nigger, what you doing? Get off the road!’ People blow at you, stick their finger up and holler,” Cozart continued. Some of the cars carried well-known Klansmen, and one of the Teels, a brother and son of the men charged with killing Henry Marrow, rode in one of the cars that circled back again and again. “They would go so far and then come back around, trying to see who was marching and all,” Cozart said. One carload of hostile whites fired pistols into the air. Another group of marauders lit a string of firecrackers and threw them under the wagon to try to spook the mule.

  But the most tense moment occurred after lunch on the second day as several hundred marchers made their way past two mobile homes on the right side of the road, near a little store just over the Wake County line. A Confederate flag flew from one of the trailers and, as the march approached, several white men with rifles came outside and took firing positions. “Niggers! Hey, niggers!” the cry went up from the trailers. “They had done gone outdoors with their rifles setting out there,” said Herman Cozart. Some of the marchers tried to inconspicuously make ready to return fire. “I said, ‘Y’all keep walking, long as they don’t shoot,’ ” Cozart said. “ ‘Don’t even say nothing to ’em or even try to look at ’em.’ But some of us was ready to jump. They was hollering, ‘Hey, nigger! Where y’all going, niggers?’ But we just kept walking.” Several of the marchers remembered that the hecklers had fired several shots, though perhaps only in the air. “There were at least three shots fired,” Linda Ball said years later. The highway patrol sent officers over to talk to the armed white men, “but I never did see a police car taking anybody away or anything like that,” she added. Nobody shot back at the trailers, according to Ball, who carried a .32-caliber pearl-handled revolver, “but it was quite a panic there for a while.” That night, the marchers slept at a church on the outskirts of Raleigh.

  “The march just swelled,” Ben Chavis reported, “to almost a thousand people by the time it got to Raleigh.” Entering the city, the marchers paraded past the First Baptist Church, whose most illustrious member, Jesse Helms, was an increasingly popular commentator on WRAL-Tv. Helms, who had begun his career as a public relations official for the North Carolina Banking Association, was making a statewide reputation by opposing the civil rights movement. He liked to outline what he called “the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect,” and he defended the Ku Klux Klan as being no different from the NAACP, even though the former was a terrorist group and the latter operated primarily through the courts. The grist for the cranky commentator’s mill—“forced integration” and alleged “communists” and “sex perverts” in the black freedom movement—fed his growing popularity. Coming into Raleigh on Sunday morning, the marchers delighted in making a stir as they filed past the church where Helms taught Sunday school every week—and which he would eventually abandon, allegedly after the congregation took in a black member. “Yes, sirree, we went right by Jesse Helms’s church,” Golden Frinks recalled, “and we let ’em know we were out there.”

  The procession led by Frinks, Chavis, Willie Mae Marrow, and Reginald Hawkins, a black dentist from Charlotte who had recently run for governor as a protest candidate, arrived at the state capitol at about one-thirty. Students from Shaw University, St. Augustine’s College, and North Carolina Central University swelled their ranks. “Every time you do one of these things,” Chavis said, “you learn a lot about how to keep people together, how to keep their spirits high, and how to keep them on target, even if you have a setback.” Chavis addressed the throng on the capitol steps, as did Frinks and Hawkins. “Granville County has some of the meanest white folks I have ever seen,” Frinks told the crowd, “and they are lucky the black people have not taken the law into their own hands.”

  It was a well-attended rally, and the press had given the march heavy coverage. “We couldn’t believe how many people had showed up,” Eddie McCoy remembered. “There was people from all over the place, thousands of people.” The organizers had contacted Governor Robert Scott’s office several days ahead of time and informed him that they would like to discuss the troubles in Oxford and the larger problems of black citizens in dealing with the judicial system. But the governor’s aides had finally told them that Governor Scott would not meet with them. Ben Chavis and Willie Mae Marrow knocked at the statehouse door for a long time, but nobody came. “I remember going to the door, the state capitol door,” Chavis said, “and knocking on the door, and couldn’t get an answer. A lot of people in Oxford who had marched all the way,” Chavis continued, “was hoping and praying the governor would give us an audience, that the governor would
step up and call for justice in Oxford. It did not happen.”

  Chavis, Hawkins, and Frinks returned to the rally and reported that neither the governor nor any of his staff would receive them. “The day for begging for black people in North Carolina is over,” Hawkins declared, vowing to register enough black voters to end this disrespectful treatment. “What killed Henry Marrow,” Golden Frinks preached to the crowd, “was symbolic of racism in North Carolina. And what the governor just told us by his absence is that to the white power structure, it’s just another nigger dead.” These sentiments at the podium echoed those among the rank and file of the marchers. “We got all the way to Raleigh,” Carolyn Thorpe recalled bitterly, “and [the governor] was not even there. We could not talk to him. All that walking and marching and they said he wasn’t even in there. That told me everything I needed to know.”

  While the other marchers worried about getting the governor’s attention, Eddie McCoy had what he considered a far more serious problem: he and two of his friends had borrowed the mule for the march from Lonnie Fields, a black farmer in Granville County, and now they had to get it back to him—two days late. “Lonnie Fields was the meanest man in Granville County, and he would kill you,” McCoy laughed. “I don’t mean he might kill you, I mean he would kill you.” On top of that, to borrow the mule they had found it necessary to tell Fields a deliberate lie. “We told him we was just gon’ take the mule out to the edge of town,” McCoy recalled, “and be back that afternoon. And that evening we still won’t back with the mule, and Lonnie Fields went in the house, turned on the news, and saw his mule on television, and he sent some people to tell us he was gon’ kill us, and he won’t kidding. He said to tell us he was gon’ kill every damn one of us.” Two days later, they were in Raleigh with Lonnie Fields’s mule, and trying to figure out how to get the mule back without walking him the whole fifty miles.

  The young men got the U-Haul truck they had used to carry provisions for the marchers and decided to load up the mule to return it to the furious farmer. But when they tried to walk the animal up the gangplank into the back of the truck, the mule planted his front feet, brayed and snorted, and refused to move. They tugged on the lead rope and even tried beating the mule with a stick, but the stubborn beast would not budge. “I told them we ought to just leave the mule in Raleigh,” McCoy chuckled, “because if we didn’t take the mule back Lonnie Fields was gon’ kill us, and if we took the mule back Lonnie Fields was gon’ kill us anyway, so I told ’em, said to hell with the damn mule.” But they struggled on. Their fathers and grandfathers had loved mules, studied mules, sat around the store and bragged about mules, but the Black Power generation didn’t know much about mules beyond their political symbolism. Finally one of them went to a pay telephone and called his grandfather, who advised them to blindfold the beast. “We took a sack and covered that mule’s head,” McCoy said, “and walked him around until he didn’t know where he was, and then just led him right on up into the truck. But when we got back to Oxford, didn’t nobody want to return the mule. Finally we found one of Lonnie Fields’s children and got him to take the mule back. And Lonnie Fields said he was gonna kill him for helping us.”

  The leaders of the march had even worse luck with the governor than McCoy and his friends had with the mule. Governor Scott was not blindfolded, and his decision not to meet with the black protestors made crystal clear electoral sense. A “law and order” Democrat, Scott was resisting a Republican tide strengthened by the cresting waves of white backlash against civil rights gains. Two years earlier, during the presidential election of 1968, the Democratic tally in the state had dropped 42 percent; George Wallace, the slick-haired racebaiter from Alabama running on the American Independent Party ticket, had outpolled the Democrats in North Carolina. Jim Gardner, the Republican Party candidate for governor in 1968, actually endorsed Wallace for president of the United States, though he nonetheless narrowly lost to Scott, whose father had been one of the state’s most notable governors. “I’ve never heard Wallace say anything that I disagreed with,” Gardner explained. Presumably this included Wallace’s most famous declaration: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

  As the 1960s ended, both Democrats and Republicans knew full well that the whole electoral process was cascading into a one-issue waterwheel, with race at the hub. In 1972, North Carolina would elect James Holshouser, its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. White voters would also elevate the state’s most prominent opponent of racial equality, Jesse Helms, to a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he would never lose. So in 1970 the incumbent Democrat, Governor Scott, ignored black concerns, apparently having forgotten that the majority of whites backed Gardner, and that only black voters had saved him from defeat in 1968. Black voters were hardly likely to swing over to the party of Jesse Helms, but white voters were pouring out of the Democratic Party in a racially driven realignment of political loyalties. Maybe Scott was right, at least in electoral terms, to keep his distance. But it made the demonstrators who had walked fifty miles from Oxford bitterly angry.

  The governor’s refusal to acknowledge the protest reignited the anger of black incendiaries in Oxford who felt that his political posture showed that he and the white-dominated state apparatus stood with the murderers of Henry Marrow. “Everything was going fine,” Mayor Currin told a reporter. “Then, wham, Sunday it started happening again. We thought the black community was satisfied.” Around midnight, after most of the marchers got home from Raleigh, someone threw firebombs into a small antique store in a downtown alley called Bank Street. James Currin Antiques was an easy target, white-owned property hidden from view and readily accessible, through back streets and alleyways, to the black neighborhood around Granville Street. This was only the diversionary attack, however; a few minutes later, flames roared through the Chapman Lumber Company on McClanahan Street, within sight of my father’s church. The vast, two-story lumber company building held large quantities of paint and turpentine, as well as sizable stores of lumber. In a matter of minutes, the blaze completely engulfed the building. This was the first truly serious calculated blow to white economic power in Oxford, and the most costly fire in Oxford during the twentieth century—until the following night.

  CHAPTER 10

  PERRY MASON IN THE SHOESHINE PARLOR

  ON MONDAY, MAY 25, a week after the murder, half a dozen black veterans huddled in the back room at McCoy’s Pool Hall, mixed several gallons of gasoline with half a box of Tide washing powder, and made firebombs. The soap “thickens it up good,” one of them observed. “Makes it stick to things long enough so it doesn’t just flame out but catches everything on fire. The military taught us how to make ’em.” Downing several quarts of Miller High Life beer while they worked, the men used a homemade funnel to pour the mixture into the empty bottles, which they stoppered with rags. Big enough to ignite a good-sized blaze, the Miller quarts flew like small footballs and were made of thin glass that would always break. “Shit, man,” one of them said, “a Coke bottle is so thick the damn thing won’t even break. The big quart was the thing.”

  They devised a careful plan for their fiery announcement to the white-controlled legal system. “They could get an all-white jury and let ’em off, they could sure enough do that if they wanted to,” one of the black men said years later, “but we were going to sure enough let ’em know that we won’t gonna take that shit.” The black veterans synchronized their watches, took careful note of police patterns of surveillance, and rarely attacked without a coordinated diversionary operation. “We’d light up some tool shed or something easy like that on the other side of town,” one explained, “and then Andy and Barney would haul ass over there and then, bam, we’d burn the damn warehouse. It was a military operation.”

  Two of the younger black men agreed to torch a white-owned house on New College Street that had been standing empty for months. “We burned that one house, trying to get a diversion up,” one of them recalle
d. “See, once you hit the railroad tracks,” another arsonist explained, “we could split up—they couldn’t catch you. All we had to do was make it to the railroad tracks. If you couldn’t run that fast, you didn’t have no business doing it.” The older black veterans would then take out the real targets. That night, they set their sights high, planning to torch two large tobacco warehouses, Planter’s Warehouse and the Owen Warehouse Number Two. Inside these warehouses were eight hundred thousand pounds of golden cured tobacco, a known flammable substance, with a total value of more than a million dollars.

  Just before midnight, as police and firefighters rushed to the flaming house on New College Street, two squads of veterans crept through darkened alleyways to the enormous warehouses downtown. Lookouts posted earlier gave the all-clear sign. Quickly stretching duct tape across the large windowpanes—“that shit muffles the sound”—the men shattered the windows with bricks, lit the rag stoppers on the bottle bombs, and “just threw our shit in there and ran down to the corner where we could just watch it go,” according to their leader.