Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  The magnitude of the fires surprised even the arsonists. At first they stared wide-eyed at the huge blazes, and then they hurried to a row of homes behind the warehouses to help the families hustle their furniture out. They used garden hoses to soak the rooftops with water to prevent fiery debris from igniting the whole neighborhood. Soon more than a hundred firefighters were battling the blaze, six fire departments from nearby towns having sent men and trucks. The old pine-and-brick structures stacked high with the cured leaf roared like piles of tinder. By the time the first fire truck reached Planter’s Warehouse, it was already engulfed in flames. Moments later, the front wall of the enormous building blew out in a great explosion, scattering bricks and flaming debris into the street, pulling down telephone and power lines as the side of the building fell. Glowing debris landed on residential lawns miles away.

  The screaming sirens woke up my family, and we children followed Daddy and Mama onto the brick walkway in front of the house on Hancock Street, huddling together in our pajamas. Like a hundred-foot torch held skyward, the flames from the warehouses licked into the night sky. Farmers twenty miles away smelled the smoke and saw the horizon lit up with a bright red glow, as though the sun were setting in the middle of the night. From four blocks away it looked to me like the whole world was on fire. I wasn’t quite eleven years old, of course, and I had clean sheets waiting inside and nothing could harm me, as the old song says, with my mama and daddy standing by. What would come of all of this destruction and anger and fear? I did not know enough history to understand what was happening, and it would be many years before I did, but Oxford would burn in my memory for the rest of my life.

  The pool hall conspirators had wanted their attack to hit the white community where it mattered most, in the economic engines of the town. To that end, several African American men employed at Burlington Mills on the third shift ran through the plant at the prearranged hour shouting that Oxford was burning. These in-plant co-conspirators, who had synchronized their watches with those of the arsonists, urged their coworkers to rush home and make sure their families were all right and their houses did not burn. When the employees ran outside and saw the raging red skyline and the town shrouded in smoke, most of them left their jobs and hurried home. Although the Oxford Public Ledger stressed that this only caused workers to lose wages, the black insurgents working the “cash register at the pool hall” calculated that the biggest losers would be mill management. The Ledger ’s lead editorial on the day after the fires, “Lessons To Be Learned from Memorial Day,” highlighted the Confederate origins of this “day for decorating the graves of the men who fell in the War Between the States” and did little to suggest that the editors understood what was happening in their hometown.

  Whatever the Oxford Public Ledger might report, Oxford’s all-white economic elite had been hit and hit hard. The next day, Mayor Currin estimated the damages at “well over a million dollars, though it is hard to say at this point.” (In 2003 dollars, the total damage would amount to something approaching $5 million.) Not only the warehouses and the empty house on New College Street had gone up, but also three smaller buildings downtown. Coordinated attacks had occurred all over town, although further investigation revealed that not all the squads of arsonists had been successful. Law enforcement officers found failed firebombing attempts at six other buildings: the Southern Railway Station, the clubhouse of the all-white veterans of Foreign Wars, the Fleming Warehouse Number One, and three smaller structures. The charred landscape in the business district awed the teams of journalists and officials who came to survey the damages. A large section of downtown Oxford, the Raleigh News and Observer reported, “look[ed] like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II.”

  On the night of the bombings, the Oxford Police Department arrested six young black males, ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen, who were running the streets in defiance of the curfew. One or two of them carried Coke bottles full of gasoline. White Oxford breathed a deep sigh of relief, reassuring itself that the culprits responsible for the devastation had been swiftly apprehended. Unfortunately for those who relied on this line of reassurance, the police had taken the young men into custody in the hours before the fires. It is possible, though not likely, that the boys may have been responsible for one or two of the failed arson attempts around town that night or the previous night. But the arrests and investigations never threatened to disrupt the “military operation” raging in the shadows of Granville County. No one could have been more pleased at the arrests than the pool hall enclave of black veterans. The police were happy to pat themselves on the back without actually catching any of the conspirators. The youngest three teenagers, all of them fourteen or fifteen years old, were released on bond and confined by the court to their homes pending trial. Authorities held the three older boys, all seventeen-year-olds, for ten days and then released them under large bonds. None of the boys could be linked to any of the firebombings, and the court eventually dropped all of the charges to misdemeanor curfew violations. “[City officials] probably knew better, but they let people believe it was just a bunch of shirttail boys burning up stuff,” one of the older veterans recounted.

  The black veterans who actually burned down the warehouses in Oxford and the activists who applauded their efforts had no illusions about the prospect of colorblind justice in Granville County. “We knew damn well they won’t gonna convict Teel and them,” one of their ringleaders commented. This makes the arson smack of preemptive vigilantism but, given the experiences of these men in Vietnam and in Oxford, they could hardly place their faith in the white-dominated legal system. In their minds, the courts were owned and operated by their enemies, who considered them unfit for full citizenship. “There wasn’t no need to wait around and see what might happen,” the bomb thrower continued. “They won’t gonna convict ’em noway.”

  The white prosecutor, W. H. S. Burgwyn, a gray-haired, steely-eyed veteran of the courts and the scion of North Carolina political aristocracy, felt more hopeful. Burgwyn’s father had been a judge, planter, and politician, and the direct ancestor of illustrious heroes of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Something of a courtroom legend himself, Burgwyn knew that the murder case confronting him posed the most serious challenge he had ever faced as a prosecutor. “The whole community was in an uproar,” Burgwyn recalled. Support for the murderers had taken on the air of a cause célèbre among some whites, he acknowledged. “The Klan was kicking up a fuss,” he said, “and some of the country club crowd had raised a big defense fund,” but he still thought he had a strong case. “We felt that this boy had been cold-bloodedly murdered, in a helpless state, shot on the ground,” he said.

  He conceded some confusion, however, about exactly what had happened in the shadows beyond Teel’s store. “We had a dead man,” Burgwyn explained, “with three or four white men standing over him with a gun. We knew which gun had killed him, but we couldn’t place the gun in the hands of any one individual at the time of the shooting.” It was getting dark, he explained, and most of the witnesses had run away from the scene. Boo Chavis had had the best view, but he may have seemed an unreliable witness because of his criminal record. Still, the prosecutor insisted, he had a strong case. Neither the black veterans, who had no faith in the legal system, nor prosecutor Burgwyn, who had spent his life in it, could have predicted what would actually happen in the Granville County courthouse that summer. Years later, referring to the popular television attorney of the time, whose cases always ended with a dramatic courtroom twist, Burgwyn said, “It was just a Perry Mason kind of thing.”

  In a sense, the legal proceedings had begun shortly after the murder. “Go call the ambulance,” Robert Teel told me he had snapped at twenty-one-year-old Roger just after Marrow was shot. Teel walked quickly down the front of the cement-block building with his large ring of keys, shooing out a handful of customers, gathering up all the money, and locking the grocery store, the barbershop, the laun
dry, and the motorcycle shop, and stacking the guns in the trunk of his car. After he closed down all the businesses, the Teel family drove to their home on Main Street, only a few hundred yards from the courthouse and the police station.

  At the house, as unattestable rumor echoed it down the years, the family had a discussion in which Robert Teel decided that Roger, who certainly had helped kill Henry Marrow, would have no part in whatever consequences were to follow. Roger’s wife, Betsey Woodlief Oakley, was six months pregnant. She had already suffered two miscarriages. Roger was to stay home with her, no matter what. At around ten o’clock, an hour after the murder, Teel called his attorney, William T. Watkins, who reportedly told him to gather up as much cash money as he could and put it in a pillowcase, then wait for him at the house. Teel was not to talk to anyone, the lawyer insisted.

  Whether Billy Watkins, a ruthless lawyer and cagey politician with a dry, cottonmouth smile, advised Teel on how to confuse the police we may never know. The local courthouse legend in Oxford says that Watkins suggested that Roger Oakley and Larry Teel exchange clothing and that Larry wear Roger’s eyeglasses to the police station. Roger and Larry were both slender young men of medium height. The smearing of their appearances might have bewildered witnesses and investigators and thereby permitted Roger to avoid prosecution, at least for the moment. The reputation of Billy Watkins as a wily and unscrupulous attorney may explain the persistence of this rumor. Or the story may simply be a fiction that local people used to explain the inexplicable. Teel himself credited Watkins but did not mention the alleged subterfuge. “Billy told me not to say a word to anybody,” recounted Teel, “and let them accuse whoever they wanted. And we did not tell them who or whatever,” he continued, “but just let them build their own case. We listened to Billy Watkins.”

  “The name Watkins,” said a member of one of Granville County’s leading families, “just stood for and stands for a lot in Oxford.” Billy Watkins was already Oxford’s leading attorney in 1970, the fifty-one-year-old scion of political power and the avatar of ruthless ambition. The year before, he had been elected to the state legislature. The son of a local planter who had been “one of the most reputable politicians this area ever had,” Watkins was fast becoming a leading figure in the Democratic Party. He was on his way to the chair of the legislature’s powerful appropriations committee, from which he and his chief political ally, Speaker Liston B. Ramsey, would come to exercise almost invincible sway in the General Assembly. Watkins would never face serious political challenge in his district and would become one of the two or three most powerful men in the state. As soon as he arrived at the Teel house on Main Street, Watkins took complete control of the case. “I was aiming to tell what I had shot, and what Roger had done,” Teel recalled, “but Billy listened to the whole story, and we told him, and so he handled it from there on and we went by his advice.”

  While it remains a matter of speculation, I am almost certain that Billy Watkins telephoned the Oxford Police Department that night and told them that he would bring the Teels in for questioning later. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to explain why the police did not take the thirty seconds necessary to get to the Teel house in a squad car and make an arrest. They had known about the killing, including the identity of most of those involved, since about nine o’clock. Such a telephone call reflects the day-to-day workings of power in the small-town South, which relied on personal authority and informal relationships among a certain class of white men. It is possible, as many local black folks believed, that the white police considered the killing justified and were slow to arrest a man whom they saw as having protected his family and property against the spirit of black insurrection that was sweeping the nation. But it seems more likely that Billy Watkins called and told them not to worry about it right away, that he would see to it that the Teels turned themselves in directly. Watkins was one of the few people whose authority was sufficient to ensure that the police would sit back and let Teel come in at his own convenience. Just when Robert and Larry Teel actually went to the police station remains a matter of dispute.

  The Oxford Public Ledger claimed a few days later that Billy Watkins accompanied the Teels to the police station around ten o’clock Monday night. Mayor Currin and Chief of Police Nathan White both later claimed that the Teels surrendered sometime shortly after the shooting, that the magistrate draw up a warrant immediately, and that the two suspects went to jail at about six o’clock Tuesday morning. None of the black witnesses who went to the police station that night saw them there, however. Other reports indicated that the two men went to the police station sometime Tuesday morning. But the most reliable document—the official arrest warrant—indicates that Robert and Larry Teel were arrested at eight-thirty on Wednesday morning—almost thirty-six hours after the killing. “There was a hell of a mix-up in the Oxford police station,” W. H. S. Burgwyn acknowledged. “It was very confusing.” The young black people running through the streets did not feel confused.

  If blacks interpreted this delay as a display of whites’ determination to protect one of their own and preserve white power, Robert Teel certainly did not believe that he was the beneficiary of the white power structure. “My lawyer told me he’d have me out in twenty-four hours,” Teel said later. “He told me to go on over to Raleigh and let them book me and fingerprint me, and go through the regular processing, and he’d be over there with people to go my bond, and have me out in twenty-four hours. It took four months.”

  After arresting Teel and Larry, state troopers took them to Central Prison in Raleigh. At first, they were in a large holding cell. In a few days, however, “it got to be common knowledge between the blacks who we were and what we were there for and the pressure was building up,” Teel remembered. “The sheriff had to put us in a private cell because they had the two of us whites locked up in a cell with thirteen blacks and this boy that was a trustee running up and down the hall telling everybody who we were.” Soon the police transferred the father and son to the jail in nearby Henderson for the duration of the trial; they were kept together at all times. “They tried to make me believe that [the incarceration] was for my own safety and my own protection,” Teel complained. “And I cannot say whether it was good or bad for my protection or somebody else’s protection, but they seemed to be saying that I would have shot another black or else I would have been shot. Which very well could have been true, but my understanding of bond is that it is not what’s good for the man but only whether you will appear in court or not.” In any case, the father and son remained in custody after their arrest in mid-May.

  On July 27, the first day of jury selection, sheriff’s deputies led Robert and Larry Teel into the old red brick courthouse, accompanied by a team of five attorneys. Billy Watkins and his law partners, Gene Edmundson and Charles W. Wilkinson, employed Frank Banzet, a lawyer from a prominent family in Warrenton, to join the defense team after it became clear that the pool of jurors would be drawn from Warren and Wake Counties. Warren, northeast of Oxford, was an old plantation county, with a heavy black majority and a firmly entrenched white aristocracy built on cotton, tobacco, and black slave labor; Banzet would handle the jury pool. Edmundson, a junior partner in Watkins’s firm, didn’t much like defending the Teels, but he was philosophical about his duties. “I had to look at it not as an individual but as an attorney,” he recalled. “We were there to do a job.”

  At the prosecution’s table, William Burgwyn was flanked by Charles White, an attorney from his office, and James E. Ferguson, a black attorney from Charlotte and one of the leading civil rights lawyers in the state. Burgwyn, though clearly an “establishment” figure in North Carolina, was regarded as extremely able and completely honest. And Ferguson was a very gifted attorney with a strong track record. “Ferguson had already played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement in North Carolina,” historian David Cecelski writes. “He had led or been involved in most of the civil rights law-suits arising in eastern North Carolin
a; he had been successful enough to have the Ku Klux Klan target him for assassination.” His new partner, Julius Chambers, narrowly escaped death in 1965 when his car was bombed in New Bern.”

  The attorneys for both sides prepared to fight the case in front of Judge Robert Martin. Martin, who would preside over a series of racially charged trials in North Carolina in the 1970s, had campaigned for hard-core segregationist I. Beverly Lake a decade earlier. Judge Martin “hardbored no prejudice” against African Americans, he told one reporter. “I was raised in a mainly black county,” he was quoted as saying. “I ate with them and played with them. We had an instinctive love for the Negro race. Why, my secretary is black. That should show you how I feel about them.”

  Whatever the judge may have felt in his heart, the atmosphere in the ancient courthouse grew exceedingly tense as jury selection began. Though the courtroom was no longer formally segregated, 250 local black folks crowded the left side of the aisle, while 150 white observers sat on the other side. “There was a lot of people there,” Carolyn Thorpe said later. “It was packed. There was a black side and a white side. There was a lot more blacks than whites—that place was full of black people.” State troopers searched everyone who entered the room. “Rumor had it that there were some Black Panthers that were recognized that were in the courtroom,” court reporter Rebecca Dickerson explained.

  The prosecution initially moved to have the trial relocated outside Granville County, where white support for the murderers and white fears of black revolt ran high. Though Robert Teel had not been accepted among the leading white families of the county prior to the murder, many of them now rallied around him. “Teel was the white champion,” said a white woman born of an old and prestigious local family. “It was the fear of integration—it was not so much that you identified with Teel but that his skin was white. It was like you had to band together.” Anywhere would be an easier place to get a conviction, Burgwyn reasoned, and it certainly was not hard to establish that the local community was too turbulent for a trial. The charred wreckage of the warehouses still scarred downtown, carloads of armed men continued to cruise the streets, and headlines like “Oxford—A Quiet Town Becomes a Battleground” were a regular feature in the state’s leading newspapers. Judge Martin ruled that the trial would stay in Granville County, but that a pool of jurors would be brought in from outside the community.