Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  The slave trade and its consequences carved a chasm between my father and Ben Chavis as deep as the Atlantic and, paradoxically, bound them inseparably to one another. If it had been sufficient merely to ease the material predicaments of black Americans and ensure equal access to the resources of this society, perhaps the young black preacher and the older white one could have joined forces and moved forward together. But the slave trade was a crime so enormous that the men who profited from it had been compelled to concoct a justification for it. At first, they rationalized this profitable death machine by pointing out that the Africans were not Christians. But the conversion of the enslaved Africans to Christianity threatened to undermine that story of “heathens” from Africa, lifted up to Christ by their kidnappers. And so the slave traders and the larger society that depended on them conjured up the poisonous lie of white supremacy; that is, the notion that God conferred moral, intellectual, and cultural worth upon humanity on the basis of pigmentation, with lighter-skinned people inherently more worthy and darker-skinned people intrinsically less worthy. Both Ben Chavis and my father carried this poisonous lie deep in their minds, but there it operated in divergent ways that made it hard for them to work together.

  As a white liberal, my father’s unconscious white supremacy tempted him to feel that he knew what was best for the black freedom struggle. Never mind that he had rarely even been directly involved in that struggle. Of course, even if he had not examined all of his racial assumptions, he really did have a damned good political mind, and he knew what his congregation was thinking. To him, it was plain that most white people either opposed the movement or found it terrifying. Daddy thought the important thing was to persuade those who feared racial equality to examine the question calmly, so that they could join together and oppose those who insisted upon white domination.

  You could call it naiveté, but Daddy practiced a wonderful kind of unjustified hope whose power derived from its gentle audacity. In the end, he believed, we were all God’s children and we were all in this together. He believed that progress depended on dialogue, which depended on civility and communication. Lasting change required entire institutions to open their doors and rethink their traditions, and this would not happen overnight. He understood that black radicals like Chavis needed to press those institutions, but he also thought that they needed to be patient and avoid alienating potential white sympathizers. Because of his Tyson family history of dissent and service, Daddy was able to imagine himself as a “swinging door” across the color line, he told me later. He hoped to become a peacemaker and help explain blacks and whites to one another. For that reason, Daddy wanted the black freedom struggle to behave itself in a way that would help him reassure white people.

  But the young black preacher sitting across from my father that morning in the Church of the Black Madonna had his own story, and it didn’t cater to my daddy’s desires. Chavis was a direct descendant of Reverend John Chavis, a black man who had fought in the American Revolution, become one of the leading preachers of his day, taught Latin and Greek to North Carolina’s prominent white families, and was said to have died at the hands of white terrorists because he’d refused to stop teaching slave children. Ben Chavis had grown up with that story the same way that Daddy had grown up on stories of William Tyson’s dissent from the Confederacy. Chavis was a radical because the race problem was literally radical; that is, white supremacy went to the very root of the social order. White men could never lead black Southerners into some peaceable kingdom beyond color.

  Chavis knew that white supremacy was not just a matter of an all-white chamber of commerce, a Ku Klux Klan rally, or an all-white jury. Those things harmed black people, to be sure, but the white supremacy that was even more insidious and deadly was the internalized white supremacy that made African Americans believe, deep down, that they could not stand up for themselves. Black people needed to oppose white supremacy in the fiercest possible terms and to confront it not only in the streets but in their own souls. The challenge was not just to create a new social order but to create a new black sense of self. White paternalism, from this perspective, was nearly as toxic as white backlash. Chavis also knew that, in practical terms, gradualism nearly always rested on empty promises; “later” always meant never. He believed, with Frederick Douglass, that power concedes nothing without a demand, and that black people could have what they had the power to take and could keep what they had the power to hold. To Chavis, all that my father could offer was the chance to blur the tough issues, ease the inherent contradictions, forestall the necessary conflict, and smear salve on a wound that needed surgery. The problem was that the world that had to be destroyed had a lot of people like my father and Thad Stem in it. But his personal regard for Daddy could not alter the situation.

  Chavis was polite, even warm, but it would have been a shocking departure if he had not rejected my father’s liberal logic. Instead of candor, he offered decorous evasion. “I am down here with a group of people from Raleigh, Vernon,” he said, gesturing toward the roomful of people around them. “I really don’t have time to talk today. We have to get back to Raleigh late this afternoon. But the next time I am in town I will call you, and we’ll have some time together and see if we can figure something out.” That conversation never happened. The next time my father visited Chavis, the most notorious of the world-famous “Wilmington Ten” was wearing a prison uniform instead of a clerical collar, and guards of a different sort monitored their conversation.

  Chavis went to prison because he led a militant movement in Wilmington that fanned the fires of white reaction into a small race war. On February 6, 1971, finding themselves under sporadic gunfire from passing carloads of white men, Chavis and his followers barricaded themselves in the basement of Gregory Congregational Church. The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Department, which was heavily infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan, blocked off all the streets that led to the church. Even so, truckloads of heavily armed white terrorists from the Rights of White People paramilitary forces roared past the church, firing their weapons; ROWP terrorists shot down a respected local black minister who walked into the area that afternoon to appeal for peace. Soon state highway patrol units and then National Guard troops joined the blockade around Gregory. A police officer shot and killed Steven M. Corbett, a black student leader who was carrying a shotgun, in the shadows near the church. It seemed to many inside the church that they might not survive the night. Some of the young men may have slipped out and set fire to a nearby grocery store; arson reports flared all over the city. When firefighters and police officers arrived to battle the blaze, snipers fired at them. But bottles of gasoline and ragtag weaponry could hardly stand against National Guard troops, and many of the people in the church were soon arrested. That was not enough for Wilmington’s Superior Court Judge Johnny Walker, who declared to reporters, “Maybe we should have brought in Lieutenant Calley”—the army officer charged with murdering hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai—“to go in there and clear the place up.”

  The Wilmington Ten cases, which were based largely on the accusations of arson at the grocery store, dragged on for much of the 1970s, prompting protests around the world and imposing a burden on U.S. foreign relations during the Carter administration. It became clear, whatever the facts of the case, that the prosecution had flung down and danced upon the U.S. Constitution. In 1972, Chavis, the most well known of the ten defendants, received a thirty-five-year prison sentence, and others tallied terms nearly as long. Rallies all over the world called for authorities to free the Wilmington Ten. James Baldwin appealed to President Carter to intervene. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and many other publications provided editorial support. In 1977, Amnesty International launched a campaign to free the Wilmington Ten, calling them “political prisoners.” James Weschler of the New York Post compared the case to the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s. The controversy, featured on 60 Minutes and investigated by the U.S. Congres
s, eventually persuaded Governor Jim Hunt to reduce their sentences. In 1980, a federal court reversed the verdicts. The prosecution’s tactics had worked hand in glove with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation to shut down the black freedom movement. It is clear that several of the defendants were entirely innocent; in other cases, it seems more likely that the authorities “framed a guilty man,” as one local black man said of Chavis.

  Chavis, a talented and passionate organizer, admitted when my father visited him in prison a couple of years later that he had made many mistakes in Wilmington. He had since fasted and prayed, he told Daddy, and repented of his errors. After his release, he attended Divinity School at Duke University and later used his Wilmington Ten notoriety to forge a remarkable career as a national activist. In the 1990s, Chavis rose to the post of executive director of the NAACP. Forced to resign because of a sex scandal, Chavis then turned to the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan and orchestrated the 1996 Million Man March. He later assumed Malcolm X’s old job as minister at the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number 7 in Harlem. Like his illustrious ancestor Reverend John Chavis, Ben Chavis made some history, though probably much less history than his talents would have permitted had his opportunities been different ones.

  The power of history hung palpably over Wilmington, my father learned quickly. That history served as a terrible obstacle to progress, even though many people did not know the events that exerted such a power over their lives. “Sometimes murder does its best work in memory, after the fact,” historian Glenda Gilmore has written of events in Wilmington more than seventy years earlier. “Terror lives on, continuing to serve its purpose long after the violence that gave rise to it ends.” This point became clear to my father in the midst of the upheavals, when he called a series of meetings of black and white parents to see whether something could be done to find a pathway toward racial reconciliation.

  At the first meeting, which he convened at our church, Daddy heard African American parents make bitter references to “what happened” and “what caused all this”—as if the causes of Wilmington’s racial turmoil were self-evident. Yet the quizzical expressions and vacant nods of white parents made Daddy suspect that the white parents were oblivious to something that every black person in the room understood. “When you say, ‘What caused all this,’ what are you talking about?” he finally asked the black parents. At first, the black parents refused to believe that he did not know what they meant. Finally, one black mother paused to point in the direction of the Cape Fear River. Flashing her mind’s eye seventy years into the past to November 10, 1898, she told him, “They say that river was full of black bodies.”

  In fact, though none of the white people in the room knew what had happened along the banks of the Cape Fear in 1898, the Wilmington Race Riot was probably the most important political event in the history of the state. Its omission from North Carolina history may have been the biggest of the lies that marked my boyhood. This “riot”—better described by H. Leon Prather Sr. as a massacre and coup d’état—signaled a turning point in American history, a period when African Americans lost their civil rights and the new social order of segregation was born. White people, of course, and many blacks believed that Jim Crow segregation simply had replaced slavery—still oppressive, but better—and had accepted it as a kind of natural stage of progression toward equality rather than the bloody and undemocratic counterrevolution that it really was. Even my father, though he’d grown up in North Carolina, had never heard about the white supremacy revolution that had voided interracial democracy until the civil rights era.

  At the turn of the century, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina. It had electric lights and streetcars in the 1890s, when most of the state remained a remote backwater. With a large black majority, the port city was the center of African American economic and political power. Wilmington boasted large numbers of African American artisans and businessmen: ten of the city’s eleven eating houses were owned by blacks, as were twenty of its twenty-two barbershops. Black financiers and real estate agents helped make Wilmington prosper. The Daily Record, edited by Alexander Manly, was the only black daily newspaper in the United States.

  In the 1890s, hard times and clear-eyed politics brought a kind of interracial democracy revolution in North Carolina—one conducted in the shadow of slavery by mutually suspicious allies, but a revolution nonetheless. This interracial Fusion alliance between mostly black Republicans and mostly white Populists swept every election and captured the governorship, the General Assembly, every single statewide office, and countless local positions. Black and white together appeared to have ushered in a new era of free and equal citizenship, though the racial politics of the coalition were far from perfect and anything but simple. White men controlled most of the important offices. In Wilmington, despite its black voting majority, only three of the ten aldermen were black; the rest were white Populists. Even so, white Democrats, who also called themselves the Conservatives, could not abide the democratic process. Before the next election, the self-proclaimed “party of white supremacy” launched a campaign of racist appeals and political violence aimed to shatter this reprehensible cooperation between blacks and whites. “We will not live under these intolerable conditions,” Colonel Alfred Waddell, soon to become mayor of Wilmington, told a crowd of cheering Democrats. “We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.”

  Waddell, a former U.S. congressman and Confederate veteran, revealed the Democratic Party’s electoral strategy the night before the 1898 elections. “Go to the polls tomorrow,” he declared, “and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.” This strategy led to victory at the polls, but the white Democrats were not satisfied. On a chilly autumn day two days after the election, armed columns of white business leaders and working men seized the city by force. Led by Colonel Waddell and Hugh McCrae, an MIT-trained textile mill owner, hundreds of white vigilantes burned the Daily Record’s printing press. Next they marched into the neighborhood called Brooklyn, where they left a trail of dead and dying African Americans. Armed with the latest repeating rifles and rapid-fire guns, they outgunned black men who sought to defend their homes with antique revolvers and shotguns.

  Nobody really knows how many African Americans died in Wilmington in the bloody counterrevolution that overthrew one of early-twentieth-century America’s few chances for meaningful democracy. The most readily confirmed estimate is fourteen; the leader of the white mob said “about twenty.” Hugh McCrae boasted later of ninety dead. Echoing the stories of their grandparents, many African Americans in Wilmington say they believe that the death toll exceeded three hundred. That night and the next day, hundreds of black women and children huddled in the swamps on the outskirts of the city while white men with guns built a new social order. The white insurgents forced the remaining city officials, whether they were black or merely had made alliance with blacks, to resign at gunpoint, and took power for themselves, issuing a fiery “Declaration of White Independence.” Colonel Waddell assumed the mayor’s office. Conservatives drove their political opponents, black and white, into exile and forcibly banished the city’s most prominent African American professionals, confiscating their property. One reason the death toll remains so difficult to determine with any accuracy is that fourteen hundred black citizens fled the city during the next thirty days.

  Approval, not condemnation, thundered down on the vigilantes from white pulpits, editorial pages, and political podiums across the United States. White dissent in North Carolina had been rendered almost impossible, and black dissent suicidal. The Wilmington Race Riot was the centerpiece of a white supremacy revolution that swept the state in 1898, and the first thing the new regime did was to take the vote away from African Americans. This created what one of the nation’s leading Democrats, Raleigh News and Observer editor Josephus Daniels,
hailed as “permanent good government by the party of the white man.” Without their black political allies, the dissenting whites of that day had nowhere to go. Most signed on with the new order, encouraged by their ministers and elected officials. “We have taken a city,” the Reverend Peyton H. Hoge declared from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington. “To God be the praise.” Governor Charles B. Aycock, one of the architects of the white supremacy campaign that robbed blacks of their civil and political rights, assessed the role of the Democratic Party this way: “We have ruled by force, we have ruled by fraud, but we want to rule by law.”

  The events of 1898 were a source of great pride to the Democratic Party in North Carolina, and the next five governors of the state were all selected from among the authors of the white supremacy crusade. During the New Deal, however, its luster began to fade and the self-proclaimed “party of white supremacy” dropped all references to their glorious counterrevolution. North Carolina history textbooks never mentioned anything about either the massacre in Wilmington or the white supremacy campaigns of which the killings were the cap-stone. What black schools taught about this white-supremacy revolution I do not know. Governor Aycock, who’d helped organize the campaigns, became known as “the education governor,” the founding icon of North Carolina’s “progressive” self-image, and the leading political figure in the history of the state. For twenty years or so, the white supremacy campaigns became a springboard to political success,” Glenda Gilmore writes. “And those who had failed to participate found it difficult to win any office.” And then the white power revolt faded from popular memory. The architects of white supremacy became heroes, and the bloody and undemocratic means by which they came to power were largely forgotten among white people.