Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  CHAPTER TWO: ORIGINAL SINS

  Population figures for Granville County are drawn from the United States Census of 1970. For the economic development of Granville County after World War II, see Statistical Profile of the Henderson-Oxford, North Carolina Redevelopment Area (Washington: United States Department of Commerce, 1962). See also Oxford, North Carolina Population and Economy (Oxford: Granville County–Oxford Planning Commission, 1965) and North Carolina Profile on Granville County, n.d. Another very useful source is Dennis McAuliffe, “The Transformation of Rural and Industrial Workers in Granville County” (Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1984), especially the tables on pages 71–72. All of these studies are available in the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For information on tobacco production in Granville County, see Heritage and Homesteads: The History and Architecture of Granville County, North Carolina (Oxford: Granville County Historical Society, 1988), 27, 34, and 61. For the 1887 fire, see Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 218, 244–46.

  Much of the narrative here relies on my father’s diary, which he was gracious enough to let me use, and on my interviews with him and my mother. I have verified the reaction inside the Oxford United Methodist Church in my conversations with Ben and Joy Averett. The descriptions of race relations in Oxford rest on interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, William A. Chavis, James Edward McCoy, James Chavis, and Mary Catherine Chavis. For the evolution of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings with respect to racial covenants, see Donald Nieman, Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122, 129, and 144. For interracial contacts in Greensboro in the late 1940s and early 1950s, see William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 29–34.

  In fact, all scholars of racial politics in North Carolina and in the United States owe a great debt to the insights in Chafe’s landmark work on Greensboro. For racial paternalism in North Carolina, see Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 7–10, 38–41, 48, 67–70, 204, 236. See also Stephen Kantrowitz, “The Two Faces of Domination,” in David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 95–111. For race relations in Granville County before and shortly after World War II, see F. E. Hunt Jr., “Oxford, N.C.,” 1947, and untitled paper by Francis B. Hays, July 5, 1948, in the Francis B. Hays Collection, vol. 22, 254–61. Dr. King’s reference to the “thingification” of human beings comes from Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 123.

  The colonial origins of the race and sex taboo that has marked racial politics in the United States, particularly in North Carolina, are explored in Kirsten Fischer’s brilliant Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). My early thoughts about the subject responded to insights found in Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: The Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), and “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 50, no. 3 (August 1984): 363–84; and Leon Higginbotham Jr., “The Ancestry of Inferiority, 1619–1662,” in Edward Countryman, ed., How Did American Slavery Begin? (New York: Bedford–St. Martin’s, 1999), 85–98. See also Timothy B. Tyson, “Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1994, 1–12. For the insight that our ideas about “race” are not simply handed down but constantly retranslated, see Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 95–118. For a contrasting view, see Alden vaughan, The Roots of American Racism: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 136–74. I am also grateful to colonial historians Peter Wood, Elizabeth Fenn, Kirsten Fischer, and Jennifer Lyle Morgan for their advice on conceptions of race, freedom, and sexuality and the relationship of those concepts to the social structure of colonial America.

  All of the material about slavery in Granville County, North Carolina, comes from interviews housed in the James Edward McCoy Papers in the Southern Oral History Project in the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These include McCoy’s transcribed interviews with Lonie Allen, Helen Currin Amis, Novella Allen, William Baskerville, Rachel Blackwell, Lucille Peace Blalock, Lois Braswell, Judge Chavis, Mary Catherine Chavis, Thomas Chavis, Annie Bell Cheatham, Ethel Carrington Clark, Frank Clark, Johnny Crews, R. F. Cousin, and Mary Thomas Hobgood. The sources of specific quotations are indicated in the text. My views of the distinctive Afro-Christianity in the South have been shaped most strongly by Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 141–71, and Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). The quote from W. E. B. Du Bois is from his timeless work Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Touchstone, 1995), 124.

  The material here on sex and race in the Jim Crow and civil rights–era South derives from work by a number of scholars, principally John Dollard, Sex and Caste in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 134–72; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body,” Southern Exposure (November-December 1984): 64–69; and Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). One of the most lucid explorations of the racial politics of sex, the sexual politics of race, and what W. J. Cash called “the rape complex,” is Glenda Gilmore’s brilliant essay “Murder, Memory and the Flight of the Incubus,” in Cecelski and Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed, 73–93. See also Gilmore’s classic work of Southern history, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, especially pages 91–118. See also Danielle McGuire’s pioneering essay “ ‘It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Black Womanhood, White violence, and the Civil Rights Movement,” Rutgers University, forthcoming.

  The quote about “the destruction of the purity of his race” by the North Carolina editor is from Bignall Jones, “Only One Way to Maintain Schools,” Warren Record, April 2, 1955. For William F. Buckley’s opposition to voting rights for Southern blacks, see National Review 4 (August 24, 1957): 149. For James J. Kilpatrick’s advocacy of white electoral supremacy, see “Down the Memory Hole,” New Republic 193 (July 1, 1985): 9. The exchange between Kilpatrick and James Baldwin about blacks and whites marrying each other’s daughters is quoted in Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 268. The story about racial clashes over the “girlie show” at the county fair in Yanceyville comes from Good Neighbor Council report, September 21, 1970, Governor Robert Scott Papers. Reactions to these dynamics of race and sex with regard to the integration of the Granville County schools come from interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, Reverend Don Price, and several others who preferred not to be cited.

  CHAPTER THREE: “TOO CLOSE NOT TO TOUCH”

  My description of Grab-all rests upon my own memories and observations, but also on McAuliffe, “Transformation,” 122, and my interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, James Edward
McCoy, Mary Catherine Chavis, William A. Chavis, James Chavis, Roberta Chavis, Fannie Chavis, and Benjamin Chavis. For relations between the Teels and the African American community, I relied on my interviews with Robert G. Teel, William A. Chavis, James Chavis, Herman Cozart, Billy Watkins, Richard Shepard, and Goldie Averett. On economic development in Granville County during the decades after World War II, see my sources for chapter 2.

  For an excellent account of the material and cultural life of tenant farm families in eastern North Carolina during this period, see Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Roy G. Taylor, Sharecroppers: The Way We Really Were (Wilson, N.C.: J-Mark Press, 1984) is also useful. For a scholarly examination of the economic realities beneath the crop lien system, see Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For readers who seek an engaging tour of the rapidly changing American South from the 1930s through the 1950s, I recommend three excellent recent books that have shaped my thinking in different ways: John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Numan Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race Relations in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), sets a standard for all other scholars of that subject.

  For the mid-1960s Ku Klux Klan revivals in North Carolina, see especially David S. Cecelski, “Ordinary Sin,” Independent Weekly, March 19, 1997. See also David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 36–39, 183. Almost all of the specific information in my account of the Klan revivals comes from coverage in the Raleigh News and Observer in 1965: the U.S. congressional investigation that named North Carolina the number one Klan state was covered on October 20, October 23, and October 24; for the Methodist church in Smithfield that invited the local Klan leader to speak, see November 13; for the Fayetteville KKK rally with fifteen thousand in attendance, see November 10; Jim Gardner’s comments are from the October 24 issue; the story of the bombing of the black migrant labor camp is from October 1; the New Bern funeral home bombing, the arson attack on Mayor Royce Jordan’s barns, and the attack on the college students were covered on October 3; the torture of the interracial drinking buddies can be found in the October 9 issue; the arson of the black schools in Mars Hill and Johnston County can be located on October 12 and 26, respectively; the statewide KKK campaign of burning crosses on courthouse lawns is from October 22; and the story of Judge Pretlow Winborne and the wiener roast was reported on November 3. The New York Times, October 30, 1966, reported the story of the Ku Klux Klan booth at the North Carolina State Fair.

  For the Klan revival of the late 1940s and the quotes from Thomas Hamilton, see John Powell, “The Klan Un-Klandestine,” Nation, September 29, 1951, 254–56; Time, February 25, 1952, 28, and August 11, 1952, 21; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 290–91.

  The 1950s Klan career of Reverend James Catfish Cole is a fascinating and largely unexplored topic. I rely mainly on the James William Cole Papers. For the fabled clash between the Klan and the Lumbee Indians in Maxton, North Carolina, see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 61–62 and 137–41. See also “Klobbered Klan,” Raleigh News and Observer, April 19, 1964; Harry Golden, Carolina Israelite, January-February 1958; “Editorially Speaking,” New Mexican, January 21, 1958; Chapel Hill News Leader, reprinted in News and Observer, January 30, 1958. The Lumbees repelled the Klan with a long-standing tradition of armed resistance to white oppression, extending back to the Henry Berry Lowery gang in the nineteenth century. See William McKee Evans, To Die Game: The Story of the Lowery Band, Guerrillas of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).

  For the route of Catfish Cole’s Klan by the Monroe NAACP, see Norfolk Journal and Guide, October 12, 1957; B. J. Winfield and Woodrow Wilson interviews with Marcellus Barksdale, Duke Oral History Project, Perkins Library, Duke University; Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), 57; Andrew Myers, “When violence Met violence: Facts and Images of Robert F. Williams,” M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1993. The story of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Clay comes from Henry Lee Moon to Roy Wilkins, November 29, 1957, Box A92, NAACP Papers. My descriptions of the Klan in Granville County and Teel’s relationship with the Klan rely on three independent interviews.

  For the ubiquitous nature of armed self-defense among black Southerners of the civil rights era, see Timothy B. Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Origins of the African American Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540–70. See also Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Akinyele K. Umoja, “Eye for an Eye: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996, and “Ballots and Bullets: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 29, no. 4 (March 1999): 558–78; Lance Hill, The Deacons: Armed Self-Defense and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Simon Wendt, “The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the African American Freedom Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 2004; and Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of the Law: Race, violence, and Justice in the Post–World War Two South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For armed self-defense by Martin Luther King Jr. see Stewart Burns, Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 22. For armed self-defense by Medgar Evers, see Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 49–50. The quote from the Jackson, Mississippi, Eagle Eye is from the August 20, 1955 issue, which I located in the Governor Paul Johnson Papers at the University of Southern Mississippi. For armed self-defense by Daisy Bates, see Daisy Bates to Thurgood Marshall, August 3, 1959, Box 2, Daisy Bates Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. See also Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (New York: David McKay, 1962), 162; and Arkansas State Press, May 23, 1959.

  For Robert G. Teel’s police record of violence, see Granville County criminal court records 69-CR-1239, driving while under the influence of intoxicants; 69-CR-1238, assault on an officer; 70-CR-425, assault on an officer; 70-CR-1532, assault by pointing a gun and assault and battery; 70-CR-1847, murder by aiding and abetting Robert Larry Teel; 70-CR-1848, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury; 70-CR-3232 murder by aiding and abetting Roger Oakley; 72-CR-1812, assault and battery; 72-CR-1813, assault and battery; 75-CRS-1907, assault on a female; and 77-CRS-3708, assault with a deadly weapon. My accounts of Teel’s violent confrontations with members of the Oxford Police Department and with school teacher Clyde Harding rely on Granville County criminal court records 69-CR-1238, 70-CR-425, and 70-CR-1532 and on my interviews with Robert G. Teel, William A. Chavis, Gene Edmundson, James Chavis, and Billy Watkins. For a description of Billy Watkins’s political career, see his obituary in the Raleigh News and Observer, August 28, 1989.

  CHAPTER FOUR: MISS AMY’S WITNESS

  The story of Dr. Samuel Proctor’s visit to our church in Sanford relies largely on my interviews with Vernon Tyson, Martha Tyson, Samuel Proctor, and Sarah Godfrey. I have also used materials from my parents’ diaries from the period, for which I am grateful to them.


  For the national and international dynamics of the Cold War and the African American freedom struggles in the South, see Mary Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988): 61–120. See also Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 51–53, 59–60, 103–104; 90–136; and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). The quote from Dr. King about the Cold War comes from Taylor Branch’s classic work Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1955–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 791.

  Regarding the Greensboro sit-ins, I rely here on Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights. My account of the Birmingham campaign relies on Branch, Parting the Waters, 673–802; David Garrow’s irreplaceable standard Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 231–86; Adam Fairclough’s important organizational history To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 111–61; Andrew Manis’s lovely biography A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Diane McWhorter’s deft combination of memoir and history Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama—the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); and especially Glenn T. Eskew’s trail-blazing and thorough history But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). The quote from Colonel Stone Johnson came from my notes taken at Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry in Birmingham on June 3, 2001. I am grateful to Andrew Manis for fact-checking the chapter.