Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  CHAPTER FIVE: KING JESUS AND DR. KING

  For our family’s move to Oxford, I rely on my interviews with my parents and my father’s diary. My stories about Thad Stem draw on my interviews with my father, on Stem’s written work, especially Entries from Oxford (Durham, N.C.: Moore Publishing, 1971), and on Stem’s glittering correspondence with Jonathan Daniels, which can be found in the Jonathan Daniels Papers. For the history of the Confederate monument in Oxford, see Heritage and Homesteads, 86; Oxford Public Ledger, January 3, January 7, and May 2, 1947; see also Hays Collection, vol. 22, 196.

  For the decisive role of World War II on African American freedom struggles, see Timothy B. Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” in Cecelski and Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed, 253–75. See also Richard Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History, vol. 55, no. 1 (June 1968): 90–106; Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial violence During the Second World War,” Journal of American History, vol. 58, no. 3 (June 1971): 663–83; and Harvard Sitkoff, “African American Militancy in the World War II South,” in Neil McMillen, ed., Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 70–92. See also Neil Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes and Meirer, 1976), and Herbert Garkinfinkel, When Negroes March (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

  The first quote from A. Philip Randolph comes from the Philadelphia Tribune, July 10, 1943. The second is from Randolph, “A Reply to My Critics: Randolph Blasts Courier as ‘Bitter voices of Defeatism,’ ” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1943. See also Randolph, “Call to Negro Americans,” July 1, 1941, Office File 93, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, Hyde Park, New York. For NAACP membership-growth figures and the expansion of African American newspaper circulation, see Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial violence,” 663, and Sitkoff, “African American Militancy in the World War II South,” 77. For the wartime sit-in campaigns by the Congress of Racial Equality, see Pauli Murray, “A Blueprint for Full Citizenship,” Crisis 51 (November 1944): 358–59. There were also widespread reports during the war that young black men in North Carolina sat down at drugstore lunch counters, demanded service, and were arrested by the police. See Howard Odum, Race and Rumors of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 93.

  For wartime clashes in Oxford and the story about the women at the sewing room, see the Raleigh News and Observer, May 3, 1944, and Oxford Public Ledger, May 2 and May 5, 1944, in Hays Collection, vol. 22, 139. See also Heritage and Homesteads, 121.

  Information about early civil rights stirrings in Granville County, the Good Neighbor Council, and other efforts at racial amelioration in Granville County come from my interviews with Richard C. Shepard, James Edward McCoy, Mayor Hugh Currin, and Golden Frinks, and also from Capus M. Waynick, et al., eds., North Carolina and the Negro (Raleigh: North Carolina Mayors’ Cooperating Committee, 1964), 135–38. The quote from Tom Ragland comes from the Raleigh News and Observer, May 15, 1970, 3. Thad Stem’s story about Major Stem, Mrs. Shaw, and the bootlegger comes from Stem, Entries from Oxford, 32–33. The quote from Richard Baxter about preaching comes from “Love Breathing Thanks and Praise,” Poetical Fragments (1681; New York: McGraw Hill, 1971).

  While this is not a broad history of “the civil rights movement,” a project I would consider somewhat misguided in any case, historians of the African American freedom movements in the twentieth-century South are making their way toward an understanding of these struggles as essentially local but also inescapably national and international in their dynamics and implications. The path breaking works in the unfolding of these movement histories include John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Communism in Alabama During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Eskew, But for Birmingham; 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); and Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  My account of the white backlash is based on Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) and From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 2002). The quote from Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina comes from the latter work, 32. Lyndon Johnson’s prediction comes from Perlstein, Before the Storm , 365.

  Most of the best books on Martin Luther King Jr. have been cited above for the Birmingham campaign. King has been fortunate, however, in his biographers, especially the early but still important David Levering Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (New York: Praeger, 1970), which brims with insight even though it was written before the papers of Dr. King and the SCLC were available to researchers. For a recent and useful revision to the more traditional view, see Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000). Adam Fairclough’s Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995) provides a concise and considered biography. Marshall Frady’s Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: viking Penguin, 2002) is both brief and eloquent. For Dr. King’s views on affirmative action, see his book Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 1964), 134–41. The quote from Dr. King’s “Advice for Living” column comes from Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 99. Documentation of the FBI’s effort to push Dr. King into committing suicide may be examined in Michael Friedly and David Gallen, eds., Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 48–49. See also Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s File on Black America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 144–45.

  My account of the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination comes from William H. Chafe, Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 367–68. Ronald Reagan’s comment on the assassination comes from the New York Times, April 10, 1968. The quote from Richard Wright is from Twelve Million Black voices (1940; New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988), 10.

  CHAPTER SIX: THE DEATH OF HENRY MARROW

  My account of Henry Marrow’s life and death has been cobbled together from transcripts of testimony by Edward Webb, Donnie Eaton, and William A. Chavis in the June 2, 1970, habeas corpus hearing for cases 70-CR-1847 and 70-CR-1849; the transcript of Roger Oakley’s testimony in both the cases above on June 2, 1970; and the coroner’s report signed by Dr. William B. Tarry and Dr. Harold L. Taylor, May 11, 1970, all of which I obtained in the Granville County court records. I also relied upon newspaper coverage of the trial, principally in the Raleigh News and Observer, and upon my interviews with Robert G. Teel, Mary Catherine Chavis, Beatrice Chavis, Benjamin Chavis, James Chavis, Roberta Chavis, William A. Chavis, Herman Cozart, Hugh Currin, Carolyn Thorpe, William H. S. Burgwyn, and several sources who preferred to remain anonymous.

  The story of John Chavis’s life here is drawn from Marvin Hunt, “The Life and Legacy of John Chavis,” Raleigh Spectator, May 25, 1989, 5–6, and John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1943), 12. The quotes from Helen Chavis Othow are from her book John Chavis: African American Patriot, Preacher, Teacher and Mentor (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 9, and from an Associated Press story in the Augusta Chronicle, May 5, 1998. See also Larry Reni Thomas, “A Study of Racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, Prior to February 1, 1971,” M.A. t
hesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1980, 42–45; Benjamin Chavis interview with Sam Bridges, October 30, 1984, transcript in possession of the author; Sam Bridges, “Radicalism in Black Religion,” unpublished paper, Wesleyan University, 1984, copy in possession of the author.

  For the violence in Augusta, Georgia, see the Raleigh News and Observer, May 12, May 13, May 16, and May 17, 1970. See also the Pittsburgh Courier, May 23, June 4, and June 27, 1970, and the Atlanta Daily World, May 17, 1970. My account of the shootings at Jackson State University rests upon the Durham Carolina Times, June 6, 1970, and the Raleigh News and Observer, May 18, 1970, which ran a national wire service story that is the source for the quote from the Mississippi state trooper. The Militant, May 26, 1970, published telling photographs of the windows of the women’s dormitory. The quote from Dr. Aaron Shirley is from the Pittsburgh Courier, August 8, 1970. See also George Katsiaficas, “Remembering Kent and Jackson State,” Zeta (May 1990): 33–37.

  The quote about the North Carolina State Highway Patrol is from the Durham Carolina Times, May 30, 1970. See also Good Neighbor Council report, May 12, 1970, Scott Papers, in which the GNC explains that blacks in North Carolina “see the police as the establishment’s militia whose job is to control and suppress the people.” My account of the curfew draws on Mayor Hugh Currin, Western Union telegrams to Governor Robert Scott, 11:41 A.M., May 13, 1970, and 12:56 P.M., May 14, 1970, Governor Robert Scott Papers; Oxford city ordinance 1697-11-1; State Bureau of Investigation Civil Intelligence Bulletin, May 13, 1970, Governor Robert Scott Papers; Oxford Public Ledger, June 1, 1970; Raleigh News and Observer, May 14, 1970; and my interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, James Edward McCoy, and Herman Cozart. Information regarding the arrests came from the Durham Morning Herald, May 15, 1970; the Raleigh News and Observer, May 16, 1970; and the Oxford Public Ledger, May 19, 1970; and also the Granville County court records.

  My account of the hearings and the Human Relations Council meeting are drawn from the Raleigh News and Observer, May 23, 1970; the Pittsburgh Courier, May 23, 1970; the Oxford Public Ledger, May 15 and June 1, 1970; McAuliffe, “Transformation,” 125–26; State Bureau of Investigation Civil Intelligence Bulletin, May 23, 1970, Scott Papers; and my interviews with Benjamin Chavis, Linda Ball, Sam Cox, Mayor Hugh Currin, Vernon Tyson, and several others who prefer to remain anonymous.

  For the first march to the courthouse on Black Solidarity Day, I drew on Elizabeth Finn, “North Carolina, Ben Chavis, and the Wilmington Ten,” chapter 3; the Oxford Public Ledger, May 15, 1970; and my interviews with James Edward McCoy, Golden Frinks, and Benjamin Chavis.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DRINKIN’ THAT FREEDOM WINE

  The story about the African American men who drove into the roadblock with a carload of dynamite and weapons comes from the Durham Morning Herald, May 16, 1970; the Raleigh News and Observer, May 16 and May 19, 1970; the Oxford Public Ledger, June 1, 1970; Wayne King, “The Case Against the Wilmington Ten,” New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1978; Thomas, “A Study of Racial violence in Wilmington Prior to February 1, 1971,” 44; and my interviews with Hugh Currin, James Edward McCoy, and Benjamin Chavis.

  My account of the first round of firebombings in Oxford draws on the Durham Morning Herald, May 16, 1970; the Raleigh News and Observer, May 16, 1970; the Oxford Public Ledger, May 19, 1970; and my interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin and three anonymous sources.

  My account of the funeral of Henry Marrow draws on the Durham Morning Herald, May 17, 1970; the Raleigh News and Observer, May 17, 1970; my interviews with Vernon Tyson, Golden Frinks, Benjamin Chavis, and James Edward McCoy, and my conversations with Thad Stem.

  There is a blossoming historical literature on the Black Power movement. Ephemeral early works echoed the vacuous mainstream media, portraying Black Power as a “new black mood” or a “radical response to white America”— a black backlash to the betrayals of white liberals and the assaults of white reactionaries. The first real breakthrough in the scholarship came with Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially pages 191–228, which recognize that Black Power “affirmed the legitimacy of a long-standing tradition of armed self-defense in the rural deep South” and that it reflected “dormant traditions of black radicalism” in Dixie. William L. van Deburg’s landmark New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) points beyond disillusionment and despair toward Black Power’s important cultural self-affirmations. Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) documents the national and international implications of the Black Power movement in one city through the life of Amiri Baraka, one of the movement’s critical figures. See also Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, William W. Sales Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994), and Charles Jones, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998). valuable memoirs of the Black Power generation in the South include James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972; University of Washington Press, 1997) and Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (1973; Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990). A thoughtful and refreshing contemplation of the rise of Black Power in Mississippi can be found in Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 338–90. For an excellent overview of the literature on Black Power, see Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” Black Scholar, vol. 31, no. 3-4 (fall-winter 2001): 2–19.

  All discussion of the Fusion movement in North Carolina must begin with Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), and H. Leon Prather Sr., “We Have Taken a City”: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984). See also Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, and Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). The quote about the Fusion movement in Granville County comes from Heritage and Homesteads, 77–78.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: OUR “OTHER SOUTH”

  The phrase “Other South” comes from Carl Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissidents in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). The assertion of Ulrich B. Phillips that “the South” is “a people with a common resolve, indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country” is quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; 3rd rev. ed, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 8.

  Much of the family history collected here comes from my father’s research and his own stories. See Vernon Tyson, “The History of Our Family Reunion,” unpublished pamphlet, 2001, in the author’s possession. I have also relied upon my interviews with Dewey Tyson, Tommy Tyson, and Pauline Pearce. The information about Robert G. Teel’s boyhood comes from my interview with him.

  The best sources for Southern white dissidents during the Jim Crow era and the post–World War II decades include Frank Adams’s excellent Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 1975) and especially James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897–1983 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Anthony Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981); John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); David Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave McMillen, 2002). See
also Timothy B. Tyson, “Dynamite and the ‘Silent South’: A Story from the Second Reconstruction in South Carolina,” in Jane Daily et al., eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern History from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 275–93. John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day is also an excellent source on white Southern dissenters of various stripes. For one remarkable story, see Kathryn Nasstrom, Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). A thoughtful commentary on generations of similar stories is Fred Hobson, But Now I See: The White Southern Conversion Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1999).

  Useful memoirs of white Southern dissenters include Anne Braden, The Wall Between (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1958); Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949); Stetson Kennedy, I Rode With the Klan (London: Arco, 1954); and Virginia Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Durr (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). For a memoir more akin to this one—that is, not the story of a civil rights activist but the story of a young white Southerner who cared about racial injustice and grew up to be a historian—see Melton McLaurin’s lovely Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

  For the history of eastern North Carolina during the Civil War, including both runaway slaves and dissident whites, see David S. Cecelski’s lyrical and scholarly masterpiece The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 121–201. The quote from General Ambrose Burnside is from page 187. For the story of the twenty-two local men who were hanged in Kinston by the Confederates under General George E. Pickett, see Gerard A. Patterson, Justice or Atrocity: General George E. Pickett and the Kinston, North Carolina Hangings (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1998).