Blood Done Sign My Name (12 page)

That was why she had parked on the grass—she hadn't even wanted to walk the fifteen yards from the street to the office door, even in the middle of the afternoon. My father, who would have slapped one of his children into perdition for saying
that
word, did not scold the woman. His view was that you needed to have a relationship with someone before you could hope to change that person's habits, let alone her heart, and he wasn't even her minister yet. “I don't know why I came down here,” she told him. “I just felt that I ought to come here.” That was good enough for Daddy, who had no problem believing that God sends messengers, few of them angels.

By any conventional measure—size, salary, prospects, and so on—the church in Oxford was not quite as promising as our church in Sanford. But Daddy rattled down the highway home with the very strong sense that the Lord wanted him in Oxford. “It was as strong a sense of Divine guidance as I have ever felt about anything,” he said. Ten days later we were unpacking boxes at 415 Hancock Street, Oxford, North Carolina.

Mr. Jones, the homicidal shopkeeper who had held a pistol to the head of the previous pastor, was out in the driveway with a posthole digger, putting up a basketball goal. Women from the church showed up with heaping platters of chicken, steaming casseroles, brimming pots of collard greens, and homemade pies—chocolate, lemon chess, and apple. After lunch, when Mama put away the leftovers, she discovered that they had stocked the refrigerator with bacon, eggs, bread, milk, and juice, so that she wouldn't have to go to the grocery store in the morning. And the neighbors came to greet us. I still remember Daddy and Thad Stem sitting on the back porch that first day, sipping coffee and telling each other stories. They were only having coffee, not whiskey—Daddy was a teetotaler, not a drinking man like Thad—but you'd have never known it to watch them throwing back their heads and laughing. That was the day that I first met Gerald Teel. Four years later, underneath that basketball goal, he would tell me that his father and his brothers had killed a black man.

We arrived in Oxford at a moment when African American freedom movements across the region had begun to galvanize black folks in Oxford to press harder for equal citizenship. There had been little in the way of visible victories, although the movement had begun stirring twenty-five years earlier. Resistance to white supremacy went back to slavery days, but the black South's longstanding protest traditions emerged full-blown during World War II because international politics gave black Americans fresh perspectives and new leverage. “The problem of the Negro in the United States is no longer a purely domestic question,” A. Philip Randolph observed in 1943. “We have become the barometer of democracy to the colored peoples of the world.”

African Americans wielded these contradictions as weapons in their own war on the home front. Randolph, a crucial link between the “New Negro” militants of the 1920s and 1930s, the civil rights generation of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Power rebels that followed, argued during World War II that there was “no difference between Hitler of Germany and Talmadge of Georgia or Tojo of Japan and Bilbo of Mississippi.” NAACP membership grew nearly tenfold during the war years, and the number of branches tripled, three-quarters of the new branches arising in the South. CORE organized nonviolent direct-action campaigns against segregation in northern cities that laid the groundwork for its important Southern campaigns in the 1960s. Circulation of black newspapers increased by 40 percent during wartime, and the black press kept the pressure on the federal government by publicizing the widespread violence that occurred around military bases across the South.

These same tensions and transformations came to Granville County during the war. Camp Butner, a large training camp, brought thousands of black soldiers from across the country, many of them “not familiar with the laws and customs of this section,” the editors of the
Oxford Public Ledger
complained. In fact, most of the black soldiers were quite familiar with the rules of segregation, but their refusal to obey them made enforcement “utterly impossible,” officials at the North Carolina Utilities Commission protested in 1943. When white bus drivers attempted to enforce the segregation ordinances, black soldiers at Camp Butner overturned the buses. The Oxford Police Department purchased tear gas, riot equipment, and a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun.

That machine gun came in handy one Saturday night in June 1944. A black private named Wilson stationed at Camp Butner had accompanied a fellow soldier into Oxford. Walking into a downtown café, the two black GIs asked for a beer. Told that there was no beer, Private Wilson tried to buy a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The white proprietor claimed that he told the black soldiers, “We only serve white patrons,” an unlikely choice of words if I ever heard one. As Wilson and his comrade stalked out the door, one of them muttered that the proprietor was a “poor white son of a bitch.” Chief of Police H. J. Jackson, who'd been eating meat loaf in one of the booths, ran outside, collared Private Wilson from behind, and clubbed him to the sidewalk with his pistol. Wilson's friend escaped back to Camp Butner while Chief Jackson dragged the black private to the jail in the basement at the rear of the courthouse.

Less than an hour later, sixty black men from Camp Butner launched what the Raleigh
News and Observer
called “an unsuccessful effort by a squad of Negro soldiers to storm the Oxford jail and release one of their number.” Huddling in the shadow of the Confederate monument, the soldiers sent two representatives toward the double front doors of the courthouse to negotiate Private Wilson's release.

Chief Jackson met the two black soldiers on the steps, pistol-whipped one of them to the concrete, and jabbed the barrel of the gun hard into the face of the other. The two men retreated into the crowd of black enlisted men. Chief Jackson loudly ordered the troops to disperse, and police fired tear-gas grenades into the crowd, but the black soldiers decided to rush the courthouse doors. Swinging the doors wide, Assistant Chief J. L. Cash confronted the oncoming phalanx with the large, tripod-mounted machine gun Oxford had purchased “expressly for such a purpose,” according to the
Oxford Public
Ledger
. Only in the face of certain annihilation did the black soldiers scatter and flee, thus averting another tragedy of the kind that was all too common around Southern training camps during the war. Across the World War II–era South, dozens of black G.I.s died in uniform at the hands of their own countrymen.

Racial clashes, though frequent, did not entirely define the wartime experience in Granville County. During the war, a sewing room operated by the Works Progress Administration in Oxford quietly employed white and black women alike, and they worked side by side in apparent harmony. White men went before the county commission in 1941 to insist that the sewing room comply with the segregation statutes. The men insisted that the room be segregated, if only by having a curtain hung down its center. But the women who worked there enjoyed their subversive camaraderie. The white woman who supervised the sewing room firmly resisted the men's segregation proposal, arguing that the white women really did not mind and that the black women especially needed the work. Finally, the county commission let the matter drop. In an all-female space, “race mixing” did not threaten to become “amalgamation,” apparently; in any case, the women simply would not comply.

After the war, local black veterans came home determined that the war for democracy abroad would expand democracy at home. Randolph Johnson and James Gregory, two black veterans, organized voter-registration drives in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Though some whites recognized the contradictions in denying the ballot to black men who had risked their lives for democracy, they remained silent. Black registration drives met with considerable resistance. “Out in the county,” recalled Richard C. Shepard, a local black funeral home director, “you had to go to some of these stores to get registered. A lot of them was Klansmen, and they would give you the long way around to get registered.” The black freedom movement had never confined itself to mere citizenship rights, however, but also sought to bolster a new black sense of self. Randolph Johnson, who had “nothing
but
brains,” in the words of a former employer, not only tried to register votes but also broadcast a local weekly radio program entitled
Negroes in the News,
in which he featured both local and national achievements by African Americans. Like the Black Power militants who came afterward, black World War II veterans struggled against internalized white supremacy, defeatism, and apathy in their own communities.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, black churchwomen in Oxford rallied against that apathy in a series of church meetings and soon affiliated themselves with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King Jr. Elizabeth Chavis, Helen Amis, and quite a few others met regularly and supported the movement in Oxford and across North Carolina. “They believed in the civil rights,” SCLC field secretary Golden Frinks recalled. “Some of them had come out, had gone to other demonstrations in places like Ayden and Edenton, had come way down there in eastern North Carolina, wherever we was needing them to demonstrate or cook or whatever needed doing. Elizabeth Chavis was very strong. These were some strong women.”

Young black people in Oxford also responded to news of the growing movement in the South. “Yeah, we was listening to Tv, that's how we got involved in the first sit-ins in Oxford, because we saw on Tv they was doing it up in Greensboro,” Eddie McCoy recalled. Soon afterward, he and two friends went to a local department store and sat down at the segregated counter. “We told them we wanted to be served,” he said, “but they didn't pay no attention to you. And we said again we wanted to be served, and they said we don't serve no niggers here.

“The funny thing,” McCoy continued, “is that if they had served us, we didn't have no money. If it had been fifty cents, we would have been in trouble.” McCoy and his friends knew that the police would arrive soon. “We even knew who would come,” McCoy recounted. “They gonna send Nathan White. He's one of those white guys that's like a diplomat, he want to work with everybody, he don't mean no harm, that's just his nature.” The police officer's response was classic small-town South. “When he come in he looked at us and asked who our parents are,” McCoy said, “and then we told him, and that rang a bell, so he said come on outside and work this thing out.” They walked out to the sidewalk, where White told the young men to go home and warned that he would contact their parents, whereupon they left. “But when we went back again, they decided they just didn't serve anything in the afternoon to anybody. They started taking up the stools.”

Soon afterward, a group of young black high school athletes in Oxford organized a sit-in at Herring's Drugstore, right next door to the barbershop where Robert Teel worked. After asking to be served, the young black men were shocked to see the white proprietor quietly drop their hamburgers onto the flat grill and their french fries into the deep-fat fryer. Again, McCoy wondered how they would pay for the food if the manager actually served them. But as they sat watching their lunch sizzling on the grill and wondering what might happen, the proprietor made a short series of telephone calls. “We knew damn well he wasn't calling up people to tell them he done seen the light of integration,” McCoy laughed. A large group of Klansmen began to arrive in the drugstore and gather around the seated young men, making menacing remarks. “They was getting ready to flat kick our ass,” said McCoy, who told his teammates that when he gave the signal, they should all dash out the door. As they fled, the white men gave chase.

Most of the young black men easily outran their pursuers, but James Lyons found himself cornered in an alley and was forced to take cover in the back entrance to the Oxford Police Department. Needless to say, in 1960 this was not widely considered a safe haven for black revolutionaries. As Lyons careened through the back door, he lost his footing and landed at the feet of the desk officer, panting, “Please don't let them kill me, please don't let them kill me.” In seconds, the mob crowded into the room around the prostrate young black man. The police officer began kicking and stomping Lyons in full view of the crowd, but using the flat side of his foot and making only light contact; even at that terrifying moment, the young black man realized that the officer was putting on a show for the crowd so that they would not kill him. “Y'all go on, now,” the white cop told the angry mob, kicking the fallen black man again. “I can take care of this black bastard.” When the men had all filed out the back door, the policeman looked down at Lyons and spat, “I ought to have let them kill you.” Such was the strange debut of nonviolent direct action in Granville County, North Carolina.

James Lyons, Eddie McCoy, and quite a few of the other young African American men joined the sporadic campaigns of picketing and boycotting against segregated businesses in downtown Oxford in the early 1960s. In fact, their efforts closed the lunch counters for a time. “We shut down the lunch counters,” McCoy said. “And we was happy with that. Everybody was treated equal.” In the wake of that limited success, a group of the young men tried to desegregate the Orpheum Theater and the police took them into the alley and beat them with nightsticks. “I knew that won't gon' work,” McCoy recalled. “It's an alley, blacks had go down the alley to go upstairs. Whites went in the front door. But when my friends bought tickets and tried to go in like the white people, the police came and beat them up.”

But the young men were not alone. Local women of their mothers' generation formed the backbone of the early movement in Oxford. “Ben Chavis's mama, Mrs. Elizabeth Chavis, she got out there, and her sister Eunice and all of them, and her other sister Helen, and some of their friends, they was up on it,” Golden Frinks recalled. “They was up on what was happening.” These movements, which were not directly linked to efforts by national organizations like the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), met with occasional and sometimes temporary success. In June 1963, inspired by the SCLC's campaign in Birmingham, hundreds of black citizens in Oxford took to the streets in a series of protests aimed at segregation at local restaurants, lunch counters, and the Orpheum Theater. Many of the demonstrators confronted violence at the hands of local whites, including the Oxford Police Department. When the police attacked protestors in 1963, blacks fought them in the streets and the demonstration “became a riot,” according to a report from the governor's office.