Blood Done Sign My Name (18 page)

An educator as well as a minister, John Chavis founded a school in Raleigh in the early 1800s, where he taught Latin and Greek to the sons of the state's most influential white families. This was a most unusual achievement. His pupils included two sons of a Supreme Court justice, a future United States senator, and a future governor of the state. Chavis was determined to educate African Americans and early in his enterprise apparently taught black and white pupils together, a practice that offended some whites; in 1809, he advertised that he would “open an EvENING SCHOOL for the purpose of educating Children of Colour, as he intends, for the accommodation of some of his Employers, to exclude all Children of Colour from his Day School.” For twenty years Chavis taught the children of North Carolina's landed gentry by day and “when the white children leave the house,” the clergyman wrote, “those of colour will take their places, and continue until ten o'clock.” He became prosperous and well respected, buying several choice lots in Raleigh, a large house outside of town, and one hundred acres of land in northern Wake County. Historian John Hope Franklin has called John Chavis “the most prominent free black in North Carolina.”

In 1831, however, Nat Turner and his band of slave rebels cut a swath through the southern
Virginia countryside, coming very close to Oxford and slaughtering fifty-seven white men, women, and children in their messianic march against slavery. Whites put down the rebellion, killing hundreds of blacks and impaling the severed heads of suspected rebels on pikes as a warning. Across the South, white authorities moved to strengthen the racial caste system. The North Carolina legislature voted in 1832 to outlaw preaching and teaching by African Americans, free or slave, and took the vote from free blacks soon afterward. The state's “Act for the better regulation of the conduct of Negroes, slaves and free persons of colour” barred blacks from preaching or exhorting in public “under any pretense.” The legislation prohibited blacks from “acting in any manner as preacher or teacher,” under penalty of public whipping “not to exceed 39 lashes on his bare back.” Three years later, when the legislature took the vote from free blacks, John Chavis was no longer even a citizen.

Despite his political connections, John Chavis was forced to sell his property, close his illustrious academy in Raleigh, and move to the Mangum farm in Granville County. Though the new law pressed Chavis into poverty, he quietly persisted in teaching black children, and his posture remained defiant. After he was “charged with going to Raleigh to teach the children of free people of colour,” Chavis wrote to a prominent former pupil to complain about his treatment. “Tell them that if I am black,” he wrote to Senator Willie P. Mangum in 1837, “that I am free born American & a revolutionary soldier & therefore ought not be thrown entirely out of the scale of notice.” The following summer, when John Chavis was seventy-five, legend has it that somebody clubbed the old man to death at his home in Granville County. According to Helen Chavis Othow, his biographer, it is possible that “he was killed because he didn't stop teaching or preaching.” The Chavis children grew up hearing that white opponents bashed in his skull because he refused to stop educating black children.

The legacy of John Chavis was a controlling influence in the life of succeeding generations of the Chavis family. Both of Ben Chavis's parents, Benjamin Chavis Sr. and Elizabeth Ridley Chavis, taught school in the county and served the local branch of the NAACP. “Major Chavis,” as the senior Benjamin Chavis was known around town, had fought in World War I, then traveled home on a segregated troopship, bitterly angry at how little the war to “make the world safe for democracy” had done to free black Americans. Racial politics and African American history were mainstays of the dinner-table conversation at the Chavis home. The younger Ben recalled lengthy family discussions of the Supreme Court's 1954
Brown
decision and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy butchered by two white men in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white cashier. After the Till murder, the seven-year-old Chavis “didn't want to go out of the house for two weeks,” he remembered. The Chavis family taught their children to read the newspaper every day and imposed high standards of academic performance. One of Ben's sisters, Helen Chavis Othow, received her doctorate, chaired the English Department at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, and published a biography of Reverend John Chavis. June Chavis Davenport became a supervisor in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. Another sister, Francine Chavis, graduated from medical school and came home to practice medicine in Oxford.

Born in 1948, Ben Chavis was an intensely aware and articulate young man who had led an effort to desegregate Oxford's public library while still a student at Mary Potter High School. Chestnut skinned and small of frame, Chavis attended St. Augustine's College for a year but transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1966 after the death of his father, becoming one of the first African American students to enroll there. Active in student politics, Chavis won election as president of the UNCC Student Union, campaigning against the
Vietnam War and inviting renowned black militant Stokely Carmichael to campus. He worked in the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, switching to Eugene McCarthy's crusade after Kennedy was assassinated.

The searing events of the spring and summer of 1968 radicalized Ben Chavis as they did thousands of other young Americans. A natural leader, Chavis helped create the Black Cultural Association, whose “Black House” in Charlotte became a local center for black radical politics. Chavis and his associates sought to organize a Charlotte chapter of the Black Panther Party, modeling their approach on the Panthers' “Ten Point Program” and setting up a free breakfast program for poor black children. The national Panther organization, however, was in a period of turmoil that would not permit them to charter new groups, and was beset from coast to coast with paid infiltrators and assorted idiots who called themselves Panthers and acted in ways that embarrassed the party. Factional disputes among the would-be Panthers in Charlotte earned Chavis and his accomplices denunciation from the
Black Panther,
the official newspaper of the Oakland-based Black Panthers. Two of Chavis's Black Cultural Association colleagues in Charlotte, Theodore Hood and David Washington, tallied long police records and were suspected of a number of violent crimes. Chavis was also close to James Grant, a radical chemistry professor at UNCC and a black
Vietnam veteran turned full-time revolutionary.

Having earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry, Chavis came home to Oxford and reopened the old Ridley Drive-In, a defunct restaurant owned by his family and adjacent to their family homeplace, renaming it the Soul Kitchen. The establishment became a focal point for young blacks in the county, providing space for both partying and politics. Soon after opening the Soul Kitchen, Ben Chavis accepted a substitute-teaching position at Mary Potter High School. He taught the last classes of students to attend the all-black high school; in the fall of 1970, several months after the murder and the conflagration that followed, Granville County would finally integrate its school system. But among the last students at Mary Potter High, Chavis quickly put his organizing experience to good use. “I was trying to raise the black consciousness of the students,” he explained. “In the English class I was teaching, I had them write black poetry. In the journalism class I totally transformed the school paper in terms of articles—they had articles against the
Vietnam War, raising political consciousness.”

Chavis also helped form a group called the Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress, composed largely of students from Mary Potter, which built upon earlier activist efforts and focused largely on the lack of recreational facilities for young people. In early 1970, Chavis addressed the city council with a recreation proposal that would have forced the recreation committee to hold meetings and open all existing recreational facilities to the public; six years earlier, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the city's white leadership had secretly committed itself to providing no public recreational facilities so that they would not have to integrate them. The main impact of these organizing efforts was that, as Chavis said, “We already had a sense of a communications network, but it was mainly on the issue of recreation—nobody knew that a tragedy like this was going to happen.”

After the murder, despite Mayor Currin's curfew and the presence of dozens of state troopers, Oxford was a tinderbox and matches were not in short supply. A bomb threat interrupted classes at predominantly white D. N. Hix School that Wednesday morning; a similar threat disrupted all-black Orange Street Elementary. The schools were not that far apart. After classes let out for the day, groups of white and black young people engaged in rock-throwing battles and group fistfights. “We'd catch 'em coming up that hill by D. N. Hix,” one young black woman recalled, “and we used to flat kick their ass. It was like that for a long time.” Despite the presence of local police and state troopers, these clashes continued for months after the murder. Young blacks would gather at one end of Hillsboro Street, near the poolroom and the corner of Granville Street, and white teenagers would assemble at a gas station near Hix School. “Literally, around ten o'clock at night,” one recalled, “the two groups would march toward one another and there would be fighting all up and down the street.” The street battles became an almost nightly occurrence. “We was throwing bricks at car windows, all like that,” one black woman confessed, “but they be doing the same thing to us.”

Oxford was not the only place where street battles raged; in fact, dozens of communities in the United States saw violent racial clashes in May. That same Tuesday of the riots in Oxford, a sixteen-year-old black boy named Charles Oatman was beaten to death in a jail cell in Augusta, Georgia. Oatman was mentally retarded and weighed only 104 pounds. “He had been beaten something awful,” said the wife of the undertaker who prepared his body. “There were cigarette burns on his hands and feet and—well, there were burns on his buttocks, too.” Sheriff E. F. Atkins in Augusta told black leaders that the frail boy had fallen out of his bed and struck his head on the concrete. But few black people believed that Oatman could have fallen out of his bed twenty or thirty times, sometimes onto burning cigarettes, and the white coroner refused to issue a report. Young blacks began to burn white-owned businesses in the black community. Governor Lester Maddox blamed the violence on “a Communist conspiracy” and ordered state troopers into the city, warning the rioters that they had “better prepare to meet their maker.” The troopers fired into the crowds, killing six blacks and wounding dozens more. According to national wire service reports, all six of the dead had been hit multiple times in the back at close range.

Four days later, on May 16, eighty Mississippi state troopers fired at least 350 rounds into a women's dormitory at Jackson State University, killing two students and wounding at least twelve more. In the presence of a national wire service reporter, one of the troopers radioed back to headquarters, “You'd better send some ambulances. We've killed some niggers out here.” Governor John Bell Williams claimed that snipers inside had fired hundreds of shots at police, but a Justice Department investigation revealed no evidence of any shots fired from the dorm whatsoever—not a shell casing, not a bullet hole, not one witness. Local black leaders announced the formation of a black self-defense organization. “We are determined,” Dr. Aaron Shirley, a prominent black physician, told reporters, “that from now on when we suspect that law enforcement officers are hell bent on killing some black folks, they'll be doing it at their own risk.”

In Oxford, at least, the police held their fire. But the firebombing, which had damaged seventeen downtown stores during the first night of rioting, persisted on Wednesday night. At about ten-thirty, someone hurled a small, ineffectual gasoline bomb through the window of the Tiny Tote, a convenience grocery store on Lanier Street; this appears to have been a diversionary attack. Ten minutes later, three firebombs landed on the roof of James Rudder's house in a quiet, all-white, middle-class housing development called Green Acres. Two of the bottle bombs, failing to shatter, bounced onto the lawn and flamed out. The third burned out on the asphalt shingles, but failed to ignite the roof and caused only minor damage. Perhaps the arsonists had selected the home at random, wishing only to take the battle to a white suburban area; perhaps Rudder was a target for some specific reason. Though the physical destruction was slight, the psychological effect of a bombing attempt in a white residential area heightened many white people's sense that this was a war in which they could choose only one side. Many whites, and not just Klan members, began muttering about retaliatory violence. Granville County had become an armed camp. “People didn't know when something might happen out their way,” Mayor Currin explained. “Folks were just scared half to death.”

Heavily armed state troopers ringed Oxford with roadblocks. In their gray uniforms and military-style hats, pump shotguns at the ready, backed up at many of the checkpoints by local police, the highway patrol garrison presented an imposing presence—one that blacks saw as a militia for white political power. The highway patrol had not employed its first black officer until 1967; most people in the state had never seen one of the handful of black troopers. Even black North Carolinians who wanted no part of radical politics tended to view the patrolmen as storm troopers for white supremacy. On May 30, two weeks after the murder, the
Carolina Times
, a fairly conservative black newspaper at the time, warned African American drivers in North Carolina “to be on their guard and take care not to encounter a member of the North Carolina Highway Patrol.” The editors, noting several beatings and killings by state troopers, reported dozens of complaints about “brutality committed against blacks by Highway patrolmen.” Middle-class white people, on the other hand, generally regarded the highway patrol as nice men who issued traffic tickets, which could be thrown out if you knew the right lawyer.