Blood Done Sign My Name (19 page)

The emergency curfew ordinance under which they operated gave law enforcement officers tremendous leeway; it forbade anyone to “travel upon public roads, streets, alleys, or any public property” during the hours stipulated by the mayor, “unless in search of medical assistance, food, or other commodity or service necessary to sustain the well-being of himself or his family or some member thereof.” In practice, this large loophole permitted the white authorities to allow anyone they deemed trustworthy to move freely and to arrest anyone on the streets whom they deemed untrustworthy.

Children may not fully understand the social order, but they learn it easily enough when it gets acted out in front of them. I remember riding in Chief Pontiac with my father at the wheel, and how terrified I was when the men with guns stopped our car at the roadblock. But Daddy pulled up to the blockades of troopers and smiled fearlessly. I recall feeling as though Daddy must be important, a man well known to the troopers, since they simply waved him right on through the barriers. I realized years later that the state troopers were not even from Oxford and had no idea who he was, beyond the crucial fact that he was a white man wearing a tie. Blacks had a completely different experience at the roadblocks.

Herman Cozart, who was easily as large as my father but many shades darker, found out about the curfew by driving up to a roadblock manned by the state troopers. “They didn't just look in there and say, ‘Get out of the car,' ” Cozart recalled. “They snatched the driver right out.” No one snatched Herman Cozart easily; the pulpwood hauler had arms like legs and legs like tree stumps. “And I said, ‘Hold it, now, I ain't handicapped,' ” he recounted, and he lumbered down from the cab of his truck. The troopers leveled their shotguns at his chest. “I said, ‘What the hell—did somebody done hold up a bank or something?' And they said, ‘No, it's a curfew,' and that was the first I heard of the damn thing.” Cozart, who rarely went anywhere without a gun, became one of twenty black men arrested on the first night of the curfew, charged both with violating the emergency statute and with carrying a concealed weapon. “I didn't really think it was concealed,” said Cozart. “It was laying right there on the seat.”

Despite the almost nightly Ku Klux Klan gatherings that summer, every one of the roughly one hundred persons arrested for violation of the curfew was black. Young blacks derided the curfew measure as “the No-Niggers-after-Nightfall Act.” Mayor Currin, who did not approve of the Klan, nonetheless found the highway patrol's immense display of force comforting: “The pistol on the belt, that's one thing, but the big shotgun, that's something else.”

NO AMOUNT OF military force could have made the district court preliminary hearing on Wednesday afternoon a soothing experience for Mayor Currin or the rest of the white power structure in Oxford. Ben Chavis led Mary Potter High School in a massive walkout and herded black students into the courthouse by the dozens. “When it came time for the preliminary hearing,” Chavis said, “I took the class I had to court, and when my class left the school, the whole school walked out behind us. I looked around and saw the whole school coming. I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will be good for everybody.' ” Walking several blocks to the courthouse without a permit, the large group filed into the courtroom, filling nearly every available seat. “We had all four grades, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelth grades, in the Granville County courthouse. Even the teachers came. Of course, the judge and everybody was shocked.” Judge Linwood Peoples kept strict order, but the presence of two hundred young blacks clearly unnerved the white people who worked in the courtroom.

The young blacks listened quietly as Boo Chavis told the court how he had watched the Teels kill Henry Marrow. According to a report in the
Pittsburgh Courier,
Chavis testified that
three
white men stood over the fallen Marrow: Robert Teel with a shotgun, Larry Teel with a rifle, and a third man with a stick. Only the first two sat before the court charged in the killing; it is not clear why the third man was not identified and arrested. The third man had been Roger Oakley, of course—the fact that this seems not to have occurred to the police is beyond explanation. That Boo Chavis and the others who hung around near the store did not recognize Roger immediately is less mysterious; Roger worked at the Bandag rubber plant, not at his father's store, and was not a familiar figure at Four Corners the way Teel and Larry were.

Some of the confusion about who stood over Henry Marrow's body may have been by design. According to local courthouse legend, Billy Watkins instructed Larry to put on Roger's clothes before Larry and Teel went to the police station, in order to confuse the witnesses. None of the Teel family had said anything about Roger's presence whatsoever. His wife, Betsey, was pregnant and had reportedly suffered a series of miscarriages, and the family is said to have thought that he should stay out of the legal proceedings if possible. Whether the rumored clothing swap occurred or whether it influenced the accounts of the witnesses is hard to say.

All of them had partaken in the violence against Marrow, Boo Chavis testified, but he identified Larry Teel, now sitting at the defense table, as the one who'd fired the fatal shot, after his father had ordered him to “shoot the son of a bitch.” Of course, all three of them had been engaged in the killing of Henry Marrow—stomping him, kicking him, smashing his skull with the stocks of the guns. In both moral and legal terms, the specific one who fired the final shot through his brain seems almost beside the point.

Despite some fogginess about the details of the killing, one thing became crystal clear to the blacks who attended the preliminary hearing: there were powerful white people who did not want to see Robert and Larry Teel go to jail. Lonnie Breedlove, a city commissioner, attested to the good character of the defendants. Basil N. Hart, a wealthy landowner, offered to put his property up to ensure that the Teels would appear for trial. vassar Surratt, a prosperous lumberman, offered to post bond and swore that Robert Teel was a reliable and civic-minded citizen of excellent repute, as did a number of other prominent whites. “It was shocking,” recalled Ben Chavis, “to see some of the presidents of local banks getting up and testifying as character witnesses for [Teel].” Judge Peoples found probable cause to charge each of the two defendants with firstdegree murder in the death of Henry Marrow. He also charged Robert Teel with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily harm, for having shot Boo Chavis. Persuaded that no amount of money would be enough to keep Teel and his son in jail, given the combined wealth of their backers, the judge ordered them held without bond. Wednesday night, sheriff's deputies whisked the two men to Raleigh for safekeeping in the Wake County jail at Central Prison.

The following morning, the Human Relations Council, set up in Oxford several years earlier, met at the courthouse. My father and Thad Stem, who had both joined the committee recently, walked to the meeting together. “I was just trying to get the young man buried without having a race war,” Daddy told me later. “I didn't worry much about the trial, because it seemed to me that the murder had been committed in a public place, and there wasn't much mystery about who had done it. And so my immediate concern was that people of goodwill on both sides come together and try to prevent further violence. And I wasn't sure that most of the whites knew how dangerous the situation was. I mean, I had church members sleeping in their stores downtown with guns. And I knew that the blacks were fed up, especially some of the young people. I worried that many white people didn't comprehend the level of anger and mistrust, and of course there were many others who didn't much care how black people felt.”

Dan Finch, the white liberal attorney who chaired the committee, called the meeting to order, describing it as “an open forum for discussion in an atmosphere of mutual respect.” According to newspaper accounts of the meeting, roughly 120 people came to discuss the racial situation, only fourteen of whom were African Americans. The black people who did come to the meeting were “respectable Negroes”—teachers, ministers, and businesspersons. They were angry at the racial injustice in Oxford, but they were not the same people rioting in the streets and making firebombs. Their critique of the problem and their anger at what had happened, however, were much the same. Sam Cox, the principal spokesperson for the African American contingent, charged that “there is no justice in the judicial system in Granville County.” Authorities had to act to change things, Cox said. “I'm not going to call names,” he continued, referring to Magistrate J. C. Wheeler, “but there is a magistrate who refuses to serve a warrant against whites who commit crimes against blacks.” The black schoolteacher also reminded the group that the courts in Oxford had recently convicted a young black woman of first-degree murder after a white salesman had driven her, against her will, to a remote wooded area and had been shot with his own pistol. “We have not had justice,” Cox declared, “and we are trying to do something about it.”

The handful of people like Cox who had come to speak for “the black community” had an agenda of grievances that amounted to a brief against the whole racial caste system. One man called the attention of the white officials to the obvious: the city did not pave the streets where black people lived. Landlords who rented to African Americans in these places could safely ignore health and housing codes. Some of the houses rented to blacks had smelly, illegal outhouses that would not have been permitted in white neighborhoods. Neither the sheriff's department nor the fire department had any black employees. Neither of the two black policemen had ever been promoted above patrol officer. The health department, the welfare department, the public library, and the board of education were lily-white. Stores downtown did not hire blacks in anything but the most menial positions. The city had closed recreational facilities rather than integrate them.

The African Americans who attended the hearing did not approve of violence in the streets, they reminded the whites on the committee, but no one should be surprised at what was happening. My father agreed completely: “The shooting and the burning and the destruction which followed it are only the fever, not the disease,” the newspapers quoted him as saying. “The disease has been around for three hundred years.” The sound of hundreds of angry black people milling around in front of the building underlined the point.

“You've got our attention,” city manager Tom Ragland told the black people at the meeting, unwittingly affirming that rioting and firebombs had succeeded where patience and petitions had always failed. But Mayor Hugh Currin then went on to explain the procedures for getting a street paved or making a complaint about building code enforcement, as though virtually all the white-owned rental housing in black neighborhoods was either substandard or dilapidated merely because no one had filed the proper paperwork. Finch, the committee chair, conceded that the Civil Rights Act's requirement that whites share public recreational facilities with blacks
might
have something to do with the city Recreation Committee's failure to have a quorum since 1964. Some of the blacks started to leave the meeting in disgust.

Ragland, apparently sensing that the white officials were not getting over with the dwindling black contingent, pledged that things would change: “We're not going to sit dumb as we have in the past. I think that something will be done now.” In an effort to dampen black anger, the city manager even incorporated a little New Left lingo into his speech: “The judicial system must serve the people, not the system.”

Most of the anger focused on the police department's inexplicable treatment of the Teel family after the killing of Henry Marrow. “Two or three blacks at the meeting Thursday indicated there were rumors that the arrests had been deliberately delayed,” the Raleigh
News
and Observer
reported. Assistant Chief of Police Doug White claimed that the Teels had come to the station voluntarily and turned themselves in on Monday night at about ten, roughly an hour after the shooting. Not one of the African Americans present accepted this account. One black woman confronted White, saying that she herself had seen Robert Teel loading ice onto a truck at seven o'clock Tuesday morning. Others chimed in with similar evidence. Eventually, Officer White retreated from the official story by thirty-six hours: “White told the group that the Teels had definitely been sent to jail before 7 A.M.
Wednesday,
” the
News and Observer
reported. But by that time, whatever credibility the acknowledgment might have earned was lost. Almost half of the African Americans present walked out of the Human Relations Council meeting before it ended.

Those who remained could not help but hear the thunderous chants from outside. The Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress, which had been organized at the Soul Kitchen the day before, had called earlier that day for a march to the courthouse. “We called that day ‘Black Thursday,' ” recounted Ben Chavis, “and we assembled at First Baptist Church.” More than a thousand African American schoolchildren boycotted classes; two-thirds of the students at Mary Potter High and Orange Street Elementary, the all-black schools, were absent. Hundreds of them joined a large number of adults for the march to the courthouse. “We decided when we left the First Baptist Church that we were going to have a silent march, that if somebody shouted something derogatory that we would not respond, eyes straight ahead, because we were marching in memorial to Henry Marrow and out of our respect for him and for our own self-dignity,” Chavis said. The march proceeded wordlessly out of First Baptist and down Granville Street, turned right on Hillsboro, and into the shadow of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse. Willie Mae Marrow, Henry Marrow's young widow, visibly pregnant with the dead man's third daughter, marched at the head of the procession. At the courthouse, organizers used the back of a pickup truck as a podium and Chavis “spoke to the crowd, just to get the spirit of the thing together,” he recalled.