Blood Done Sign My Name (20 page)

Boo Chavis did not make a speech, but he marched with the protestors that day and wanted to get a good seat from which to hear his eloquent kinsman's oratory. “Me and a guy named Ronald Jordan, me and him climbed up on the Confederate soldier, and we had a fist up,” Boo said years later. “But the policeman out there told me that I had to get down.” Boo crawled down and joined the angry and high-spirited throng on the streets and sidewalks below. Newspaper photographs of the crowd show dozens of fists raised in the Black Power salute. The tone of the rally could not have been a comfort to the people who heard it from inside the courthouse. My father and Thad Stem found nothing to say and no place to go, and walked home from the courthouse in silence. “We're going back to our own community and we ain't going to let no white folks in,” one speaker told the cheering crowd as Daddy and Thad strode pensively down Main Street. Another young black boy, defying the police, climbed up the Confederate monument with a large placard that warned, BLACK POWER STRIKES WITH THE POWER OF A PANTHER.

CHAPTER 7

DRINKIN' THAT FREEDOM WINE

AT A ROADBLOCK on the southern outskirts of town, two highway patrolmen and a local police officer squinted into the headlights of an oncoming car. Whatever else the occupants of the automobile were doing here, they were violating the city council's emergency curfew. At other checkpoints around the city, law enforcement officers had already arrested twenty-five black men that night, ten of them carrying concealed weapons. As the aging green Buick slowed to a stop, the local cop stepped forward and both state troopers loudly cocked shells into the chambers of their Browning automatic shotguns. The driver, an African American named Walter David Washington, handed over his license and then his keys, keeping his hands up in plain view. Opening the trunk, the police officer found a case of dynamite and a stack of high-powered rifles.

If most white people in Oxford did not know what to make of “Black Power,” many had their worst fears confirmed when they read the
News
and Observer
the following morning. After the fruitless meeting of the Human Relations Commission and the fiery rally at the courthouse, readers learned, the police arrested a wave of black men trying to enter the town with weapons. The carload of dynamite and rifles made folks wonder if they were about to have a war on their hands.

Two of the men, Washington and Theodore Albert Hood, had police records of staggering dimensions; Washington was under lengthy suspended sentence for armed robbery and under investigation for five separate murders, while Hood had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and was facing an armed robbery charge, too. Both men had worked closely with Ben Chavis's would-be Black Panther chapter in Charlotte. Joseph Preston Goins, the third man in the car, was apparently a friend of black radical Jim Grant's, Ben Chavis's former chemistry teacher and political ally from UNC at Charlotte. Years later, FBI files and their own courtroom testimony revealed Washington and Hood to be police informants, and each received thousands of dollars and legal immunity from the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments as part of the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program—COINTELPRO—in exchange for testimony against Ben Chavis and Jim Grant. “Later,” Chavis claimed, “we found out that the guys that came from Charlotte with the dynamite were actually working for the government at the time.”

The three men carried a hand-lettered map that suggested that they had intended to bomb J. F. Webb, the local white high school. Black activists in Oxford believed that on their way to the school the three men tried to go see some local girls on Highway 15 and got their directions mixed up. “They was running with those Smith girls,” Eddie McCoy asserted. “That was what messed them up. That's how they got caught with all that dynamite.” Although it is impossible to know for certain, it seems just as likely that government informants Washington and Hood drove into the roadblock on purpose, snaring the third man, Goins, and implicating Ben Chavis and Jim Grant—prominent COINTELPRO targets—on related charges. In any case, whether it was COINTELPRO or the Smith girls, Washington and Hood escaped prosecution entirely. The
Oxford Public Ledger
had not heard about the Smith girls, but it revealed other information: “In possession of one of the trio was a slip of paper bearing the name of Mary Frances Thornton,” the editors noted, “and giving the address of Rt. 5, Oxford, Box 355-B, Salem Rd, Huntsboro community.” The editors, who routinely printed announcements for the Ku Klux Klan, also included her telephone number, presumably printing this information just in case any of their readers wanted to visit or call upon the woman in question.

Whatever the reason for their wrong turn—whether they were working for the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO operation, which secretly promoted divisive and especially criminal activity in an effort to undermine the black freedom movement, or whether they lost their way while returning from a social call—the heavily armed trio from Charlotte drove straight into a roadblock that was not on their way to the high school. “We had the map over at City Hall,” Mayor Currin said years later, referring to the map the police had captured from the three black men. “They were going to Webb High School, evidently to bomb it, and they made the wrong turnoff, right into the middle of this roadblock.”

To hear that police had stopped a carload of black men with dynamite and firearms was hardly a comfort to white people in Oxford. It got worse. At around eleven o'clock, a firebomb landed on the roof of the Oakes Motor Company on Lewis Street, but it rolled onto the ground and burned out without causing much damage. Around midnight, oil torches ignited a serious blaze in the A&P grocery store on Hillsboro Street. Police had been guarding the store and believed that whoever lit the blaze had been monitoring police activity on a minute-by-minute basis. The “military operation” swung into action. In Grab-all, young blacks torched an unoccupied hovel, creating a dramatic blaze that drew police and firefighters away from a much bigger target, a tobacco warehouse on Goshen Street. “We burned one house up, trying to get a diversion,” one of the arsonists recalled. “The diversion we had set over on Hicks Mill Road, a little house there, didn't nobody live in it. We wanted the cops to go there while we hit the warehouse on Goshen Street.” The incendiaries set firebombs in the flues beneath the large wooden building, but the homemade fuses failed. Nonetheless, the events of Thursday night— twenty-eight arrests, the seizure of dynamite and high-powered rifles, several firebombings and attempted firebombings—suggested the possibility of a small-scale guerrilla war. “It just literally scared the hell out of us,” the mayor admitted.

If my parents were frightened, they never told their children. My memories of these days and nights are strangely blurry. Mostly, we stayed home. One night my father came home with a watermelon and sat it in a tub of ice on the back porch, and we ate the cool, pink flesh slathered with salt, a summer treat. Another night we made homemade vanilla ice cream, and Daddy let me and
Vern take turns at the crank and then lick the paddles when it was done. Mama and Daddy seemed pensive, but they never talked to us about the atmosphere of war that grew steadily that week. And we lived happily enough inside the cocoon of their calm and loving manner.

But they felt the tension in ways large and small. One of Daddy's parishioners, a man who managed a department store downtown and slept in the store that week with a shotgun, was furious when he saw his minister walking into the courthouse wearing an Irish cap that Thad Stem had given him. Something about the hat just set him off. Like the mother in Ohio who told a journalist that same week, after the National Guard had killed four student protestors, “Anybody who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair . . . deserves to be shot,” the department store manager apparently cared more about what was on Daddy's head than what was in it. To him, the cap represented an act of rebellion that my baffled father had not intended at all. “I saw you walking in the courthouse with your little ‘go to hell' cap on,” he growled at Daddy after church the next Sunday, refusing to talk further and walking away in anger.

On Friday night, arrests were up slightly. The police and the highway patrol arrested twenty-seven more black men, most of them for simple curfew violations but quite a few for carrying concealed weapons into Oxford. White merchants hired armed guards or slept in their own stores, shotguns at the ready. Hardware stores sold guns and ammunition nearly as fast as the Orpheum Theater sold popcorn and Coca-Cola. Mayor Currin, Police Chief Nathan White, Assistant Chief Doug White, and several other city officials began spending their nights at City Hall, drinking bad coffee and wondering what would happen next. “We were pretty much on pins and needles,” Currin recalled. The mayor did not want liquor added to the things that inflamed Granville County's population, and persuaded the county Alcoholic Beverage Control board to close the county's liquor stores early that Friday and to keep them closed all weekend. One reason was that Henry Marrow's family had scheduled his funeral for the following day.

The murder of Henry Marrow had attracted the attention of the larger civil rights movement. Golden Frinks, a native of North Carolina, heard about Marrow's funeral when he picked up the telephone in Canton, Mississippi, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had sent him temporarily. He says that Hosea Williams, the SCLC's fiery field director, “done told me about, ‘Hey, man, they done killed somebody down there in your town.' Say, ‘Abernathy wants you to go down there and take a look at it.' That's how I got in there. I called, and they said the funeral gon' be Saturday.” Oxford was not his town, exactly, but Frinks was the most important black activist in eastern North Carolina and knew people in Granville County. A former nightclub owner from Edenton, North Carolina, Frinks had entered the freedom struggle with great vigor in the late 1950s, patching together a strong local organization and taking on the air, if not the piety, of a Southern black preacher. Some folks seemed to think his “nightclub” catered to sins of the flesh beyond dancing and drinking. Frinks was far from saintly. He could preach and pray with the best of them, though, and he worked well with most of the black women and young people who made up the rank and file of the movement.

A big, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man whose speech rambled in the pungent language of the black South, Frinks was brave almost to a fault. His friends called him “Goldie.” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference hired Frinks because of his success as a local organizer in Edenton and Williamston, and he had marched across the South with King and his lieutenants. Frinks was a kind of bridge figure between Martin Luther King's generation and the Black Power rebels, and with a job like that, it probably helped that he was something of a snake oil salesman. An instinctive politician and a sharply analytical organizer, Frinks also leaned toward Christian mysticism, believing that “the Spirit” would guide him. His vibrant speeches could bring a crowd to tears of grief or cries of outrage. “Back then I was hot as pepper,” Frinks remembered. “I was either gonna get it now or I couldn't wait. I was restless because I had been introduced to a type of freedom that the truth was in.” Frinks knew his role. “I was the stoker,” he laughed, “that kept the fire burning. I would stick that fire to it and shake it and keep it hot.”

Whites widely regarded Frinks as a wild-eyed militant, partly because in his speeches he sometimes ranted about whites being “devils” and he'd once released dozens of live chickens to stop traffic at a protest march. But Frinks betrayed no hatred for white people as such. Flashing a broad smile, he would reach across the color line even to proven enemies, and try to exploit divisions among whites. In his early days in Edenton, when the local mayor led police officers on a raid against a mass meeting in a local church, Frinks walked down the aisle, embraced the white leader, brought him down front, praised him warmly, and introduced him to the cheering crowd in a way that induced the amazed mayor to make friendly remarks. Frinks never gave up in his efforts to sway his opponents. After a protest rally, Frinks would typically walk up and down the line of highway patrol officers and SBI agents, shaking hands and making jokes. “What I would do, as I'd leave, was thank 'em, say I certainly appreciate this, and then create a handshake with 'em, especially the commander or the sergeant or whoever,” Frinks recalled.

As he explained to me at his home in Edenton two decades later, Frinks understood that Southern whites could hardly present a united front. Few whites truly backed the movement, especially in their own communities, but there were many shades of weak support, moral queasiness, deep misgivings, and reluctant opposition, in addition to the fire-eating racists. “You couldn't forget that you had some good white folks, and even the other ones wasn't necessarily all bad. There was some Methodists, there was some Presbyterians, and a few Episcopalians that weren't against you. They were cramped because of the age-old mores of time,” Frinks asserted. The old freedom fighter knew that many whites, though they benefited from white domination, did not wholeheartedly support it, even if most of the dissenters were afraid to say anything. Dr. King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” argued that such people were often worse than outright opponents. But Frinks saw them as an opportunity. “A lot of the good whites couldn't just come down here and speak. ‘You're wrong, Mr. Teel,' they couldn't say that, but they had what you might call a silence that I could hear. If you forgot that, you wouldn't be nowhere. A man like Teel, getting his badge of honor from the murder of a man who had no cause to be put to death, that man was somewhat out of place. Lots of them supported him, but lots of them didn't, and some that did was ashamed of themselves. You couldn't forget that.”

Frinks tried to nurture a similarly pragmatic and expansive vision inside the ranks of the freedom movement at a historical moment when its forces had fragmented. Deeply committed to nonviolence, Golden Frinks's aggressive organizing style sought to bridge the gap between civil rights preachers and Black Power militants. Though he had worked for Dr. King's SCLC for many years and walked faithfully in the path of nonviolent interracialism, no one could question his mettle or call him an Uncle Tom. Frinks remained close to Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality, a fellow North Carolinian, a lawyer and World War II veteran who had helped lead the mid-1960s revival of black nationalism.

The Black Power generation, some of whom like McKissick were not so young, rejected interracialism, often to the point of dogma; Frinks did not think that there was so much white support that there was any reason to bicker about it, but that eventually everyone would have to learn to live together. While Frinks knew plenty about guns, he tended to think the youthful embrace of armed self-defense provided more political problems than physical security; he and many other members of the older civil rights generation were also well armed but felt no need to talk about it. Racial separatism, as a philosophical position, made no sense to Frinks at all. But he shared the Black Power cohort's militant opposition to white domination, their sensible emphasis on economic uplift, and especially their fiery assertion of African American pride. He knew that much of the old order's power to oppress black folk came from the lingering self-loathing bred by white supremacy, and he said it loud, black, and proud, nearly as often as James Brown.