Blood Done Sign My Name (47 page)

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. thesis, 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Sam Bridges, October 30, 1984, transcript in possession of the author; Sam Bridges, “Radicalism in Black Religion,” unpublished paper, Wesleyan University, 1984, copy in possession of the author.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).

My understanding of the growth of the textile industry in the Carolinas and its racial politics draws on Jacqueline Dowd Hall et al.,
Like a Family: The
Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 183–236. The
Southern Textile Bulletin
is quoted in John A. Salmond,
Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 113. See also Liston Pope,
Millhands
and Preachers
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).