Blood Done Sign My Name (9 page)

Though the crusades in Alabama received more press coverage, North Carolina had provided no hiding place from the civil rights movement. On February 1, 1960, four black college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, where my mother and father had both attended college a decade earlier, and asked to be served. The next day twenty-three classmates joined them; the next day, there were sixty-six; the day after, one hundred. When white hoodlums with Confederate flags blocked the doors, players from the North Carolina A & T football team formed a flying wedge that broke through the hostile crowd, each player carrying a little American flag. The wedge of big bodies permitted demonstrators to reach the lunch counter. One of the hoodlums demanded to know just who they thought they were, and one of the black football players replied, “We're the Union Army.” Within two months, there
was
an army of sorts; the nonviolent warriors carried the sit-in campaign to fifty-four towns and cities across nine of the eleven states of the old Confederacy.

The battalions of nonviolence eventually overran segregation, and they also helped free white Southerners who felt the way my father did. After the sit-ins opened a new, more aggressive phase of the freedom movement, Daddy began to press the Methodist Church to live up to the inclusive vision of the gospel. “Since 1960, I have increasingly become associated with those who fight for social reform and renewal in our state,” an entry in his diary revealed. Mama wrote on February 10, 1962: “Beautiful Sunday.
Vernon preached on race relations. He really ‘laid it on the line.' It was real good.” That was when we were living in Sanford and he was serving Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church. He persuaded the administrative board of his local congregation to vote to seat anyone who came to church, regardless of color. He chaired the Commission on Social Action of the North Carolina Council of Churches and sat on the executive committee of the North Carolina Council on Human Relations. “I believe that the Church must relate itself to this struggle for racial equality,” his diary said in 1962. “It is doing so in spots and these spots are increasing. I hope it is not too late.” In later years, I would come to understand what he meant by that.

On April 3, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched their Birmingham campaign with sit-ins at the city's segregated lunch counters. The movement initially found it hard to recruit supporters, with large elements of the black community still reluctant and many of King's supporters in jail. Slapped with a court injunction to cease the demonstrations, King decided to go to jail himself on the same day that a group of “moderate” white clergymen pronounced the campaign “unwise and untimely.” During eight days of confinement, King penned his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent critique of “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order' than to ‘justice.' ”

It is easy, King wrote, for those who had not suffered the violence and the indignity of segregation to advise patience. But it was excruciating, he said, to “see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” King described the agony of finding “your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky.” Black Americans find themselves “living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness,' ” King wrote. And the biggest obstacle, King argued, was the sympathetic white liberal who wanted to preserve peace and civility.

The effect of King's words on my father was electric. He was already committed to racial equality, but Dr. King hit him with the conviction that he needed to do something. “When I began to read his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,' ” Daddy recounted, “I wept while I was reading it and got down on my knees, because it was the best thing outside Scripture that I had ever found.”

As his rhetoric galvanized liberals like my father, Dr. King's organizers located the perfect adversary in Birmingham's Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. Knowing that the television cameras followed Dr. King, they also knew they could count on the volatile Connor for a dramatic display of brutality; though the SCLC organizers did not know it, Connor longed to be governor of Alabama and believed that becoming the state's leading segregationist firebrand was his ticket. Sure enough, whether it was temper or ambition, Connor ordered his officers to use police dogs and fire hoses. In resorting to open violence, Connor stepped right into King's trap. “The ball game was over, once the hoses and the dogs were brought in,” former city official David Vann recalled. “In marching only one block, they could get enough news film to fill all the newscasts of all the television stations in the United States.” The images of violence in Birmingham echoed around the world: “Sensational aspects of the Birmingham crisis including arrests of children and use of dogs and hoses have received widespread play,” one diplomat reported to the White House.

While the televised drama played out perfectly, Birmingham could not be reduced to an epic struggle between pure nonviolence and bare-fanged evil. King and his organizers were committed to nonviolence, but their strategy depended on provoking violence against demonstrators. And though the SCLC taught nonviolence and begged those who could not accept nonviolent discipline to stay home, black bystanders often pelted police with “nonviolent” rocks, bricks, and bottles, which helped prod Connor's cops into stupid overreactions that played to King's advantage in the media.

Beyond the chaos in the streets, white terrorism, especially dynamite bombings, had long plagued Birmingham's black community. But Klan terrorists who wanted to kill the leaders of the freedom movement knew that they themselves might die in the attempt. Colonel “Stone” Johnson, a black labor union representative, organized the Civil Rights Guards, who armed themselves to protect the movement and sometimes exchanged fire with the Klan. Asked many years later how he'd managed to protect civil rights leaders in Birmingham, given his commitment to nonviolence, Johnson grinned and said, “With my nonviolent .38 police special.”

Armed self-defense was nothing new. But black Birmingham responded to the bombings in a new way during the SCLC's 1963 campaign. After white terrorists bombed King's motel room, poor blacks whose commitment to nonviolence was negligible took to the streets, ravaging nine blocks of Birmingham, overturning cars, shattering storefronts, and burning buildings. It was in large measure the prospect of race war in the streets, with the whole world watching, that forced President Kennedy to respond. Kennedy, a devoted Cold Warrior, lobbied white business leaders in Birmingham to reach an agreement with the freedom movement, ending what he called “a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.” Birmingham was a decisive triumph for nonviolent direct action, but violence and nonviolence were both more ethically complicated and more tightly intertwined than they appeared in most media accounts and history books.

Across the South, the news from Birmingham inspired dozens of similar campaigns. In cities, hamlets, small towns, and rural crossroads far beyond the scope of television camera crews and civil rights celebrities, black Southerners pushed hard for their freedom. In a ten-week period, African Americans launched at least 758 demonstrations in 186 cities and towns, yielding 14,733 arrests.

Sanford, North Carolina, was no exception. As in Birmingham, violence and nonviolence lived side by side, working in tension and in tandem with each other; the jails filled with nonviolent demonstrators, but riots in the streets left many people injured and one man shot through the leg. The tension in the streets made its way into the pages of my parents' diaries, which they let me read almost forty years later. “I returned from Biscoe,” my father wrote in his diary, “to find that racial demonstrations had been held on our streets and 52 Negro youths had been arrested. I visited the jail and talked and prayed with some of those who had demonstrated.” On December 28, 1963, Mama noted tersely in her own diary, “Much stir over Negro demonstrations.”

The next day, Daddy wrote a letter to the editor of the
Sanford
Herald,
not from jail but from the confines of his conscience in a community of white Christians that did not want to hear him. His letter clearly drew on the tone of King's Birmingham missive. “Last night, a 14-year-old boy spent his first night in jail,” Daddy wrote. “He was one of the more than 50 young people who were arrested yesterday in our city. His only real crime is that he had the wrong mother.

“A moment of truth has arrived for Sanford,” he asserted. “Our Negro neighbors are no longer able to accept indignities imposed upon them. They are asking for centuries-long delayed justice. They have been charged with ‘trespassing.' Indeed, they have trespassed, not so much upon our restaurants as upon our consciences.” Daddy went on to make some specific proposals for negotiation and reconciliation, employing King's own phrasing to suggest that “our churches ought to open their doors to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and thus become the headlights of our community rather than the tail-lights,” and advocating “that our School Board ought to make plans now to voluntarily desegregate our schools next fall.” He saw no reason “to force our Negro neighbors to haul us into court.”

“That 14-year-old boy who spent last night in our jail is going to win,” Daddy declared. “The highest we know of Democracy and Christianity is on his side. He wants to be free. Our community now has the opportunity finally to become true sons and daughters of one who once said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.' ” He signed the letter “A fellow sinner,
Vernon Tyson.”

The newspaper editor wrote my father a scolding reply, reminding him that leaders who went “too far, too fast” ended up without any followers, and maybe without a job, too. Other people signaled their disapproval with lowered eyes, resentful stares, or anonymous hate mail. The editor was right that people in the pews at most white churches resisted the news that God called them to love their black neighbors as themselves—and to accept them as civic and social equals. My father needed no reminder that he was walking through a minefield. The editor had no way of knowing, of course, that my father drew on a deep well of spiritual strength, and was a Tyson from eastern North Carolina and therefore half crazy besides. It was not a bad trait for a man facing what was about to happen to my father in the perilous historical moment of 1963 and 1964.

In the months after the Birmingham crusade, the fixed stars and immovable pillars of American history began to reel and rock. On June 11, 1963, fearing that Birmingham might soon ignite a local race war, President Kennedy made a historic address on national television, describing civil rights as “a moral issue” that was “as old as the Scriptures” and “as clear as the American Constitution” and calling for new civil rights legislation. Later that night, a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson, Mississippi, took a high-powered rifle and assassinated NAACP leader Medgar Evers. On August 28, Dr. King spoke to 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech; this brought him wide admiration but caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.” On September 16, Klan members in Birmingham bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four little black girls and maiming many others. And before Thanksgiving, sniper fire in Dallas took the life of President Kennedy, a death that seemed inextricably bound up with the momentous racial challenges confronting the nation.

Amid these perilous hopes and agonizing tragedies, my father met Dr. Samuel Proctor at a statewide meeting of the North Carolina Council of Churches. Dr. Proctor was the president of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, where the sit-ins had been born, and one of the leading black preachers of his generation. Proctor gave a majestic speech at the council meeting, and Daddy stood patiently in line to speak to him afterward. Without thinking about it much, Daddy asked Dr. Proctor to come preach on February 2, 1964, Race Relations Sunday. Dr. Proctor accepted immediately, smiled warmly as he shook my father's hand, and said, “Yes, and we'll get run out of town together.”

Proctor probably knew just how close to the bone of truth he was cutting with that prediction. As Dr. King liked to remind people, eleven o'clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, and our all-white churches did not welcome black preachers to the pulpit. Daddy had extended the invitation in the fall of 1963, when things were fairly calm in Sanford, but when we came back from my grandmother's house in Biscoe after Christmas, the jails in Sanford were filled with black teenagers, the police had shot one of them, the Klan was on the rampage, and the whole community was in an uproar. Daddy's timing could have been better. And he had neglected to tell anyone, even his allies, that he had invited a black preacher to come only a month later.

Dr. Proctor was not just any black preacher, either; he was one of the leading black educators in the country and one of the most prominent African American ministers of his generation. In the decades to come, Ivy League universities would pay thousands of dollars to have Dr. Samuel Proctor deliver their commencement addresses. In late 1963 and early 1964, however, Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church rocked on its foundations at the thought of having a black man in their pulpit. When church members began to hear about Dr. Proctor's proposed visit, the telephone started to ring incessantly. Fifty church members called a protest meeting in the fellowship hall and insisted that my father rescind the invitation. He was shocked at the outcry. “We are really having fireworks in our church concerning Dr. Proctor's coming,” Mama scrawled in her diary. “I have hardly slept at all.”