Blood Done Sign My Name (21 page)

For that reason, and because he was an extremely engaging person, the Black Power militants respected Frinks. He befriended Stokely Carmichael, Howard Fuller, Ben Chavis, and the other young black radicals who chanted “Black Power” and often denounced their elders, taking them into his home and feeding them good counsel and collard greens. The young firebrands listened to him, even though they did not always agree. “Whether they admit it or not,” he reflected in later years, “they were stealing, getting ideas, replenishing their aggressiveness. And then they went and killed the movement.” In the late 1960s, Goldie Frinks donned a golden dashiki in the manner of the Black Power crowd, but he always wore a good-sized cross around his neck, too. And in Oxford, Frinks detected a moment of Divine purpose and historic opportunity for the shaken movement to pick up the disparate threads of protest and restitch freedom's quilt.

“This was at a period when sacrifices had to be made,” Frinks reflected, “and everybody has a purpose for being born.” Though the murder of Henry Marrow was a tragedy, he said, the sorrow “was supposed to bring that kind of feeling to his daughters, that kind of showing of the weeping of his wife, until a reconnection among the people come. And I was—some kind of way—I was destined to go in there and raise the devil and dust it up and move on. I was supposed to go in there and leave the community but dust it up a little bit so they would have the memory.” It may seem ludicrous to suggest that Marrow, who was not even an activist himself, died in order to energize the movement. But Frinks saw himself as a man of history caught up in a moment of destiny. “And after Oxford, we could all look back and say, ‘You gonna be a symbol to us for a long time.' ” Opponents of the movement had moved the nation into a reactionary posture, and the movement's most important voice and symbol, Dr. King, had fallen to an assassin's bullet. “If Oxford had not been protested,” said Frinks, “it would have given legitimacy to stay with the backlash. This was going to revive us and bring us together and get us moving again in North Carolina, was the way I saw it unfolding.”

Frinks hurried to town at the invitation of Elizabeth Chavis, Helen Amis, and other African American women in Oxford. “Those women had got together down in Oxford, don't you know,” Frinks recalled. “They were some mighty tough black women down there. They believed in the civil rights.” Those women must have been slightly dismayed Saturday afternoon, however, when the hour for Henry Marrow's funeral had arrived but the illustrious Golden Frinks had not. Hundreds of mourners overflowed the New Light Baptist Church and crowded the grounds, where latecomers could listen to the service through loudspeakers. “I think near about all of black Granville County attended the funeral,” Ben Chavis recalled.

My father and Thad Stem appear to have been the only white people who came to the service. “There may have been another member of the Human Relations Council there,” Chavis speculated to me years later. “But the only white people I remember was your daddy and Thad Stem.” In any case, neither the city nor the county government dispatched a representative, sent flowers, or shared a word of condolence, a fact that did not go unnoticed among African Americans in Oxford. Daddy thought this was not only wrong but criminally stupid. With the entire community teetering on the brink of racial cataclysm, not one leader of the white-controlled political and economic system of Granville County had the foresight to show his face at the funeral—unless Thad's familial ties in the Democratic Party qualify him. I personally don't think anyone over fifty who wears tennis shoes to church counts as an elite.

Golden Frinks, on the other hand, was a kind of North Carolina civil rights celebrity. When Frinks finally arrived at New Light Baptist, a cordon of state highway patrol cars and officers had already surrounded the church and denied him and his entourage of young people entrance to the grounds. Over the loudspeakers, Frinks could hear the service commencing without him. To Frinks's frustration, the minister who was speaking was “less than impressive,” and he was desperate to get inside the barricade and take the pulpit himself. “It seemed like that preacher was restraining himself,” Frinks recalled, “trying to say, ‘Well, I don't want to upset the white folks, don't want to stir up the black folks, I just want to get this thing over with and get this young man in the earth.' ” Frinks sidled up to a white trooper with a crew cut and grumbled, “That's a sorry sermon that man is preaching.”

The trooper shook his head in agreement but averred that the preaching should “pick up right much directly” because “they're expecting Golden Frinks to come in here and stir this thing up. That's why all of us are here, because they think Frinks is going to show up and get this thing on the move.” Laughing, Frinks identified himself and shook the officer's hand warmly. “Well, I guess you're supposed to be over in there,” the trooper said with a grin, waving him through the barrier. It was like a drama in which everyone played a part, but not all of the characters were as predictable as Hollywood and history books usually suggest. Ducking under the barricade, Frinks hustled to the church, where he did not disappoint his new friend the state trooper.

At the end of the service, people started getting in cars to go to the graveside, but Frinks held up his hands and stopped them. “I said, ‘Now, wait, we don't want to ride here, we want to march. Ben, Leon, all of y'all come up here.' ” He gestured to Ben Chavis and Reverend Leon White, a United Church of Christ minister and another leading activist in eastern North Carolina, then beckoned to Thad Stem and Daddy. The black activists spread the word through the crowd that they planned to march to the cemetery. “They just gave over to me,” Frinks said. The black firebrand, who knew the small-town South like Ray Charles knows the keyboard, asked Thad and my father to talk to the police and get their approval for the march.

Daddy and Thad strolled over to the captain of the state highway patrol and Chief of Police Nathan White, who were standing by the rope barrier around the cemetery smoking cigarettes. Hands stuffed deep in his pockets, Thad greeted everybody, introducing my father all around. He wasn't Major Stem's boy for nothing, and he knew local politics. After he'd made a couple of pleasant inquiries about the health of Chief White's family and that sort of thing, Thad lit a Camel, lowered his voice, and got down to business. “Nathan, they want to march downtown,” Thad said, snorting tobacco smoke. “I believe you ought to lead them down there. Seems to me we'd rather have this thing official than unofficial.”

“They're going to have to get a permit,” White answered. “They can't have a march without a permit. I don't have enough men on duty to handle that kind of thing. The captain here would have to bring in some state troopers. It might take a couple of days to handle the paperwork.”

“They didn't have a permit to break every goddamn window in Oxford the other night, either,” Thad said bluntly. “If you let them march, maybe they won't burn the place down tonight. You know as well as I do that tightening the valve ain't gonna keep the boiler from blowing. If they let off a little steam, we might just get past this thing and everybody keep their job.” This last point, no doubt rendered with a certain class condescension, seemed to focus Chief White's attention, and the sweet light of reason descended upon him.

“Tell 'em they can march, but they have to keep it orderly and they have to stay in the right-hand lane,” White growled. “I am going to need a few minutes to put up some roadblocks.” He spat on the ground. “You tell Frinks they can go ahead on to the cemetery any time they want, we already got that covered, but he better not take one goddamn step past there until I give the go-head.” Having routed Chief White while permitting him to preserve some semblance of authority, Thad walked with my father back over to where Frinks and his lieutenants were huddled, let them know that the police had okayed the march, and then joined the mourners.

The hearse drove slowly as the wet-eyed throng plodded the several blocks to the graveyard. My father walked alongside Thad, neither of them quite knowing what their part might be at such a moment. All around them the tone of the funeral was shifting from mourning to protest, and the days of white clergymen marching across the Selma bridge with Dr. King were over. For my father, like for most white liberals, his marching days had ended before they had really begun. Most white advocates of civil rights were, as Daddy had feared they would be, too late. The tragic irony was that by the time mainstream white liberals had mastered a few verses to “We Shall Overcome,” the young Black Power insurgents had begun to sneer that the lyrics should be changed to “we shall overrun.” Daddy walked uncomfortably, though no one tried to make him feel unwelcome. “We were glad to be there, but it was a little awkward,” Daddy recalled.

“We walked slow, you know, impressive,” Frinks said. “The hearse going along slow, here we come right behind it, walking strong. Got to the cemetery, let the preacher say ‘ashes to ashes,' and bam-bam. But then I said, ‘Hold up, now.' ” Frinks stepped up beside Henry Marrow's grave, alongside Willie Mae Marrow, the weeping widow, and he climbed onto the pile of earth that would soon cover the casket. Calling on the black community to make this tragedy meaningful by uniting in a campaign for justice, Frinks summoned the deep emotions of the moment. “Back then you played on the feelings to bond people together,” he recalled decades later. “You had to create such an emotional, sad moment in your delivery, in your oratory, act like you were gonna cry, and then they'd be ready to go again.”

Frinks reminded the crowd of their loss and its meaning. “This young man was a husband, he was a daddy,” he said, gesturing toward the pregnant Willie Mae Marrow and her two children. “And he was a son, an uncle, and a cousin.” Stressing the word “cousin,” Frinks looked directly at Ben Chavis, the handsome young leader, knowing that Ben had taken a new level of leadership among the young people in recent days and mindful of the Chavis family's friendship to Marrow and their historic prominence in the African American community. “I had to do that because Ben was kind of a cousin to the young man, and Ben was coming on up,” Frinks recalled. “And then I said, ‘Come around here hand in hand, and sing “We Shall Overcome.”' That was an impressive thing. And I knew my thing was working.” When Golden Frinks called for the crowd to sing “We Shall Overcome,” Daddy and Thad crossed their arms like everyone else, reached for the nearest black hand, and sang along. “And I said, ‘All right, now you can go ahead and cover him up,' ” Frinks told me. “ ‘And we're going on uptown. Now, we ain't got no permit, ain't got nothing. But we're going to march on.' The thing I wanted was to go back down to that big old Confederate monument, you see. That's what I knew we needed to do.”

Daddy and Thad, on the other hand, had come to pay their respects and to try to get Henry Marrow buried without further bloodshed. If it had been 1963 instead of 1970, it is possible that Daddy and Thad both would have made their debut that day as civil rights marchers. That would have been unusual, even in the early years of the movement. Most of the white people who appear in film footage of civil rights marches were brave followers of Leon Trotsky or radical Catholic sisters or saintly kooks of one description or another, and almost all of them were from somewhere else. very few whites actually joined their own local civil rights demonstrations; local whites never thought the protests were well timed or appropriately organized. Daddy hadn't been there, either. But if he had found himself thrust into the march like this, he probably would have been crazy enough to pay the price. Thad was a federal employee, belonged to an affluent, old-line Oxford family, was on speaking terms with many of the state's most powerful Democrats, and did not give a damn what people thought anyway. Daddy would have been risking his pulpit, of course, but he was used to that. In 1970, however, with young black people chanting “Umgawa, Black Power” all around them, finding themselves walking in a sea of black fists bristling upward in the Black Power salute, neither the white man of letters nor the white man of the cloth knew quite what to do.

As the flow of black marchers poured into the street and headed toward the Confederate monument downtown, Thad muttered to Daddy that he felt “like the one-legged man at a public tail-kicking.” When the march neared the corner of Front Street, where both men would have turned to walk home, Thad asked if Daddy might like to stop by the house for a sandwich and a bowl of soup. The two of them ducked out of the march and turned toward home, and out of history, for there was nowhere else to go. One problem was that they had not had the experiences in interracial coalition politics that would have enabled them to disagree with some parts of a black political agenda and support other parts, for example, and hammer out their differences while finding common ground. Nor was there anything like a ready welcome from blacks. Not knowing about the real history of the South, few blacks and even fewer whites knew that these problems had been confronted before, and with some success. In some respects, the split between white liberals and black radicals was a failure of memory. This tragic parting of the ways occurred across the country. That may have been inevitable, but it would have mixed and enduring consequences for American history.

As Daddy and Thad split off from the procession, the marchers continued toward the Confederate monument. The old Rebel soldier in the town's main intersection was more a monument to white supremacy than to the Confederacy and in 1970 most whites either liked it or simply did not think about it. But neither white supremacy nor the Confederacy had always unified the white population. The monument's appearance in 1909 had marked the consolidation of the new social order of segregation and the establishment of a new degree of racial solidarity among whites, who had been deeply divided by the Populist upheavals of the late nineteenth century and the changing politics of race in the decades after the Civil War.