Blood Done Sign My Name (22 page)

Before the war, Granville County had 1,348 farms, with an average size of 327 acres. virtually all of the men who owned these farms lived on them and managed them, though many of them enslaved other people to work the fields. By 1890, however, the size of a farm in the county had dropped to 119 acres and most of the land had changed hands; the majority of farmers, black and white, were now sharecroppers. White farmers, their land forfeited to falling prices and rapacious banks, became so desperate that they began to see their black neighbors as potential allies—and to contemplate leaving the Democratic Party, “the party of the fathers,” the party of the Confederacy, the party of “the South” as they had always known it.

Hundreds of these dispossessed white farmers joined the Populist movement in the 1890s, established their own newspaper, the
Granville County Reformer,
and founded an Alliance cooperative tobacco warehouse. They even made common cause with African American farmers, though most white Populists were reluctant to accept the former slaves as civic equals, a tragic failure that led to their defeat. Black and white farmers came to this Fusion coalition for different reasons: the white dissidents focused more on economics, while black men sought access to the ballot box and protection from terrorism. Despite these persistent differences and their enduring prejudices, white Populists helped elect a number of black Republicans to office in Granville County in the Fusion coalitions of 1894 and 1896. The most famous of these, Henry Plummer Cheatham, was the only African American to serve in the Fifty-second Congress; the interracial coalition held on longer in Granville County than anywhere else in the South. “For a time,” write two local historians, “the politics of economic interests and universal rights took the place of the politics of race in the county.” In a sense, my father and Thad Stem were the political heirs of this Fusionist interracialism; seventy years earlier, they would have had little trouble finding a political home for themselves. But the problem was that the Fusion coalition was defeated so utterly at the turn of the century, crushed by violence and fraud, and then blotted out of the history books, that seventy years later, most North Carolinians could not remember their interracial past and found it hard even to imagine a realistic interracial coalition. In the case of white liberals, this amnesia meant they could only imagine themselves as paternalists, not authentic little-
d
democrats.

In the 1890s, however, when black and white North Carolinians managed to set aside some of their differences, their combined forces routed corporate domination, returned power to local governments, reformed election laws, and regulated some of the worst excesses of monopoly capitalism. Though whites kept most of the higher offices for themselves, the coalition elected a number of African Americans, especially in sixteen eastern North Carolina counties where blacks held a majority. And they won, despite the fact that they confronted the entrenched power of wealth and privilege. Whatever the limits of their racial egalitarianism, in 1896 the Fusionists captured the governorship, the state legislature, every single statewide race, and helped refashion race relations at the street level.

In 1898, however, white conservatives, unwilling to live with the consequences of universal male suffrage, overthrew the state government, employing violence, fraud, and demagoguery. White Democrats in Granville County joined Red Shirt clubs, whose leaders urged them to “defend white womanhood” by killing any black man who insisted on voting—and any white man who advocated equal citizenship. White solidarity, when lashed together with the powerful language of sex and manhood, proved stronger than philosophical commitments to democracy. In Oxford, clashes between vindictive white Democrats and the Fusionists saw widespread arson, violence, and upheaval. After the Democratic Party seized power in the white supremacy campaigns of 1898, black men lost the vote. The whites that had been their allies were forced to slink back into the Democratic Party.

In the early years of the twentieth century, after black disfranchisement was an established fact and the race and class conflicts died down, Oxford's erection of the monument
To Our Confederate
Dead
buried the bitter divisions of the 1890s among whites in a glow of nostalgia for the Lost Cause. Only two generations later, the fact that the Confederacy itself had divided whites was now lost to popular memory, as were the interracial political movements of the decades after the Civil War. In North Carolina as elsewhere, black and white farmers had fitfully but repeatedly sought to make alliance with each other. It was not until the violent overthrow of their democratically elected coalition government in the last years of the nineteenth century that Confederate monuments rose in every Southern town.

This was the point when white supremacy, formerly the slogan of
one
faction of whites in the county, became the insoluble glue of civic life, and inseparable from the legacy of the Confederacy. In 1909, the Granville Grays chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy purchased the thirty-foot bronze statue of a Confederate soldier and planted his feet atop a high pedestal of local granite in the center of Oxford. City officials placed it in the middle of the town's busiest intersection, even though some critics pronounced it an inconvenience and an eyesore. The monument faced forever north, the majority of whites believed, because the boys who'd worn the gray had never run from the damn Yankees. Elderly Confederate veterans, cadets from the local white-only military academy, children from the segregated Oxford orphanage, and young women from Oxford Seminary were among the thousands who gathered to hear Governor W. W. Kitchen render a high-flown paean to the Lost Cause, which “brought tears to many an eye,” reported the
Oxford Public Ledger
. This tall bronze figure testified to the entrenched power of the new social order, standing guard in front of the courthouse for the next sixty-five years—until the next revolution in racial politics came to town.

That latest revolution marched with Golden Frinks from the graveyard to the courthouse in 1970 on that sunny Saturday afternoon after Henry Marrow's burial. “I saw that Confederate monument,” Frinks said, “and I thought it was a good time for this. There was something in the core of these black people's psyche that carried a little racism that is still there, but they can't see it.” To confront white supremacy was not just about confronting white people, Frinks believed, but also a matter of stamping out internalized feelings of inferiority among blacks. “I looked out at all the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks, and I knew we needed to go down to that Confederate monument.” For hundreds of black citizens in Granville County, this was a moment of healing, a moment when they stood up for themselves, defying subjugation with such force that centuries of fear evaporated like spilled lemonade on hot pavement. Freedom pounded in their hearts. Several hundred black citizens marched silently to the courthouse, spirits soaring with possibility despite the sadness of the occasion. “We was drinkin' that freedom wine,” Frinks liked to say.

The crowd came together all around the much-loathed monument and heard Ben Chavis, the leader of the young folks and grieving for his slain contemporary, address the crowd in the fiery style of a new generation of Black Power militants. Frinks, the veteran SCLC warrior, spoke about the meaning of the old Confederate's vigil in the center of town. The monument needed to be moved, he said, “because it's a stigma, because it stands for hundreds of years of a repressive period—slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, bigotry, and all of that complicity of keeping a people down. But we ain't staying down no more,” he declared. Years later, Frinks told me how he had waved his broad hands to the assemblage and leavened the fiery rhetoric with humor: “I talked about that man, this old Confederate soldier, how he hadn't been to the bathroom since 1865, and it was time for him to come on down now and get some relief.” But Frinks ended the rally by reminding his listeners of the unconscionable brutality of the murder, how Robert Teel and his sons had butchered Henry Marrow as he lay helpless and pleading for his life. He closed his speech with a bitter attack on the white power structure in Oxford: “To them it's just another nigger dead,” he said, “but it ain't gonna stay that way. What's going to be dead here soon is old Jim Crow.”

Frinks, with his cross and his dashiki, looked like neither an old civil rights veteran nor like a candidate for membership in the Black Panthers. Younger black insurgents, sometimes quick to play “blacker than thou” politics, could not dismiss Frinks as an Uncle Tom. For one thing, they had a fair amount of common ground. Although “Black Power” was a murky slogan that seemed to invite clashing interpretations, most of the elements that have become associated with Black Power—black self-affirmation, international analyses of white supremacy, an interest in Africa and things African, independent black political action, a willingness to employ armed self-defense when necessary—were already present in the small towns and rural communities where the freedom movement was born. A distinct strain of homegrown African American radicalism can be traced back to slave revolts and Reconstruction-era militants. The Black Power generation, often portrayed as a sharp break with the past, drew on long-standing political traditions in the black South.

“I didn't need the sixties or the civil rights movement to make me angry,” Eddie McCoy, one of the most forceful of the young African American militants in Oxford, explained to my father and a roomful of students during a class we taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. “I didn't need that.”

McCoy was a graceful, broad-shouldered man, born in 1942 in a shotgun house across from the jail. His mother, Lucille McCoy, labored as a maid and cook in white people's houses to support six children. James McCoy, Eddie's father, worked three jobs as a janitor until he saved up enough money to open a pool hall in 1960. “The floor in our house had gaps in it, you could feed the chickens through the cracks in the floor,” Eddie recalled bitterly. “And it snowed in the house and it rained in the house. And it was hot—you didn't have no fans. There was one plug in the whole house, you run everything off a drop-cord.”

McCoy traced his rage in 1970 to the ordinary, day-to-day humiliations that white supremacy imposed on his childhood. “When my grandmother used to take us to the five-and-ten-cent store, we would want water, and she would say wait until you get home. Because you can't drink out of that water fountain, we couldn't read, and she'd say it was for white people and we couldn't have any.” Until he and his brothers and sisters got old enough to read, McCoy recalled, laughing softly, “We thought the
water
was white. And we wanted some of that white water because we never had white water. The things we couldn't do, I always thought ‘Why can't we do this?' and the things white people had that we didn't have, I always wanted to know why I couldn't have those things.”

The signs that whites relegated black people to a separate, inferior caste were glaringly obvious, as they were intended to be. “You had to go to the back of a restaurant to get food,” McCoy said. “The blacks called the restaurant downtown ‘hole in the wall' because you couldn't go in the door, you had to go down the alley. The restaurant had a real name on the front, but they had a hole in the wall in the alleyway where the blacks would go pick up their food.”

When black children walked to school, school buses filled with white children often passed them by. “When you saw a bus of white kids coming you had to get back,” recounted McCoy. “You get back as far from that bus as you can, because they gon' spit at you or throw something at you, because they're in a bus and you can't get at 'em.”

And when they got to school, said McCoy, all they had to do was open a book to be reminded of their status. “We never got new books,” he told me. “All our ratty old books came from the white schools, after they were done with them. When I got a book it was four or five years old, you had three or four more spellers by the time I got your old one. And everybody didn't get one, we had to share. You'd share it with someone else and if they took it home and forgot it, you'd be out of luck for the next two or three days until that kid remembered to bring it back.”

The black children whose parents managed to provide them something like a middle-class existence, McCoy explained to my father and the college students, might embrace nonviolence. But the poor, to whom the system had been brutally indifferent, were faster to grab a brick or a fire bomb. “It was always poor children,” McCoy observed, “people that didn't have nothing to lose, and their parents were poor and didn't have nothing to lose, so do I paint the picture? We was dispensable, we could see that. I was a write-off kid from the time I was born. I won't gon' be nothing, won't nothing gon' become of me, I won't gon' finish school, I was supposed to go to jail, am I right, Reverend Tyson?”

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard,” Dr. King told America, but it was far easier for people like my father to hear Dr. King's words about love than to heed his counsel about the young people rioting in the streets. The Black Power insurgents of the late 1960s, disillusioned by the assassination of Dr. King, and keenly aware of themselves as a new generation, rejected interracial approaches and nonviolent direct action. “We wanted the whole system to change,” Eddie McCoy explained. “Those civil rights Negroes, the professional people, they was nice, they talked to white people. I didn't think that would work. Martin Luther King was never my favorite. I admired him, I liked what he stood for,” McCoy said, “but I didn't think it would work. When nonviolence did work, mostly it was because white people were afraid we was gon' burn the place down.”