Blood Done Sign My Name (29 page)

The increasingly large crowds at local Klan rallies and the support for the murderers of Henry Marrow among an even larger segment of white people in Granville County spurred black activists to take their protests to a higher level. As the murder trial loomed, Teel had little trouble raising an enormous defense fund. Some of the wealthiest people in the county contributed to his war chest. In a quiet way, the defense of Robert Teel and his family became a symbolic cause, a way local whites could express their resentment of the changes that were being forced upon them, especially school integration, which was scheduled for that fall. Although few people were willing to stand up for Teel in the newspapers, plenty of them were happy to give money. The court proceedings did not look promising. “After it became clear, in the preliminary hearing stage, that all of white Oxford was backing Teel,” Ben Chavis recalled, “we decided that we needed to raise this issue statewide and nationwide. That's when we decided to march to Raleigh.”

An ad hoc committee to plan the proposed fifty-mile march to the state capitol began meeting in the basement of First Baptist Church, led by Ben Chavis. Golden Frinks, who helped plan the march, obtained funding from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I had the money, see,” Frinks recalled, “and I would say, ‘Well, what we gon' do is, we gon' march from here to Raleigh, and we gonna get a mule cart'—I had all this in mind.” Frinks negotiated with the highway patrol, letting them know that he was willing either to cooperate with them or to defy them. Two students from Shaw University in Raleigh, John Mendez and Janet McCoy, obtained a city permit for the march, which said that the marchers would assemble on the capitol grounds on Sunday, May 24, at noon. Frinks sent Governor Robert Scott a telegram asking to meet with him at two o'clock. “We got that mule hitched up, we put that lady and a makeshift coffin up there and took off.”

There were both official and unofficial efforts by local whites to stop the march. Mayor Currin drove out to the Chavis homeplace to persuade Ben not to hold the trek to Raleigh. “He said, ‘Please don't march. Can't we work this thing out? Don't you know the highway is dangerous? Some of y'all might get hurt out there on the highway,' ” Chavis recalled.

“I did warn them that I didn't think they ought to march,” Mayor Currin confirmed. “The only thing I was concerned about was that it be a peaceful thing. I didn't want folks to get hurt, anybody to get hurt.” The Ku Klux Klan had announced that they would not allow the march to leave Granville County, so the mayor's fears were not groundless. The town's Human Relations Council called an emergency meeting. The black leaders they talked to, however, were in no position to call off the protest even in the unlikely event that they wanted to do so. In a concession that suggests their impoverished understanding of what the black insurgents wanted, Mayor Currin and City Manager Tom Ragland announced on the day of the march that six basketball goals would be built on city property. That's just how clueless local white authorities were—they thought that black people might stop complaining if the town simply built enough basketball courts.

Other whites in Oxford tried to deter the march in their own ways. “My daddy was living down on Charles Adcock's farm,” Carolyn Thorpe, an activist and a sharecropper's daughter, remembered. “Adcock told him that if he did not stop [his daughters] from marching, he was going to fire him.” On the morning of the march, Carolyn Thorpe and her sister saw their father's landlord at a local service station. “I went up and told him, ‘Fire my father if you want to, but I am going to march and my sisters are going to march, and if you get in my way or mess with my family, you will have to deal with me.' He could not stop us from marching.” Thorpe's father kept his job.

About seventy marchers left Oxford on Friday, May 22, walking down the Jefferson Davis Highway behind a mule-drawn wagon. Atop the wagon sat Willie Mae Marrow, the bereaved widow, visibly pregnant with the dead man's third child, wearing a dark veil and holding one young daughter on her lap while comforting another. “That was the symbolic part,” Frinks explained. The mule cart echoed the one that had hauled Dr. King's coffin through the streets of Atlanta two years earlier. The mule was a Southern-inflected symbol of the fact that the humble Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, and also of the menial labor that white supremacy had imposed upon black people; the black woman was “de mule uh de world,” as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. The protestors draped the coffin in black to mourn not only Henry Marrow but the deaths of many others across the country that month. Signs noted the four students killed and eleven wounded at Kent State on May 4; the six killed and dozens wounded in Augusta, Georgia, on May 12; and the two students killed and twelve wounded at Jackson State on May 16. A placard around the neck of the mule listed black uprisings that sounded the threat of retaliation: REMEMBER WATTS, DETROIT, NEWARK, OXFORD.

Despite the sweltering heat that afternoon, hundreds of young blacks joined the march as it made its way down the Jefferson Davis Highway toward Creedmoor, where the marchers planned to sleep at a black church that night. Eddie McCoy had raised money and rented two trucks to carry supplies from Oxford. Buck Peace, a black man who had recently run unsuccessfully for sheriff in Granville County, used his own truck to ferry cold drinks out to the thirsty marchers. “We would go back to the pool room and take up money for all the sodas,” McCoy said, “and people would give you like five, ten, fifteen, or twenty dollars, and we'd buy 'em by the case, ice 'em down good, and Buck Peace or I would bring them back on a truck.” Though it was a serious occasion, people enjoyed themselves. “We bought hot dogs, sandwiches, people carried food like going on a picnic,” chuckled McCoy. “They would cook up chicken, make up boxes of food. There was no problem about food and things to drink.”

The march was no picnic, though. The Ku Klux Klan had sworn to stop it, and they showed up at various points along the route. The highway patrol had no choice but to protect the marchers. “Our first interruption,” Frinks remembered, “was when we got on the Creedmoor Road, and Captain Jenkins got out of the car and told us that the Ku Klux Klan was gathering up by this store up ahead on our right hand.” The state troopers lined their cars up in the right lane, forming a protective line between the openly armed Klansmen and the less visibly armed marchers. “There were quite a few of them,” Frinks said, but no one fired their weapons.

Despite the traditional songs and chants of the movement, which balanced the new Black Power anthems, the marchers were well armed. No one carried a weapon in plain view, but people like Herman Cozart, selected to serve as a marshal, kept their guns close at hand and out of sight. Eddie McCoy literally stuck to his guns, too. “Ben and them said it had to be nonviolent,” McCoy recounted, “but we all had our shit with us. That wagon with the mule had more guns on it than a damn army tank. A lot of 'em like me had been in the army, combat veterans, and we told Ben and them, ‘All nonviolent ever got Martin Luther King was dead, or else he'd be out here with us.' We wasn't gonna start nothing but we was ready. We wasn't going out there without our guns, no way.” That night in Creedmoor, hundreds of local blacks brought food and joined the marchers for supper and singing. Armed sentries protected those who slept at the church. Carloads of whites fired two or three shots at blacks standing around outside, but screeched off into the night when the guards returned the fire.

Golden Frinks arranged for a busload of young blacks from Hyde County, way down in the state's eastern swamps, where the movement was still boiling hard, to join the march in Creedmoor Saturday morning “to get the numbers right,” he said. Other activists trickled in from all over the state. The mule-drawn wagon creaked out of Creedmoor full of guns and grape soda at about ten o'clock that morning, with Willie Mae Marrow and the coffin once again perched on top. “She stood up very bravely,” Ben Chavis said later. “She was getting death threats all the time at home, and there she was up there on the wagon where everybody could see her.”

The atmosphere on the highway heated up on the second day. Carloads of whites would drive by and shout obscenities. “We got a lot of threats, especially after we left Creedmoor,” Herman Cozart recalled. “You got some of everything throwed at you—‘Hey, nigger, what you doing? Get off the road!' People blow at you, stick their finger up and holler,” Cozart continued. Some of the cars carried well-known Klansmen, and one of the Teels, a brother and son of the men charged with killing Henry Marrow, rode in one of the cars that circled back again and again. “They would go so far and then come back around, trying to see who was marching and all,” Cozart said. One carload of hostile whites fired pistols into the air. Another group of marauders lit a string of firecrackers and threw them under the wagon to try to spook the mule.

But the most tense moment occurred after lunch on the second day as several hundred marchers made their way past two mobile homes on the right side of the road, near a little store just over the Wake County line. A Confederate flag flew from one of the trailers and, as the march approached, several white men with rifles came outside and took firing positions. “Niggers! Hey, niggers!” the cry went up from the trailers. “They had done gone outdoors with their rifles setting out there,” said Herman Cozart. Some of the marchers tried to inconspicuously make ready to return fire. “I said, ‘Y'all keep walking, long as they don't shoot,' ” Cozart said. “ ‘Don't even say nothing to 'em or even try to look at 'em.' But some of us was ready to jump. They was hollering, ‘Hey, nigger! Where y'all going, niggers?' But we just kept walking.” Several of the marchers remembered that the hecklers had fired several shots, though perhaps only in the air. “There were at least three shots fired,” Linda Ball said years later. The highway patrol sent officers over to talk to the armed white men, “but I never did see a police car taking anybody away or anything like that,” she added. Nobody shot back at the trailers, according to Ball, who carried a .32-caliber pearl-handled revolver, “but it was quite a panic there for a while.” That night, the marchers slept at a church on the outskirts of Raleigh.

“The march just swelled,” Ben Chavis reported, “to almost a thousand people by the time it got to Raleigh.” Entering the city, the marchers paraded past the First Baptist Church, whose most illustrious member, Jesse Helms, was an increasingly popular commentator on WRAL-Tv. Helms, who had begun his career as a public relations official for the North Carolina Banking Association, was making a statewide reputation by opposing the civil rights movement. He liked to outline what he called “the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect,” and he defended the Ku Klux Klan as being no different from the NAACP, even though the former was a terrorist group and the latter operated primarily through the courts. The grist for the cranky commentator's mill—“forced integration” and alleged “communists” and “sex perverts” in the black freedom movement—fed his growing popularity. Coming into Raleigh on Sunday morning, the marchers delighted in making a stir as they filed past the church where Helms taught Sunday school every week—and which he would eventually abandon, allegedly after the congregation took in a black member. “Yes, sirree, we went right by Jesse Helms's church,” Golden Frinks recalled, “and we let 'em know we were out there.”

The procession led by Frinks, Chavis, Willie Mae Marrow, and Reginald Hawkins, a black dentist from Charlotte who had recently run for governor as a protest candidate, arrived at the state capitol at about one-thirty. Students from Shaw University, St. Augustine's College, and North Carolina Central University swelled their ranks. “Every time you do one of these things,” Chavis said, “you learn a lot about how to keep people together, how to keep their spirits high, and how to keep them on target, even if you have a setback.” Chavis addressed the throng on the capitol steps, as did Frinks and Hawkins. “Granville County has some of the meanest white folks I have ever seen,” Frinks told the crowd, “and they are lucky the black people have not taken the law into their own hands.”

It was a well-attended rally, and the press had given the march heavy coverage. “We couldn't believe how many people had showed up,” Eddie McCoy remembered. “There was people from all over the place, thousands of people.” The organizers had contacted Governor Robert Scott's office several days ahead of time and informed him that they would like to discuss the troubles in Oxford and the larger problems of black citizens in dealing with the judicial system. But the governor's aides had finally told them that Governor Scott would not meet with them. Ben Chavis and Willie Mae Marrow knocked at the statehouse door for a long time, but nobody came. “I remember going to the door, the state capitol door,” Chavis said, “and knocking on the door, and couldn't get an answer. A lot of people in Oxford who had marched all the way,” Chavis continued, “was hoping and praying the governor would give us an audience, that the governor would step up and call for justice in Oxford. It did not happen.”

Chavis, Hawkins, and Frinks returned to the rally and reported that neither the governor nor any of his staff would receive them. “The day for begging for black people in North Carolina is over,” Hawkins declared, vowing to register enough black voters to end this disrespectful treatment. “What killed Henry Marrow,” Golden Frinks preached to the crowd, “was symbolic of racism in North Carolina. And what the governor just told us by his absence is that to the white power structure, it's just another nigger dead.” These sentiments at the podium echoed those among the rank and file of the marchers. “We got all the way to Raleigh,” Carolyn Thorpe recalled bitterly, “and [the governor] was not even there. We could not talk to him. All that walking and marching and they said he wasn't even in there. That told me everything I needed to know.”