Blood Done Sign My Name (46 page)

For the Klan revival of the late 1940s and the quotes from Thomas Hamilton, see John Powell, “The Klan Un-Klandestine,”
Nation,
September 29, 1951, 254–56;
Time
, February 25, 1952, 28, and August 11, 1952, 21; Wyn Craig Wade,
The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 290–91.

The 1950s Klan career of Reverend James Catfish Cole is a fascinating and largely unexplored topic. I rely mainly on the James William Cole Papers. For the fabled clash between the Klan and the Lumbee Indians in Maxton, North Carolina, see Timothy B. Tyson,
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the
Roots of Black Power
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 61–62 and 137–41. See also “Klobbered Klan,” Raleigh
News and Observer,
April 19, 1964; Harry Golden,
Carolina Israelite,
January-February 1958; “Editorially Speaking,”
New Mexican,
January 21, 1958;
Chapel Hill News
Leader,
reprinted in
News and Observer,
January 30, 1958. The Lumbees repelled the Klan with a long-standing tradition of armed resistance to white oppression, extending back to the Henry Berry Lowery gang in the nineteenth century. See William McKee Evans,
To Die Game: The Story of the Lowery
Band, Guerrillas of Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).

For the route of Catfish Cole's Klan by the Monroe NAACP, see Norfolk
Journal and Guide,
October 12, 1957; B. J. Winfield and Woodrow Wilson interviews with Marcellus Barksdale, Duke Oral History Project, Perkins Library, Duke University; Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), 57; Andrew Myers, “When violence Met violence: Facts and Images of Robert F. Williams,” M.A. thesis, University of
Virginia, 1993. The story of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Clay comes from Henry Lee Moon to Roy Wilkins, November 29, 1957, Box A92, NAACP Papers. My descriptions of the Klan in Granville County and Teel's relationship with the Klan rely on three independent interviews.

For the ubiquitous nature of armed self-defense among black Southerners of the civil rights era, see Timothy B. Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,' and the Origins of the African American Freedom Struggle,”
Journal of
American History,
vol. 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540–70. See also Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Akinyele K. Umoja, “Eye for an Eye: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996, and “Ballots and Bullets: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,”
Journal of Black Studies,
vol. 29, no. 4 (March 1999): 558–78; Lance Hill,
The Deacons: Armed Self-Defense and the Civil Rights
Movement
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Simon Wendt, “The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the African American Freedom Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 2004; and Gail Williams O'Brien, The Color of the Law:
Race, violence, and Justice in the Post–World War Two South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For armed self-defense by Martin Luther King Jr. see Stewart Burns,
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus
Boycott
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 22. For armed self-defense by Medgar Evers, see Charles Payne,
I've Got the Light of
Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 49–50. The quote from the Jackson, Mississippi,
Eagle Eye
is from the August 20, 1955 issue, which I located in the Governor Paul Johnson Papers at the University of Southern Mississippi. For armed self-defense by Daisy Bates, see Daisy Bates to Thurgood Marshall, August 3, 1959, Box 2, Daisy Bates Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. See also Daisy Bates,
The Long
Shadow of Little Rock
(New York: David McKay, 1962), 162; and
Arkansas State
Press,
May 23, 1959.

For Robert G. Teel's police record of violence, see Granville County criminal court records 69-CR-1239, driving while under the influence of intoxicants; 69-CR-1238, assault on an officer; 70-CR-425, assault on an officer; 70-CR-1532, assault by pointing a gun and assault and battery; 70-CR-1847, murder by aiding and abetting Robert Larry Teel; 70-CR-1848, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury; 70-CR-3232 murder by aiding and abetting Roger Oakley; 72-CR-1812, assault and battery; 72-CR-1813, assault and battery; 75-CRS-1907, assault on a female; and 77-CRS-3708, assault with a deadly weapon. My accounts of Teel's violent confrontations with members of the Oxford Police Department and with school teacher Clyde Harding rely on Granville County criminal court records 69-CR-1238, 70-CR-425, and 70-CR-1532 and on my interviews with Robert G. Teel, William A. Chavis, Gene Edmundson, James Chavis, and Billy Watkins. For a description of Billy Watkins's political career, see his obituary in the Raleigh
News and
Observer,
August 28, 1989.

CHAPTER FOUR: MISS AMY'S WITNESS

The story of Dr. Samuel Proctor's visit to our church in Sanford relies largely on my interviews with
Vernon Tyson, Martha Tyson, Samuel Proctor, and Sarah Godfrey. I have also used materials from my parents' diaries from the period, for which I am grateful to them.

For the national and international dynamics of the Cold War and the African American freedom struggles in the South, see Mary Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,”
Stanford Law Review
41 (November 1988): 61–120. See also Mary Dudziak,
Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American
Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tyson,
Radio Free
Dixie
, 51–53, 59–60, 103–104; 90–136; and Thomas Borstelmann,
The Cold War
and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). The quote from Dr. King about the Cold War comes from Taylor Branch's classic work
Parting the Waters: America in the
King Years, 1955–1963
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 791.

Regarding the Greensboro sit-ins, I rely here on Chafe,
Civilities and Civil
Rights
. My account of the Birmingham campaign relies on Branch,
Parting the
Waters,
673–802; David Garrow's irreplaceable standard
Bearing the Cross:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(New York: William Morrow, 1986), 231–86; Adam Fairclough's important organizational history
To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 111–61; Andrew Manis's lovely biography
A Fire You
Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred
Shuttlesworth
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Diane McWhorter's deft combination of memoir and history
Carry Me Home:
Birmingham, Alabama—the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); and especially Glenn T. Eskew's trail-blazing and thorough history
But for Birmingham: The Local and National
Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). The quote from Colonel Stone Johnson came from my notes taken at Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry in Birmingham on June 3, 2001. I am grateful to Andrew Manis for fact-checking the chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE: KING JESUS AND DR. KING

For our family's move to Oxford, I rely on my interviews with my parents and my father's diary. My stories about Thad Stem draw on my interviews with my father, on Stem's written work, especially Entries from Oxford (Durham, N.C.: Moore Publishing, 1971), and on Stem's glittering correspondence with Jonathan Daniels, which can be found in the Jonathan Daniels Papers. For the history of the Confederate monument in Oxford, see
Heritage and Homesteads,
86;
Oxford Public Ledger,
January 3, January 7, and May 2, 1947; see also Hays Collection, vol. 22, 196.

For the decisive role of World War II on African American freedom struggles, see Timothy B. Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” in Cecelski and Tyson, eds.,
Democracy Betrayed,
253–75. See also Richard Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 55, no. 1 (June 1968): 90–106; Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial violence During the Second World War,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 58, no. 3 (June 1971): 663–83; and Harvard Sitkoff, “African American Militancy in the World War II South,” in Neil McMillen, ed.,
Remaking Dixie: The Impact
of World War II on the American South
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 70–92. See also Neil Wynn,
The Afro-American and the Second
World War
(New York: Holmes and Meirer, 1976), and Herbert Garkinfinkel,
When Negroes March
(New York: Atheneum, 1973).

The first quote from A. Philip Randolph comes from the
Philadelphia
Tribune,
July 10, 1943. The second is from Randolph, “A Reply to My Critics: Randolph Blasts Courier as ‘Bitter voices of Defeatism,' ”
Chicago Defender,
June 12, 1943. See also Randolph, “Call to Negro Americans,” July 1, 1941, Office File 93, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, Hyde Park, New York. For NAACP membership-growth figures and the expansion of African American newspaper circulation, see Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial violence,” 663, and Sitkoff, “African American Militancy in the World War II South,” 77. For the wartime sit-in campaigns by the Congress of Racial Equality, see Pauli Murray, “A Blueprint for Full Citizenship,”
Crisis
51 (November 1944): 358–59. There were also widespread reports during the war that young black men in North Carolina sat down at drugstore lunch counters, demanded service, and were arrested by the police. See Howard Odum,
Race and Rumors of Race
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 93.

For wartime clashes in Oxford and the story about the women at the sewing room, see the Raleigh
News and Observer,
May 3, 1944, and
Oxford Public
Ledger,
May 2 and May 5, 1944, in Hays Collection, vol. 22, 139. See also
Heritage and Homesteads,
121.

Information about early civil rights stirrings in Granville County, the Good Neighbor Council, and other efforts at racial amelioration in Granville County come from my interviews with Richard C. Shepard, James Edward McCoy, Mayor Hugh Currin, and Golden Frinks, and also from Capus M. Waynick, et al., eds.,
North Carolina and the Negro
(Raleigh: North Carolina Mayors' Cooperating Committee, 1964), 135–38. The quote from Tom Ragland comes from the Raleigh
News and Observer,
May 15, 1970, 3. Thad Stem's story about Major Stem, Mrs. Shaw, and the bootlegger comes from Stem,
Entries from
Oxford
, 32–33. The quote from Richard Baxter about preaching comes from “Love Breathing Thanks and Praise,”
Poetical Fragments
(1681; New York: McGraw Hill, 1971).

While this is not a broad history of “
the
civil rights movement,” a project I would consider somewhat misguided in any case, historians of the African American freedom movements in the twentieth-century South are making their way toward an understanding of these struggles as essentially local but also inescapably national and international in their dynamics and implications. The path breaking works in the unfolding of these movement histories include John Dittmer,
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Payne,
I've Got the Light of Freedom;
Robin D. G. Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe: Communism in Alabama During the Great
Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Eskew,
But
for Birmingham; David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North
Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Chana Kai Lee,
For Freedom's Sake: The Life
of Fannie Lou Hamer
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

My account of the white backlash is based on Dan T. Carter,
The Politics of
Rage: George Wallace, the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of
American Politics
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) and
From George
Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution,
1963–1994
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Rick Perlstein,
Before the Storm
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Kari Frederickson,
The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Earl Black and Merle Black,
The
Rise of Southern Republicans
(Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 2002). The quote from Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina comes from the latter work, 32. Lyndon Johnson's prediction comes from Perlstein,
Before the Storm
, 365.

Most of the best books on Martin Luther King Jr. have been cited above for the Birmingham campaign. King has been fortunate, however, in his biographers, especially the early but still important David Levering Lewis,
King: A
Critical Biography
(New York: Praeger, 1970), which brims with insight even though it was written before the papers of Dr. King and the SCLC were available to researchers. For a recent and useful revision to the more traditional view, see Michael Eric Dyson,
I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin
Luther King Jr.
(New York: Free Press, 2000). Adam Fairclough's
Martin Luther
King, Jr.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995) provides a concise and considered biography. Marshall Frady's
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(New York: viking Penguin, 2002) is both brief and eloquent. For Dr. King's views on affirmative action, see his book
Why We Can't Wait
(New York: Signet, 1964), 134–41. The quote from Dr. King's “Advice for Living” column comes from Garrow,
Bearing the Cross,
99. Documentation of the FBI's effort to push Dr. King into committing suicide may be examined in Michael Friedly and David Gallen, eds.,
Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 48–49. See also Kenneth O'Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI's File on
Black America
(New York: Free Press, 1989), 144–45.