Warning
February 28, 1965
Terror approached Lowndes County through the school system. J. T. Haynes,
a high school teacher of practical agriculture, spread word from his white
superiors that local Klansmen vowed to kill the traveling preacher if he
set foot again in his local church. This to Haynes was basic education in
a county of unspoiled beauty and feudal cruelty, where a nerve of violence
ran beneath tranquil scenes of egret flocks resting among pastured Angus
cattle. Across its vast seven hundred square miles, Lowndes County
retained a filmy past of lynchings nearly unmatched, and Haynes tried to
harmonize his scientific college methods with the survival lore of
students three or four generations removed from Africa – that hens would
not lay eggs properly if their feet were cold, that corn grew only in the
silence of night, when trained country ears could hear it crackling up
from the magic soil of Black Belt Alabama.
Lessons about the Klan arrived appropriately through the plainspoken Hulda
Coleman, who had run the county schools since 1939 from a courthouse
office she inherited from her father, the school superintendent and former
sheriff. After World War II, when Haynes had confided to Coleman that the
U.S. Army mustered him out from Morocco with final instructions to go home
and vote as a deserving veteran, she explained that such notions did not
apply to any colored man who valued his safety or needed his job in her
classrooms. Haynes stayed on to teach in distinguished penury with his
wife, Uralee, daughter of an engineer from the Southern land-grant
colleges, loyally fulfilling joint assignment to what their Tuskegee
professors euphemistically called a “problem county.” Not for twenty
years, until Martin Luther King stirred up the Selma voting rights
movement one county to the west, did Negroes even discuss the franchise.
There had been furtive talk since January about whether Haynes’s 1945
inquiry or a similarly deflected effort by an aged blind preacher
qualified as the last attempt to register, but no one remembered a ballot
actually cast by any of the local Negroes who comprised 80 percent of the
15,000 residents in Lowndes County.
Despite ominous notices from Deacon Haynes, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison was
keeping his fourth-Sunday commitment when the sound of truck engines
roared to a stop outside Mt. Carmel Baptist on February 28, 1965. Panic
swept through the congregation even before investigating deacons announced
that familiar Klansmen were deployed outside with shotguns and rifles.
Harrison gripped the pulpit and stayed there. He lived thirty miles away
in Selma, where he knew people in the ongoing nonviolent campaign but was
not yet involved himself, and now he switched his message from “How can we
let this hope bypass us here?” to a plea for calm now that “they have
brought the cup to the Lord’s doorstep.” He said he figured word would get
back to white people that he had mentioned the vote in a sermon. Haynes
reported that some of the Klansmen were shouting they’d get the
out-of-county nigger preacher before sundown, whether the congregation
surrendered him or not.
Harrison kept urging the choir to sing for comfort above the chaos of
tears and moans, with worshippers cringing in the pews or hunched near
windows to listen for noises outside, some praying for deliverance and
some for strength not to forsake their pastor even if the Klan burned the
whole congregation alive. There were cries about whether the raiding party
would lay siege or actually invade the sanctuary, and Harrison, preaching
in skitters to fathom what might happen, said he had been braced for phone
threats, night riders – almost any persecution short of assault on a
Sunday service – but now he understood the saying that bad surprises in
Lowndes could outstrip your fears. Deacons said they recognized among the
Klansmen a grocer who sometimes beat debtors in his store, a horseman who
owned ten thousand acres and once shot a young sharecropper on the road
because he seemed too happy to be drafted out of the fields into the Army,
then with impunity had dumped the body of Bud Rudolph on his mother’s
porch. There was Tom Coleman, a highway employee and self-styled deputy
who in 1959 killed Richard Lee Jones in the recreation area of a prison
work camp. Such names rattled old bones. Sheriff Jesse Coleman, father of
Klansman Tom and school superintendent Hulda, successfully defied the rare
Alabama governor who called for state investigation in a notorious World
War I lynching – of one Will Jones from a telegraph pole by an unmasked
daytime crowd – by pronouncing the whole episode a matter of strictly
local concern.
Noises outside the church unexpectedly died down. Uncertain why or how far
the Klan had withdrawn, deacons puzzled over escape plans for two hundred
worshippers with a handful of cars and no way to call for help – barely a
fifth of the county’s households had telephone service, nearly all among
the white minority. A test caravan that ferried home sick or infirm
walkers ran upon no ambush nearby, and a scout reported that the only
armed pickup sighted on nearby roads belonged to a known non-Klansman. The
task of evacuating Harrison fell to deacon John Hulett, whose namesake
slave ancestor was said to have founded Mt. Carmel Baptist in the year
Alabama gained statehood, 1819. Hulett, a former agriculture student under
deacon Haynes, was considered a man of substance because he farmed his own
land instead of sharecropping and once had voted as a city dweller in
Birmingham. He recruited a deacon to drive Harrison’s car, put the
targeted reverend down low in the back seat of his own, and by late
afternoon led a close convoy of all ten Mt. Carmel automobiles some
fifteen miles north on Route 17 to deliver him to an emergency way station
at Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church on U.S. Highway 80, where
Harrison’s father was pastor.
Celebrations at the transfer were clandestine, urgent, and poignant, being
still in Lowndes County. Until Hulett pulled away to attend the stranded
congregation back at Mt. Carmel, Harrison kept muttering in terrified
regret that one of them had to follow through on this voting idea no
matter what. “If I have to leave, you take it,” he told Hulett with a
tinge of regret, as though cheating his own funeral.
Just ahead lay fateful March, with a crucible of choice for Martin Luther
King and President Lyndon Johnson. The Ku Klux Klan would kill soon in
Lowndes County, but its victims would be white people from Michigan and
New Hampshire. Lowndes would inspire national symbols. It would change
Negroes into black people, and deacon John Hulett would found a local
political party renowned by its Black Panther emblem. Beyond wonders
scarcely dreamed, Reverend Harrison would vote, campaign, and even hold
elected office for years in Selma, but never again in the twentieth
century would he venture within ten miles of Mt. Carmel Church.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from At Canaan’s Edge
by Taylor Branch
Copyright © 2006 by Taylor Branch.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2006
Taylor Branch
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-684-85712-X
