BLACK BELT THUNDER [NORTH CAROLINA AND THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATIONAL FUND]: OUR MAJOR -- AND SUCCESSFUL -- MOVEMENT IN THE NORTHEASTERN BLACK BELT COUNTIES [HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] MARCH 9 2006 -- UPDATE NOTES

For a sense of the civil liberties challenges faced by an effective organizer, see this cluster of four related pages:

The Northeastern North Carolina Black-Belt Project, which burst forth with rapidly growing claws and feathers in the mid-1960s, had a major impact on that far-flung racist and poverty-stricken [Deep South in every sense!] multi-county section of the state -- as well as on the entire state itself and the region well beyond. Yet it received, aside from much often hostile local and regional press coverage, little enduring publicity. One of the reasons was that it, in an obscure corner of the South, was frequently overshadowed by events in more publicized regions of the Deep South. Another -- especially to those academic and popular historians deemed revisionist -- is that its primary sponsor was the left Southern Conference Educational Fund and its principal organizer was myself. I should add that, from the point that I was honorably released from the United States Army after a full hitch at the beginning of 1955, just turning 21, I have been my own kind of ecumenical socialist with consistency. I belonged to the IWW from the very beginning of 1955 well into 1960 -- and have remained always a rather quintessential Wobbly. At the same time, my deepest waters have always been Iroquoian -- with its traditional bent toward careful organization with democratic form and structure and ethos.

In any event, the public mention of this critical and sometimes wild crusade has been relatively minimal. In my own book, Jackson Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism [1979 and 1987], my necessarily trenchant epilogue, covering my life since Jackson to the end of the '70s, spends the better part of three pages on our Carolina Black-Belt struggle. Willa [Johnson] Cofield, who with other members of her family, was among the key leaders in Halifax County, our starting point and the most major of several related battlefields, contributed a chapter containing a discussion of our saga in a quite interesting anthology [Cathy L. Nelson and Kim A. Wilson, editors, Seeding the Process of Multi-Cultural Education [Plymouth, MN: Minnesota Inclusiveness Program, 1998.] These editors and Willa all honored us with a long visit at our Idaho home in 1998.

I, myself, have written some pieces on the Project -- e.g., the J.P. Stevens Textile boycott and its background in the Halifax County mill town of Roanoke Rapids, the United Klans of America, Jesse Helms -- which have been published in good and honorable radical journals. This website of ours, Lair of Hunterbear, contains much stuff on the Black-Belt fight. But, despite the strong commitment of the grassroots people [mostly Black but many Indians as well], the high drama, the firm backing always of our SCEF executive director Jim Dombrowski and the often involvement of Ella J. Baker [herself a SCEF staffer at that point who had grown up in Halifax County], the [non-violent] War in the Black-Belt has received little notice.

I have been doing a great deal of writing these past two years. It began in December, 2003, several months after I was struck openly by systemic lupus or SLE -- described by medical authorities as "a deadly disease" -- and an especially virulent version at that. Genetic in origin, with no cure, it strikes Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and women in a hard and disproportionate fashion. After several hospital sojourns and very close brushes with death, I had -- in late December 2003 -- an extraordinarily vivid "dream" about which I immediately wrote. "Ghosts" concluded with this:

THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATIONAL FUND [THE GOOD REALITIES] HUNTER GRAY

The link posted earlier this morning on ASDnet -- "SCEF and CPUSA" -- is simply another instance of substantive misinformation. This is the case with the post's "label" -- and the historical outline given by the link [from whomever] is certainly replete with errors and omissions. The problems that confronted a rapidly waning SCEF in the early 1970s and beyond had nothing to do one way or the other with CPUSA -- which can certainly not be blamed for those! These difficulties involved other groups and issues of which I, frankly, know little.

Eldri and I, who had come into Mississippi in the ominous Summer of '61, left the South in the Summer of '67 and went into the Pacific Northwest and then, for an academic year, to Coe College in Iowa. From 1969 to 1973, I directed the large-scale grassroots organization of block clubs and related groups [mostly Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano] on Chicago's very bloody South/Southwest Side. Also active in Native affairs and issues on the Northside, we organized the long-enduring, all-Indian Native American Community Organizational Training Center [of which I served for a number of years as Chair -- doing so for some time after we left Chicago.] Later, we were in Iowa again, then up-state New York, then the Navajo Nation -- and then to the Northern Plains -- and now to Idaho. The organizing trail is very much a Romany trail.

SCEF, very broadly Left in a completely non-sectarian fashion, grew out of the very fine Southern Conference on Human Welfare -- a courageous and interracial group of Southern liberals and some radicals originating in the New Deal era. SCEF had its most effective period from the onset of the 1950s to the retirement of its excellent executive director, Jim Dombrowski, at the end of 1965.

During that period, its splendid newspaper, The Southern Patriot, was very capably edited by Alfred Maund and later by the equally capable Anne Braden. [ Al Maund, a good friend of mine, is a noted Southern writer and author of a great novel, The Big Boxcar, and was also editor of Labor's Daily and later a key staffer of International Chemical Workers Union.] The SCEF board was a fine interracial cross section of sensible Southern activists -- religious and labor and general social justice folk -- and its advisory committee extended into Arizona. Aubrey Williams [a major Southern leader with a highly placed New Deal background] served as its President for years and was later succeeded by the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham [President of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and National Secretary of SCLC.]

My own activist links with SCEF began soon after Eldri and I arrived at Tougaloo in the Summer of '61. Almost immediately I became Advisor to the Jackson Youth Council of NAACP and a member of the board of directors of the Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches. When we launched our historic Jackson boycott in late 1962, SCEF -- especially through Jim and Anne Braden and Carl Braden -- gave us a great deal of invaluable assistance. The very effective Jackson Boycott Movement became, in due organizing course, the massive and historic Jackson Movement in which youth played a major role at all points. I was Chair of its Strategy Committee.

At the conclusion of the very hard-fought, super-dramatic and extremely sanguinary Jackson Movement era, Jim Dombrowski offered me the position of SCEF Field Organizer -- with the understanding that I could do my own thing pretty much in any way I wished. I was pleased to accept. We set my salary at the precise salary figure drawn from NAACP by my very good friend, the recently murdered Medgar Evers: $6,500.00 with some expenses and benefits. At the same time I joined SCEF, my very good friend, Miss Ella J. Baker, founder and Advisor to SNCC [who had been SCLC's first Executive Director], accepted Jim's offer of an ongoing position as Consultant. I was instrumental, with Jim's enthusiastic concurrence, in securing the New York law firm of Kunstler, Kunstler and Kinoy [known affectionately as KKK] as SCEF's counsel. [Bill Kunstler had already represented me in several key Mississippi cases.]

Much was certainly accomplished by SCEF during the next two years or so. I worked in grassroots civil rights and anti-Klan organization in several very hard-core Deep Southern areas. Ella played a critical role in liaison work with SNCC and other projects and gave me much assistance at key points. Carl Braden did a great deal of valuable, on-going work with Northern supporters -- and was much involved in Appalachian affairs. A key fund-raising role was carried by Howard Melish. Through The Southern Patriot, Anne Braden reported Southern civil rights news -- much of which would otherwise have been obscure -- to a national and international audience and gave much media-linkage assistance to a wide variety of grassroots civil rights projects.

Jim Dombrowski, severely crippled by illness [but he marched in the SCLC demonstrations at Danville, Virginia], continued to very capably hold down the SCEF national office on 822 Perdido Street, New Orleans. [My old Chicano Mine-Mill companeros were always intrigued by that address since it, of course, translates into "Nowhere."] During this period, we were constantly Red-baited and attacked on many fronts -- including the notorious Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee/State Police raid on the New Orleans SCEF office in October 1963, the arrest of Jim and two other SCEF officials, the seizure of the SCEF records -- and their illegal shipment by train into Mississippi where they were then taken by Mississippi Senator Jim Eastland and his U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. SCEF sued and, in 1965, won a total victory at the USSC level: Dombrowski v. Pfister.

At the end of 1965, Jim retired as SCEF director and Anne and Carl Braden became co-directors. At the point Jim retired, Ella and I both left. She, of course, continued to work with SNCC and related projects and I continued my organizing work in the South -- in radical grassroots anti-poverty activism [much support from Highlander Research and Education Center.] Ella and I and Jim kept in very close touch, always, both during this period and thereafter all the way through. Jim died at New Orleans in 1983 and Ella passed away in NYC in 1986. I miss them much indeed.

After our departure, SCEF hired a much larger number of staff people than had formerly been the case -- essentially on subsistence "Movement wages." In time, internal difficulties developed.

The major SCEF papers are at State Historical Society of Wisconsin: Jim's collected papers, those of the Bradens, and mine -- including my organizing reports plus much secured from FBI via FOIA/PA. [My papers are also held by Mississippi Department of Archives and History.] A very good biography of Jim was done by another good friend of mine and I strongly recommend it: Frank Adams' James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic [Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1992.]

I personally have copies [many of them originals] of my basic organizing materials and detailed reports from over these many decades.

I have a fair amount of material on SCEF organizationally at our large website www.hunterbear.org -- stemming from our part of its extremely productive period -- and a good deal relating to my own work as SCEF Field Organizer. It all starts at this point http://www.hunterbear.org/creative.htm .

Fraternally -

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

I regularly and with some frequency filed very long, detailed letter/reports to Jim Dombrowski on my organizing activities in the Black-Belt. These, along with related materials from the somewhat later "anti-poverty wars," have been an invaluable resource for me over the many, many years that have followed. Initially, they dealt with the formative organizing period [for a time I was assisted by J.V. Henry and Doug Harris of SNCC -- but mostly I was the sole "professional".] Quickly, succeeding reports move into the exciting realms of massive voter registration campaigns, economic boycotts, non-violent direct action, our litigation in a number of cases [almost exclusively in Federal courts], and bitter resistance from the Klan, Birch Society, and the North Carolina Defenders of States' Rights [White Citizens Council.]

Two of my major latter reports not only provide summarization -- but also give a specific category-by-category breakdown of our specific action areas and their successful development:

For the SCEF Board Meeting of April 15-16 1965 at Atlanta, I presented a detailed five page single-spaced report.

At Jim's request, I wrote again for the SCEF Board a long and detailed wrap up on the whole Black-Belt project which, with a long covering letter, I sent on October 5 1965: 12 double spaced legal sized pages. [In addition, I also attached the previous report to the Board of April '65]

An important piece of my writing during this period is, Organizing The Community For Action , March 1965 and several subsequent editions [six tightly spaced legal-sized pages] -- part of the basis for my much later Combined Community Organizing catechism in January 2004 [With Addenda]. That "catechism" has now been widely reprinted in various print journals and websites. http://www.hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

In my long covering letter to Jim with that final report, I expressed our great appreciation to the SCEF Board and its officers and to the staff. And I explicitly noted, "This work in the black-belt counties would not have gone as well as it did had it not been for the whole-hearted backing of SCEF. We are mighty indebted to you and to Ella."

And, years later, Jim wrote an extremely strong, kind statement for my career reference file at Arizona State University. It was written carefully with pen and ink. The original is shown in the bloc of North Carolina Black-Belt material on our website and is also on the large Tribute:

JAMES ANDERSON DOMBROWSKI [d. 1983] Director, Southern Conference Educational Fund. From a vigorously positive letter of reference [9/17/79]:

"Mr. Salter is an unusual and many talented person. He is a careful scholar, writes and speaks well, relates easily to all kinds of people, understands and practices the art of listening. He has few peers as a community organizer.

For those and other reasons, I hold Mr Salter in the highest esteem, professionally and socially."

James Anderson Dombrowski, PhD, Executive Director, Southern Conference Educational Fund [Ret.]

The basic sections in my report to the SCEF Board, April 15/16 1965:

Background

Halifax County Voters Movement

Political Action [First Portion]

School Desegregation

Retreat of the County Officials

The Towns

Justice

Public Accomodations

Attacks on Non-Literacy

The Willa Johnson Teaching Case

Anti-Poverty Program

Clothing

Unions

Change in the Attitude of the Whites

Political Action [Second Portion]

The Enfield and Weldon Gerrymandering

School Transfers [First Portion]

Other

Black-Belt Counties Workshop/Conference

Bertie County

Organization

Political Action [Third Portion]

The First Successful Effort on Federal Food [Our mass demonstration at the Bertie courthouse]

School Transfers [Second Portion]

Bertie KKK

Northampton County [and other adjoining areas]

Impact on the State and Region

The basic sections of my report to the SCEF Board, October 5 1965:

General Organization

School Desegregation

Operation Head Start

Tutorial

Bertie Co. School System

Political Action

Legal

Ku Klux Klan and Allied Activities

Hospital Complaints

Employment

Food Stamps

Public Accomodations

Anti-Poverty

Bi-Racial Committees

Outside Contacts

Other Aspects During This Latter Period

Involvement of SNCC

Some Continued Contact

Impact on the State and the Region

Summary

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We have a great deal of Mississippi material on our Lair of Hunterbear website. What follows here is some SCEF and North Carolina material -- and then some high spots from some of the other many human rights campaigns that followed over the many years:

http://www.hunterbear.org/creative.htm [The initial, key link to 20 consecutive, sequential pages covering basics in the Northeastern North Carolina Black-Belt Project. Included is some SCEF material and three pages with photos [taken by J.V. Henry] of our historic Black Belt Conference, March, 1965.

http://www.hunterbear.org/salt2.htm [I was the speaker at Superior, Arizona in late 1963 -- a very long gathering indeed, heavily attended from a dozen, often widely scattered Mine-Mill copper locals, and sponsored by the Arizona Mine-Mill Council.

http://www.hunterbear.org/personal_reminiscence.htm [North Carolina and Jesse Helms.

http://www.hunterbear.org/handling_the_klan_on_easter_sund.htm [Major, Southwide United Klans of America Rally in the Black-Belt and our effective non-violent counter-Klan activism.

http://www.hunterbear.org/chicago_organizing.htm [Chicago Organizing: Tough, Cat-Clawing and Bloody.

http://www.hunterbear.org/more_on_organizing.htm [Chicago, more.

http://www.hunterbear.org/rochester.htm [The Church and social justice organizing.

http://www.hunterbear.org/great_algonquin_freedom_campaign.htm [Algonquin Migrant Fur Workers: organizing and action

http://www.hunterbear.org/organizer2.htm [The Algonquins at Bennett's Camp.

http://www.hunterbear.org/training%20center.htm [Our Chicago-based Native American Community Organizational Training Center.

http://www.hunterbear.org/Devil's%20Lake.htm [Racism in the Northern Plains: Some Native Rights high spots.

http://www.hunterbear.org/lumbee_indians_of_north_carolina.htm [Lumbee Indians seek Federal recognition and social justice.

COMMENT:

I love your writing and your great example and good work. I work with the
Shinnecock Nation here in Southampton, NY.

Best, Bob Zellner [long time SNCC worker]

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Posted in the "Our Stories" section. Let me know if you need any changes.

Keep on trucking

--bruce [hartford], webmaster of Civil Rights Movement Veterans

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As always , I enjoyed reading your writings.

Mary Ann [Mary Ann Hall Winters] [Tougaloo College activist in the "old days"]

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Thank you for the interesting reading material in today's email.

Jyri Kokonen [Finland]

A NOTE ON THE ATTEMPTED RAID BY SCOPE, SPRING 1965 [HUNTER GRAY APRIL 30 2008]

[Excerpt from a letter to a friend.]

By the spring of '65, our Northeastern NC Black Belt project was well established. Also at that time, SCLC launched its SCOPE project [Summer Community Organization and Political Education] -- bringing a fairly sizeable number of northern volunteers into the South. It was obviously influenced by SNCC's example the preceding summer in Mississippi. Part of the SCOPE contingent came to our region and, its director, Hosea Williams [a very key SCLC staffer], decided it would be easier to "take over" our project rather than organize the unorganized in other parts of Eastern NC. We were, of course, very resistant to this raid and, soon enough, substantial red-baiting came from the SCOPE leadership in the region, especially from Williams. When all of this began, and we fought to hold our fort against SCOPE [aware that the average SCOPE person was a "good kid", though poorly trained and ill-instructed], I protested to SCLC through Fred Shuttleworth its national secretary and also SCEF president; and I also protested through CT Vivian, SCLC's director of affiliates and a key SCEF board member. Each, although sympathetic, said they had no control over Williams and his raiding venture. Our lines held firm -- out of a vast number of Black churches in the context of our multi-county project, all save one closed their doors to the raiders, After a month of this standoff, Wiley Branton of the Voter Education Project [Southern Regional Council], a funding source for SCOPE, and generally no friend of SCEF, but who had decided, a year before, that I personally and organizer-wise was quite OK, arranged for Norman Hill [IUD AFL-CIO and much more -- David McReynolds certainly knows of him] to come into the situation to determine the facts. Hill came to a meeting of our local leaders gathered in Bertie County. His rented car went into a muddy ditch and we met him initially by helping him get it to dry ground. Within an hour, he had high praise for the work of all of us and indicated he would see that the SCOPE raid ended. He did so immediately upon returning North. That ended that, which had taken up much of my time for a month. But it should never have happened and the fact that it did was an indication of serious structural problems then becoming endemic within SCLC. [As you have gathered, I am neither a "vanguard" type nor a centralist, but the SCOPE mess should never have happened.]

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THE OBAMA VICTORY [HUNTER BEAR] MAY 6 2008:

And we are very proud of North Carolina tonight. Beba, of course, was born at Raleigh. I worked several hours away within our multi-county Northeastern Black Belt Project, often getting home only infrequently. When we began in the Black Belt, it was well nigh impossible for Blacks and Indians to even try to register to vote in that region -- let alone actually vote. Thanks to what became thousands of people in that wild but well organized crusade, and despite every kind of opposition, all of that and much more of the old order changed, and changed damn fast. Nice to feel we all had a small part in the welcome victory tonight.

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NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR AUGUST 21 2008:

I was privileged to receive a most kind letter from a Ms. B. -- who lived in Halifax County in the old days, went north with her husband for several years in 1963 before we began our great Movement in the Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt counties, and then returned many years ago. She is now much involved in doing research on slavery, the plantation owners, poverty, the segregation days, schools, churches, our Movement and its activists, and also the role of the NAACP in the Black Belt. Among other things, my response gives a few suggestions for further research.

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FROM HUNTER BEAR:

Dear Ms. B.

It's very good indeed to hear from you. I've been involved in a number of social justice struggles but our long, tough fight in Northeastern North Carolina is always one very close to my heart. Your obviously committed interest is extremely commendable. And, from many standpoints, you are obviously well qualified! I'm very pleased that you all have found our website material useful -- letters like yours make it worthwhile -- and you can feel free to use anything thereon which would be useful to you in your projects. I ask only that you credit myself and the Lair of Hunterbear website.

Ella Baker was a dear friend of ours from around the point we were first in the Deep South [Mississippi] , we worked closely together when I was the Field Organizer for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, I saw her a number of times thereafter, and we kept in touch until her passing in the mid-1980s [1986, I believe.] We sat in rocking chairs at her home at Littleton, which she continued to own; and we visited at her Harlem apartment. She and I were a speaking team in Midwestern and Western states for six weeks in late '63 and we shared the same scenery in some interesting civil rights happenings in the South.

The NAACP state office in North Carolina, based pretty much at Charlotte [Kelly Alexander, president] and also, I think at Winston Salem [Charles McClain [sp ?], its field secretary], was not interested in those days in Eastern North Carolina -- the rural areas east of Raleigh. The key state NAACP officers rarely got into those regions and virtually never into the Northeastern Black Belt counties where, as you know, things were as tough as things could get in the way of poverty, segregation, repression. There were brave local NAACP units in those eastern regions but they went largely unserviced by the state NAACP and tended to be quite small. But, despite these handicaps -- in no sense their fault -- they kept alive the sparks of dissidence. Attorney Floyd McKissick [Mack] at Durham was identified with the national NAACP and he, who became a very good friend of mine, had given some assistance to folks in the eastern regions. About the time I entered the scene, late in '63 and in full force from early '64 onward, Mack had shifted to CORE, first as its national chair, later its national director, and worked primarily in that vein on a national basis.

When I first saw the Northeastern Black Belt, it was a dismal situation with one signal and extremely important area of exception: the tremendous spirit of the grassroots people with whom I spoke. They convinced me that much of my time as an organizer would be well spent and much appreciated -- and so I dug in and we all fought Dragons, together in solidarity, for a long tough campaign which, as you've noted from my material, successfully cracked the hardcore Northeastern Blackbelt counties. [The organization for which I was Field Organizer [and Ms, Baker, the Consultant] -- SCEF -- was not a membership group beyond its Southwide board of directors, advisory committee, and staff. In other words, we were not competing with NAACP.]

In a very real way, of course, I have always been a Shane-type, the lone and migratory organizer. [You've probably seen that great Western film.]

And the local NAACP units in the Blackbelt were as happy to work with us as we with them. As our county movements grew -- e.g., the Halifax County Voters Movement -- the local NAACP units also grew. And other efforts came to sprout -- as the movements rolled on and things changed vastly for the better.

I may have met Dr James Tinsley -- but, if so, he was no longer active [and he may have passed by the time I arrived.] I did work closely with the very active social justice couple at Weldon, Dr Salter Cochran [MD] and his wife, Doris. I do recall meeting, again at Weldon, Dr Tinsley's son, then a lawyer based up North, when he came down for a visit. Mr A.C. Cofield at Weldon and Mr Thomas Cofield at Enfield were always extremely supportive of our work -- and Willa Cofield [Johnson] and her husband, Reed, were true mainstays. There were many others in Halifax County and across that whole multi-county Blackbelt region.

I spoke several times in the Haliwa setting and many Indian people came into our Halifax Movement. And there were other Indians in Northampton, Bertie and Hertford counties and some adjoining areas who did likewise.

The considerable amount of North Carolina material in our website gives a good overview, major developments, some detail. There is considerably more on all of this in my collected papers in the National Social Action Collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 816 State Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. [This is a major national repository.] This includes my field reports, memos, letters, telegrams, leaflets -- all sorts of relevant stuff from the Blackbelt struggle. You could get copies of those things -- but they'd charge, and probably too damn much by this time. Another possibility would be contacting the North Carolina Dept of Archives and History and asking them to secure a microfilm of the North Carolina stuff in my collection at Wisconsin. Years ago, about 1983, as my basic collection was gathered at Madison, I wrote to Raleigh and suggested they seek a microfilm. The North Carolina archivist was very open to this but, for whatever reason, turned out to be unable to get approval from his agency -- NC Archives and History -- to purchase a microfilmed copy of my Blackbelt stuff. I had sent the archivist a smallish sample of my material, he had been glad to get that, listed that in their publication, and that small batch is probably still available for viewing. But many years have come and gone since 1983 and there may now be sufficient interest at Raleigh to get a copy of my material from that long and momentous struggle.

Dr Willa Cofield now lives at Plainfield, NJ -- a long-time PhD in Urban Planning. She is active and her address is:

I am sure she'd be delighted to hear from you. She has done a great deal of historical research into the Blackbelt region.

Again, I'm delighted to hear from you. If I can be of any further assistance, don't hesitate to ask.

Our very best,

Hunter Gray [John R Salter Jr]

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JOHN SALTER [BEBA] COMMENTS ON MS. B'S VERY KIND LETTER:

Nice note; wish more people would take the time to thank you for the lives they're able to live now.

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AND FROM MS. B:

Dr. Gray,

I shall forever treasure this e-mail from a giant whom God has blessed to be a continuous advocate and legendary figure. Nothing is any sadder than the famous movie line "Shane, please don't go Shane." I inherited my love of western genres from my dear deceased dad. . .

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SEVERAL DAYS IN VIRGINIA: A PRELUDE TO OUR NORTH CAROLINA BLACK BELT PROJECT [HUNTER GRAY, SEPTEMBER 5 2008]

[This post is in part is excerpted from an older one of mine -- based on a cordial interchange with Bill Mandel.

By the early '60s, things had become a little "easier" in parts of Virginia -- though not in other parts. Voter registration of Blacks and Indians was beginning to come. South of the Virginia border -- e.g., the North Carolina Black Belt counties, things were as rough and tough as things could get: rampant poverty, rigid segregation, multi-faceted repression, KKK stuff. That region, of course, was the scene of the prolonged and very hard fought civil rights fight of ours, county by county. In the end, we all cracked the NC Black Belt and brought it well into the 20th Century. At the very outset of our struggle, I asked Moses Riddick of Southside Virginia to come to our first organizing meeting at Enfield to talk about his Virginia victory. He did come. I recall it was raining. His saga, in which I had been privileged to play a role, was genuinely inspiring -- although to our initially small group gathered that long ago winter night at the Cofield Funeral Parlor at Enfield, Halifax County, NC, that Virginia triumph seemed far off for us. But we did finally get there in our bailiwick -- and far beyond. H.]

To Bill Mandel from Hunter Gray:

I rarely got to Virginia during my civil rights period [1961-67] but did

on one significant occasion particularly. I had recently become SCEF Field Organizer,

working across the South. And I did spend a good number of days in
Southside Virginia, at Nansemond County [Suffolk], in the fall of '63, assisting Moses
Riddick in his successful break-through campaign for a major county board of
supervisors position. The race was of both state-wide and regional
importance since Riddick was running against the major pillar of the Byrd
Machine on the Southside, N.T. Poarch. Predominantly Black labor unions at
Suffolk -- especially in the peanut industry -- were a key factor. Northern
financial and other support was provided via a fine SCEF colleague of mine,
the Rev. William Howard Melish -- the very left [and very "controversial"]
Episcopal clergyman, Brooklyn N.Y. [I have a strong hunch you will recognize
his name. He was Dr DuBois' executor. . .

Anyway, amid constant rumors of imminent assassination attempts on
Riddick's life and considerable tension, the campaign moved vigorously to
its wild climax. There was a last-ditch major effort at Poarch's all-white
precinct to maneuver "irregularities." I upset that when I got inside the
voting place for a moment and saw the huge, unlocked -- note, unlocked --
ballot box, before being forced out. But I got the word to Riddick's
headquarters forthwith via a kid who was my runner. The sheriff -- White,
of course, but sensing Riddick's imminent victory [Black turnout was
subsequently huge] -- had secretly switched sides just the previous night in
a fascinating meeting -- a harbinger of the New & Pragmatic South. While I
watched from the required- yardage-distance at the polling place, the
sheriff arrived with his White deputies [he was soon to hire Black ones as
well], holding up a huge padlock for my purview which he then applied inside
to the ballot box. Riddick won -- and went on to other significant
political things.

Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]

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NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR: March 6 2008

I'm delighted to get this letter from Willa Cofield [formerly Willa Johnson] and learn -- not surprisingly -- that she continues her activism. A lot of good things came out of our wild saga in the Northeastern North Carolina Black-Belt -- and this key and critical case, won when the USSC denied cert to North Carolina [backed by every other Southern AG] following a Fourth Circuit decision on our behalf was one of several significant cases that emerged in the course of our multi-county struggle. Principal attorneys in Johnson v Branch were Phil Hirschkop of northern Virginia, Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy of New York City, and Sam Mitchell of Raleigh. Morton Stavis, New Jersey and New York City, assisted in this case -- and, with Bill and Sam, was instrumental in winning our major voting rights case which, for the first time since Reconstruction, opened the voter rolls in the Blackbelt to Blacks and Native Americans. Through all of this, Willa [a courageous and then high school teacher] and her husband, Reed Johnson, and other members of her family were key players and key pillars of strength. See

http://hunterbear.org/NORTH%20CAROLINA_OUR%20SUCCESSFUL%20BLACK%20BELT%20MOVEMENT.htm This extensive page contains a number of links to other website pages of ours on the long North Carolina campaign. H.

Hi, Hunter:

I'm so happy to hear the good news about your health. It's impossible to keep a good man like you down! I was in Charlotte, NC last week talking about the Willa Johnson v. Joseph Branch case at an NEA-sponsored banquet, which was held during the CIAA Basketball Tournament. It certainly brought back many memories of our battles against the Klan in Enfield and of your brave and unfaltering leadership. The historian who had unearthed details about the case in the NEA archives said that the NEA credits the case with saving 35,000 Black teacher jobs in the South. Take care and keep winning battles..

Willa Cofield.

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'