THE EVICTED
Travis, Fred
THE EVICTED by FRED TRAVIS "no person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of...
...He cited the national trend toward mechanized farming and the consolidation of farms into bigger units...
...I'm a nonviolence man myself, but I can't always control my people...
...We need medical help, too...
...Credit and even gasoline for farm tractors were refused those who had registered...
...Man come out here and say he want ten tenant families fo' his farm somewheres over 'bount Nashful," said Mrs...
...I worked shares," Mrs...
...Negro leaders in the registration drive, he continued, had been "blacklisted by local merchants and cannot buy food and clothing...
...But the Negroes were deeply suspicious of the offers, seeing them as a further part of the campaign to get them out of the county so the white man can remain firmly in control of the ballot box...
...Dixon, she said, asked her to sign a promise not to help any member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League, "or anyone else that the central committee does not approve of...
...Then she tell me las' fall I got to get offn her farm...
...Don't quote me and don't mention my name," said one farmer...
...That was too broad," Mrs...
...Nine of the white defendants called by the government as witnesses clammed up, claiming Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination...
...He is president of the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League...
...McFerren, whose "supermarket" is plastered inside with signs like "Please don't discuss politics in here unless you are registered to vote," reported he had checked out two of the job offers and rejected them...
...Trouble started in Haywood and Fayette Counties in 1959 when the Negroes, with some outside help, organized Civic and Welfare Leagues...
...Roy Wilkins, chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, reported the situation to the Democratic Platform Committee at Los Angeles a few days before the party's nominating convention opened last July...
...An exception was one white woman, Mrs...
...As long as just a few of us were registered and voted, the white folks didn't pay no attention to us," said Scott Franklin, who runs a little store in the Moscow community down near the Mississippi line...
...Franklin and other Negro merchants, like John McFerren, who runs a pint-sized "supermarket" just outside Somerville, the seat of Fayette County, were among the first to feel the economic pressure...
...The United States government says this is wrong...
...He warned of possible further violence: "The white people started the shooting...
...Of course, we are mechanizing our farms...
...The white people were so exercised over the Democratic Party's civil rights position that they voted for the States' Rights ticket in 1948 and 1956 and, in 1960, voted Republican for the first time...
...The policy in these two counties was in sharp contrast to most of Tennessee, which is a border state and has adopted generally what is by Southern standards a moderate policy in handling racial problems...
...This is just a sample of what is going to happen in Mississippi when the Negroes try to vote down there," said the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith of Nashville, a leader in the Rever-and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference...
...She say, 'I got yo pi'ture,' and I don' know what she mean at fust...
...Distributors of four nationally-known oil companies have joined in this punishment of men who sought merely to exercise their American right to vote...
...After we got out this injunction, I heard some white people say, 'We can beat them.' Then we didn't know what it was...
...In the 1,223 square miles of Fayette and Haywood Counties, the number of farm units dropped by 1,815 between 1954 and 1959 and the number of farm tenants declined by 1,586...
...I'm gonna fix up th' house.'" These are some of the results of the Federal government's first attempt to enforce the right of Negroes to vote in Deep South counties where they outnumber the white man but are heavily dependent upon him for economic survival...
...Until last August, no Negro had ever voted in that county unless he did so during the Reconstruction...
...I never disobey my boss lady, and I ain' holdin' nothin' ag'in her now...
...John McFerren, who was busy directing the operation of "Freedom Village," said: "The sheriff told us we could go to other counties without being shot at and intimidated...
...Esther Green, who testified she had refused to sign a petition pledging economic action against Negroes who registered...
...Mrs...
...Meanwhile, people cannot eat and cannot make their crops...
...We got plenty of corn-picking machines, and a lot of farmers are turning to raising livestock...
...Last December, the Justice Department went into the Federal court at Memphis and asked a temporary injunction restraining landowners from evicting Negroes who had registered...
...One organization which has contributed substantially is the Southern Conference Education Fund, a favorite target of Mississippi's Senator James Eastland, who likes to call it a Leftist organization or worse...
...Federal Judge Marion S. Boyd of Memphis refused to grant the government's request to halt the evictions...
...Salesmen for distributors in Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee, said they would have to stop supplying the Negro merchants or lose their white customers...
...We have to go to Memphis to get a doctor, and that's nearly forty miles away...
...this effort will hinge the chances for Negroes in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina to participate freely in future elections, and perhaps determine the course of new civil rights legislation in Congress...
...In October, my landlord came down to th' cotton fiel' 'n' say, 'Willie, you'll have t' get out...
...THE EVICTED by FRED TRAVIS "no person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose for, or not to vote for, any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, member of the Senate, or member of the House of Representatives, delegates or commissioners from the territories or possessions, at any general, special or primary election held solely or in part for the purpose of selecting or electing any such candidate...
...Now this tent my home but it about as good as that house I had...
...We've got to stay in business...
...The whites called attention to the fact that Negroes have declined tenant and sharecropper offers from Arkansas and other Tennessee counties where their race is in a minority and farm hands are badly needed...
...They came down here and got the niggers all stirred up and told them they ought to go register and vote," he continued...
...Turner continued...
...He recently traveled through Fayette and Haywood Counties on special assignment for The Progressive...
...She say she don' want me there no mo...
...Meanwhile, bitterness hangs heavily over the land...
...Turner...
...A few days later, he was overruled by the Sixth United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the Negroes could not be evicted as an interference with their right to vote...
...Boyd's decision places the burden of proof on the landlord, but it also leaves a door open for evictions in connection with a normal rearrangement of agricultural practices...
...I don't know of any need around here...
...I told him it didn't sound right to me, and 1 didn't want to sign...
...I'm going to machines...
...Green said...
...Boyd then told landlords they could not evict Negro tenants without proving in his court that the eviction was not an attempt to interfere with the Negroes' voting rights...
...Aside from the few sawmills, cotton gins, and soybean oil mills, there is practically no industry...
...Negroes long have been permitted to vote in other counties and are even encouraged to do so by politicians in the metropolitan areas...
...That's all it does, I believe...
...The fifty-eight-year-old widow and three of her five children were among a growing number of Negroes being forced off the land because they registered and voted in Fayette County, where Negroes outnumber whites by more than two to one...
...she explained, "I think for myself...
...Turner said, pausing to wipe from her face the cold rain that beat down incessantly...
...Their credit and deliveries from local wholesalers were cut off...
...The Civil Rights Act is intended to protect the right to register and vote and provide injunctive relief against such interference and coercion," he said...
...We don't have a Negro doctor in this county, and the Negroes can't get any help from the white clinics...
...Haywood County to the north has a population of 23,393, of which sixty per cent is Negro...
...James A. Kurts, a clerk in the Economy Store in Brownsville, was quoted by an FBI agent as having said he was told by the store owners "not to extend credit to names that appear on a list" of members of the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League...
...I don't believe this court has any right to enjoin the evictions or enjoin the altering of leases...
...But most are sharecroppers and are furnished a house, food, equipment, seed, fertilizer, medicine, and other supplies on credit...
...Last summer I wen' down to Somerville an' register to vote and she say she seen my pi'ture in th' paper...
...Georgia Mae Turner grubbed at a shallow trench with a cotton hoe, trying to drain a puddle of water in front of her tent in a camp called "Freedom Village" three miles south of Somerville, Tennessee...
...A few tenants lease the land and work it with their own equipment...
...Notice of tenant lease and sharecropper contract termination began shortly after Tennessee's August Democratic primary to nominate Federal and state officials...
...What little the Negroes could get to sell they had to haul from Memphis...
...For the Fayette and Haywood County cases in Tennessee have produced a conflict between the Negro's civil rights and the white man's property rights which ultimately must be resolved by the United States Supreme Court...
...A landowner over in Lauderdale County say he want two families to work for wages but he won't say how much wages...
...Emotions are running high on both sides, with threats and accusations and even occasional gunfire being exchanged...
...Whites claim McFerren has found a profitable operation in handling the relief packages for the displaced tenants, but the Negro leader denies this...
...I'm not a defendant in one of those Federal court cases yet, and I don't want to be...
...Voting qualifications have been so lax that Negroes in some cities were not even required to be alive to have their names on the registration books...
...If the government wins its fight, the Negroes may get the right to free use of the ballot in Fayette and Haywood Counties, but there may not be many of them around to enjoy it...
...The Federal government's Commission on Civil Rights sent in agents to investigate, and the Federal district court at Memphis issued an injunction prohibiting local officials from blocking the registrations...
...John Doar, the government attorney, called the planned evictions "the most cruel step people could take against citizens of this country in telling them to get off the land...
...Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation joined those of the Civil Rights Commission in an investigation...
...Today as we talk here," he said, "Negro farmers in Fayette County who persisted and finally registered to vote are being refused gasoline for their tractors, trucks, and other farm machinery...
...Of course, they are all lies, but you've got to hire yourself a lawyer and defend yourself just the same...
...Why, we've got sixty or seventy mechanical cotton pickers in this county already, and each one of them can do the work of seventy-five niggers...
...We defendants refer to ourselves as the 'Honor Roll' and laugh about it, but it's a mighty dry laugh, I'll tell you...
...When a shot was fired into the tent city, wounding slightly a Negro man sleeping there with his wife and four children, McFerren said: "I expected they'd try to get me, but I didn't think they would shoot into the tents while people were asleep in them...
...he said he was afraid he might omit one from the list and offend someone...
...Negroes work the land under many arrangements...
...I don' know...
...The net profit on the five to twenty acre plots may range from $50 to $300 a year, though it is just as liable to turn out to be a loss of that much or more...
...Fayette County, on the Mississippi state border, has 24,577 residents, but the number has been dropping steadily since 1940 as both whites and Negroes seek opportunities elsewhere...
...Others registered later in preparation for the November general election and found their names were added to the lists...
...The Somerville weekly newspaper, The Fayette County Falcon, carried a number of advertisements offering places in Phillips County, Arkansas, and Lauderdale County, Tennessee...
...You don't need many farm hands for livestock...
...Negroes voted in the primary in both counties, and some of them claim lists of names were compiled at the polls for use in the campaign for economic retaliation...
...He disputed the claim that the machine could replace the Negro and predicted that a lot of landowners would go broke trying to use machines on the small, sometimes hilly farms...
...Those niggers go down there to those government lawyers and swear out those false affidavits...
...Their broad fields stretch on each side of the Nashville-to-Memphis highways, and sharecropper and tenant shacks stand out against the flatlands...
...The tent camp set up on the 200-acre farm of Shepherd Towles, one of the few Negroes with substantial landholdings in the area, was denounced by whites as a publicity stunt to attract sympathy and relief for the Negroes...
...McNamee say I owe her as much as fo' or five thousan' dollar, an' I work it all off...
...Isaac Smith Carter, a white tenant on another farm, testified his landlord had refused to have anything to do with him after he refused to join in the campaign to hamper Negro registration...
...If the government's case fails, more than 700 Negro families may be ordered out of the farm tenant and sharecropper shacks which have been their only homes most of their lives...
...Before that happens, however, there may be an explosion of racial violence more intense than any the South has experienced in the desegregation of public schools...
...I don't owe her nothin' when I lef...
...As word of the Negroes' plight spread, assistance arrived in the form of food packages from Memphis, Nashville, New York, Chicago, and other cities...
...It's mostly the work of some of those Northern agitators...
...Sometimes Mrs...
...The Appeals Court left it to Judge Boyd to decide how its finding should be enforced...
...I'll let the Lord settle with her...
...Some of these people are getting pretty desperate...
...I always done what that woman say...
...Before last August, a few Negroes had been permitted to vote in Federal and state elections, but they always were excluded from the county Democratic primary in which local officials are named...
...I'm a defendant in that Federal court case...
...Now we know they was going to run us out of the county...
...The action of the courts to date has been a temporary holding action aimed at maintaining the status quo while the issue is being litigated...
...I register to vote in September," said William Trotter, who moved into the tent camp with his wife and six children...
...Meanwhile, conditions in the West Tennessee cotton country are likely to get a lot worse before there is any improvement...
...When the harvest is in, the sharecropper's part is usually about a half to a third of the crop, out of which he must pay for items advanced him...
...If we don't win the fight for the vote in Fayette County, we won't have a chance in other areas of the South...
...Groups of them went to the old courthouse in the middle of the Brownsville public square to register but found the Haywood County election commission had just resigned...
...I been on that farm for thirty-eight year," Mrs...
...They couldn't answer details on assurances of making a living on the farms," he said...
...We need government help to get relief from this pressure," he continued, "and we need relief from this boycott the white folks have put on us...
...She al'ays kep' the 'counts...
...Seventy per cent of the population is Negro, and they own about ten per cent of the land...
...She recalled a 1959 visit by Shelby Dixon, a cotton ginner in the Stanton community, to her farm "way up in the hills in Haywood County...
...We just don't have any need for so many niggers any more," said another landowner, who was equally emphatic in his demands for anonymity...
...I worked for Mr...
...When Negroes went into white stores to make purchases, the clerks checked their names against lists of registered voters or Welfare League members before making the sale...
...Section 131, Civil Rights Act of 1957, Federal Statutes...
...I trust the Justice Department will do something about this," he added...
...We've known this was coming for a long time, and we've been trying to reduce our nigger population...
...On the outcome of FRED TRAVIS has been a newspaper reporter and editor for twenty-five years, for the past decade and a half as state capitol correspondent at Nashville, Tennessee, for The Chattanooga Times, an assignment which has included coverage of race relations problems throughout Tennessee...
...One" landowner, Montezuma Carter, Jr., said he was shifting to machines and had "no earthly need" for the ten Negro tenant families on his property...
...What he go'n do wit' ten tenant fam'lies on a farm no bigger'n that...
...The defense denied that Negroes were being evicted in reprisal for voting and insisted that the dismissals resulted from the inefficiency of tenants and mechanization of farming...
...In good years, I sometimes use t' make fifty or hun'red dollar...
...In Fayette County, when Negroes began showing up in groups at the election commission office, they were told they could not register...
...It's just a propaganda stunt," declared Mayor I. P. Yancy of Somer-ville...
...He say he got eighty acres of land...
...McFerren declined to identify the organizations which are providing assistance in the form of food, clothing, and money...
...An oil distributor removed the gasoline pumps from in front of Franklin's store...
...White landowners and businessmen, on the advice of their lawyers, who include practically the entire bar associations of both counties, decline to discuss the situation with strangers...
...I say I get off at th' end o' th' year...
...They reported merchants checking lists of Negroes who had registered or were members of the Welfare Leagues and refusing sales to them...
...The county primary, financed by qualifying fees imposed upon the candidates and without sanction in state law, is regarded as a private affair for the white people, though the nominations are equivalent to election to local offices...
...Ignorant and unskilled, they are incapable of earning a living except by raising cotton, corn, and soybeans, and maybe a few chickens and hogs...
...McNamee, and when he died I stay on an' work for his widow...
...Fayette and Haywood Counties, thirty miles east of Memphis, in the West Tennessee cotton country, are part of the Old South...
...I'm trying to get the niggers off my land before they enjoin me...
...Further hearings were ordered before a final decision, and there is no doubt the case ultimately will reach the United States Supreme Court...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
