Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography

1. My Earliest Memory Was a Mob

9 —1— My Earliest Memory Was a Mob Not even an omnipotent God can blot out the deeds of history. —mays, Quotable Quotes of Benjamin E. Mays “I remember a crowd of white men who rode up on horseback with rifles on their shoulders. I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry. They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was not yet five years old, but I have never forgotten them.”1 So began Benjamin Mays’s description of his coming of age in an era of fear and terror. Mays was born in 1894 as the curtain of Jim Crow fell over the American South, violently segregating worlds into black and white.2 The mob terror that had so thoroughly shaped Mays’s earliest memory and imagination stemmed from the Phoenix riot of 1898, a politically calculated mob action by the supporters of South Carolina governor Benjamin Tillman to eliminate the last vestiges of black political activity.3 What was worrisome to Tillman and his acolytes was the possibility that their rivals within the Republican Party might use black votes to realign the party against their political initiatives.4 Ostensibly, the justification for the riot existed because of the Republican political activism of the Tolbert family. The Tolberts were a well-off, formerly slaveholding family that had lived in Greenwood County since the Revolutionary War era. Although they had opposed secession, four Tolbert brothers fought on the side of the Confederacy, but then they endorsed Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election. During Reconstruction, the Tolbert family, allied with blacks in Greenwood County, controlled the black vote and exercised substantial control over the Republican Party. By 1894, the Tolberts’s alliance was strong enough that they decided to run Red Tolbert as the Republican candidate for Congress. The alliance encouraged black males to vote at the polls in the rural town of Phoenix , South Carolina.5 The Tolberts, it was alleged, hoped to use their votes to challenge Tillman’s proposed changes to the South Carolina State Constitution in 1895, which fueled the potential of reactionary violence by the Democrats. By 1898, the local Democratic Committee chair assured a violent 10 : my earliest memory was a mob response if black men came out to vote.6 As Election Day neared, vigilantes terrorized black residents of Edgefield, Abbeville, and Greenwood counties. Twelve black men were shot dead (“two or three” of them were Mays’s father’s close friends), and one rural church in Greenwood County was set on fire. The terror was so extensive that Mays later remembered his father saying, “Negroes were hiding out like rabbits.”7 On the afternoon the vigilantes road into Epworth , the then four-year-old Mays had scurried under a nearby white neighbor ’s porch and tearfully viewed his father being terrorized. Mays’s father was lucky to have survived the attack. The marauding offenders, many of whom were known in the region, were never held responsible for their actions. In response, many local black residents either moved to other regions within the state or deferred to local white political rule.8 The tragic irony of this “riot” was that the Republican Party had not been a significant political threat in South Carolina since 1882, the year when the Democrats (under Tillman’s leadership in the state House) wrested control of the South Carolina legislature from the Republican majority. Upon completing their takeover of the legislature , the Democratic lawmakers moved to change all the laws governing voter registration and balloting to curtail black political participation.9 Outbreaks of violence like the one that took place in Phoenix were aimed at eliminating the black vote. Violent political maneuvers such as the Phoenix riot were justified by a civil religiosity known as the Lost Cause.10 The propaganda of the Lost Cause created an effective narrative that redefined white southern life and historical reality. Its proponents alleged that the real victims of terror were white planters and yeomen who had been unfairly victimized by the rapacious North during the Civil War. Advocates of this theory argued that the war was fought over states’ rights rather than the entrenched interests of slave owners. The premise of this theory was that white southerners were actually the heroes of the war for defending states’ rights and...