NAACP Elders
Defy White Supremacy
James Myles Hinton Sr.
They tied him to a tree. The men -- those who kidnapped him, those who were waiting in the woods -- studied the blindfolded James Myles Hinton Sr. in their flashlights’ glare. Hinton heard one say, “This is not the n—.” Perhaps that’s why they didn’t kill him. They beat him, head to toe. After several cars drove off, Hinton found his way to a highway. He walked barefoot for two hours, until he flagged down a bus. It was spring 1949.
Hinton knew he had narrowly escaped death. He knew exactly how dangerous South Carolina was. And, if his captors had known who he truly was, the outcome surely would have been worse. They had abducted the president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the NAACP.
“He wasn’t afraid of anybody -- white, black, blue, green,” said Earl Matthew Middleton, a World War II veteran and Orangeburg entrepreneur active in the NAACP.
At a meeting a few nights after the abduction, Hinton told NAACP members, “I counted the cost long ago when [I] entered this fight and decided that I had only one life to give. I am more determined than ever, God helping me, to carry on.”
While Hinton’s accounts didn’t acknowledge this, his friends and neighbors in the Waverly neighborhood of Columbia, South Carolina, said he was horribly beaten, the fury made visible. Recountings acknowledged a KKK night ride, a deliberate echo of antebellum slave patrollers. Neighbors said that Hinton’s kidnappers tied him to a tree and whipped him, that he returned to Columbia bruised, eyes swollen, skin broken. The very next day he was working.
“He would just take it and go on the next day,” said daughter Novella Hinton, an eighth grader at the time.
“In the Forties and early Fifties, for a man to do the things he did, they were so strong, ‘real’ men, or they were crazy,” said Noble Cooper Sr., a dentist, friend of Hinton’s, and NAACP fundraiser. “What they thought of their lives was nothing because you just didn’t challenge the white authority. He was defying them on every level and succeeding at it.”
Levi Grant Byrd
Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, the state’s capital and its port city respectively, became home in 1917 to the first two South Carolina branches of the NAACP. James Weldon Johnson, appointed in 1916 the NAACP’s first field secretary, wanted to organize branches throughout the South. The attorney, poet, and songwriter believed the job of the NAACP had to be awakening black Americans. As 1920 approached, membership reached close to 100,000 people, mostly black and Southern.
The national organization began in 1909. Around 60 people, all but seven of them white, met to discuss violent attacks on black people and ways to achieve racial justice. Ending lynching ranked highest among initial concerns, as did securing the rights promised in the U.S. Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Violence in Charleston, South Carolina, illustrated how difficult and long that task would be. On May 10, 1919, an attack on black residents by white sailors expanded into a riot, the first of many instances in what Johnson called the Red Summer, when escalating white violence against black citizens was answered with self-defense.
Levi Grant Byrd believed the NAACP’s efforts to organize black Americans promised eventual racial justice. Born in 1891 in Anson County, North Carolina, Byrd farmed then worked as a freight handler. In 1918, while carrying boxes into a boxcar, a stranger goaded him to seek more. At one end of the box car loomed a question: “What is your life?” An answer was scrawled on the car’s other end: “Your life is what you make of it.” Byrd began hunting a better future, according to Peter Lau, in Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865.
In the 1930s, Byrd worked in Cheraw, South Carolina, as the only plumber and a regional salesman for black-owned newspapers. Byrd regularly wrote the national NAACP office and executive secretary Walter White. He had very little schooling but a vivid and clear way of making his points. “We are wishing to form a branch of the N.A.A.C.P. hear to fight the Brutal way that doin our Race hear for the last 6 are 8 Months we Had 5 are 6 Brutal Beaten hear in town bye the whites and there has not one of them bee eaven arrested for it we have no propten when it comes to the law.”
By May 1939, Byrd had engineered the chartering of an NAACP branch in Chesterfield County. He served as treasurer and, because he wrote most everyone frequently and faithfully, as an unofficial corresponding secretary. On November 10, 1939, he pulled together representatives of seven branches to found a state conference. And, in 1941, knowing that Hinton liked to lead, Byrd played a part in Hinton becoming the second-ever president of the state conference. Within Hinton’s first three years as state leader, NAACP membership in South Carolina reached 15,000, and within the first seven years, the number of branches grew from thirteen to eighty.
On January 19, 1956, an unidentified gunman fired double-aught buckshot, used to kill large game, into the home of Hinton, his wife Lula, and four children, piercing the frame house’s front wall and interior plaster, shattering a mirror and houseplant pots. Police removed nine shotgun casings from the walls, floor, and stairs. While no one was hurt, Lula Hinton was home and heard at least three other shots, likely into the air, before the blast into her home.
Byrd told Thurgood Marshall, NAACP legal counsel, of “the Thugs shooting.” He wrote, in all capital letters, that he was “VARY SORRY THAT I LIVE IN A STATE LIKE THIS BUT WE ARE DETERMED TO MAKE IT A DECEN PLACE TO LIVE FOR OUR CHILDREN….” Of Hinton’s and his own life-threatening experiences, he predicted, “AS LONG AS I AND SOME OTHERS THAT HAVE NINE LIVES THE N.A.A.C.P. WILL NEVER DIE IN S.C. RIGHT WILL WIN.”
A chapter in Stories of Struggle is devoted to Hinton. Photos courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.