Two Elders

James M. Hinton Sr.

Levi Grant Byrd

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 nigger.” 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 SC 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 in the Waverly neighborhood of Columbia, South Carolina, said he was horribly beaten, the fury 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.”

Hinton radiated calm and purpose, his hair cropped short, his eyes keen, cheeks full, shoulders broad, feet rooted to the ground. People frequently mistook him as white; he instantly corrected them. He said, “I’m not white; I’m colored.” A fire plug of a man, five foot seven and stocky, Hinton didn’t worry about stepping on toes but wasn’t rash. “He believed in looking at all sides of everything. He would take that knowledge and test it for accuracy,” said S.M. Richburg, a Columbia principal and Hinton friend.

Hinton seemed determined to overcome each barrier – endless barriers -- to full citizenship. He spoke every Sunday at black churches about rights and injustices, earning admiration for his fiery sermons. In the 1940s, he served as chairman of the Negro Division of the American Red Cross War Fund drive and the Negro Defense Recreation Committee, acquiring a community center for black soldiers. He served as secretary-treasurer of the Richland County Interracial Committee, obtaining a park for black children.

He demanded accountability from all and sundry. He wrote to a Bethune police chief about the beating of two black men. He wrote to Belk’s department store about including black children in a youth-radio program. He wrote to Columbia’s mayor about the need for a school crosswalk after a driver injured a black child. He wrote to a WIS-radio commentator, who had drummed up a mob by connecting a knifing to a voting rights case: “We request that you make a PERSONAL INVESTIGATION into the alleged attack and slashing of the white woman and see if you do not find that the alleged attacker WAS NOT A NEGRO.”

On August 26, 1950, the KKK attacked Charlie’s Place, a Myrtle Beach dance hall popular since 1937 with black and white fans of such Chitlin’ Circuit artists as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and Little Richard. Around 8 p.m., robed Klansmen paraded through Atlantic Beach, a black-owned beach resort, and through Myrtle Beach and its black neighborhood, The Hill, their lead car adorned with a cross of red light bulbs.

A Hill caller warned police the Klan better not come back; the police passed that on to Grand Dragon Thomas L. Hamilton. Incensed by the threat and furious that white and black patrons danced together at Charlie’s Place, about sixty Klansmen returned. Hooded men swarmed waiting-and-armed owner Charlie Fitzgerald, battering him and thrusting him into a car trunk. They shot up his club, firing 300 rounds and wounding one patron. They broke windows and furniture. They beat male and female staff.

Klansmen then drove Fitzgerald out of town, where they beat him. During a debate about killing him, Fitzgerald escaped, shot in the foot, his ears sliced by a man sporting a sheriff’s deputy star. Only a Klansman died, likely shot by his compatriots. James Daniel Johnston wore, underneath his robes, his policeman’s uniform. He was buried by 2,000 mourners offering six truckloads of flowers.

Horry County Sheriff C. E. Sasser held Fitzgerald in custody, whereabouts unknown. Hinton and Walter White, NAACP executive secretary, announced on August 30 that, if Fitzgerald were charged with any crime, the NAACP would defend him. White appealed to the US Justice Department. Marshall met with a Justice official. The state attorney general said the Klan was as free to operate within South Carolina as a “ladies’ sewing circle.”

Within a week, Sasser cleared Fitzgerald in a radio address, preceded by a bomb threat; arrested and charged Hamilton and thirteen other Klansmen for conspiracy to commit mob violence; obtained the firing of state Constable T. M. Floyd for participation in the Klan parade; and turned over confiscated Klan records to the FBI. Sasser also promised separate warrants for the dynamiting of one home and the defacing of another in a biracial Myrtle Beach neighborhood.

Fitzgerald, released as a material witness on September 7, said, “I am a free man – and I am not a free man. I don’t know who is and who isn’t a member of the Klan.”

On October 6, a grand jury refused to indict Hamilton and four other Klansmen. Charges against nine others had been dropped the previous week. On November 5, Klansmen dragged Rufus Lee, a white Conway farmer, from his home and bullwhipped him for daring to criticize the club siege, not so popular with white residents after the resort lost $100,000 in Labor Day tourism. On November 12, a green-robed Hamilton stood in the back of a truck in nearby Conway, addressing 5,000 at a rally lit by a twenty-foot cross and guarded by armed Klansmen.

The resurgent Klan obsessed over desegregation, particularly of public schools. Hamilton declared, “The Klan is fighting so that no Negro will ever sit in a classroom with white children.” 

Hinton played a larger role in that story. He had established in 1943 and then revived an NAACP branch in Clarendon County. In April 1946, the NAACP gathered key players in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss legal tactics for education lawsuits in the South. Strategists included attorneys from throughout the South and Washington, DC. Attendees included Hinton and Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter, counsels for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Among the conference topics was bus transportation for black schoolchildren. 

In June 1947, during an assembly for students at the summer school of side-by-side Benedict and Allen colleges, Hinton issued a challenge: Find someone and some way to get school buses. Hinton told the assemblage, “No teacher or preacher in South Carolina has the courage to get a plaintiff to test the School Bus Transportation practices of discrimination against Negro children.” Hinton wanted more than letters or petitions; he wanted a lawsuit. 

He energized the Rev. Joseph Armstrong DeLaine of Clarendon County. DeLaine, who partnered with farmers Levi and Hammett Pearson and other ministers, set in motion efforts to replace a bus the Pearsons had provided with a school district bus, like the white children had. In 1949, Clarendon County parents agreed to ask for more, for equal school facilities and, in 1950, for the end of segregation in schools. The petitioners of Briggs v. Elliott faced ferocious opponents. Their courage and the support of Hinton sustained this first of five NAACP-sponsored cases opposing school segregation and leading to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 and 1955 US Supreme Court rulings that ended segregation of public schools.

Photos courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Levi Grant Byrd

In 1917, Columbia, the capital city, and Charleston, a port city, became home to the first two South Carolina branches of the NAACP. James Weldon Johnson, appointed the NAACP’s first field secretary in 1916, was organizing 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, when 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 US Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. A Charleston riot 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 search for 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 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. What might have seemed a better future was interrupted by an attack on Byrd, who was investigating abuse of black residents. White men severely beat him, and Byrd found himself at another turning point, according to Lau. Byrd began regularly writing 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.” As Byrd explained, no laws protected black residents.

By May 1939, Byrd had engineered the chartering of an NAACP branch in Chesterfield County. He served astreasurer 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 — Hinton wrote Byrd “I’ll go along with you, but if I can’t run it, I’ll tear it up” — Byrd played a part in Hinton becoming the second 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.”

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