“Today, It's Time to Stop Singing and Start Swinging” – Malcolm X (Oops, Wrong Birthday Celebration)

The Daily Kos has a post up called The day the Klan messed with the wrong people. Unsurprisingly, the wrong people included black people in North Carolina.

By the mid-1950's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. Their campaign of terrorism swept through many of the southern states, but largely fell flat in North Carolina.

James W. “Catfish” Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, decided he was going to change that. Cole was an ordained minister of the Wayside Baptist Church in Summerfield, North Carolina, who regularly preached the Word of God on the radio. His rallies often drew as many as 15,000 people. As Cole told the newspapers: “There's about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up.”

Cole made a critical mistake that couldn't be avoided by a racist mind — he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.

Dr. Perry was a black doctor in Monroe, NC, and helped finance a local chapter of the NAACP. One night at a meeting, the word was received that the Klan threatened to blow up Dr. Perry's house. The meeting broke up and everyone went home to get their guns.

Sipping coffee in Perry's garage with shotguns across their laps, the men agreed that defending their families was too important to do in haphazard fashion. "We started to really getting organized and setting up, digging foxholes and started getting up ammunition and training guys," Williams recalled. “In fact, we had started building our own rifle range, and we got our own M-1's and got our own Mausers and German semi-automatic rifles, and steel helmets. We had everything.”

Many of these men were veterans of WWII and didn't scare easily. Men guarded the house in rotating shifts and the women of the NAACP set up a telephone warning system.

On October 5, 1957, Catfish Cole organized a huge Klan rally near Monroe. Afterward the decision was made to move on Dr. Perry's home.

a large, heavily armed Klan motorcade roared out to Dr. Perry's place, firing their guns at the house and howling at the top of their lungs. The hooded terrorists met a hail of disciplined gunfire from Robert Williams and his men, who fired their weapons from behind sandbag fortifications and earthen entrenchments. Shooting low, they quickly turned the Klan raid into a complete rout. “[Police Chief] Mauney wouldn't stop them,” B. J. Winfield said later, “and he knew they were coming, because he was in the Klan. When we started firing, they run. We run them out and they started just crying and going on.”

Amazingly no one was killed, but a number of cars were disabled. The following day the Monroe city council held an emergency meeting and passed an ordinance against Klan motorcades.

Yep, cross burnings are all fun and games until somebody gets on an old black man's lawn in Monroe. It's all shooting and crying after that.

The real lesson to be taken away from this, though, seems to be that black activists weren't the only ones to benefit from Dr. Martin Luther King's teaching of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance tactics. There's at least one Grand Dragon that wishes it had started sooner.

* Pictured, Charlie Warriax and Simeon Oxendine, of the Lumbee tribe, another group of North Carolinians you probably shouldn't fuck with.