The night after Robert Williams and the Monroe NAACP drove Catfish Cole's Klan away from Dr. Perry's house, the black physician pulled his car into his driveway and found the police waiting with a warrant for his arrest on charges of “criminal abortion on a white woman.” Although abortion was illegal in North Carolina in 1957, the statutes made no mention of race. The fact that newspapers and official documents invariably appended the phrase “on a white woman” suggests that the woman's race was considered highly relevant to the alleged crime. As though she were a fictional character created especially for the part of defiled white womanhood, her name was Lilly Mae Rape.
An impoverished and illiterate twenty-five-year-old mother of four, Rape had once been a nurse's aide at the hospital where Perry worked. She claimed that she had come to Perry's clinic three times, pleading with him “to do something for me. I knew that I was going to lose my job,” she stammered in court later, “and we couldn't afford another child.” Unable to find a white doctor who would perform the abortion and “desperate” at her predicament, Rape went back to Perry, who told her that there was nothing he could do for her. “I called him a liar,” she testified later. Perry advised her that it would be “dangerous,” she claimed, but to “get up $75 ” and come back. When she returned on October 4, Rape swore, Perry reluctantly sterilized his instruments and performed the abortion. That night, sick with fever and frightened, Rape was admitted to Union County Memorial Hospital, where she apparently had a miscarriage. Almost immediately, she reported Perry to the police.1
Perry, a devout Catholic, acknowledged that Rape had come to his office late in the afternoon on three separate occasions, pleading for an abortion, but the physician maintained that he steadfastly had refused to accommodate her. The last time she came to see him, Perry stated, he had told Rape that there were “too many dangers” in a white woman even being in his office, reminded her that he had told her already not to come back, and demanded that she “get out.” Never did she give him any money, he testified, nor did he perform any medical procedure. “I would have had to have been crazy to have done such an act in the face of all the animosity against me,” Perry said later.2 “I am Vice President of the local branch and it is because of this that I have been framed,” the doctor wrote to NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins.3
Whatever occurred between Lillie Mae Rape and Dr. Perry made no difference in the minds of the black women of Union County. Word of the esteemed physician's arrest raced across the telephone lines and through the beauty parlors. Bertha Perry called B. J. Winfield and told him that they would need bail money. Robert Williams marched straight into the police station and demanded to know what bail had been set. “You can't get him,” Chief of Police Mauney told Williams, referring to the fact that the magistrate had set bail at $7,500. Williams asked to use the telephone on the desk. “I called Mabel,” Williams recounted, “and [Mauney] was standing there listening, and I said, ‘Mabel, tell the boys I am in the police station and to get ready because we may have some action tonight.’ And you should have seen that man's face.”4 Outside the station, dozens of angry African Americans, most of them women, filled the courthouse square. “Many were the nights when Dr. Perry risked his life against Klan threats to deliver a baby for a woman who didn't have a penny,” Mabel Williams remembered fondly. It was time to return the favor.5
There was neither time nor need for Robert Williams to summon “the boys.” From inside the station, Williams and the police chief heard tires squealing, motors racing, and the clamor of dozens of angry women. “Women came up with butcher knives, housewives with hatchets and shotguns and pistols,” Robert Williams laughed years later.6 “Within minutes,” Jet magazine reported the next week, “an estimated 45–100 Negroes had rushed to the town square, crowded policemen out of the headquarters building, and confronted Police Chief Al Mauney.” B. J. Winfield told the chief, “If they don't let him out, we are going to tear down the damn jailhouse.” The black women demanded to see their beloved doctor alive and safe. “And when the chief seemed slow about arranging bail, and bringing the doctor up from the basement, where he was being held alone, the crowd got fidgety, surged against the doors, fingered their guns and knives until Perry was produced.” The women who thronged the station cheered when the doctor walked upstairs under guard. Williams telephoned J. Ray Shute, who agreed to sign the $7,500 bond for Perry. The police soon released the physician into the arms of his family and friends, ending the drama for the moment.7
Almost a year later, as Perry's case ground on through the courts, an even more vivid local drama unfurled, dragging the little town of Monroe onto front pages around the world and further underlining the power of sexual issues in the racial politics of the segregation-era South. Accounts differed sharply. “The white—and official—version,” wrote one white reporter, “is that the two Negro boys trapped the three white girls in a culvert and told them that the price of escape would be a kiss.” Two of the girls, according to this rendition of events, managed to elude that levy. The third—a seven year old—either kissed or was kissed by Hanover Thompson. White sources asserted that one of the African American boys had held the girl while the other had kissed her or even tried to rape her. Local officials openly accused the boys of “molesting three white girls” and quietly suggested to reporters that what actually had occurred was a rape attempt. Governor Luther Hodges wrote to one critic that the boys “had assaulted three small white girls.”8
The Carolina Times, the black newspaper published in Durham, touted separate eyewitness testimony that the girls, in a game, had sat voluntarily on the laps of black and white boys and kissed them playfully. The crisis in Monroe, editor Louis Austin wrote, had nothing to do with assault or delinquency. It stemmed from the embarrassment of white officials that the children had not yet learned “the unwritten law of white supremacy.” That law, Austin observed, held “that white is right and that God is a respecter of persons and that He has made one race of men superior to another.” In any case, Austin spat, “no one but a bunch of numbskulls with hearts full of the filthiest kind of dirt would attach any significance to what children of six to ten years of age do at play.”9
David Ezell “Fuzzy” Simpson, eight, and James Hanover Grissom Thompson, ten, both black, remembered these events for the rest of their lives. In their accounts, the two playmates met a group of white children in a culvert below Harvard Street in a white section of Monroe. According to Simpson and Thompson, the pair saw some white boys playing and joined in their romp. “At first it was just boys playing,” Thompson recalled thirty-five years later. “We was just running through the water with our feet at first, acting crazy like kids.” A handful of white girls dawdled near the ditch. Gradually the two groups of children merged, and all but one or two of the white boys went home. One of the remaining boys suggested a kissing game in which each girl would sit on a boy's lap and kiss him, “like on TV or in the movies,” ten-year-old Thompson told a white questioner soon afterward. According to the young boy, a white girl sat in both his lap and that of a white companion and kissed each of them.
Three decades later, Thompson could not be sure whether or not the children knew how deeply this “little peck on the jaw” violated the un-spoken boundaries of race. But he suspected that he was strangely influenced by feelings of racial self-loathing that he had absorbed, almost without noticing them, from his world—perceptions about racial meaning that brought him to follow the lead of the white children regardless of the taboo. “Being a black kid growing up in that era,” he speculated, “if the little white kids do something, you think it's right. That's what we were taught.” Thompson knew Sissy Sutton, the girl who kissed him, fairly well; his grandmother, Angela Nixon, had worked as a maid for the Suttons for many years. “She tried to kiss David,” Thompson remembered, “but I don't think David played. I know she kissed a white boy right in front of me and she kissed me.”10
It is impossible to unravel precisely what took place among children playing in a deserted ditch on an autumn afternoon several decades distant. Memories falter, especially where childhood traumas intrude. Virtually all contemporary accounts—white and black, official and unofficial—shifted and shuffled “the facts” in reaction to a racially charged and politically perilous atmosphere. Both the defenders of the boys and the protectors of white supremacy in North Carolina launched massive public relations campaigns around the case.11 Volatile reactions among their elders, too, probably shaped the accounts of all of the children. “As for the boys,” reported George Weissman, who interviewed them soon afterward, “it was clear to us, when we saw them, that they felt from what had happened that they were caught up in some monstrous crime.”12
Rarely has an event so small opened a window so large onto the life of a place and a people. The view from that window supports Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 observation that sex was “the principle around which the whole structure of segregation of the Negroes . . . [was] organized.”13 Sexuality, like violence, served as both pillar and signpost of the Southern social order. That order permitted white men in the South, by virtue of their position atop the caste system of race and gender, to take their liberties with black women, while black men and white women remained absolutely off-limits to one another; the much-traveled sexual backroad between the races was clearly marked “one-way.”14 Though black women were the most frequent victims of this bizarre arrangement, black men who dared to defy the code—and even a careless inflection of voice in addressing a white woman could constitute a violation—did so at the risk of death.
The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, butchered in Mississippi in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, drew the racial and sexual boundaries of the Jim Crow South in blood for the world to see. The sexual dynamic was not merely racial but signaled the whole shape of social power in the society. No black man could safely protect “his” women from any white man, while the black male who ventured across the color line represented not merely a threat to a particular white man but to white supremacy generally—and was likely to be dealt with as such.
At the same time, a legal system controlled by white men winked at sexual assaults on black women by men both black and white, since these attacks posed no threat to—indeed, they expressed and strengthened—the racial and sexual caste system of which they were a part.15 “The rhetoric of protection—like the rape of black women,” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues, “reflected a power struggle among men.” Patriarchal control over women constituted an important part of the equation. “As absolutely inaccessible sexual property,” states Hall, “white women became the most potent symbol of white male supremacy.”16 One fundamental truth shines through all accounts of the Monroe ‘kissing case,” however seething or partisan: relations between black and white citizens in North Carolina were such that a single kiss between small children, stolen or shared across the color line, could cause the earth to tremble.
It was hardly unusual in the small towns of the segregated South for little children of both races to play together. The African American women who fried the chicken and tended the children in the homes of white families often brought their own little ones along, and games of cowboys-and-Indians or kick-the-can made for a certain sandlot equality. Though the residential sections of Monroe were segregated, black and white neighborhoods bordered one another, and children walked freely from one to the next, meeting, talking, and playing together. Only with the approach of puberty, when the natural openness and sensuality of children became freighted with sexual power, did such games pose a threat to the prevailing social order. “The racist,” wrote Southern poet and essayist Wendell Berry, “fears that a child's honesty empowered by sex might turn in real and open affection toward members of the oppressed race, and so destroy the myth of that race's inferiority.”17
The parents of Sissy Sutton heard about the kissing incident almost accidentally. Sissy's mother was only half-listening to the child later that same afternoon when she realized that what she had heard was not idle chatter but something that actually had happened to her daughter. Failing in her effort to restrain her emotions, Mrs. Sutton pressed the girl for details. When she heard that Sissy had kissed a black boy, “I was furious,” she said. “I would have killed Hanover myself if I had the chance.”18 The parents of all three girls, according to the Charlotte Observer, were “hysterical,” and one of them called the police.
The critical question was whether the police or the Suttons would find the two boys first. By several accounts, Mr. Sutton “armed himself, gathered friends, and went looking for the boys.” Neighbors claimed that several white people with shotguns had raced to the Thompson house at 703 South Parker Street and threatened not only to kill the boys but to lynch their mothers. Mrs. Sutton, who made several public threats to kill the boys, admitted that she had been to the Thompson home that day but claimed that her intention was only to order Evelyn Thompson to get out of town, not to attack her. “When I had gotten in that afternoon,” Mrs. Thompson recalled three decades later, “These people—that family—had been to my house with guns and said they were going to kill me.”19
City officials recognized a mob in the making. Six carloads of police arrived at the Thompson house to forestall trouble.20 Late that afternoon, a squad car spotted the youngsters pulling a red wagon loaded with soft drink bottles down Franklin Avenue, oblivious to their peril. “Both cops jumped out with their guns drawn,” Thompson recalled. “They snatched us up and handcuffed us and threw us in the car.” One of the police officers slapped Hanover Thompson and said, “We'll teach you little niggers not to kiss white girls.” The boys were terrified. “When we got to the jail,” Thompson recounted, “they drug us out of the car. They threw us down and then started beating us. Body punches, hitting us hard in the chest and calling us all kind of names.”21 “They threw us in these holding cells,” Thompson said, “and they talked about how they was going to hang us and lynch us.” Evelyn Thompson learned of her son's arrest from a neighbor's child. “A girl came down later in the afternoon and told me I better go get my children,” she recalled, “because [the police] were beating them unmercifully in the bottom of one of the jail cells downtown.” J. Hampton Price, the local juvenile court judge, reported that police had detained the boys for their own good “due to the feeling in the case.”22
If the judge perhaps gave the police too much credit, he made a solid point about the reaction among white citizens. “The mothers were so frightened,” their attorney said, “that for several nights they dared not sleep in their own houses but hid with neighbors.”23 Gunmen in passing cars fired dozens of shots into the Thompson home, and hooded terrorists burned a wooden cross on their lawn. A family member found Hanover Thompson's dog shot to death in the front yard. Both mothers were fired from their jobs as housekeepers. Evelyn Thompson's landlord served her with eviction papers two days after the kissing incident. The clamor of angry crowds outside the Monroe jail kept the boys in terror for their lives. “The Klan was all outside, trying to get in the jail, demonstrations, torches at night,” according to Hanover Thompson. “People was out there trying to get in there to kill us.”24
Robert Williams first heard about the kissing case from Mayor Fred Wilson, who called to enlist his help and advice. By Williams's account, the mayor wanted to know what the NAACP leader would advise him to do and suggested that perhaps Williams could arrange for the boys to be quietly spirited away from Monroe.25 Williams instead rushed to the homes of the boys and found Newtown in a state of siege. “The whole neighborhood had been so terrorized,” he later told a reporter for the New York Post, “that many people were afraid to turn their lights on at night. Others, including the boys’ mothers, had stayed away from their home at night for fear that they might be lynched.” Williams, his army .45 strapped to his belt, was the most obvious local ally for the mothers, who had known him for years, though not well, and he became their adviser and advocate. One of his first actions was to place the Thompson and Simpson homes under armed guard by the men of the Monroe NAACP.26
Though it is unlikely that most whites would have supported outright violence against the boys, many sympathized with the virulent reaction of the Suttons. If they did not support the Suttons, at any rate, they left no record of their dissent in the matter. Not even J. Ray Shute or any of the other white members of the Human Relations Council made any public statement in support of the boys. Those “decent and respectable white people” who may have disagreed with the prevailing tone of outrage, it seemed to Louis Austin, “have either been silenced or are afraid to speak out and halt the reign of terror now going on in their community against Negroes.” This state of coerced consensus reflected the depth of uneasiness and fear that issues of interracial sexuality aroused among white Southerners during the 1950s.27
Not surprisingly, the racial politics of rape reflected and focused the extraordinary power of the sexual taboo. Not only did white Southerners generally regard murder as an appropriate response to suggestions of sexual interest in white women on the part of black men. They also seemed to believe, as W. J. Cash put it, “that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern [white] woman.”28 White politicians in the South had long used rape as the central metaphor for any hint at alteration of the region's racial hierarchy; the 1959 report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Senator Strom Thurmond charged, was an attempt by “the federal government [to] further rape the rights of the states.” The continuous outpouring of such metaphors during the 1948 “Dixiecrat” revolt led by Thurmond prompted this response from W. E. B Du Bois: “The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.”29
The double standard that prevailed in questions of sexuality and sexual violence was the subject of a letter from a white woman to the Charlotte Observer in 1959. “Our whole attitude has been that the violation of a Negro woman, while not condoned, of course, is not on the same plane of iniquity as the ravishing of a white woman,” the writer charged.30 In fact, a black man accused of the rape of a white woman in the South during the period from 1930 to 1976 was eighteen times more likely to be executed than a black man charged with the rape of a woman of his own race. “From all appearances,” Louis Austin wrote in 1959, “the death penalty for that crime in this state was made ‘for Negroes only.’” This, of course, was quite apart from the lingering possibility that a white mob would preempt the jury.31
Perhaps it was unusual for African American children eight and ten years of age to evoke what W. J. Cash called “the Southern rape complex.”32 The memory of the Till murder three years earlier hovered over Monroe, with hostile reporters quick to accuse Robert Williams of trying “to make another Emmett Till case out of this incident.” One of Governor Hodges's advisers in the case privately remarked to the governor that “if Till had not made a pass at a white woman he would be alive today.”33 Still, the four-year age difference between Emmett Till and Hanover Thompson seemed to matter; a white woman from Greensboro who wrote to Governor Hodges on Christmas Eve to protest the cruelty of incarcerating the two boys over the holidays acknowledged that “if the boys were over twelve it would be a different story.”34 White sexual fears carry considerable weight in explaining the fierce reaction of white citizens to the kissing case. But the most immediate context for white sexual paranoia was the prospect of public school desegregation.
Governor Hodges hurried to the front of the movement to resist the Brown decision, partly by invoking the terrors of miscegenation.35 This tactic was quite successful, resonating with the concerns of white citizens across the state. “What the white man fears and what the white man is fighting to prevent at any cost,” one of the governor's editorial supporters wrote in 1955, “is the destruction of the purity of his race. He believes that integration would lead to miscegenation and there is some basis for his fears.”36 Many whites assumed that “race-mixing” in schools would lead to rampant interracial sexual activity and that the “death” of the white race might be inevitable. Mainstream conservative James J. Kilpatrick, whose national influence would persist well into the Ronald Reagan era, declared that white Southerners had every right “to preserve the predominately racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two thousand years.” The National Review backed Kilpatrick, arguing that the white race was “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically.” The murderers of Emmett Till could not have said it better.37 “We can talk about it all we want to—justice, equality, all that sort of thing, talking,” said one white man from western North Carolina, “but when we come right down to it, that's what it's all about: a nigger a-marrying your sister or your daughter.”38 James Baldwin, a shrewd observer of the dynamics at work, offered a timeless retort to this brand of muddled racial thinking. “You're not worried about me marrying your daughter,” the black writer told a white segregationist who raised the matter of intermarriage. “You're worried about me marrying your wife's daughter. I've been marrying your daughter since the days of slavery.”39
On October 17, 1958—less than two weeks before the kissing incident occurred—Robert and Mabel Williams had petitioned the local school board to transfer their sons to all-white East Elementary School, “now designated as a white school and excluding Negroes solely on racial grounds contrary to recent Supreme Court decisions and Amendment XIV of the United States Constitution,” they wrote. The all-white school board intimidated black teachers, the Williams family charged, “to the extent that the American idea of intellectual freedom is a farce” in Union County. Black teachers held in racial subordination by white authorities “become agents of inferiority complexes, white supremacy, undemocratic and un-American traits.” Their children, the Williamses insisted to the school board, were “not being properly educated for life in a democracy based upon the proposition that all men are created equal and that wholesome convictions of freedom are worth fighting for.”
The Monroe Enquirer printed the entire text of the Williams family's letter to the school board.40 No African American students had ever attempted to attend a white school in Monroe before the Williamses made their petition. White citizens in Monroe panicked at this challenge to racial etiquette, at least in part because of the sexual fears that accompanied their vision of where desegregation would lead. “If [black children] get into our rural schools and ride the buses with our white children,” one woman wrote, “the Monroe ‘kissing’ incident is only a start of what we will have.”41
In Monroe, opening white schools to black children was not even a matter for discussion. But there remained the question of what to do with the two small boys held in the basement of the Monroe jail. Chief of Police Mauney, Judge Price, and Mayor Wilson debated the matter, keeping Han-over Thompson and Fuzzy Simpson behind bars for the next six days without so much as a hearing. The authorities did not permit the boys to see parents, friends, or attorneys during this period. According to Thompson, jailers cruelly terrorized the youngsters. “Them people just beat us like they wanted to,” he winced decades later. “They were trying to intimidate us by telling us the KKK was coming to kill us. They called us niggers, rapists, all kinds of names.”42
The worst moment came on October 31 when white men draped in sheets stomped down the stairs into the basement cellblock. The two boys were convinced that the Ku Klux Klan had broken into the jail to lynch them. They knew little about the Klan, but they knew enough to be terrified. “I knew that they wore sheets over their head,” Thompson recalled. “That they hated people. That they killed people.” The boys screamed in horror. “We thought we was dead,” said Thompson. “We thought we was going to die.” The hooded men roared into a fit of laughter and shook off their sheets to reveal police uniforms. It had been their idea of a hilarious Halloween joke. More than thirty years later, the memory of that childhood terror still brought tears to Thompson's eyes.43
Police officials told Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Simpson, and the local NAACP leadership that Fuzzy and Hanover were being held only for their protection and that there would be no charges against them. This was necessary, Judge Price repeated, “because of strong race tension resulting from the incident.”44 But not all observers agreed that the men who held these eight- and ten-year-old boys prisoner were preoccupied with their welfare. Indeed, since a local grand jury had only recently ruled that the Union County jail was “far below the standard” and had “no facilities to isolate delinquents from regular criminals, white or colored,” it is easy to understand why the African American community concluded that the authorities did not care what evils might befall the children.45 “It takes no sage to determine how much help a juvenile judge would be to two little Negro boys to whom he referred to twice in his testimony as ‘niggers,’ ” Louis Austin snarled in the pages of the Carolina Times. “When [Judge Price] slammed them in jail and held them there for six days, he was giving them exactly the kind of help he felt they should have.”46
On November 4, 1958, six days after taking the boys into custody, local authorities finally held a hearing, ostensibly to decide what would be done with Hanover Thompson and Fuzzy Simpson. Judge Price, however, had made his decision well in advance of the proceedings. As soon as the boys had been jailed, Price wrote to Blaine M. Madison, commissioner of the State Board of Corrections and Training, to ask whether the Morrison Training School in Hoffman could admit the two boys. When Madison replied that Morrison would take the boys as “emergency cases,” the jurist immediately called a hearing. For Judge Price, the court session represented not an opportunity to hear the boys but simply an occasion to announce their punishment.47
“There were really two hearings,” wrote Chester Davis, a reporter notably hostile to the two boys. “At 2 P.M. on Nov. 4 Judge Price heard the white girls and their parents. At 4 P.M. in the absence of any white parties to the case, he met with the two boys and their mothers.”48 According to Evelyn Thompson and Jennie Simpson, the judge twice referred to their sons as “niggers.” Price claimed that the hearings had been “separate but equal.”49 The boys were not permitted legal counsel. The judge also barred Robert Williams from the courtroom. Nor were the boys allowed to confront their accuser; Sissy Sutton “wasn't even in court to identify them or give any testimony against them,” said Williams. White defenders of the proceedings later argued that the mothers of the boys had not requested counsel, but another local woman “personally well acquainted with the parties concerned” explained to Governor Hodges that “the boys were refused counsel of law.”50
Commissioner Madison argued that neither of the boys had been “held as a ‘criminal’ nor [was] the proceeding deemed a ‘criminal prosecution or conviction.’ ” Other state officials, including the governor, attempted to persuade critics that the boys “as juveniles were not even convicted of a crime, under North Carolina law,” and therefore did not require the legal rights generally extended to other defendants.51
But a written statement sent to Governor Hodges by J. Hampton Price on November 30 stated plainly that the boys “were tried for assault on three charges of assault and molesting three white girls.”52 On November 4, Price sentenced Hanover Thompson and Fuzzy Simpson to indeterminate terms in the Morrison Training School for Negroes in Hoffman, North Carolina. If they behaved well, Price told the boys, they might be released before they were twenty-one.53
On October 21, two weeks earlier, in Raleigh, the North Carolina Supreme Court had finally rejected Dr. Perry's last appeal and ordered the physician's imprisonment on charges of what the newspapers invariably called “criminal abortion on a white woman.” On the night of the decision, Perry received a call from B. J. Winfield, a black sharecropper who lived in a rural area of Union County. For several years Winfield's daughter had suffered from chronic convulsions. Though Winfield could scarcely afford medical care, Perry had always accepted a sheaf of collard greens, a sack of sweet potatoes, or a jar of homemade honey in payment.
“He would speak for the poor black folks,” Winfield said, “and it caused us to love him. You couldn't help but have love for a man like that.” Hearing that the physician had been sentenced to five years in prison, Winfield rather bashfully asked Perry if he had any advice about diet or home remedies for his daughter. Perry insisted on driving far out into the darkened countryside to deliver some pills and dispense instructions. Afterward, as Perry left the house and made his way slowly through the darkness toward his automobile, the sharecropper could hear his soft voice wafting up the driveway: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / A long way from home.” Winfield said later, “I couldn't keep from crying.” When Dr. Perry got home, the state police were waiting to take him to prison.54