THE MASSACRE AT CAMP HILL THE MASSACRE AT CAMP HILLOne may die of too much endurance as well as too little.
—Joseph Conrad, Chance
In April 1931, just weeks after the Scottsboro teens were arraigned, Tallapoosa County planters suspended sharecropper and tenant credit at their commissaries. The price of cotton had dropped significantly in 1930, and croppers were encouraged to look for part-time work at the new Russell Saw Mill near Alexander City.
Sharecroppers from adjoining plantations met in small groups to discuss the crisis. Estelle Milner, a black twenty-one-year-old Birmingham schoolteacher, party member, and daughter of a Tallapoosa cropper, brought a copy of the Southern Worker to one of these meetings and read aloud about how the Reds were organizing Farm Relief Councils up in Whitney.1
Two brothers, Ralph and Tommy Gray, said they would contact district 17. When Ralph did, Tom Johnson sent Mack Coad, a black Chattanooga TUUL organizer to Camp Hill. Coad brought along Harry Simms, a white Young Communist League organizer.2
The Grays were grandsons of Alfred Gray, a black Perry County Reconstruction senator. Ralph, a World War I veteran, had a reputation as a troublemaker because he’d refused to chop Sheriff Kyle Young’s cotton. The sheriff wouldn’t pay him more than fifty cents a day. Infuriated by Gray’s refusal, Young warned him that “white folks aren’t going to stand for Negroes setting the price of labor in Tallapoosa.”3 Neither ever forgot the incident.
The Grays brought Coad and Simms around to meet the croppers and arranged for meetings to discuss “credit suspension strategy”—union organizing. Coad also updated them about the Scottsboro case, which by then was before the Alabama Supreme Court. Several of the Scottsboro teens came from sharecropping families.
The longer Coad and Simms remained in Camp Hill, the longer the croppers’ list of demands grew. They wanted to market their own cotton instead of selling it to the plantation commissary merchants, generally called furnish merchants because they furnished supplies to croppers, often at double the price elsewhere—and croppers were not permitted to trade elsewhere. The furnish merchants stored the croppers’ cotton until the prices rose. It wasn’t fair. Day laborers wanted cash payment for picking cotton, and everybody wanted written contracts.4
After an informer betrayed Coad to the planters, croppers were warned that anyone caught associating with him or with the Gray brothers would be evicted. Despite these threats, in April the croppers chose four delegates to represent them at an All-Southern Scottsboro Defense Conference, cosponsored by the ILD and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, to be held in Chattanooga on May 24, 1931.
Neither the white nor the black Chattanooga preachers welcomed these delegates or the others who came from all over Alabama and Tennessee. The police arrested many of them for loitering. Bessie Ball, a local white woman who tried to attend, was beaten by her husband. Their daughter had him arrested, but at trial the judge congratulated him and suggested that next time he use a shotgun on the Reds.5 All the Camp Hill delegates were arrested when they tried to enter the Black Odd Fellows Hall and were detained long enough to miss the event. B. D. Amis of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Tom Johnson were also jailed. The two hundred delegates who managed to get inside, however, voted to establish an ongoing Southern Scottsboro Defense Committee.6 At the same time, the planters made good on their threats to evict any cropper who associated with the Grays. Union organizing threatened their cheap labor advantage—and that was unacceptable.
By July 1, the fledging Croppers’ and Farm Workers’ Union counted eight hundred members. That summer the price of cotton dropped to six cents a pound—one-third what it had been in 1929. The planters announced that they could not extend credit on six-cent cotton—it didn’t even cover the cost of fertilizer. They were furious with the Reds who they believed were encouraging the croppers to make all these demands, and they called on Tallapoosa County sheriff J. Kyle Young to do something about it. He didn’t waste any time.
On Wednesday evening, July 15, 1931, Sheriff Young, acting on a tip from a black informer, took a few deputies to an abandoned building seven miles south of Dadeville, where a union meeting was allegedly in session. Eight croppers were inside, with Mack Coad drafting a petition to Governor Miller to demand the Scottsboro teens’ release. When Young and his men burst in, the croppers created a diversion and pushed Coad out the back door. Young was livid. This was worse than he expected. These niggers were not only making demands but passing judgment on white man’s justice in the Scottsboro affair. He and his deputies roughed some of them up to teach them a lesson.
The following day, the same informer sent Young to the Mary Church outside Dadeville. This time the sheriff brought a posse and surprised 150 croppers in the act of electing delegates to an upcoming Scottsboro Defense Committee meeting in Birmingham. Ralph Gray, the sheriff’s nemesis, was standing guard outside.7 Young decided to make an example of this black man who considered his labor worth more than fifty cents a day. They argued, and as Gray reached for his gun, the sheriff shot him. As he fell, Gray also fired, hitting Young in the stomach. As his deputies rushed him to an Alexander City hospital, Camp Hill Police Chief Matt Wilson ran to a nearby revival meeting shouting, “the niggers have shot the sheriff all to pieces.” The fiery preacher ordered him to “keep quiet,” and assured the congregation that “somebody’s just trying to bring Chicago down here.” Most of the men left however, to get their guns.8
Despite his wounds, Ralph Gray survived long enough to return to his cabin. Chief Wilson’s men tracked him there, killed him, fractured his wife’s skull, and wounded several of his friends. Then Wilson went looking for that black Birmingham schoolteacher, Estelle Milner, who thought she was so smart. When he found her, he beat her so violently that he ruptured several of her vertebrae.9 His deputies arrested thirty-three croppers, including her father, and threw them in the Dadeville jail. Five others were reported missing and assumed dead. Gray’s body was dumped on the Tallapoosa County Courthouse steps in Dadeville and used for target practice—a lesson to would-be organizers.10 One month later, on August 6, fifty-five Croppers’ and Farm Workers’ Union members regrouped to form the Alabama Share Croppers’ Union (ASCU), and divided up into five Tallapoosa County locals. They would never meet again in large numbers under a single roof.
The Reds were to blame, the planters said. They not only pumped up the blacks to make demands, but they told them that the Scottsboro trials proved that white justice was corrupt.11 White men couldn’t allow this to go on.
Chief Wilson told reporters that his deputies found literature in Gray’s cabin encouraging blacks to “demand wages of $2 a day and urging them to intermarry with the white race.” He hadn’t thought it necessary to intervene when members of his posse shot croppers as they tried to escape, and yes, he’d ordered Gray’s cabin and the Mary Church torched.12 Wilson’s deputies searched in vain for Mack Coad, who by that time was well on his way to Atlanta.
Local whites did not consider the police chief’s methods excessive since they believed that black insurrection was being encouraged by these outside agitators who were taking full advantage of the Scottsboro situation. Most whites never imagined how completely Scottsboro changed the calculus. That single case came to represent every injustice that blacks had ever suffered. Scottsboro called up issues of disenfranchisement, racial and labor discrimination, lynching, violence, poverty, and the white obsession with female purity. The Scottsboro teens’ defense came to be nearly as important to the croppers as their own demands for labor reform and financial equity. And while the Scottsboro case might be considered in some ways an issue worthy of black self-determination, it had nothing to do with seceding from the United States or with forming a separate nation. Blacks had decided to stay and fight back, and white Alabama was terrified.
Throughout the summer of 1931, as blood flowed in Camp Hill, the ILD was vying with the NAACP over the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. The NAACP’s persistent warnings about the Reds’ deviousness had backfired in July when Eugene Davidson, editor of the black Washington World, wrote that “if [the NAACP] now feels that fighting the spread of communism is more important than fighting white Southerners who will lynch, massacre and slaughter and expect to get away with it then it has outlived its usefulness.”13
At the same time, headlines in the Montgomery Advertiser were screaming “Race Riots and Red Violence” and editor Grover Hall was insisting that “the simple ignorant Negroes have been duped by wily pied piper Communists who came in solely to stir up trouble and to fleece the poor sharecroppers of their earnings.” Hall did not acknowledge the hunger, poverty, and oppression that croppers had been enduring for decades, but he did publish unsubstantiated rumors about croppers stockpiling machine guns and dynamite in preparation for race war.14
When the white Birmingham Herald erroneously reported that eight carloads of black communists were coming from Chattanooga to Dadeville to break their comrades out of jail, whites organized vigilante patrols.15 By the time the white Birmingham News reported that the eight cars were actually a black funeral procession, it was too late—the damage was done. One Tallapoosa resident had already appealed to the Klan in an open letter in the Dadeville Record, asking the Knights to take action to “quiet disturbances among our Negroes in Tallapoosa County and to stop the flow of outside influences.”16
Whites rejected the possibility that blacks might be fighting back on their own initiative. Ben Cothran, white president of Alabama’s Commission on Interracial Cooperation, appealed to Tuskegee Institute superintendent Robert Moton to take a delegation of “prominent and respectable Negroes” to Dadeville and discourage the croppers from “going Red.” Moton did as he was asked, but he and the “respectable Negroes” were completely ignored.17 The croppers had finally found an organization willing to fight alongside them as comrades, and they were not interested in speaking with emissaries from the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), the NAACP, or Tuskegee. Where had they been when the Scottsboro Boys were facing the electric chair?
On July 18, 1931, ILD’s white Southern Counsel George Chamlee represented the forty-seven Camp Hill croppers who’d been arrested and charged with everything from assault to conspiracy to commit murder. The following day the New York Times reported that J. Louis Engdahl, ILD national secretary, held Sheriff Young responsible for Ralph Gray’s murder.
“The Negroes of this county have been organizing against miserable starvation wages,” he said. “The plantation owners planned to cut the sharecroppers off from all food advances, giving a small number of them the alternative of working in the fields or in saw mills at wages of 60 to 90 cents a day. The lynchers went after the members and leaders of the union. . . . The Sheriff’s posse is now hunting and shooting down Negroes in several towns in that section, as well as raiding and shooting tenant farmers in their homes. This is a deliberate slaughter.”18
Engdahl demanded “immediate cessation of the terror let loose by the landowners and the police against the sharecroppers.”19
White Alabamians, still smarting over the national sense of outrage that Scottsboro provoked, were incensed. Their rage would have had no bounds had they read a black Chicago Defender editorial opining that “the Negro in Alabama has no vote and can have no voice except in protest by motion or petition. If a Negro turns communist in Alabama . . . he is driven to his new alliance by a despair he can hardly control.”20
A few weeks later, George Chamlee and his ILD white cocounsel Irving Schwab won reprieves for thirty-three of the Camp Hill prisoners due to insufficient evidence.21 One of these men was Estelle Milner’s father. The charges were never refiled. By September 1931, the last fourteen croppers were released and all charges against them dropped. Dadeville had decided not to invite the kind of scrutiny Scottsboro had.22
In August, the NAACP hired Howard Kester, then southern secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, to investigate the Camp Hill Massacre. Local white farmers told him that the five croppers reported missing were dead, and one of Sheriff Young’s deputies explained to him that “the Sheriff heard the niggers were having a Communist meeting and we went with him to break it up.” When Kester asked why, the deputy said, “the Communists want to take peoples’ property away and divide it up,” assuring Kester that “[everything] was fine down here until the Chattanooga Reds came and told the Dadeville niggers that everything in the South was made with nigger labor and that they ought to get some of it back.”23
John Henry Calhoun, a journalist with the Associated Negro Press, reflected: “Most Southern whites who want to be fair concede that the Scottsboro Boys are victims of a condition brought about by race feeling [i.e. discrimination]. But the methods of the communists have made the Southern white close his eyes to justice. The same is true for the croppers . . . the Southern white will interpret any organization among the Negroes which implies force—even that of collective bargaining, as a threat against whites.”24