Steele Secrets by Andi Cumbo-Floyd

Author:Andi Cumbo-Floyd
Language: eng
Format: epub

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By the time Stephen finished telling us what he knew about the events of the past few months, I felt like someone had pulled my lungs out of my mouth, twisted them, and shoved them back in. Things like this didn't happen in towns like Terra Linda. Not in 2014. Maybe 1954, but sixty years later? No way.

Except this really was happening. And I was smack dab in the middle of it.

11

What I knew of the white supremacist groups came from documentaries about the KKK—horses and bonfires and men in hoods—and that movie my mom loved, In the Heat of the Night. In some unexamined part of my self, I thought stories like that were exaggerated, or at least extinct, dinosaurs of an old system. Both Mom and Beatrice were quick to assure me that racism now—at least most of the time—tended to be more subtle, harder for that, but also less violent. People were still killed because of their skin color, they said, but it was harder to prove that. “It’s progress, I guess,” Beatrice said, “but not much of it.”

Yet, apparently, here in Terra Linda, my quiet town of 2,321 people, we had our very own white supremacist group, listed with the Southern Poverty Law Center map of Hate Groups and Everything. The White Citizens Council was homegrown and very much alive, having survived the asteroid of the Civil Rights Movement. A quick search on Mom’s phone told us that these groups existed all over the South in particular. They were created in response to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision to integrate schools. The members of White Citizens’ Councils were violent—if a little richer than the KKK membership, Mom noted. Apparently, a Council member had killed Medgar Evers back in the ’60s, but Mom didn’t share that with me. I found out that fact when I did my own search later that day.

According to Stephen Douglas, the Council in Terra Linda had been around for decades and had been started by two white business owners in the 1950s when black-owned businesses started to catch up with them in profits. In a small town like ours, there really isn't room for two drugstores, but Jim Crow made two drugstores necessary, and the black drugstore was better—it had more things people needed and cheaper prices—and these two white business- men—Mr. Hollins and Mr. Rocket—did not much appreciate that. So they started a hate campaign—flyers in mailboxes, rallies, boycotts outside the store—and all the propaganda was about how the black business owners were trying to steal good, honest people's money and take it "back to Africa" or how the stores weren't clean or safe. They told the white women stories about how black men couldn't control themselves and might rape those white women in broad daylight right in the middle of the store. (The irony of this given what I now knew about the actions of slave owners was not lost on me.) There were bomb threats and fiery bottles through windows.

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