Good Morning POU! Today’s entry is pretty riveting.
Nat Crippens, North Nashville community historian
A tense confrontation: It was very early in my life. I was seven years old and I lived on a street of shotgun houses, all of them made of wood, of course. And the boy next door to me when I was seven was seventeen at the time.
He had worked in a white family since he was twelve. And, apparently the family had a daughter who was eleven when he was twelve. And they grew up together. And most of the time during the summer, only the two of them were in the house together. And, inevitably, two kids like that sort of formed a closer relationship than they perhaps should have.
And the father forgot some papers. He was a businessman and came home one day and the boy ran out the back door. And obviously he had been engaged in the most taboo thing in the South at that time. And the only place he ran was home. And that happened in the morning, and by mid-afternoon, the word was around town in both the white and black communities that they were going to lynch him and string him up in front of the big black church, which was about a block from my home.
And both whites and blacks all afternoon were engaged in buying ammunition. And the only place to get ammunition was from a white hardware man. And whites criticized him for selling ammunition to blacks. And he said, “I’m in business. I’m going to sell to whoever will buy.”
Anyway, about dusk dark, people began to collect in a vacant lot near my house. And by seven or eight o’clock, there were perhaps four or five hundred people down there, all male, all white. And during the afternoon, my father, who happened to be a minister, and about twenty or thirty other blacks congregated and had prayer meeting in our house. And they got whatever weapons together that they had. And they went next door to where this boy lived and they had vowed that if anybody came to take this boy, they’d have to take them first.
The resolution of the standoff: The top law official came up to the house next door, talked with the people there and was surprised that they were there. And he finally said, “Let’s cut out all this small talk. We know this boy’s here. We have watched this house ever since he came home. And you might as well give him to me, because they’re going to come and get him.” And my father and the others told him that they knew what the plan was and that they would not give the boy up.
And he got angry and said — now, I heard this from my father — he got angry and said, “It’s cheaper to let one boy die than for this whole community to be destroyed.” And they said, “We’ll take the chance.” And they said, “Well, it’s enough people down there to get you.” And my father and the others said, “There’s enough people to take him. But fifty of them will be there in the morning if they take him.” And he went back down there and this is what I heard, “Let’s go get that N. Let’s go get that N.” I heard that for an hour or so and every time I heard it, I’d break out crying again. And my brother would, too. And my mother started howling, just crying.
But an hour or so later, we noticed the cars by their lights were going in all different directions. We thought they were surrounding the place. But actually, they were going home. They had decided that they couldn’t see in the dark up there what was going on and that they were not going to take a chance.