Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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secretly organizing in Tallapoosa County in May of 193 1.<br />
Within a month they had gathered over 700 members.<br />
Under settler-colonial rule, this effort was, of course, conspiratorial;<br />
members were not only pledged to secrecy, but<br />
sworn to execute any Afrikan who betrayed the struggle to<br />
the settlers. Nevertheless it was felt necessary to risk security<br />
in order to rally sentiment behind the planned strike.<br />
Weekly niass meetings were begun, as secretly as possible,<br />
at nights in a local church. But these stirrings had alerted<br />
the police forces. At the sharecroppers' second mass<br />
meeting on July 15, 1931, the gathering was discovered and<br />
attacked by armed settlers. Tallapoosa County Sheriff<br />
Young and a force of planter deputies broke into the<br />
meeting right at the beginning, beating and cursing. Only<br />
the drawn gun held by the chairman of the meeting allowed<br />
people to escape.<br />
The next night, after a feverish day of gathering<br />
settler reinforcements, Sheriff and an enlarged group of<br />
200 armed settlers went "night-riding" to prevent a planned<br />
Afrikan meeting and to assassinate the leaders.<br />
The settlers first targeted Ralph Gray, one of the<br />
most militant sharecroppers and one of the main<br />
organizers. Gray, who had been out on guard that night,<br />
was shot down without parley by the settlers as soon as he<br />
was identified. Badly wounded, he told his compatriots<br />
that he had emptied his shotgun at the enemy, but had<br />
become too weak to reload and continue fighting. The settler<br />
mob left, satisfied that Gray had been finished off.<br />
Hours later, hearing that the wounded sharecropper had<br />
been brought home by car still alive, the settlers regathered<br />
and attacked his house. Gray was killed and his wife's head<br />
was fractured by a beating. But a defense guard of<br />
Afrikans hidden in the nearby field sniped at the invading<br />
settlers; Sheriff Young was "critically wounded" and a<br />
deputy was also shot. (14)<br />
This unexpected organized resistance by Afrikans<br />
pushed the settlers into a frenzy of counter-insurgency.<br />
Taft Holmes, one of the arrested sharecroppers, said after<br />
his release: "They blew up the car Gray was brought home<br />
in. They arrested people wherever they found them, at<br />
home, in the store, on the road, anywhere. All the white<br />
bosses was a sheriff that day and whenever they seen a colored<br />
man they arrested him or beat him up. I was put in<br />
jail Friday evening. The boys who were put in Friday morning<br />
was beat up bad to make them tell - but none of<br />
them told. " Even those mass arrests, general terrorism and<br />
killings failed to break the Afrikan stuggle on the land.<br />
(15)<br />
We can understand why when we look at Ralph<br />
Gray himself. His role in the struggle grew out of his own<br />
oppression, of his own rejection of the all-embracing colonial<br />
occupation suffocating him. Gray had called on his<br />
brothers and sisters to refuse to do plantation labor for the<br />
then-prevailing wages in Tallapoosa County - 50 cents<br />
per day for Afrikan men, 40 cents per day for Afrikan<br />
women. He and his wife would work over the state line in<br />
Georgia, where plantation wages were slightly higher, leaving<br />
the oldest son home to care for their chickens and pigs.<br />
In effect Gray had started a strike of Afrikan plantation<br />
labor, urging everyone to withhold their labor until<br />
the settlers raised wages. So Sheriff Young singled Gray<br />
out; he told Gray that he and his family had to come out<br />
and chop cotton on the Sheriff's farm. Obviously if Gray<br />
submitted then the attempted strike would be undercut.<br />
Gray refused. (16) Then Gray had a fistfight with his<br />
landlord; while the Grays owned their own shack, they had<br />
to rent farmland from the local mail carrier, Mr. Langly.<br />
Incidentally, this was very common. Not only the planters<br />
and middle classes, but even the "working class" settlers in<br />
the Afrikan colony were "bosses" over the Afrikan colonial<br />
subjects. Many landless settlers themselves rented<br />
farmland from the banks and the planters, which they then<br />
had worked by Afrikan sharecroppers or day laborers.<br />
While Afrikan sharecroppers were in theory eligible<br />
for New Deal farm loans for seed and fertilizer, the<br />
common practice in the South was for the settler landlords<br />
to just take the money. When Ralph Gray's check arrived<br />
his landlord (who was also the postman) had him sign it<br />
under the pretext that he'd deliver it to the bank for Gray.<br />
Of course, the settler just kept the money himself. Gray<br />
finally waited for Langly at the mailbox and they got into a<br />
fistfight. Gray was a marked man because he was standing<br />
up. The colonial oppression was so suffocating that despite<br />
any dangers the Ralph Grays of the Afrikan Nation were<br />
moving towards revolution. (17) That's why the embattled<br />
sharecroppers secretly wrote away to the communists and<br />
asked their help.<br />
Afrikans were picking up the gun. That should tell<br />
us something about their political direction. Even defense<br />
trials of individual Afrikan sharecroppers who had<br />
resorted to arms continued to draw attention throughout<br />
this period. The Ode11 Waller case in 1942 created<br />
newspaper headlines and demonstrations throughout the<br />
U.S. Empire. The Richmond Times-Dispatch said: "The