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