Chapter 7

The funeral of Henry Morrow is the basis for this chapter but not the focus. The focus is on how national black leaders like Golden Frinks and local blacks like Ben Chavis and Eddie McCoy turned the tragedy into a cause for action. The author uses Oxford’s courthouse confederate monument, the location of a post-funeral black demonstration, as an opportunity to discuss a time in post-Civil War North Carolina when black and white farmers worked in common cause and gained considerable, but short-lived political clout.

What united black and white farmers (to some degree anyway) in the 1890s? How did the proliferation of courthouse confederate monuments in the early 1900s represent the end of that unity movement?

Why did the Chavis family want Golden Frinks to come to the funeral? What is your opinion of the politicizing of what normally would have been a private matter between family and friends of a beloved departed?

What were the feelings Vernon Tyson and Chad Stem experienced as the only white citizens of Oxford to attend “Dickie” Morrow’s funeral? While they accompanied the procession to the graveyard, they did not continue on to the confederate monument—why not?

To what extent to you agree or empathize with Eddie McCoy’s statements in 2003 to students at the University of North Carolina?