Unspeakable

The Story of Junius Wilson

Susan Burch,Hannah Joyner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780807884348
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent seventy-six years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including six in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life. Using legal records, institutional files, and extensive oral history interviews--some conducted in sign language--Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner piece together the story of a deaf man accused in 1925 of attempted rape, found insane at a lunacy hearing, committed to the criminal ward of the State Hospital for the Colored Insane, castrated, forced to labor for the institution, and held at the hospital for more than seven decades. Junius Wilson's life was shaped by some of the major developments of twentieth-century America: Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, deinstitutionalization, the rise of professional social work, and the emergence of the deaf and disability rights movements. In addition to offering a bottom-up history of life in a segregated mental institution, Burch and Joyner's work also enriches the traditional interpretation of Jim Crow by highlighting the complicated intersections of race and disability as well as of community and language. This moving study expands the boundaries of what biography can and should be. There is much to learn and remember about Junius Wilson--and the countless others who have lived unspeakable histories.

Chapter 1: One Misstep (1908–1924)

Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up the folds of the garment.

TONI MORRISON, THE BLUEST EYE

In 1910 Mary and Sidney Wilson lived in a house facing a dirt road in the predominantly African American community of Castle Hayne, a rural area on the outskirts of Wilmington, North Carolina. Neighbors’ homes dotted the lane. Their houses, many of which had dirt floors, were heated by fireplaces and woodstoves. Electricity and running water would not come to the community for many more years. Yards in the community were swept clean by brooms made from native grasses. Almost all of the homes were surrounded by vegetable gardens, where residents grew food for themselves and to trade with neighbors. Dirt roads connected Castle Hayne to nearby Wilmington. There were a few wagons and buggies. Most people walked wherever they needed to go. Children and adults fished and relaxed along the Cape Fear River that snaked around the town.¹

In 1905, at the age of seventeen, Mary Wilson gave birth to her first child, a daughter whom she named Asynia.² Soon after, Mary apparently had another child who died shortly after birth. In 1908 she delivered her third child, this time a boy, Junius. Daughter Carrie followed in 1911. Her husband Sidney worked for the railroads as a woodcutter while Mary reared the children and tended the home. Junius’s mother had grown up in Harnett County, North Carolina, the daughter of Nathaniel and Joanne Nixon Foy.³ Before Mary was born, her father worked as a farm laborer in Pender County. Migrant work as a carpenter required Nathaniel to live apart from the family for extended periods, leaving them to manage on their own.⁴ In her husband’s absence, Joanne worked as a farm laborer to support Mary and her five siblings. Sidney Wilson also grew up in North Carolina. His parents likely were James and Annie, who, like the Foys and many other African Americans in the Tar Heel State, farmed the countryside.⁵

A few doors down from Mary and Sidney lived their older neighbors Arthur Smith Sr. and his wife Annie with their four sons: George, Arthur Jr., Jim, and King. In 1880 Arthur Sr. had worked with Mary’s father on the farm in Pender County.⁶ By 1910 Arthur Sr. and his adult sons worked alongside Sidney Wilson as woodcutters. Mary turned to Annie for advice about raising children. The families frequently gardened, collected firewood, and enjoyed free time together. Their bonds of affection and support strengthened over the years.⁷

Although the Wilsons’ resources were meager, their lives must have seemed much more promising than the lives of their grandparents, who were almost certainly born into slavery. In just fifty years, their neighborhood of Castle Hayne had witnessed the enormous change from slavery to freedom. Progress in race relations was less linear; it included both profound opportunities for African Americans seen in very few areas of the South but also times of racial terror and brutal violence. Living in eastern North Carolina at the dawn of the twentieth century, Junius Wilson, his parents, and his community were the inheritors of a complicated legacy of freedom and horror.

FOR MUCH OF THE LATTER PART of the nineteenth century, Wilmington was a city of promise for African Americans. It did not start out that way. During the late antebellum period, the Cape Fear region in eastern North Carolina was one of the state’s plantation districts, growing rice with the labor of enslaved African Americans. The sale of products made from pine trees—such as turpentine, tar, and rosin—served as the other main source of income for the region. Wilmington, the state’s largest city at that time, was filled with commerce and industry. Although North Carolina as a whole seemed modest and middling compared to its wealthy neighbors Virginia and South Carolina, many of Wilmington’s gentry laid claim to the polish and affluence of elite plantation culture.⁸

The Civil War facilitated the emancipation of more than half the population of the city of Wilmington. At the war’s end, the economy came to a standstill: in addition to the loss of slave labor forces, railroad and shipping lines were badly damaged by war. At the same time, Wilmington filled with war refugees, both black and white, from around the South. Food was scarce and sanitation was inadequate. In spite of the chaos of daily living, members of the African American community began to celebrate their freedom and come together. Throughout the state, plans for economic survival and growth were charted. Political leaders began to emerge within the black community. Churches and schools were established.⁹

When the Union army began to withdraw authority from the Wilmington area, whites in the newly emerging Conservative Party (the name often used to describe southern Democrats of that era) attempted to reestablish their control over the county. In an effort to map out how planters and their former slaves would interact, they created the Black Code. The code effectively removed many of the rights that emancipation had promised African Americans. Both police and militias made sure that black citizens followed these rules. The Ku Klux Klan emerged to enforce racial subjugation. White-owned newspapers publicized the Klan, which rapidly grew in strength.¹⁰

In 1867, when the federal government required each southern state to adopt universal male suffrage, Conservative white elites lost not only their tenuous grip on their plantation labor force but also much of their political power. The voting population of the Lower Cape Fear region doubled as African Americans joined the rolls. Despite intimidation by the militias and the Klan, Wilmington’s blacks were determined to claim their rights. In the April 1868 election, Republicans garnered more votes than the Conservatives in four of the seven Cape Fear counties. In the city of Wilmington, the large number of black citizens allowed the Republicans to receive twice as many votes as the Conservatives. Throughout the state, new opportunities arose for North Carolina’s black community, sometimes created by blacks themselves and sometimes promoted by supportive whites. The Peabody Fund of Boston helped communities establish educational facilities for free schools for both white and black North Carolinians. The American Missionary Association opened a school for the state’s deaf and blind African American children, and the state soon oversaw its operation. The future was awash with possibilities for African Americans and new fears for many in the white community.¹¹

Wilmington’s first Republican ticket did not include the name of a single African American. Soon, though, blacks not only represented the community in city government but also made up almost half of the officers of the police force. In 1869 New Hanover County elected its first African American representative to the North Carolina House. Members of the black community became barbers, restaurateurs, artisans, educators, preachers, lawyers, and physicians. Wilmington had an African American daily newspaper, the Daily Record. The city continued to send black legislators to represent the district in the North Carolina Assembly for decades. Many blacks regarded Wilmington as “one of the South’s most successfully reconstructed cities.”¹²

As the years passed by, it became clear to North Carolina’s African Americans that significant change in the racial dynamics of the region would be a long battle with many setbacks and disappointments. Conservatives used techniques such as gerrymandering to dampen significantly the political voice of the states’ African Americans. But in Wilmington, with its black majority, Conservative Democratic rule was never solid or stable. More than in other parts of North Carolina, Wilmington’s African Americans retained some political voice. In addition, they continued to build a strong social infrastructure based on black churches, schools, and professional achievements.¹³

There were renewed hopes in the African American population of Wilmington when interracial alliances began to develop in the late 1880s. During this period, both Junius Wilson’s mother’s family and the Smiths moved closer to Wilmington. Black and nonelite white farmers emphasized their common concerns in order to gain more political power. In 1894 this coalition of Republicans and Populists, called the Fusion Party, was able to end twenty years of Democratic rule. By 1896 the Fusionists gained every statewide office. Interracial democracy seemed to be the way of the future.¹⁴

IN 1898 THE CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS struck back. Angered that white Populists had abandoned racial solidarity to unite with Republicans, Democratic leadership conducted a massive statewide white supremacy campaign in order to end what they called “Negro rule” and “Negro domination.” The Democrats claimed the Fusion government was full of corruption and scandal.

Strategies to split the Fusion alliance were not all based on allegations of misdeeds, however. The Democrats’ most successful tactic was the drawing of a fierce line between black and white citizens. Democrats suggested that Wilmington’s African Americans were publicly disrespectful of whites. Extensive discussion of interracial mixing and black men’s supposed interest in white women ignited flames of suspicion. From white racial fears emerged the image of the predatory and sinister black man threatening the purity of the defenseless women of the white South. Rebecca Felton of Georgia called on the white men of the South to “lynch a thousand times a week if necessary” in order to protect white women from black rapists. Her call fanned the flames of racial hatred and fear among Wilmington’s whites.¹⁵

Alexander Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s black newspaper, wrote a column in August 1898 responding to Felton and her supporters. He argued that, although true rape should not be condoned by anyone, the truth was that many accused rapists were innocent. Sexual relations between black men and white women were not by definition rape. African American men, as Manly wrote, could be “sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is well known to all.” He continued that it was “no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.” The white community exploded in anger. Under headlines such as “Negro Defamer of White Women” and “A Horrid Slander of White Women,” Manly’s editorial was widely condemned in the white press for attacking southern white womanhood.¹⁶

The Democrats exploited racial tensions in order to dismantle the fragile Fusion alliance and end its progress toward interracial democracy. Alfred Waddell, a white supremacist who sought to oust the Fusion government, claimed that African Americans were inherently criminal and that white men who had betrayed their race by voting for the Fusionists were “responsible for the evils of Negro rule.” He promised to protect his version of the South, even if he and his supporters had to clog the Cape Fear River with the corpses of Wilmington’s blacks in order to end Fusionist rule.

The Red Shirts, a militant wing of the Democratic Party, backed up Waddell’s threats by terrorizing both blacks and pro-Fusionist whites throughout the state. The Democrats, with their warning of impending race war, succeeded in almost silencing the Republicans in Wilmington and surrounding areas. By November 1898 white voters, persuaded of the dangers of black political participation, were galvanized to vote the party of white supremacy back into office. African Americans, on the other hand, avoided the polls in large numbers in order to evade bloodshed. In a city with a Republican majority of 5,000 in 1896, the Democrats won the 1898 election by 6,000 votes—a turnaround of 11,000 votes in two years.¹⁷

Although the Democrats had regained political power, many positions in the city government were not open for election and were still held by Republicans. The Democrats were unwilling to allow any vestiges of interracial democracy. The day after the election, a mass meeting of the city’s white men approved the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence,” a document that promised that blacks would no longer have any political power in the region. One of the document’s resolutions explicitly condemned Manly’s column and demanded that the editor leave Wilmington and cease publication of his newspaper. A committee of white citizens, appointed to carry out the declaration, called thirty-two prominent black community leaders to meet with the white committee. Waddell, head of the committee, told them they had been chosen to deliver the message to the black community and the ultimatum to Manly.

Although Manly had already closed the offices of the Daily Record and fled from Wilmington, a mob of as many as 2,000 heavily armed white men bent on violence gathered the next morning. The men marched to Manly’s office, smashed his furniture, poured kerosene over the floors and walls, and lit it afire. This was just the beginning of a day of violence in the city. Although many African American citizens fled to avoid bloodshed, others organized themselves for retaliation. When the white militia met the blacks, shots rang out. A white man fell. Then six black men fell during the heavy fire that followed. For the next hours, gunfire could be heard throughout the city. The white vigilantes moved into the poor black sections of town to “hunt niggers.” Many African Americans left their homes to hide in the woods, where the mob could not find them. One witness reported the murder of an African American deaf man, shot by the mob when he did not hear and thus failed to respond to the white mob’s order to halt.¹⁸

Newspapers varied tremendously in their reporting of the death toll. One paper estimated that nine people had been killed, while another guessed sixteen. Waddell himself suggested that about twenty blacks were shot to death. Some witnesses claimed that more than 100 of the city’s African Americans were murdered. Many people told stories about the Cape Fear River being “choked” by b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Unspeakable The Story of Junius Wilson
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: One Misstep (1908–1924)
• Chapter 2: From One Institution to Another (1924–1931)
• Chapter 3: Walls (1930s–1950s)
• Chapter 4: Renaming, Remaining (1950s–1970s)
• Chapter 5: Classified (1970s–1981)
• Chapter 6: Vital Signs (1980s–1991)
• Chapter 7: Reinterpreting (1991–1992)
• Chapter 8: New Places, New Faces (1993–1994)
• Chapter 9: Almost Home (1994)
• Chapter 10: Judgments (1994–1997)
• Chapter 11: The End? (1997–)
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index