 HOME | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | PAST ISSUES | ADVERTISING RATES | RACK LOCATIONS Margie Horton Ellison A Remembrance of the Late Chatham County Organizer Al McSurely Friends of George Moses (although he was 32 years old he still had no last name because he was legally classified as the chattel property, like a horse, of a Chatham County man named James Horton) published a collection of his poems in 1829 called “The Hope of Liberty.” As beautiful poems formed in his mind, George Moses memorized them, and then spoke them to his White friends and customers. The same year they published his poems, in 1829, another Black writer from North Carolina, David Walker, published his own Appeal to slaves across the south to throw off their chains. Within the next couple of years, the N.C. legislature came down hard on Black writers. By 1831, it was a crime to teach a slave to read, or for a slave preacher to preach to slaves, other than those of his own master. George Moses’ friends plan was to sell a book of his poems to pay for his freedom and passage to Liberia. Their plan to unfetter and expel his genius failed. George Moses returned to selling his love poems and acrostics to sons of rich white families of North Carolina who attended the University in Chapel Hill. The young men made life-long friendships with the sons of other white men in Chapel Hill. They learned how to make and use the law, along with their new friendships, to protect and sustain the profitable system of slavery. Every weekend George walked the 8 miles north to Chapel Hill from the Horton farm near what is now called Mt. Gilead Church Road and sell his poems for a quarter to the students, who would copy them and later read them to their girlfriends, taking full credit for George’s genius. It was not until 1865 when the U.S. Army and its Constitution suddenly transformed the George Moses and his siblings from chattel property to full citizens of the nation and state, that he took his master’s last name, left Chatham, and spent the rest of his life in Philadelphia. When the U.S. Army left, the area had become quite dangerous for any Black citizen who expressed any interest in education. Forces at the University were so concerned that one or two of the new Black citizens would try to get an education at the University that their taxes paid for, a terrorist organization was formed. Col. William Saunders and other ex-confederate soldiers exchanged their gray uniforms for white sheets with hoods, so they could terrorize Black citizens who dared to try to exercise their new rights. At least one brother of George Moses lived through the decades of terror, as did his son, Charles Horton. When his grandson, Charles Horton, Jr., was born in the 1920’s, KKK activity was declining, although there was still a big fence around the People’s University in Chapel Hill for any Black person who might want to teach, or be taught there. The only jobs available were housekeepers, groundskeepers, cooks and laundry workers. In the 1940’s Charlie Horton, Jr. had the good sense to marry Ruth and they had two wonderful daughters--Stella and Margie. Margie Horton Ellison died at the University’s Hospital on October 2, 2009, with her husband, Joe Ellison, an employee of the University Housekeeping Department for over 30 years, at her side. Margie, like her great great uncle, wrote poems of Liberty, Hope and Love all her life. Like George Moses, these ideals never left her mind. Unlike him, she gave away her poems. She never charged a penny for them. She didn’t care about who got credit for her poems. She just wanted to share her ideals. Engaging Voters Like George Moses, Margie was serious about the business of Liberty. She could register voters in her sleep. We somehow got paired up registering voters for the 1988 election, trying to stop George Bush I. Margie had moved back to Chatham a few years before, after a short stay in New Jersey. Stella, her sister, had left the area after the Orange County school authorities came down on her for assigning her students the Autobiography of Malcolm X. But I digress. The School of Law at N.C. Central (where Margie graduated) had just awarded me a law degree. I was 51 when I passed the bar, ready to spend the rest of my life as a civil rights lawyer, so I figured I better learn my way around Orange and Chatham. Margie had a wonderful pace. We walked dirt roads to old houses where African Americans had lived since the early part of the century. She had a list of the registered voters and between each house she gave me a short course on the history of Black people in Chatham. As we knocked on the door, Margie glanced down and said something like: “Robert is not registered. Neither is his brother, Steve.” Margie knew at least one person in each house. We did not leave the house until everyone was registered and was made to understand they would probably go to hell if they did not vote. She spent most of the visit talking about relatives, church, and children—all with great love. By the end of the visit, everyone was registered and committed to vote the Democratic ticket. Margie showed me where the homesteads of several Black families were flooded out by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1967, while creating the northern fingers of Jordan Lake. She told me about the Horton families of Chatham, Black and White. They traced back to William Horton, whose daddy had been granted some of God’s beautiful lands in Virginia, near the N.C. border. William Horton did not want to share his slaves or his land with any of his brothers. He had some distant cousins who had moved near Pittsboro, and they encouraged him to hitch up his wagons and slaves, and come exploit the rich piedmont soil just south of the new University, being built near the cross-roads of the Pittsboro-Hillsboro Road and Raleigh-Greensboro Road. The Horton land where Margie’s ancestors had lived [and died with nothing to show for it, no money and no land to leave to their kids] was not far from where Margie and I were registering Black voters. She was a pure organizer. She wanted no credit. What Margie wanted was Liberty, Love, and Hope. She didn’t organize for money. She organized because it was her life. She had to organize. She had to sing the poems that played in her mind. CRISIS In 1998 the racism in Chatham Central High School spilt out into the rest of the County. Try as they might, school officials from the Superintendent on down could not keep a lid on it. Nooses in the bathrooms. Kids with nooses published in the yearbook. Tape recordings of the principal casually using the “N” word while talking about his students. The evidence was overwhelming. Black parents, students, and teachers were outraged. Margie knew the depth of the racism, and the depth of the anger in the Black community. Something’s got to give. The Superintendent and his hand-picked principal would fight to maintain their jobs. Margie worked for the County Social Services Department, but she was not the least bit afraid. She and her sister-in-Christ, Elder Carrie Bolton, persuaded all three Chatham Branches of the NAACP, almost all African American churches, a substantial number of African American students, teachers and parents, and a healthy number of Latino parents to come together under the brilliant leadership of The Rev. Brian Thompson, The Rev. Carl Thompson, and Elder Bolton. Getting all these groups to work together was a miracle in itself. Margie and Elder Bolton drove up to Chapel Hill and, in about a minute, talked Ashley Osment and me into being the lawyers for the new organization, which they called CRISIS, “Correcting Racial Injustice for Success In Society.” Margie claimed it was a student who came up with the name. But I have always suspected it was Margie. Her ancestor, George Moses, made good money selling acrostics to the young men in Chapel Hill made out of their girlfriends’ names. CRISIS held mass meetings across the County. It gathered evidence from parents, students and teachers of color about the patterns of discrimination in many Chatham schools. One Saturday we wanted to get the word out for a demonstration at the School Board. Margie made a list from her heart of at least 20 African American churches in the County—ranging from out near Bear Creek where she and Joe lived their last few years together; to around Pittsboro where she lived for many years, and in the northern section of the County where the Hortons–Black and White—had lived and worked for almost two centuries. I drove and she navigated the back roads. When we got to a church, she would know the pastor’s name and which side his office was on. She opened the car door and walked to the pastor’s study like she was Sojourner Truth, handing him a bunch of leaflets to pass out on Sunday morning. If the pastor or his secretary wasn’t there, Margie just wrote a personal note and left it with the right amount of leaflets for that particular congregation. In June 1999 we were putting the final touches on the Title VI Complaint to the Office of Civil Rights of the Education Department in Washington. We were going to file it on the July 4th weekend, capitalizing on The Day That Will Live in Irony to Americans of Color, to all who know their U.S. history. On July 3rd I called Margie and said, “The Title VI CRISIS Complaint is ready.” “Good,” Margie said. I could hear her smile through the phone. “Because Del (Turner, her good friend) and I have collected over 800 signatures for it, we have three vans to carry parents, students and pastors to Washington on the holiday, and we want to hand-deliver it to the Department of Education.” That was ten years ago. Although the federal government’s enforcement of civil rights in schools was problematic under Clinton, it was worse than nothing under Bush from 2001-2009. But for 18 months, CRISIS and the U.S. Government’s threat to cut off Chatham’s millions of [Black and White] taxpayer’s dollars, achieved some solid gains in Chatham’s schools. Green Jobs Margie’s love poems were about people and the land. She was particularly in tune with history’s arc and the sense of place. The environmentalist movement’s vision of saving the mysterious chemistry of air, water, land and living beings for the next 2,000 years was an obvious truth to Margie. When Dr. William Barber became President of the N.C. Conference of NAACP Branches in October 2005, he laid out his prophetic vision. “We must,” he said, “Break out of the box the anti-racism movement had been put into that falsely implied the struggle to dismantle racism was a Black thing -- a Black responsibility. White people must be an active part of this central struggle to bring democracy to all Americans. And Black people must be part of the Movement to save the environment.” Margie was aware of the trick bags. If Sunday morning at 11 was the most segregated hour of the week, a close second were environmentalists meetings. She had always made a point of working with White activists in the environmental and peace movements. Her lifetime membership in the Episcopal Church gave her much experience in ignoring the hurtful fallacies/actions of many White ‘liberal’ ideas/acts. With her Buddha smile and patience, she helped many white liberals make the critical step from patronizing Blacks to becoming sisters and brothers in the struggle to dismantle racism. I knew Margie had many White environmentalist friends. I asked her guidance in helping The Rev. Barber and the NAACP develop some working alliances with them, while remaining true to our mission of dismantling racism. “Green jobs,” Margie answered with just the slightest bit of impatience in her voice at my being so green about environmentalism. Margie quickly agreed to help us craft the Green Jobs program for our 14-Point People’s Agenda. The NAACP had the easier job, educating our 20,000 primarily African American members. If Green Jobs meant decent jobs, this has been the main demand of every Black Agenda since Slavery. We thought it would be more difficult for Margie and the handful of Black people active in the environmentalist movement to sell their White friends. Wrong! Margie told me once she was telling a bunch of environmentalists that the NAACP wanted to make Green Jobs part of our 14 Point People’s Agenda and people cried for joy. Black and White. Early one Saturday morning, just after Thanksgiving in 2006, Margie and I drove to Goldsboro to help the The Rev. Barber unveil our 14-Point Agenda to key Black and White leaders of progressive organizations. We both knew most of the people who were coming. Like us, they had been burned at least once by well-intentioned efforts to form a massive progressive Black/White Coalition, which meant changing the arrangement of the music, the solo players in the orchestra, the credits that each section received, and other changes that are sometimes hard for activists. I knew the people at the meeting would be checking out the 14 Point Agenda carefully and checking out President Barber carefully, before deciding whether to cede a little of their programmatic and organizational sovereignty to this new Black-White-Brown Movement. The Rev. Barber’s welcome included a dream he had about Ezekiel and the miracle of breathing life into dry bones laying in the valley. He described his vision of Historic Thousands coming to the General Assembly building on Jones Street in Raleigh on the NAACP’s 98th birthday in February 2007, demanding action on our 14 Point People’s Agenda. There was a moment of silence. A couple of veteran leaders, burnt before by joining Black-White coalitions around programs that lacked an anti-racism core, started to raise questions about a couple of the 14 Points. Margie, who had been saying, “Yes Lord” while the Rev. Barber was prophesizing, interrupted. “I believe God’s grace is in this room,” she said. “I believe it is time. I believe this People’s Agenda is inspired.” “I believe,” Margie Horton Ellison said with quiet force, “We must put aside our cynicism. Let us come together around this program. Let us come together around our brother, Rev. Barber. Let us make this happen.” Silence and grace flooded the room. All the talkers knew to be quiet, as if a new baby had just been born, and we all wanted to give it a chance to catch its first breath. The rest of the meeting was all business. Every leader there only spoke to say what their organization could contribute, how they could broaden the coalition, how they could get Historic Thousands to Jones Street in 10 weeks, or how they could raise money to fund the largest display of progressive political power ever seen in North Carolina. In three short years, HKonJ has become a model for new anti-racism activism across the South. The National NAACP points to N.C. as the model for the next stage in the 350-year struggle to dismantle the racism in our institutions and our minds. To honor Margie, let us name the Green Jobs Legislation for Margie Horton Ellison, and work harder re-building the grass-roots Movement to dismantle racism, get decent jobs, quality education and health care for all. Al McSurely is a Chapel Hill civil rights lawyer and NAACP activist. |