Episode 1: Pistols

Note: This transcript has been generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers. It may contain errors. Whenever possible, we strongly encourage you to listen to the Buried Truths audio.


Hank Klibanoff:	00:00:10	Somewhere around here is where it happened. Somewhere in this beautiful expanse of Georgia woods. Something terrible, tragic, and long forgotten. Except by those who lived it.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:00:28	As I walk through the dry leaves of this forest the sun flickers through the tall pines like a strobe. We’re in Alston, in South Georgia. This land used to be farm owned by a black family, the Nixon family. Three generations of them lived in a wood farm house with a tin roof somewhere on this property 70 years ago. It was a pretty good sized farm, 59 acres. They raised crops, they traveled by horse and wagon, and they relied on a mule named Della.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:01:04	This is where two white men drove up to Isaiah Nixon’s farmhouse in the late afternoon of election day in Georgie, September 1948. They had guns in their hands, they had menace in their voices, and they insisted on seeing the farmer, so Isaiah Nixon emerged from the house. His mother, his wife, his children, watched as he stepped down off the porch and walked toward the men.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:01:33	Understand now he knew them. He’d grown up with them, and they had their guns out? Their intent became clear when they asked Isaiah Nixon two questions. Had he voted? And who for?
Hank Klibanoff:	00:01:53	Now, as I walk this land I can’t help but wonder where exactly Isaiah Nixon was standing when he answered those two questions, when he refused to take a ride with them, and when one of the white men shot him, one, two, three times in front of his family.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:02:13	I’m gonna tell you that story and more about what happened on this election day in 1948. The history that led up to it, and the history that followed it.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:02:25	But now, in these silent woods, I hear the voices of people who have shared their memories with me about that time, that day, this place
Dorothy Nixon:	00:02:37	She begged him not to go because she knew the possibility that he was gonna be killed.
James Harris:	00:02:45	They told him that if he knew what was best that he wouldn’t vote.
Keith Johnson:	00:02:49	I felt like they probably got away with murder.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:02:54	We know who did it, we know what happened, we know when, and how. We know it was somewhere around here, but there is one remaining question. Why? Why did these men, why did so many men like them get away with murder in the South?
Hank Klibanoff:	00:03:14	Who were we? Who were we as a people that we allowed this to happen? That’s our search, and this is our story, because when we understand who we were, we can better understand who we are. This is Buried Truths, I’m Hank Klibanoff.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:03:48	It was the mid 1940s. A loaf of bread would cost about 10 cents, a mortgage was about 50 dollars a month, and most Americans made about 2500 dollars a year, but in the South the cost of living wasn’t measured just by what you could afford. This is the American South post World War II.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:04:15	Black soldiers who helped liberate Europe from Nazis have returned to find they still have few of the rights and opportunities of whites. Daily behavior is still governed by strictly enforced rules of racial etiquette. Bow the head, step of the sidewalk when whites approach, don’t ever look a white woman in the eye, stay out of white schools except to push a mop, don’t enter white restaurants except through the back door, stay out of white homes unless you’re the help, don’t vote with us, don’t pray with us, don’t drive a nicer car than us, just don’t.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:05:01	In Alston Georgia, enter the farmhouse of 28 year old Isaiah Nixon. What we know about him comes mainly from his family, especially his daughter, Dorothy.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:05:20	We were way out in the woods, so when we went into town it was on a wagon, and going to pick up food. Especially flour, and meal, that kind of stuff. They had almost everything else, but if you close your eyes you would have passed through Alston.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:05:41	Alston, Georgia, population 150. Dorothy’s dad, her mom, Sally, her five brothers and sisters lived on their farm where they grew tobacco, cotton, and other crops.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:05:53	Dorothy’s grandmother also lived with them.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:05:56	They had all kinds of products, they even had a lot of fruit trees, grapevines, apple tree, peach tree, it was just wonderful. The farm was on the left, the timber was on the right, so you could just walk across the street almost away from the house maybe 10 or 12 feet, and you can start with the timber.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:06:23	The timber, the pine trees, Dorothy remembers Isaiah Nixon, buckets and a small chipping tool in hand, disappearing among the pines. The trees were fertile sources of turpentine. To harvest it Isaiah Nixon would nail a bucket into the trunk of a tree, then start scraping and chipping the bark until the sap slowly filled the bucket.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:06:52	All those hours on the farm and among the trees, Isaiah Nixon had plenty of time to think about the future of his kids. He wanted them to have more. More fairness, more opportunity, more respect, but ensuring a better life was gonna be tough, because Isaiah Nixon was a black man with aspirations in a white world. In the white supremacist world of this man, Gene Talmadge.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:07:19	Now that is the priorities that veterans are supposed to have in purchasing-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:07:25	Gene Talmadge wanted to be a lawyer, but he never quite made it, so he turned his attention to politics. He ran twice for the state legislature and lost both times. Clearly unpopular locally, what did he do? He ran state wide and became agriculture commissioner. Then he set his political goals even higher. With unbridled ambition his brash rhetorical style started getting him noticed across the South, and eventually on the national stage.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:07:56	You’re the ones that I’m counting on to match that solid glump of negro votes that I know is gonna vote against me.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:08:04	Talmadge presented himself as a populist, a fighter for the little guy. Of course as long as the little guy was white.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:08:11	Gene Talmadge was a disruptive force with an angry message.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:08:17	You read the bus decision? Where the Supreme Court held that negroes could sit beside of any people on your buses. Did you read it? It was decided-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:08:28	Wherever Gene Talmadge campaigned was like the circus come to town, and he was the ring master. Wearing his trademark red suspenders he was trailed by believers who were planted in the crowd, sometimes in the trees, to yell out set up questions that Talmadge would answer to roaring applause, hoots, and hollers.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:08:48	He unfurled fiery speeches against government, federal and state, even as he ran for higher and higher offices in Georgia’s government. By the early 1940s he’d been elected governor three times, and bin 1946 he was running again for a fourth term.
Singer:	00:09:06	Now let’s elect Gene Talmadge, he is the people’s friend. He’ll see that thing-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:09:13	Gene Talmadge, like many politicians of his time owned a newspaper, The Statesman, and he used his newspaper to drive wedges between people. To rally rural voters he railed against them lyin’ Atlanta newspapers.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:09:27	To appeal to poor farmers Talmadge targeted banks and utilities. To create fear among whites, he warned blacks were out to get their jobs. In fact, he warned blacks were out to get just about everything the white man had.
Singer:	00:09:42	We may expect to see our state-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:09:46	No surprise then that when Gene Talmadge was governor the Ku Klux Klan had open access to him and his inner offices. Here’s how Gene Talmadge explains his attitude on race in America in his newspaper. He did so in all capital letters. “This is a white man’s country, and we must keep it so.”
Singer:	00:10:09	So let’s elect Gene Talmadge and bring back once again, that wise administration of the red suspendered man. Let’s pay the teacher’s salary-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:10:26	But politics was far from the mind of Dorothy Nixon back in Alston, Georgia.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:10:31	The whole life was wonderful to me playing in the dirt, and all the little ones running around. We had wood stoves, outhouse, and you know we had pails on the inside at night.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:10:48	She stayed close to her grandmother, Daisy, who owned the farm. Dorothy was in wonder of that life.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:10:54	I helped my grandmother in the vegetable garden next to the house. When the ground broke with sweet potatoes I was excited, and she let me pull them up, and shake off the dirt. Same thing with peanuts. I thought peanuts, for instance, you just go get them. I didn’t know they grew in the ground, and it breaks, and you pull it up, and you shake it, so that was the fun part.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:11:19	The fun part, but she still made time for some childhood mischief.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:11:23	We used to go under the house and play, and my oldest sister, we tried to get the grapes and make wine, but we got caught, and we were little so we didn’t know what we were doing.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:11:38	How did it taste? The wine?
Dorothy Nixon:	00:11:40	I can’t remember.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:11:41	Of course Dorothy still remembers her father, Isaiah Nixon.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:11:51	My father was an only child. My grandmother’s only child. Well he used to bring us these really large peppermints, and if you got yours, I mean that was really something. I don’t remember him raising his voice or nothing. He was just easy going. Sort of introspective. He wasn’t a big man, but he acted like a giant to me.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:12:26	As Dorothy lived her peaceful childhood life on the farm in Alston, over to the West in Columbus, Georgia, was a black man who, like Isaiah Nixon, was looking for a way to move his life forward.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:12:40	In the early 1940s black residents in Georgia weren’t allowed to vote when it really counted, and this man wanted to change that. His name was Primus King.
Actor Primus:	00:12:52	This case came up testing the democratic party primaries–
Hank Klibanoff:	00:12:57	He recounted his story late in life in this recording, but it’s hard to hear, so we’ve asked an actor to voice his words. Primus King was a barber and a pastor, and he along with his friends had come up with a plan.
Actor Primus:	00:13:17	This case came up testing the democratic party primaries, and negroes voting. Several talked about it, but nobody was willing to put a bell around the cat’s neck. I told them, ” I will.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:13:31	The bell around the cat’s neck, or who would be the first black voter to challenge the system? Let’s take a minute to talk about that system. In the mid 1940s, in Southern states, white politicians used a series of devious schemes to keep blacks from the polls.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:13:48	You’ve heard about some of them of course, the literacy tests, the poll taxes, here’s another. While blacks could vote in the general election, they could not vote in the democratic party primary. The democratic party in Georgia openly called that their all white primary, and what they really meant was their whites only primary.
Actor Primus:	00:14:12	I went in there to vote. When I went in the detectives grabbed me, asked, “What in the hell are you doing nigger?” I said, “I’m going to vote sir.” Detective said, “Ain’t no niggers voting here today.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:14:29	The democratic party insisted that it was a private club, sort of like a civic association, and it alone could decide who would participate in its activities. That is, who would be allowed to vote in its primary. The explanation to blacks went something like this, “We’re gonna let you vote. We’re
		gonna let you vote in the general election in November, the final, the most important election when we all decide together.” But black Georgians saw that for the trick that it was. They knew the general election was meaningless because in Southern states democrats made up 80 to 90% of the voters, so whoever won the primary would take office in January.
Actor Primus:	00:15:10	So I walked away to a lawyer. It was three blocks.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:15:14	To the office of a while lawyer, Oscar Smith, to make his case.
Actor Primus:	00:15:19	Lawyer said to me, “Primus do you really want to sue the democratic party? Do you know what you’re doing?” I told him, “Yes sir, I know.”
Actor Primus:	00:15:28	When I got there he said we could sue for 5,000 dollars. We sued, and it came out in the paper that afternoon. “Primus King has sued the democratic party for denying him rights, and privilege to vote because of race and color.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:15:45	That also made Primus King an instant target.
Actor Primus:	00:15:49	Later on an old cracker called me and said, “You must want to be put in the river.” I said, “Well they put so many negroes in the river for nothing, I’m willing to go in there for something.” He hung up the phone.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:16:10	What were whites so afraid of? Well, the math. In Georgia a third of the counties had black majorities. Political leaders feared losing control, and they were willing to whip whites into a frenzy to hold that power.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:16:25	Here’s how Gene Talmadge explained it in his newspaper, The Statesman, “If the door is once opened, and we allow the negro to participate in our primaries, the next move will be to allow them into our schools with our white children.
Actor Primus:	00:16:40	I stood there in court with tears running down my cheeks. I said, “Your honor, I want the right and the privilege to vote for my people.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:16:50	The case was tried in Macon, Georgia. A white federal judge ruled that democrats must let Primus King vote, and then a Southern federal appeals court agreed. Then the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, giving Primus King a historic win.
Actor Primus:	00:17:07	Primus King had won the case. This negro had won in the South.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:17:13	And with this victory a wave of hope spread throughout the black communities all over Georgia, but it would also set in motion a tragedy. The killing of the farmer in Alston, Isaiah Nixon.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:17:27	This is Buried Truths, and there’s so much more to come in this episode, so stay with us. I’m Hank Klibanoff.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:17:35	At this point in our story where do we stand? We know that blacks would now be allowed to vote for the first time, in the 1946 democratic primary.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:17:48	This was unwelcome news for Gene Talmadge and his supporters, but not for Isaiah Nixon.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:17:54	In fact, black Georgians immediately began registering to vote. In Chatham County, home to Savannah, democrats were startled to see black registrations soar over night from 1,200 to 7,000. The Atlanta Daily World, a black newspaper, felt giddy enough to run a headline that said, “Talmadge in a Dither.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:18:16	It was around this time that Isaiah got a visit from his good friend Dover Carter. Dover Carter also lived in Alston and he too was a farmer. Mr. Carter had just come from Savannah, where he had attended a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:18:36	Dover Carter was so taken by their mission to expand black political influence that he decided to start a local chapter back in Alston.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:18:45	One of his early converts, Isaiah Nixon.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:18:55	When the US Supreme Court sided with Primus King it enraged Gene Talmadge because it meant that his political foes, the negroes, could now line up to vote against him, in what had once been an all white primary.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:19:10	What really got Talmadge upset – that stunning decision landed just three weeks before the 1946 primary.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:19:26	Gene Talmadge decided he needed a new strategy to stop blacks from voting. He met with a klansman, the Exalted Cyclops. They discussed what they could do. Talmadge himself came up with an idea. Without speaking, he picked up a pencil, he tore off a piece of paper, and he wrote one word on it. Pistols.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:19:49	I wanna thank the Atlanta Journal for coming out about two months ago and-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:19:56	So now, with just a week to go till election day, Gene Talmadge gave this speech. As you’ll hear he was not giving up on the idea of an all white primary.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:20:06	Of a democratic white primary in Georgia.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:20:11	Talmadge spoke during a thunderstorm.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:20:15	Now what do my opponents say? They say that it’s the law, and negroes will vote in the primary this year, next Wednesday. What do I say? I say it’s the law this year, and some of the negroes will vote. The fewer the better. But I am sure of this, if I’m your governor, they won’t vote in our white primary the next four years.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:20:53	And so around this time the Talmadge forces, and voting officials sympathetic to Talmadge, began removing names of black registered voters.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:21:03	The FBI would later estimate that 50,000 blacks in Georgia had been purged or pressured into not registering – some after being peppered with random vague questions about democracy, others after being asked to recite parts of the Constitution. The purge became so obvious that pretty soon FBI agents were swarming Georgia, investigating not just the county voting officials, but Gene Talmadge himself. The big question in the days before the election was which would come first, the election of Gene Talmadge, or his indictment?
Hank Klibanoff:	00:21:45	In the final days of the campaign the intimidation continued. On the Sunday before the 1946 primary, in Fitzgerald, Georgia, black worshipers at eight different churches arrived to find signs on the doors that read, ” The first negro to vote in the white primary will never vote again.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:22:10	Election day approached, and then in July 1946, Gene Talmadge won. He’d take the democratic primary, and he’d win in November too, but Gene Talmadge would never live to take office. You might think that after this election the racial violence would take a break, but it didn’t. Five days later a mob of white men in Monroe, Georgia, committed what was probably the state’s most heinous racial killing. The execution of two black couples at Moore’s Ford Bridge.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:22:57	In a case directly related to voting, over in Butler, Georgia, four white men showed up at the family home of a World War II vet, Maceo Snipes. He’d been the only black person to vote in Taylor County. The men called him outside, then shot and killed him.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:23:19	The same week, a young student at Morehouse College sent a letter to the editor to the Atlanta Constitution. He decried the unfair and unequal ways that black citizens were being treated. It was his debut in the national debate over race. He signed his letter M.L. King.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:23:55	Back in Alston, Dover Carter was undaunted. The man who recruited Isaiah Nixon to the NAACP was on a roll. Within just a few months after starting his local chapter, he’d signed up 74 members in and around Alston. He’d seen too much to turn back now.
Aaron Carter:	00:24:14	I remember him telling me stories of actually seeing –
Hank Klibanoff:	00:24:18	This is Dover Carter’s son, Aaron.
Aaron Carter:	00:24:20	Actually seeing… and individuals being whipped, and beaten up, and so I think the injustice that he saw was the thing that motivated him.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:24:35	Now Dover Carter was better off than most blacks in Alston. He owned his own farm and he could be seen driving through town in his pickup truck. His son, Aaron, tells us he was serious, religious, and curious.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:24:59	Back during the campaign for governor in 1946 if you listened carefully you might have heard something.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:25:06	I’m proud they are. I wish that our colleges –
Hank Klibanoff:	00:25:09	Gene Talmadge was sick.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:25:15	– had room for more, but they’re overcrowded.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:25:16	Gene Talmadge was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, internal bleeding, and other diseases.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:25:22	In this county, and I’ve only found one county in Georgia-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:25:27	Yes, Gene Talmadge was an alcoholic, and he was dying, and just before Christmas, in December 1946, weeks after his election, and weeks before he’d become governor again, Gene Talmadge died.
Eugene Talmadge:	00:25:41	Just wait, we’ll get to it. Now you know that was about what I announced on. What I announced on –
Hank Klibanoff:	00:25:47	This led to one of the more bizarre political episodes in Georgia’s history, because over the next couple of months three different men would claim to be the rightful air to the governor’s office. More on that later.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:26:01	For now, here’s what’s important to know. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the lieutenant governor, Melvin Thomson, should take the office. It also ordered a special election for governor for September 1948, but the Talmadge dynasty wasn’t going away quietly. One of the candidates running for governor – Gene’s son, Herman.
Announcer:	00:26:24	The president of the United States.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:26:30	But you really can’t talk about this period in the South without remembering what was happening nationally, and in Washington D.C., as we headed into the next presidential election. Harry Truman had become president after FDR died, and now he was running in his own right, and a very large question was where Truman would take the democratic party, and the White House.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:26:54	Would it be towards civil rights? Or toward the segregationist views of the Southern democrats who controlled the Congress? Truman made his views clear in June of 1947, when he became the first president ever to address the NAACP symbolically on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:27:13	He did it in front of more than 10,000 people.
Harry Truman:	00:27:17	Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the harrowing fear of intimidation, and I regret to say, the threat of physical injury and mob violence.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:27:29	He said the nation could no longer afford a leisurely attack on prejudice and discrimination.
Harry Truman:	00:27:36	We cannot wait another decade, or another generation to eliminate these evils. We must work as never before to cure them now.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:27:46	So Truman speaks of a cure for prejudice and discrimination. Down South this was not gonna be easy. It would take eradication of a lot more than the disease of racism that had afflicted one man, Gene Talmadge. This was a political virus, and it had stricken the deep South for decades. White supremacist politicians had found Southerners an easy mark for their evangelical demagoguery. And what was that all about? Well, it was all designed to win elections by dividing and conquering. By pitting poor whites against poor blacks.
Harry Truman:	00:28:26	I should like to talk to you briefly-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:28:28	Besides Gene Talmadge there was Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, who publicly said, “The best way to stop blacks from voting on election day was the night before.” South
		Carolina’s Cottonhead Smith, who had walked out of the 1936 democratic national convention because the opening prayer was to be given by a black pastor.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:28:49	These men were only the latest strain of the virus. Before them were Pitchfork Ben Tillman, of South Carolina, Tom Watson in Georgia, James K .Vardaman in Mississippi.
Harry Truman:	00:29:03	The civil rights law-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:29:03	This speech by Harry Truman, to the NAACP, was a direct message to the white Southerners who believed in, and who were still infected by this political virus. “The nation,” Truman said, “Could no longer wait for,” quote: “The slowest state, or the most backward community.”
Hank Klibanoff:	00:29:21	He also cautioned Southerners to not look to their state leaders.
Harry Truman:	00:29:25	Our national government must show the way.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:29:28	The national government, the federal government, and then to close:
Harry Truman:	00:29:32	It is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:29:53	With this speech Truman turned his back on Southern democratic leaders. More than 650 miles away, in Alston, we can pretty much guess that NAACP members like Isaiah Nixon and his good friend, Dover Carter, heard about Truman’s speech and were inspired by it.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:30:16	As Georgia and the nation headed into critical elections in 1948 these farmers continued to meet and encourage blacks to register to vote. But it was still a tense time. Once again, Isaiah Nixon’s daughter, Dorothy.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:30:32	It’s hard to visualize 1948 as opposed to 1960, ’70, ’80, ’90. In those days if they decide that they were going to abuse black kids, or wives, black men and fathers had no choice. We had no rights.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:30:56	Isaiah Nixon, Dover Carter, and the others in the movement were worried. What if the Talmadge dynasty took back control of the government in the ’48 election?
Singer:	00:31:07	The time has come for Georgia to take her rightful place, and we will have a leader when Herman wins the race.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:31:19	Herman Talmadge looked just like his father, and he ran as his father’s son. Herman, or as he was more widely known,
		Huhmun, assured voters the political dynasty would remain in tact and little would change.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:31:34	In the governor’s office, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, they knew they’d still have a friend in the state’s highest office. His appeal? Well, he sounded a lot like his dad. In fact, here’s a part of a speech Herman Talmadge had given while campaigning for his father.
Herman Talmadge:	00:31:52	The other candidates for governor are opposed to a white primary. They know that the loss of the white primary will destroy our Southern traditions and principles, yet these self-seeking politicians would sell out their birthright that our grandfathers fought for, for a few votes.
Herman Talmadge:	00:32:16	Remember this-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:32:26	Herman Talmadge clearly is sounding very much like his father, and if you’re a black voter in 1948 you’re thinking that Herman Talmadge is gonna be just as aggressive in trying to suppress the black vote as his father was.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:32:40	In the closing days Herman Talmadge warned that any blacks who came to polling places with a sample ballot or written guidance on how to vote should be arrested and prosecuted, because, according to Herman Talmadge, any blacks who came to the polls with such a guide, what he called a marked ballot, weren’t intelligent enough to vote.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:33:09	As the ’48 election day neared, the Klan, in open support of Herman Talmadge, marched through black communities in and around Alston. The tension grew from a simmer to a boil, especially among members of the NAACP, but that wasn’t gonna keep them from voting.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:33:28	Isaiah Nixon’s daughter, Dorothy, says he certainly wasn’t afraid of casting a vote.
Dorothy Nixon:	00:33:34	No, he wasn’t afraid, because if he was afraid he would not have gone at all. He would have done what a lot of people did. They did not go and vote because they knew what could happen to them.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:33:51	One of the newest members of the NAACP in Alston was John Harris. He too was a long time friend of Isaiah Nixon and Dover Carter. Now, John Harris was a handy man and also a farmer, and he tells the story of how NAACP members were meeting at a church in Alston just days before the 1948 election when they got a visitor.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:34:18	A white neighbor who walked into the church uninvited. He was carrying something in his hand. He was carrying a whip. John Harris’ son, James picks up the story.
James Harris:	00:34:37	He would come down here when they were meeting, say he would walk in the church, walk from the back to the front with his whip. Said he would walk up the aisle, and on his way out, would take his whip and pop it, and go out the door. They say he never said anything.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:35:03	A whip-
Hank Klibanoff:	00:35:03	A whip at a meeting in a church? It wouldn’t work. These black farmers, John Harris, Dover Carter, and Isaiah Nixon were undaunted. Within days they would do something truly courageous, but they would pay a price for it. You got to hear what happens on the next episode of Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff.
Announcer:	00:35:37	CREDITS: Hank Klibanoff is a former reporter, editor, and coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Race Beat. Today he’s a professor at Emory University. Buried Truths is produced by David Barasoain and Kate Sweeney, edited by John Haas. The executive producer is Christine Dempsey. Please subscribe to the show, and if you have a moment, leave us a review in Apple Podcast. We’d love to hear what you think, and your review will help others find the show.
Hank Klibanoff:	00:36:05	The idea for this podcast came from a class that I’ve been teaching at Emory University in Atlanta. That’s where I direct the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases project. Over the years, I’ve asked my students to research stories like the one you’re hearing, and what they have found is fascinating, even astonishing. You’ll get to hear from a couple of them and you’ll get to hear about the hidden history they’ve uncovered. There was one more thing that I wanted to mention that deserves some extra time. We have a bonus episode about what happened right after Gene Talmadge died. We told you that three men would lay claim to the Governor’s office. This tussle over the governorship made national headlines. It was known as the Three Governors controversy and it was just this almost comical moment in Georgia history, and it showed just what the Talmadge clan, that’s clan with a C, but frankly also with a K. It showed what the Talmadge clan would do to stay in office. Look for it in a Buried Truths bonus episode coming up in a few days.
Announcer:	00:37:15	We had help on this episode of Buried Truths from the nearly 100 students who’ve taken the Civil Rights Cold Cases class that Hank Klibanoff teaches, and thanks to Professor Brett Gadsden who helped create and teach the course. Special thanks to two past students who have stayed with the project, Ellie Studdard and Lucy Baker. If you have any information related to this case, you can write or send a voice memo to stories@buriedtruths.org. You can follow us on social media at Buried Truths Podcast where you’ll find photographs and documents related to the case. Thanks to Emory University and its Centers for Digital Scholarship and Faculty Excellence for their support. We had help from the National Archives and Records Administration and from the General Oral History Collection at Columbus State University, and we had additional help from the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies at the University of Georgia with archive recordings from their Herman Talmadge Collection. Finally, thanks to the actor Rob Cleveland who played the voice of Primus King. Buried Truths is a production of WABE Atlanta.