Sallie Nixon Remembered

July 29, 2020,

When the two white men showed up at Isaiah Nixon’s farmhouse in Alston, Georgia, on Election Day in April 1948, they had two questions: Had he voted in the governor’s race (yes) and who’d he voted for (not Herman Talmadge). When he refused their “invitation” to go for a ride, they shot him three times. As he took the bullets, Isaiah Nixon’s wife, Sallie, the mother of their six children, stood on the farmhouse porch and yelled, “Fall, Isaiah, fall!” But he couldn’t get out of the line of fire soon enough and two days later, two counties away, in the closest hospital that would take a black patient, he died.

On Saturday, 72 years later, at age 96, having raised their wonderful children, then been the matriarchal guide for their children’s children, Sallie joined Isaiah Nixon in death. Nothing less mighty or less formidable than Covid-19 could stop her from living.

The killing of Isaiah Nixon was the ultimate form of voter suppression; those men didn’t stop him that day, but they made sure he’d never vote again.

Isaiah Nixon’s story has been well-explored by students in my Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University; one student discovered his long-lost gravesite deep in the Georgia woods. We saw that when all other news organizations let the story disappear, the  Pittsburgh Courier, led by publisher Mrs. Jessie Vann,  built a newspaper campaign in support of the Nixon family. For months, a half dozen reporters and photographers were coming in and out of their Georgia farmhouse, then their Jacksonville home to write about Isaiah Nixon’s courage, about the killing, about Sallie Nixon’s incredible resolve.

The  Courier found the Nixons living in terrible conditions in Jacksonville, then helped raise enough money to build them a new home, designed by a black architect in Los Angeles, Paul R. Williams, whose homes Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, and Danny Thomas were living in. Four of Sallie and Isaiah’s six children would get four-year college degrees and three of them got advanced degrees. So you can see what Sallie Nixon valued.

Listeners of the podcast, Buried Truths, Season 1 — produced by WABE in Atlanta — may remember the afternoon I spent with Sallie. By then, 2017, her second husband (with whom she had another daughter) had died and she was in an assisted living home in Jacksonville. WABE producer Kate Sweeney had found a video of Sallie’s appearance on the television program “This is Your Life” in 1953, which honored the life of Jessie Vann. Sallie had been among the surprise guests who spoke from behind a curtain until Mrs. Vann could guess who she was. Another was Billy Eckstine. Sallie had never seen the episode, so we had a delightful time watching it with her.

Sallie was sharp, quick and could be somewhere between mischievous and barbed in her responses. When I noted that the white supremacist Gene Talmadge had been elected governor multiple times in Georgia, she shot a look at me and all of my whiteness and said, “Yeah, y’all put him in there!” Before I could feel defensiveness welling up inside me, she, her daughter Dorothy and granddaughter Joi quickly erupted in laughter.

On Dec. 18, 2018, WABE (thank you, exec producer Je-Anne Berry and senior producer Dave Barasoain!) hosted a  Buried Truths Live event at the Atlanta History Center. The first exciting thing to happen came as the evening opened. Dorothy Nixon Williams, whose voice and stories carry the podcast from the first episode to the last, walked onto the stage: She got a standing ovation from the 400 people there — this for someone who the audience knew only by her voice.

The second thing happened at the end of the show. So, when  Courier reporter-photographer Alexander Rivera had driven to Alston in 1948 after Isaiah Nixon was killed, he had posed the family in front of the farmhouse and had taken an extraordinary photograph of them.