The Battle of Hayes Pond

Following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education, racial segregation in public schools was ruled unconstitutional. The announcement infuriated white nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which was opposed to desegregation and had historically used intimidation and violence to keep people of color in their place.

A firebrand in the KKK was James W. “Catfish” Cole, a South Carolina resident who took it upon himself to preserve the status quo in Robeson County, North Carolina. At the time, the county had a population of somewhere around 90,000 people, more than half of whom were either Black, or Native Americans who identified themselves as the Lumbee tribe.

After organizing two cross burnings in the county in January of 1958 at the homes of Black and Lumbee residents, Cole announced that he would be holding a massive rally on the night of January 18th in a field near Maxton, North Carolina. Klan members passed out flyers and drove through the local towns with a truck and loudspeaker announcing the rally.

Alarmed by the possibility of violence, Maxton Police Chief Bob Fisher urged Cole to reconsider and cancel the rally. The white supremacist ignored him and, if anything, intensified his predictions of how many Klan members would be on hand to send a lesson to “people who did not know their place.” Fisher reached out to other law enforcement agencies in the area asking for their help to prevent a violent confrontation.

What neither Cole nor the police chief anticipated was the action of the Lumbee people. When word spread of the coming rally, the Lumbee refused to be intimidated and decided they were going to put a stop to it.

The KKK turnout was much less than expected, with no more than 50 members showing up at the field near a small body of water called Hayes Pond. However, there was no shortage of Lumbee for the event. A crowd estimated to be 500 Lumbee, many of them veterans of World War II and the Korean War, quickly surrounded the Klansmen.

Words were exchanged, a scuffle took place, and shots were fired into the air. The cowards in their white hoods quickly turned tail and ran. Many of them had brought their families with them, who waited in their automobiles. Leaving them behind, the Klansmen ran off into the woods, abandoning them to their fate. Among those running away in terror was Cole, whose wife and three children were left to fend themselves. As the carloads of mothers and children tried to leave, some of them got stuck in ditches, and feared what the “savages” would do to them. But unlike their husbands and fathers who thrived on hate, the Lumbee did not vent their anger on women and children. Instead, they pushed the cars out of the ditches and sent them back where they came from.

Nobody was seriously injured in the melee, except for the reputation of the KKK. Cole was later charged with inciting a riot and eventually served a prison sentence. Meanwhile, the Battle of Hayes Pond, as it became known, made a laughingstock of the Ku Klux Klan. Newspapers and magazines nationwide derided them, politicians condemned them, and Cole quickly lost his standing with the organization.

There would be other Klan rallies to follow throughout the South, along with cross burnings and the murders and torture of people of color, all fueled by hatred of someone who didn’t look the same. But at least at that time, in Robeson County, someone stood up to them and said, “Not here, not in our communities.”

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Thought For The Day – The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.