A Decision of Principle by Mick Brown

Seven-feet two-inches tall and desperate, Bill Simpson was one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. It was 1993, in a city in East Texas called Vidor. A city of some 10,000 people, Vidor had been founded in the 19th century by a man named C S Vidor — the father of King Vidor, the Hollywood film director — a rough and tumble logging town, little more than a row of bars beside a railway track, that had earned the name “Bloody Vidor” because of the fistfights, until a campaign by the Baptist Church turned it dry. It was also, historically, a “sundown town” — a term to describe places throughout the American South where racial exclusion was enforced by local legislation or, more commonly, threats of violence. There had once been a sign on the road into town warning “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Vidor”. As late as the Seventies, the Ku Klux Klan had run a bookshop on Main Street; members openly drove around the town in pick-up trucks, dressed in hoods and robes, and the “Grand Dragon” of the Texas Klan, AW Harvey, had lived there until his death a few years previously. For as long as anyone could remember, no black person had

lived in Vidor. No black person, that is, until Bill Simpson moved in. What had brought Bill to Vidor was a class action suit ruling that all federal housing projects in East Texas should be desegregated. Vidor was chosen as the first town where the new law was to be tested. It was a decision of principle, that a town that had once been a centre of Ku Klux Klan activity would have a black resident — whether it liked it or not. The new law had served as a rallying call to KKK factions throughout eastern Texas. Robed and hooded members had gathered on the steps of the county seat, Orange, vowing to keep Vidor white, and a cross had been burned on private land.

Bill had been living on the streets of the nearby city of Beaumont when a local church group had arranged a home for him in Vidor. In fact, he was not the first black man to be moved into the town. John DecQuir, an elderly diabetic, had arrived a few weeks earlier, announcing his intention to spend his last days peacefully watching TV wildlife programmes and reading the Bible. His arrival had been preceded by the Klan posting leaflets through the doors of every house on the project, a collection of some 70 modest bungalows

situated on a site at the edge of town, ringed by a link-wire fence, warning of dire consequences for anyone who made their new neighbour feel welcome. DecQuir spent only one night in his new home before moving out. Bill Simpson was made of sterner stuff.

I arrived in Vidor the day after Simpson moved in, and found him in his new home, sitting on a battered old reclining armchair, smoking and watching television. A police car was parked outside the bungalow — not to intimidate, but to protect him. And there it would stay, dutifully trailing Bill whenever he walked off the project and down the street to a nearby grocery store. There and back. There and back. An odd, dispiriting ritual.

“I’m just another man trying to better himself,” Bill told me. He didn’t want to make enemies. He just wanted a chance to get back on his feet. “I’ve had this racial bullshit shoved down my throat everywhere I’ve been, but I’m not afraid of anything. The only thing I’m afraid of is the Lord Jesus Christ.”

It would be wrong to think that everybody in Vidor was hostile or unwelcoming. Over the next few days, some neighbours on the project, defying the threats of the Klan, went out of their way to welcome Bill, inviting him into their homes. (But not the woman who lived opposite, who when I suggested she might at least say “Hello” to him told me, “The only way I’d say hello to a nigger is with a baseball bat.”) The proprietor of a Mexican restaurant had organised a rally called “Thumbs Up” to promote pride, spirit and unity in the city, which without explicitly mentioning Bill Simpson was committed to promoting a positive attitude that, its organiser told me, “would make colour irrelevant”. Around 1,500 people had turned up to show their support.

But one didn’t have to scrape far beneath the surface to find bigotry and hatred. One man I spoke to boasted that he planned putting up a new sign on the road into town, “‘Support Sickle Cell Anaemia’ — because that’s the disease blacks get, y’see...?”

The KKK was no longer the presence in Vidor it had once been. In the Seventies, a new mayor passed an ordinance forbidding lighting fires inside city limits and sacked a policeman who had been attending Klan rallies in his police car. (The Klan responded by burning an effigy of the mayor on Main Street.) But you didn’t need to look far to find them. In the local diner each day, a group of men took their regular seats at the back, drinking coffee, smoking and looking up whenever a stranger walked in. In another context you might have called them “good ol’ boys”, but with their leathery faces and sour expressions they looked like the kind of men you would see on newsreels from the Sixties in the Deep South, punching and kicking any black person with the temerity to enter segregated restaurants or cross school picket lines. When I asked after the Klan, a man sidled over to my table, produced a membership card and launched into a diatribe about blacks, liberals and homosexuals and how America should be a “separatist” nation — “like Britain was during the war”. He evidently had a particular affection for Britain: he had been born, he told me, on the same day that an RAF fighter pilot had been shot down, “and I kind of took that personally”. Personally? Did I know anything about reincarnation, he asked. Did he mean, did he think...? He nodded his head slowly. “Yup...”

The following day, a man came into the diner dressed in a crisp uniform shirt, emblazoned with a cross embroidered with drops of blood — the insignia of the KKK. This was Michael Lowe, the leader of a faction called Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based 250 miles away in Waco. He worked the room like a TV evangelist, with a Pepsodent smile and a talcum powder handshake, passing out leaflets and glad-handing the good ol’ boys. The Klan, he told me, had a bad reputation, “because of the media”, but the days of cross burnings, threats and whippings were passed; the Texas Knights of the KKK were “lawabidin’ citizens”, a political party in the making, “respectable” — at least, it appeared, if “respectability” meant eschewing the “n” word and instead referring to “negroes”.

Another faction, the White Camelia Knights, based in Cleveland, Texas, 74 miles away, had been the most vociferous, and the most threatening group in opposing the Vidor desegregation project.

When I telephoned Charles Lee, the group’s Grand Dragon, to arrange a meeting, the first question he asked was whether I was working with a photographer and whether I wanted him to bring his robe. He suggested meeting at a filling station on Main Street. “You’ll recognise us.”

It was a Saturday. The “Thumbs Up” campaign had organised an auto rally. A stage had been set up on a square outside the town bank; a band was playing country music and the streets were thronged with people.

An old International Harvester school bus painted gunmetal grey, and with metal grilles at the window, turned into the filling station where I was waiting. The words “White Camelia Knights” were stencilled on the side.

Some 30 people got out of the bus, cloaked in hoods and robes, among them a hooded woman holding a baby. Others were dressed in combat fatigues and black berets. They swaggered around the forecourt, waving at traffic. Some motorists honked their horns. One wound down his window and shouted “Go home!” A hooded figure shouted back. “We are home.”

Charles Lee was a small, ginger-haired man dressed in a “White Power” T-shirt. He told me to follow the bus to a nearby park, where we sat at a picnic table, Lee flanked by a hulking thug in combat fatigues. I already knew what he would say: separate housing, separate education, the “awakening” of “white, Christian America”, the threat — or promise — of a race war. He handed me a Klan newspaper with the headline “Slavery Benefited Negroes: Did Great Harm to Whites”. Did we have “a ‘nigger problem’ in Britain,” he wanted to know. The thug laughed. “Racist” is a word that is bandied around so casually now, an all purpose epithet in the tiresome and acrimonious game of identity politics. But here was racism in its most undiluted, rancid and poisonous form. Racism that threatened Bill Simpson every day.

Bill wasn’t in town to see the White Camelia Knights strutting outside the filling station in their hoods and robes. He only left the project when he needed to. He wasn’t in Vidor trying to make a statement, he told me; he just wanted to get himself together financially, spiritually and physically. “I’m just looking for a home.”

I left Vidor after a week. When I passed by to say goodbye for the last time and wish him luck I found him sitting in his chair, smoking and watching the television — just as he had been on the first day I’d met him. It was a couple of months later that I read the news report. Bill, it said, had “just got tired” of wondering what abuse he would hear next from a passing car as he walked down the street — wondering when it might be something worse than just abuse — and had asked to be rehoused, back in Beaumont. On his second night in the city he had been held up at gunpoint, robbed of the few dollars in his pocket, and shot dead. His killer was black.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and I’m still no clearer in my mind about how to make sense of it — if you can make sense of it. So don’t ask me what the trials, the bravery and the death of Bill Simpson say about America or race, or God, or cruel irony, or how karma doesn’t always play out the way you expect it to. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t. It’s just what happened. ○