I was his assistant, and then he died and I was supposed to succeed him.
But the Negro power structure knew that they couldn't control me, so,
instead of me succeeding Dan Martin, they said that they'd have to have
an election. So they had an election, and I won the election.
[Laughter] And I broadened the scope of the
Political Division to bring in everybody, to let everybody have an input
into it. And, of course, they didn't like that; they wanted a little
structure that they could control. And they couldn't control me, and as
soon as Wheeler got in, he had me put out of my position, because he
knew he couldn't control me. And he stayed in there until his death. And
the way he did it, he just wouldn't call no election meetings. You're
supposed to meet in December and elect officers. But he didn't call any
meetings, because at that time, you know, in the sixties, you had Ben
Ruffin and
Page 38 Howard Fuller. They could have taken
the Citizens' Committee over, because technically everybody who was a
Negro was a member automatically. And they could have walked in there
with their following and just voted everybody out of office. Well, they
were scared of that. And Wheeler continued not to call meetings and so
forth, for fear that Ben Ruffin would outvote him and become Chairman of
the Committee. Wheeler turned around then, and they put Ben on the Board
of Directors of the bank, and then he started using Ben. After Ben got
the job in Raleigh as an aide to the Governor, that gave John Wheeler a
pipeline right into the Governor's office. I was just thinking the other
night,
[Laughter] sometimes the radicals
of today become the conservatives of tomorrow. Thinking of Ben Ruffin,
they had to use all kinds of restraints to keep him in line—I mean, not
doing anything rash that was irrational—and now his job is to go in a
community where anything happens to keep the Negro community in line.
[Laughter] I don't know whether he was
involved or not, but there was a group of them who went out to the Duke
Forest; they were going to burn up the Duke Forest. And it happened that
a white man passed along in his automobile and saw them and came back
and reported it to the sheriff, and the sheriff got there in time to
prevent them from burning up the Duke Forest, which was entirely stupid.
That forest is worth $3 or $4 million or more, and it wouldn't have
served any good purpose to burn it up.