The Affidavits and the Membership List: Phoenix, South Carolina and Longview, Texas

Two Ways to Stop Organizing

White supremacy did not only block Black votes. It targeted the work of organizing itself: documenting abuses, building membership and challenging unjust laws. Two November entries on the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar show the two tools it used, the mob and the ordinance.

Phoenix, South Carolina, November 1898

On November 8, 1898, Greenwood County, a majority-Black county, held a general election. Since 1876, when white supremacists retook South Carolina, Black voting had been rare, and the 1895 state constitution was written to make it rarer. At the Watson and Lake store in Phoenix, the designated polling place, a white man named Thomas Tolbert set up on the porch to take affidavits from Black men who had been turned away. The plan was to use them to challenge the 1895 constitution.

J. I. "Bose" Ethridge, a local leader of the white-supremacist faction, ordered Tolbert to leave, overturned the box of affidavits and attacked him. Ethridge was killed in the struggle, and his allies fired on Tolbert and the Black men waiting to give statements. Over the next day, a mob of as many as 1,000 white men hunted Black residents. At least nine Black people were killed on and after November 9. No one was held accountable.

Phoenix came one day before the Wilmington coup in North Carolina. Together they marked the moment when the Southern states sealed disenfranchisement with blood.

Longview, Texas, November 13, 1957

Six decades later, the weapon was paper. When the Texas NAACP planned its 1957 state conference in Longview, local officials demanded membership lists. A white journalist assaulted field secretary Edwin Washington when the NAACP refused. The city commission then passed an ordinance requiring any organization to hand over its members' names or face criminal fines.

On November 13, Police Chief Roy Stone phoned four NAACP officers, the Rev. S. Y. Nixon, I. S. White, E. C. Hawkins and Rance James, and threatened to jail them. Within 24 hours he did. Across the South, states used the same tactic to expose members to firing, eviction and violence. Alabama banned the NAACP outright from 1956 to 1964.

The Right to Assemble Wins

The NAACP fought back in court. In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the Supreme Court held that forcing the organization to disclose its members violated the freedom of association. That ruling still protects advocacy groups today. The people of Phoenix and Longview were organizers first, and the record of their courage belongs beside today's voter-protection and grassroots work across the South.

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