Maxton, North Carolina

Maxton in Robeson County, North Carolina grew up around a colonial-era settlement known as Shoe Heel, a name that stuck until it was renamed Maxton in eighteen eighty-seven. The surrounding county has one of the most complex racial demographics in the American South: it is home to a large Lumbee Indian population, one of the largest state-recognized tribes east of the Mississippi, along with substantial Black and white communities. That mix produced one of the odder moments in civil rights history: in January nineteen fifty-eight, Ku Klux Klan leader James "Catfish" Cole staged a rally outside Maxton intended to intimidate the Lumbee, and roughly five hundred armed Lumbee men surrounded and routed the Klan, smashing their light and sending Cole fleeing into the dark. The confrontation became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.