Robeson County: The Lumbee and the Night the Klan Lost
North Carolina
On the night of January eighteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina made a serious miscalculation.
James 'Catfish' Cole had been holding rallies across the region, and he decided Robeson County was ripe for one. He saw a county where Black and Native residents outnumbered white residents, where the social hierarchies of the Jim Crow South were being contested, and where, as he put it in his promotional materials, Indians were getting out of line. Cole scheduled a rally in a farm field near Maxton, built a platform and a speaker system, and hung a single light bulb from a pole. He was expecting an audience.
He got one. About five hundred Lumbee people surrounded the field in the dark. When Cole began to speak, someone in the crowd rushed the light and knocked it out. The darkness erupted. Lumbee men fired guns into the air over the Klansmen's heads and waded in with axe handles and fists. The Klan members, robes and all, scattered into the winter night. Cole fled into a swamp and stayed hidden for two days. His bodyguard fled. The Klan's banner was seized as a trophy.
The wire services had it the next morning. Life magazine ran the photographs. Across the country, people saw images of Native Americans standing in a field holding a captured Klan banner and grinning at the cameras. The Klan never held another public rally in Robeson County.
The Lumbee are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi, with more than fifty thousand enrolled members, and Robeson County has been their home for centuries. They established their own school system in eighteen eighty-five and founded what became the University of North Carolina at Pembroke in eighteen eighty-seven. They have fought for full federal recognition since eighteen eighty-eight and finally received it in December of twenty twenty-five. The night at Hayes Pond is a signature moment of Lumbee history, a story they have told and retold for sixty-plus years.
