Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

And we’ve got more guns .

3:00 P.M.

Tom Gillespie walked by Windy Wise and up to the ballot box at the City Waterworks. He was a quiet man, a hardworking farmer who had lived most of his life in Athens. There were many southern towns where a man with Tom Gillespie’s skin color wouldn’t be allowed near a ballot box, but Athens was different. It had always played by its own rules—like siding with the Union during the Civil War and declaring war on Spain in 1898, two weeks before Congress did. And even though white supremacy ran deep in Athens, it wasn’t pervasive enough to keep Tom Gillespie from voting. But things were different this year.

Windy Wise watched Gillespie with a growing fear. He wasn’t scared of Gillespie necessarily, but of the GI supporters he represented. Wise was hot—there was no air-conditioning on this steamy August day—and tired. The tension had been rising throughout the day right along with the temperature. GI election monitors had already been beaten and arrested and the whole city felt like a tinderbox. Wise started developing a fierce headache when he began to worry that the quantity and enthusiasm of GI supporters was going to make stealing this election far trickier than expected.

Just as Gillespie was about to place his ballot in the box, the deputy sheriff grabbed his wrist and snatched the paper from his hand.

“You can’t vote,” Wise said. He sounded relatively calm, despite his growing fears.

“He can too!” shouted a GI supporter, who knew Gillespie was on their side.

For a moment everyone froze. The silence was finally broken when Tom Gillespie quietly asked Wise, “Why’s that, Mr. Wise?”

The “Mr.” part of his question was calculated. Blacks did not ask whites “why” very often in the American South, and Athens wasn’t progressive enough for Tom Gillespie to do so without showing as much deference as possible.

“Boy,” said Wise, his volume increasing, “you can’t vote here today!”

Gillespie opened his mouth to protest, but Windy Wise had heard enough. He reached into his pocket, slipped brass knuckles onto his right hand, and slammed his fist into the left cheekbone of Tom Gillespie’s face.

Gillespie fell to the ground, his face bleeding from where the metal on Wise’s knuckles had cut through flesh and chipped away bone. Suddenly his head jerked back, propelled by the force of Windy Wise’s boot, which sent Gillespie rolling out the door.

The stunned crowd outside the Waterworks, which had been gathering by the hundreds in the streets all afternoon, assumed Gillespie would remain on the ground, or at least outside the polling station. But Tom Gillespie had worked hard for the respectability he’d earned over a lifetime. He believed he deserved the right to vote for the men his conscience compelled him to support. He wasn’t finished fighting for that right.

It had been shocking when Gillespie talked back to a white man—especially to a Cantrell man. But what he did next was even more stunning. The proud, bleeding farmer stood up, wiped the dust off his denim overalls, and walked back into the Waterworks.

And that’s when Windy Wise grabbed his pistol and shot the defiant, would-be voter who was walking past him right in the back.

7:00 P.M.

All day, vast crowds had gathered in downtown Athens, hoping to show the Cantrell machine that this election would not be stolen while they sat idly by. Many were GIs, but some were simply supporters and patriotic Americans who believed in clean government and honest elections. Others were people who had been shaken down by the Cantrell machine over the years and were sick and tired of it.

The largest of the crowds gathered outside a local garage and tire shop called the Essankay, across the street from the GIs’ campaign headquarters. It was this crowd, which included Bill White, that Jim Buttram, the GIs’ campaign manager, reported to on the events of the day.

“Early this morning, at the courthouse precinct, Walter Ellis asked to look inside a ballot box before the voting began, just to make sure it was empty,” said Buttram, standing on an oversized tire. “Now, that was Walt’s right under Tennessee law, but Cantrell’s boys beat him up and arrested him. He’s still locked up in the county jail.”

Bill White liked Buttram, the tall grocer with the big jaw, who was wounded twice in a war that took him all the way from Tunisia, to Sicily, to Normandy. Buttram had a just-the-facts style to his speaking that Bill appreciated.

“Throughout the day, we’ve seen repeat voters for them,” Buttram continued. “And intimidated voters for us. And I don’t have to tell you what happened at the Eleventh to Tom Gillespie. He’s recovering from his bullet wound at Foree’s clinic now.”

The crowd broke into a brief moment of conversation, partly in anger at the reminder of Gillespie’s shooting and partly in relief at the good news that he would likely survive.

“Then, at the Twelfth Precinct, Bob Hairrell protested when a young girl tried to vote. He’d made challenges to those kinds of stunts all day. He’d been ignored every time, but this time Bob knew she was seventeen. She even admitted she was seventeen. That’s when Minus Wilburn just hit him across the skull with a blackjack! Then he kicked Bob in the face and let the girl vote!” Bill White had had a few run-ins with Wilburn, and he knew more than enough about the deputy sheriff’s baton and boot.

“Now, the good news is that we’ve won by a three-to-one margin in precincts where the vote’s been counted honestly, in the open.” The crowd applauded tentatively, knowing there was more to come.

“But the bad news,” said Buttram, waving his hands to quiet the crowd, “and it’s very bad news, is that Cantrell’s got most of the rest of the ballot boxes locked up in that jail.” The crowd booed.

“He can count them behind closed doors however he wants, and he’s got his cronies on the election board inside there to certify it. Once that happens there’s no court around here that’s gonna change it. We’ve been down this road before and we know where it leads. The question is, what are we gonna do about it this time?”

Bill White had heard just about enough. He didn’t know what the crowd intended to do, but he had a pretty good idea what they should do. Bill thought back to everything he’d been through: killer sharks; months of starvation; the Imperial Army of Japan. He saw the faces of all the dead Marines he’d buried with his own hands and the enemy troops he’d killed in the name of freedom. It all boiled over.

“Listen!” Bill yelled over the noise of the crowd, which had taken Buttram’s last question as an invitation to argue over an answer.

“Listen to me, dammit!” He didn’t have Jim Buttram’s natural talent for projecting his voice, but Bill White could be heard when he wanted to be.

“I fought with the bravest of the brave and the best of the best.” His voice softened, just a bit. “Nobody could have been any better or braver.” Bill had never talked about the war before.

“They fought for democracy,” he said. “All of us fought for democracy. And I’ll be damned if I can figure out why you’d fight for it over there, and not over here!”

Bill wasn’t sure whether he was moving the crowd, but he could feel his own emotions building.

“You call yourselves GIs?” He looked his fellow veterans in the eyes, repeating the question he’d asked a smaller group earlier in the day. “You go over there and fight two or three years, but you are gonna let a bunch of yellow-bellied draft dodgers push you around? A bunch of hoodlums who stayed here while we watched our friends die?”

By now the applause had begun, and Bill was fighting to be heard over the “Hell no’s!” of an increasingly animated crowd.