An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

gap we have today, are rooted in earlier policies from the 1930s and 1940s.
Sanctioned by the government, these policies did not on the whole benefit
Black and Latinx peoples. 4
In postwar America, in the aftermath of a world war in which Native
Americans played a major role, including being the population that served
the most per capita in the armed services, they, as they had always done,
were fighting for their place as sovereign people on their land, living in the
US and being forced to integrate in greater ways. Yet, the 1950s consisted
of a series of changes. For example, several thousand Indigenous peoples
moved to cities as part of the urban relocation program in the 1950s and
ended up in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. 5 African Americans
also migrated from the South, traveling to urban centers like Detroit and
Oakland. The great migration did not safeguard them from white
supremacy, however, and Africans Americans still held a diverse set of
views of Indigenous peoples. Perhaps no event held more sway than the
Lumbee resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in January 1958.
In early January 1958, the Klan placed a burning cross in the front yard
of a Lumbee family’s home in North Carolina. They, along with other
Lumbees, were infuriated. One man named Sanford Locklear, who became
a leader of the resistance, sought to meet them head on because, as Lumbee
historian Malinda Maynor Lowery puts it, “the Klan not only was insulting
Indian people but was infringing on Indian land.” 6 On January 18, 1958,
Catfish Cole, a local Klan member, decided to hold a rally at Hayes Pond.
In attendance were about fifty Klan members, including women and
children. They were soon surrounded by some five hundred Native people,
mostly military veterans and some women, all armed with guns and knives.
The Native people started firing guns in the air, and the Klan members ran
into the swamps and ditches. 7
The moment was remembered fondly by Black activists, including
Robert F. Williams, author of Negroes with Guns, who fled the US in 1959
to Cuba and later China to avoid trumped-up charges of kidnapping.
Writing for the Chicago Defender, Langston Hughes, perhaps our greatest
Black American poet, wrote about how the Lumbee Indians fought off the
Klan in North Carolina. In a short, satirical story, Hughes narrates a
fictitious conversation between himself and a person named Jesse B.
Semple (often spelled “Simple”). The story is essentially a discussion of the
relative merits of violence and nonviolence, and the approaches used in