Kitchen Table Crusader

Halifax, Va. — The white men who ran Halifax County a decade ago didn’t have room for Cora Tucker in their monthly rituals. 

The boys in the audience grabbed most of the chairs in the Board of Supervisors’ meeting room. Then they plopped their briefcases and hats onto the empty ones. Nobody offered her a seat. 

Tucker, shrunk by cancer, leaned on a cane or crutches at the back of the room. 

“Then one day hell got in me,” she remembers. “And I sat on this man’s hat in the seat.” 

Everybody jumped up — in one motion, as if die seats had become electrified. They grabbed for their papers, their briefcases, their hats. Tucker’s victim plunked his hat in the trash. 

 

Home-Style Hell-Raiser 

Cora Tucker is a short woman with a wide brown face and dark eyes. She laughs a lot, sometimes mischievously, sometimes in an ear-piercing cackle, her mouth opening wide and her gold tooth flashing. Her voice turns syrupy-sweet when she gets a call from her granddaughters who live with their mom and dad in a trailer behind her brick home. “Hello, Sugar,” she coos. 

Her voice can boom, too. For years now, it’s been the voice of political confrontation in this tobacco-growing Southside Virginia county. Her voice has helped awaken black voters from the long dark nights of Jim Crow. And it has angered many — whites and blacks — who don’t want a loud black woman making waves and shaking up the old order. 

Flat out: Cora Tucker’s a hell-raiser. 

“Change don’t come from the top,” Tucker said. “You have to pull the grass up by its roots.” 

Tucker, 47, started Citizens for a Better America in 1975 to promote change in Halifax County and South Boston. She runs the grassroots organization from her three-bedroom home north of the town of Halifax, close enough to the Norfolk and Western tracks to feel the freight cars rumble by. 

Her kitchen table is cluttered with newspapers, documents, letters. Her new telephone book is already dog-eared. A television drones all day in her kitchen. She doesn’t watch it much, but she likes the way the noise fills her empty home. Her nonstop pace helped to break up her marriage last year. 

Tucker’s crusades against back-room politics, voting discrimination, and uranium mining have brought her success and rewards. Jimmy Carter once appointed her to a presidential commission on women’s issues, and big-name politicians like presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis send her Christmas cards. 

Last fall her anger at a prominent state legislator helped swing unheard-of numbers of traditionally Democratic-voting blacks to his Republican challenger. 

Even when Tucker hasn’t gotten what she wanted, however, she has made her voice heard in Halifax County. She’s forced whites and blacks to think about race and racism, power and powerlessness. 

The triumphs haven’t come easy. People have spit in her face, threatened her life, slashed her tires. The area’s conservative newspaper, the Gazette-Virginian, has blasted her work for social change as extending the “gimme” hand. 

“She’s black, she’s a woman, and she knows it,” said the paper’s editor, Keith Shelton. “All you got to do is have a black middle-aged woman screaming ‘civil rights’ and you got feds all over the place.” 

 

Black Land, White Stronghold 

Halifax County sits deep in Virginia’s Southside along the North Carolina line. In the center is the county seat of Halifax, which is dominated by an old brick courthouse. State Sen. Howard Anderson Sr., whose family has dominated courthouse politics for years, still has an office there with a portrait of Robert E. Lee over the fireplace. 

Six miles down Virginia 501 is South Boston, a small city of tobacco warehouses and factories. Between the town and the city is a strip of fast-food restaurants, shopping centers, and motels. 

Together the county and the city have about 37,000 people, but the population has been shrinking as young people looking for jobs head for Richmond and other large cities. 

The area, which has more than 17,000 black residents, is rich in black history. Some of the first black-owned land in the New World was in Halifax County. 

But in this century, Halifax was a stronghold of the Byrd political machine that controlled Virginia for decades by keeping blacks and poor whites away from the polls. Such tight control by the same group of white men was demonstrated most clearly in 1979, when it was learned that party bosses had inadvertently re-elected a dead man to the local Democratic committee. 

Area leaders describe local race relations these days as progressive. Yet many blacks in Halifax and South Boston remain poor, living in dilapidated houses and working low-paying, dead-end jobs. 

Tucker says prejudice thrives below the surface. “People like black folks who say ‘Yes sir’ and ‘Yes ma’am’ and know how to stay in their place. And Southside Virginia is probably the most famous place in the world for that.” 

Tucker says grassroots organizing is the best way to fight racism. In recent years she’s been a leader in a surge in black voting strength in Southside, as the last vestiges of the poll tax and literacy tests have fallen away. 

That power displayed itself last year when Tucker opposed the re-election bid of longtime state legislator Frank Slayton, a South Boston Democrat. Tucker was furious at Slayton for suggesting that two men he was defending in a civil rights lawsuit had been horsing around when they had thrown a rope over a tree and talked about lynching a black man. 

She had always supported the silver-haired Democrat, but last fall she stumped for his young Republican opponent, Mark Hagood, to show Democrats they can’t take black voters for granted. 

“If we’re gonna get our ass kicked, we just as well get our ass kicked by a Republican,” she said. “Frank had forgotten who sent him to Richmond. You have to remind people every once in a while.” 

Predominantly black districts went strongly for Hagood and helped him pull off one of the biggest upsets of the 1987 state assembly elections. 

 

“She’s Too Uppish’’ 

Cora Lee Mosely was born on December 12, 1940, in Halifax County. 

Her father, a Pullman conductor, died when she was three. Her mother, Bertha, sharecropped corn and tobacco to feed Cora and her three brothers and five sisters. 

From the time she was six, Cora spent many days in the tobacco fields, bent over with a grubbing hoe or on her knees pulling weeds. 

Cora remembers coming home crying the first time somebody called her a “nigger.” 

“My mom went and got a belt and tore me up. She said: ‘If you put a cat in the oven and it has kittens and you call them biscuits, that don’t make them biscuits, do it? Just because somebody calls you a nigger don’t make you a nigger. Nobody can’t make you a nigger but you.’” 

When Cora was in high school, she won an award for an essay on “What America Means to Me.” She wrote angrily about having to go to white folks’ back doors and other indignities suffered by Southern blacks in the 1950s. 

Cora and her family went to Richmond for an assembly of prizewinners from black schools all over Virginia. She was excited, but something was different when a teacher read her essay at the ceremony: Someone had changed it to reflect a white view of America. “They tried to make me sound like a happy little girl.” 

When Thomas Stanley, governor of Virginia, tried to give Cora her award, she kept her hands by her sides and refused it. 

“My momma cried like a baby,” she remembers. “White folks told her: ‘You better do something with that little girl or she’s going to cause you pain someday. She’s too uppish.’” 

 

Controversy and Violence 

Cora Mosely quit school and married Clarence Tucker, a farmer, when she was seventeen. 

As a young woman, she got involved in politics in a few civil rights demonstrations. But she spent most of her time caring for her seven children. She refused to allow them to miss school — as she often had — to work in tobacco. 

By 1975, her home had become a gathering place for young people, black and white, who lived nearby. They played softball in a field beside the house or went in Tucker’s basement and played records and danced. There was nowhere else for them to go. Recreational opportunities were few in Halifax County. 

Tucker and some young people from her neighborhood who had formed the Winns Creek Youth Group asked the Board of Supervisors to accept a federal grant to build a recreation center. The supervisors agreed. But three weeks later — after what Tucker says was opposition to building a center where blacks and whites would mix — the supervisors changed their minds about taking the money. 

Tucker and the youth group members decided they had had enough. They changed their group’s name to Citizens for a Better America and began studying black hiring in local government offices and businesses. With the help of Baltimore Congressman Parren Mitchell, a friend of hers, Tucker went to Harvard University to take a course in community research. She came back and taught other members of her group what she’d learned. 

After two years of study, Tucker asked the local NAACP director and other black leaders to file complaints against government agencies that employed too few blacks. “They said: ‘This is too controversial. We don’t want to do anything controversial.’” So Citizens for a Better America filed complaints of its own. Federal education officials investigated hiring in the local schools, confirmed the group’s findings, and threatened to cut off federal money. 

Meanwhile, Tucker hammered away at the local power structure with letters to the editor of the Gazette-Virginian’s competition, the News and Record. 

“Everything seems geared for the haves and nothing for the have-nots,” she wrote after the supervisors turned down the recreation grant. “Since the politicians make all the rules I think we should be very careful as to who we elect to public office, at least men that know we are here and acknowledge that we exist.” 

When her spinal cancer was at its worst from 1975 to 1978, Tucker would slump over her kitchen table all day scratching out her next salvo in a weak hand. Then, too exhausted to deliver her letter, she’d call the News and Record’s editors and plead with them to come pick it up. “They’d say: ‘Cora Lee, what in the world are you raising hell about now?’ I’d say: ‘Come out and see.’” 

Sam Barnes, a former editor of the News and Record, said the talk around the country stores often turned to who was writing those letters signed by Cora Tucker. Many suspected they were written by the newspaper’s editors. After all, the good old boys figured, Tucker had been educated in the county’s poorly funded black schools, so she couldn’t be capable of writing such prose. 

Many whites wanted it that way, Barnes said. “They didn’t intend for a black woman to be that insightful. The very idea that she was bugged the hell out of them.” 

Some people did more than talk. 

Tucker got nasty phone calls. Someone broke into her home while she was gone and soaked her bed in flammable fuel. A man walked up on her in her yard with a shotgun, stared at her, then turned and left. One of her daughters was hospitalized for two months after she was struck by a car that drove by their home twice before swerving off the road and hitting her. No arrests were made in any of the incidents. 

In 1981, Tucker ran as a write-in, protest candidate for Virginia governor. She got only a handful of votes, but the campaign gave her a soapbox to blast Democrats and Republicans, who she said were ignoring the needs of black voters. 

On the day the News and Record ran a story about her campaign, a white man spit in her face at the post office. “I looked him right in his face and said: ‘Lord forgive him,’” she remembers. “I thought if I started cussing him I’d still be cussing.” 

 

Strange Bedfellows 

One county leader Cora Tucker often clashed with was Senator Howard Anderson Sr. 

She could remember Anderson standing on the courthouse steps in the late 1950s saying he’d rather see the schools closed than blacks and whites in the same classrooms. 

She took him on when his family dominated county politics: The senator was a leader in the state assembly, his brother commissioner of revenue, his cousin county treasurer, his son county prosecutor. Tucker didn’t think one family should have that much power. 

Yet despite his politics, Tucker had always liked the patrician senator, because he was polite even when he disagreed with her. “He’s a Southern gentleman,” she said. 

So it was strangely satisfying for Tucker to find herself fighting on the same side with Anderson in the early 1980s when a mining company wanted to dig uranium upriver from Halifax. Tucker used her connections with national lobbying groups to feed information to Anderson and county supervisors about uranium’s dangers. Opposition from Halifax residents helped kill the proposal in the state assembly. The mining company was sent packing. 

The scenario repeated itself in 1986 when federal officials considered the county as a possible site for a nuclear waste dump. 

Tucker’s work in those environmental battles helped her gain more acceptance in her hometown, but it didn’t change the minds of all her critics. Keith Shelton, the newspaper editor, complains that “she gets too much ink, for what she does.” 

That sort of criticism doesn’t bother Tucker. “I’m grateful for the Lord that I don’t feel bitter. As bad as Halifax County is, I love this place. I really do. I love all of the people in it.” 

Besides, she likes a good fight. 

“I don’t like fighting with a weakling. You haven’t won nothing. In fact, I like Keith Shelton better than a lot of folks. Because he has the guts to fight.” 

 

“Cora, You Go to Hell” 

Cora Tucker sits at the kitchen table of her country home in her housecoat, her wig off. She is down-home, unpretentious. Radiation treatments for her cancer — which has come out of remission — have left her head bald in patches. 

While cancer doesn’t sap her strength as badly as it used to, it still threatens to take her away from the fray someday. 

But for now, she has work to do. 

Black employees are beginning to disappear from the fronts of local stores, she said, so it might be time to raise hell again about minority hiring. 

Even though she gets along better with the local power brokers these days, she’s still not afraid to take them on. 

She remembers the old days, when local black leaders avoided making waves. Sometimes they could make a few calls and get somebody a job. But most blacks were locked out of the best jobs. 

Cora Tucker doesn’t want to be part of the establishment. 

“I don’t want people to be grateful to me,” she said. “I want ’em to say, ‘Cora, you go to hell.’”