Just a little History lesson for all. Athens TN 1946
Bill White, a marine who had served on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, had known it would come to this. Earlier that summer, he had stood up at a meeting of the GI Party and asked: “Do you think they’re going to let you win this election?” Nobody had wanted to hear it. Now he stood among a despondent and dwindling group of GIs at a garage in downtown Athens. Most had given up and gone home, conceding yet another election to the machine. White had never made a speech in his life. But, now, he knew that if someone didn’t light a fire under the handful of GIs who remained downtown that everything would be lost.
“Well! Here you are!” White said “After three or four years of fighting for your country. You survived it all. You came back. And what did you come back to? A free country? You came back to Athens, Tennessee, in McMinn County, that’s run by a bunch of outlaws. They’ve got hired gunmen all over this county right now at this minute. What for? One purpose. To scare you so bad you won’t dare stand up for the rights you’ve been bleeding and dying for. Some of your mothers and some of your sisters are afraid to walk down the streets to the polling places. Lots of men, too! Because they know what happens. A car drives by in the night and shoots out your windows. If that doesn’t scare you enough, they’ll set fire to your house or your barn. They’ll beat up members of your family and put them in jail. For no reason! Is that the kind of freedom you were supposed to be fighting for? Do you know what your rights are supposed to be? How many rights have you got left? None! Not even the right to vote in a free election. When you lose that, you’ve lost everything.
“And you are damned well going to lose it unless you fight and fight the only way they understand. Fire with fire! We’ve got to make this an honest election because we promised the people that if they voted it would be an honest election. And it’s going to be. But only if we see that it is. We are going to have to run these organized criminals out of town, and we can do it if we stick together. Are you afraid of them? Why, I could take a banana stalk and run every one of these potbellied draft dodgers across Depot Hill. Get the hell out of here and get something to shoot with. And come back as fast as you can.”