We have talked about how there were more than 50 cross burnings in Davidson County between the end of World War II and 1960. Arrests were made after only two of these incidents. One arrest was of the white teenagers who burned a cross on the lawn of West High School. The other was Joe Baker and his wife.
I have long wanted a statue of Joe. That's because the reason he was arrested is that someone burned a cross in his yard and he pulled it out of the ground, and then — burning cross in one hand and shotgun in the other — he stopped every car with white people in it that drove by, shouting, “Did you do it?”
I’ve always wanted to know more about Joe, because this man is a hero. But Joe Baker is a very common name, and so finding him has been tricky. OK — it's nearly impossible. But here’s what we know, thanks to The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner. Joe had a wife; she was arrested with him. On April 24, 1950, when the stories were written, he was 56 years old, meaning he was born in 1894. He lived on Walton Lane, which runs just south of and then back behind the National Cemetery up in Madison. He doesn’t have a street address, which makes me think he and his wife lived in a pretty rural area. And this was the second cross burned in their neighborhood within a couple of years, so there was a neighborhood of people out where he lived. Looking at old maps, this seems to plop him down in or near Briarville, one of the small Black villages throughout Davidson County.
Both the Banner and The Tennessean treat this whole incident like something of a joke. The Tennessean’s story starts: “An enraged Negro, who county officers said was attempting to protect his home against cross burners, was in county jail without charge early today.” The headline in the Banner was “Negro Couple Held in Fiery Cross Ruckus.” But the Banner’s story starts in a way that I found peculiar: “A 56-year-old-man and his wife were in County Jail today.” There’s no mention of their race until the second paragraph. Then get this part (emphasis mine):
“It was sticking up in the ground in my lot, right there at my home,” Baker told a reporter this morning. “I saw a big light. I said to my wife, ‘look a-yonder.’” Baker said he then grabbed a gun and began stopping cars. He declared he has no idea who had ignited the cross, or why.
There’s no byline on this story. But the Banner had hired a Black reporter, Robert Churchwell, in 1950. He wasn’t allowed to come into the office, because of racism, but he was on staff. And here’s a story that frames this as happening to a man and his wife, not an "enraged Negro," and then the Banner reporter spoke with Baker. I think this is Churchwell. He’d do this kind of stuff a lot later — pushing forward the humanity of the Black people he wrote about and actually talking to them and reporting what they said. But this is a story from 1950. If it’s him, he would have been brand-new on the job.
We get a lot more detail in the Banner story:
Upon the arrival of officers, both Baker and his wife fled to nearby woods, where [Patrolman] Adams reported, Baker continued his frenzied screaming, “I’m not afraid of anybody!”
In the darkness Adams and Patterson explained that they were officers.
“To hell with that!” Baker was quoted as screeching back. “I’m not afraid of you either.”
This bit, too, makes me think it was written by Churchwell, because it provides a lot of information that would have been taken by Black readers much differently than white readers. For white readers, this is an amusing story of a silly couple overreacting to an unfortunate situation. Baker is screaming “I’m not afraid of anybody” when clearly he’s afraid of everybody.
Author Betsy Phillips’ Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control is scheduled for release via Third Man Books…
But Black readers would have recognized, I think, exactly what was being described here. A cross was burned on a Black couple’s yard in a part of town that is predominantly Black, and yet — even though it was around 10:30 at night — white people were driving by. Why? Walton Lane was not a main thoroughfare between Dickerson Pike and Gallatin Pike. The couple that complained to the police about the Bakers had their 4-year-old son in the car with them. Where are you coming home from at 10:30 on a Sunday night that just happens to take you down a rural road through a Black community? Also, it’s 10:30 at night in the country in 1950. There weren’t streetlights. So how did Baker know there were white people driving by? Because they slowed down to look.
So you have a cross burning, then white people start driving by really slowly, and then the cops show up. The Bakers must have been terrified out of their minds. They must have thought they were going to die. So Baker and his wife even still being in the woods close enough by that he could yell at the cops is pretty damn brave. Elbert Williams, after all, had been taken away by police 10 years earlier, and never seen alive again.
Anyway, to give you a taste of how difficult it’s been to track Baker down, in 1952, there were five Joseph Bakers listed in the phone book. Two had wives named Gertrude. I just wanted to find a guy named Joe living on Walton Lane, and I did that. In the 1950 Census, there’s a Joe Baker, 56, living with his wife Fannie M., 54, on Walton Lane. If you’re wondering why the street had that name, Joe and Fannie’s neighbors were Albert and Millie Walton, plus their children and grandchildren (Victor and Alberta Walton, Joseph and Jeneva Walton, and Joseph Walton III). But other than that, I couldn’t find anything else.
There’s a Joe Baker with the right birth year buried in the National Cemetery, but his wife’s name was Mary, and he was born in Georgia, not Tennessee. So who’s to say if that’s the same person?
I still wish we had a statue of him — flaming cross in one hand, shotgun in the other — confronting the people he must have thought were coming to kill him as he asked, “Did you do it?”
