One January night "hundreds" of whoop­ing, angry, gun-shooting Indians broke up a Ku Klux Klan rally that had been called to intimidate them, and the rest of the country's imagi­nation was captured for a brief moment. What is more, the Indians routed the Klan so thoroughly that they have not been able to hold another rally in Robeson County since 1958. The Klan had started agitating in Robeson County before the night of the now famous rally. They burned crosses and sent threats to Indians. One of those threatened reportedly was a White woman who had been dating an Indian man; another threat went to a family who moved into what some considered a "White" neighborhood. These incidents served to anger and arouse the Indians, as did a series of inflammatory letters by Klansmen to a local newspaper. Klan threat was answered by Indian counterthreat.

The Klan scheduled a rally for a field near Maxton, a town at the western edge of the county, and some Indians immediately proclaimed that they would not allow it. One of the pri­mary instigators of this Klan activity was the Reverend James W. Cole (known to Indians as "Catfish Cole") of South Carolina. He was scheduled to be a speaker at the rally.

During the period of increasing tension before the rally, Lumbees received telegrams from Indians of various tribes in many parts of the United States offering moral sup­port. A few offered to "send braves," as Lumbees put it. The rally received national news attention and some reporters were present at the event. Afterward, Malvina Reynolds, a folksinger, wrote and re­corded a song about it entitled "The Ballad of Maxton Field." Thus, the confrontation was set, and on the night of the rally, Indians from across the county (and, as Indians tell it, from all the cities to which Lumbees have migrated as well as from nearby military installa­tions) took up guns and other weapons and drove off to the rally.

The Indians surrounded the field where the rally was to take place, and, as it began, they doused a single lightbulb over the speaker's platform with a shot, and in the ensuing dark, gunfire and shouting predominated. When it was over, the Klansmen had fled and no one had been seriously injured. Afterward, a photographer took a picture of two In­dians, Charlie Warriax and Simeon Oxendine, draped in a Ku Klux Klan flag. This photograph appeared in Life magazine, and the first Lumbee I ever met was carrying it in her wallet in 1966. Of the effects of these events, Simeon Oxendine stated to Dial and Eliades, "We killed the Klan once and for all. We did the right thing for all people" (1975:162). And indeed, the Klan has not returned publicly to Robeson County. In 1966, "it sought to hold another rally there in order to regain the prestige it had lost in 1958. Many Indians threatened that they would never allow a Klan rally to take place in Robeson. And because some Indians feared that it would be impossible to prevent serious bloodshed a second time, they persuaded authorities in the state capital to issue an injunction against the Klan, preventing them from holding the rally. Although the legality of the injunction was questionable (the American Civil Liberties Union later took the case for the Klan), it was effective. No rally was held.

Many of the Indian participants in these events were veterans of World War II, and no one today is given credit for leading the Indians. Once again Indians had resorted flamboyantly to defensive violence as a political tactic, but this time there was no one heroic leader, and "the Indian people" have become the hero in the retelling of the story.