Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Election season yielded the discord sowed by Governor Henry Warmoth’s machinations. The seat of power in Colfax was the courthouse, formally one of Willie Calhoun’s stables. Black Republicans secured it first and staked their claims to the offices that it represented. When local whites bragged within earshot of their Negro help about the plans to take the courthouse and oust the Republican team, word soon reached William Ward. Ward raised the alarm with Republicans, who armed for defense of the courthouse. Soon, two dozen black men with guns arrived to guard the courthouse and the Republican administration.78

  The first shooting occurred when a scout posse of blacks encountered a force of mounted whites and exchanged shotgun fire. Again, the technology is significant. The shotgun is a devastating weapon at close range. But the forces here were at least two hundred yards apart. At that range, the shotgun load has spent most of its energy. So it is no surprise that no one was hurt in this first exchange.

  Other skirmishes followed. On April 5, one of William Ward’s men, Benjamin Allen, led a patrol into the countryside to search for a black man who was rumored to have been abducted. They encountered a group of twenty armed whites and exchanged gunfire. With the horses spooked, the two sides dispersed, again with no casualties.

  Cooler heads from both sides attempted a parlay, each offering to cease hostilities if the other would surrender its claims to government office. The negotiations broke down when one of Ward’s men burst into the meeting, shouting that a band of whites had just killed Jesse McKinney, a freedman who worked a small patch of land at the edge of Colfax. This was the tipping point.

  Blacks from around the countryside poured into Colfax, and William Ward’s men dug in. On April 6, skirmish squads clashed again. Both sides were mounted, and the blacks had the advantage of surprise. They laid in ambush, sending out a white ally as a decoy. The plan worked, and the blacks fired with effect from cover. The whites fled across a muddy stream, firing back over their shoulders. The worst casualty was one white man getting his thumb shot off. The black patrol returned to Colfax triumphant.79

  Black victories and stalemates in sporadic small conflicts led white Democrats to call for reinforcements. By April 13, more than 150 white men had assembled on the outskirts of town. They were led by a man who claimed the office of sheriff under the order of a county judge, whose own authority was rooted in the contested election results. Men answered the call from several adjoining counties, including a contingent from the Knights of the White Camellia and the Old Time Ku Klux Klan. The recruiting effort also yielded a four-pound cannon from a sympathetic riverboat owner.

  The blacks at Colfax were superior in number but not in fighting quality. The group of 150 included women and children from the countryside who had set up a little camp around the courthouse. Many of the black men reportedly were not armed, and the guns that they did have were largely shotguns and hunting pieces. About a dozen black men had Union-issue, breach-loading Enfield military rifles. The bigger problem was that they had only enough ammunition for each man to fire a few shots. They also attempted to construct a jerry-rigged cannon from pieces of steam pipe, but the thing blew up when they tried to test-fire it.

  On Sunday, April 9, a preconflict parlay began with demands of surrender and refusal. Finally, the white force warned the courthouse defenders that they had thirty minutes to remove the women and children. This was the point where the two white men in the courthouse—an ambivalent Republican and a Northern traveling salesman—decided to flee. Except for the hapless Negro the Democrats would force at gunpoint to throw a firebomb onto the courthouse roof, the coming conflict would be purely black against white.

  The white force advanced in a skirmish line to clear out preliminary guards and traps. At three hundred yards, they set up the canon and began firing. The Negroes fired their remaining improvised cannon. It blew up just like the first one.80

  The groups traded small-arms fire for about two hours. Blacks’ hopes rose and then fell on the empty speculation that the whistle of a passing steamboat signaled Republican reinforcements. They were heartened again by a lucky shot that took out one of the white cannon crew. But he was quickly replaced.

  Finally, with most of their ammunition spent, the black courthouse force succumbed, and then it was pure slaughter. The whites gave no quarter. Bill Cruickshank, later infamous as a defendant in a historic Supreme Court case stemming from the conflict, made a game of lining up Negroes close together so that he could kill two of them with a single shot. When some objected to the shooting of prisoners, others responded, “we are only shooting the wounded.” In later testimony, one of the surviving blacks summarized the scene this way:

  They told us to stack our arms and they wouldn’t hurt us and for us to march out; then they set the courthouse on fire; . . . They made me go among the prisoners; . . . They kept me prisoner until midnight; they took me and another man out to shoot us; one bullet struck me in my neck, stunning and dropping me; the other man was killed; they did not shoot me again; I laid on the ground until morning; fearing to move.

  When a riverboat stopped at Colfax toward sundown, travelers witnessed the carnage of a battlefield. Most of the dead were black. The armed white men who still roamed the area explained that blacks had been riled up by radical Republicans to seize the courthouse and provoked a fight. Estimates of the death toll range from 80 to 150 blacks and a handful of whites.81

  The alleged leaders of the prevailing whites were prosecuted in litigation that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The prosecutions held powerful lessons for black folk. Ninety-five whites were indicted on various charges. But only a handful of men were ultimately tried, and even they were acquitted on most charges. An editorial in the New Orleans Republican cast the lesson this way:

  The colored folks will hereafter depend to some extent upon the same weapons for defense that their enemies use for attack. A jury is really no match for a firearm. If it be generally known that in each Negro cabin in the County there is a lively weapon of defense, there will not be such a constant recurrence of homicides as have disgraced the annals of this state for many years. We expect these shotguns to prove famous peacemakers.82

  Looking back, this assessment seems unsatisfactory. Armed Negroes at Colfax had been annihilated. Urging blacks to get guns, or more guns, seems like a fruitless recipe for escalating violence. The prescription seems desperate, reflexive, not fully rational. But viewed against the unfolding pattern of state malevolence and diminishing options, it is easier to understand how a fight doomed to failure might actually have been the best among the dreary options.

  Political violence aimed at suppressing black advancement was a fact of life almost from the moment the Confederacy lost the war. It was an integral part of a strategy that paid off in 1877 when Democrats resolidified white rule through a political deal that ended the brief experiment of Reconstruction and ceded the Negro issue to Southern home rule.

  That deal was born out of the viciously contested presidential election of 1876, between the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Democrat, Samuel Tilden. Violent intimidation and cheating were rife in 1876, and by some accounts Tilden won the election. A more realistic account is that Democrats stole the election through violence, intimidation, and fraud, and Republicans stole it back through a politically tilted election review commission that overturned the ostensible Tilden victory in three Southern states and handed it to Hayes.

  The election commission’s decision fueled competing claims to the presidency that some feared might lead again to war. The Democratic slogan of the time was “Tilden or Fight.” Conflict was averted through negotiations in a literally smoke-filled room at the Wormser Hotel, in Washington, DC, where Southern Democrats ceded the presidency to the Republicans in exchange for economic stimulus, the removal of federal troops from the South, and home rule over Negroes. The country was weary of the Negro issue and anxious for reconciliation and a new prosperity. Reconstruction was dea
d.

  The end of Reconstruction opened the period some would call the nadir of the black experience in America. The political outlook was dim. Black political aspirations had been quashed by a program of violence and fraud, and now by federal abdication. Many have chronicled this story, but one of the best summaries comes from a black man of the times. In 1884, black publisher T. Thomas Fortune said this.

  It is sufficient to know that anarchy prevailed in every southern state; that a black man’s life was not worth the having; that armed bodies of men openly defied the Constitution of the United States and nullified each and every one of its guarantees of citizenship to the colored man. Thousands of black men were shot down like sheep and not one of the assassins was ever hung by the neck until he was dead.83

  With the diminishing promises of citizenship came greater personal exposure to violence. This posed a profound dilemma. State and local governments would grow increasingly hostile to Negroes. The notion of relying on the state for personal security or anything else would seem increasingly absurd against the rise of convict labor schemes, state-sponsored Jim Crow rules, and lynch law.

  It was an important moment in the black tradition of arms. There were growing reasons to believe that whatever blacks now had in the political arena was all they would get. Black political violence would steadily decline. Individual self-defense would become the predominate theme of the tradition as Negroes came to grips with the fact that the brand of citizenship they enjoyed carried shrinking benefits and increasing risks that the state would care little for their physical security or general welfare. In the dangerous times to come, Negroes pushed to the wall by violent threats would be very much on their own and would have to decide whether to just crumple or to stand and fight.

  “The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

  What would drive a four-and-a-half-foot tall colored schoolteacher to say such a thing? What did she witness? What did she fear? What were the rumors and threats that shrouded her rise from slavery to the vanguard of the black freedom struggle? And what was the culture that allowed this eminent leader of the race to exalt a gun that was the assault rifle of her day, without censure and, indeed, to wide affirmation?

  Wells came of age during the period many consider the nadir of the black experience in America. She witnessed the violent defeat of Reconstruction and chafed under the menace of John Lynch and the indignities of Jim Crow. It was a period filled with hazards where the government was not just neglectful of Negro security but was often an overt menace. Wells’s praise of the Winchester reflected hard lessons and worries about the next dark night, passed along on the whispers of black folk.

  By age twenty, Wells had been orphaned by a yellow-fever epidemic; had become caretaker of her siblings; and had moved from her childhood home of Holly Springs, Mississippi, to Memphis, where a coveted teaching contract introduced her to the city’s black elite. It was the start of her journey into journalism, publishing, and her destiny as America’s foremost antilynching crusader.

  Memphis in 1881, was a relative haven of opportunity for Negroes, whose performance on criteria like employment and arrest rates would be the envy of modern policy makers. But other aspects of the climate in Memphis were not so salutary. Blacks and Irish immigrants competed for much of the same low-cost housing and unskilled work. Black war veterans were natural combatants with the Memphis police force, which was 90 percent Irish and was described by a white army officer as “far from the best class of residents.”

  Political leaders of the period were candidly unsympathetic to Negro interests. Tennessee governor William Brownlow hopefully predicted that, with no masters to care for them, most Negroes would perish from starvation and disease within a generation. It turned out that these folk were of heartier stock.1

  Ida Wells’s fighting instinct first erupted on board a Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train. The traveling strategy for colored ladies of the day was meticulous grooming and impeccable manners, with the hope of avoiding the demeaning, random ejections from the first-class car. Wells pursued this strategy in the fall of 1883, but would only play the game so far.

  When she handed her first-class ticket to the conductor, he ordered her to move to second class. Wells ignored him and turned to her novel. Provoked by her impudence, the conductor grabbed her luggage and hissed that he was attempting to treat her like a lady. Wells answered that he should leave the lady alone. Now fed up, the conductor grabbed at Wells, intent on dragging her out like cattle.

  Wells set her feet wide against the seat-front and clutched hard into the headrest. When the conductor tried to pry her away, she sank her teeth into his hand. She was defeated only after several passengers helped the bleeding conductor lift away the entire seat section where Wells was anchored and throw it and her into the smoky second-class car.

  Bruised, her dress torn, and her ego battered, Wells left the train at the next stop, to the jeers of the first-class passengers. The episode triggered the first stage of her activism. She sued the C&O Railroad and followed with a series of lawsuits against other rail lines. Some companies responded with separate cars for black first-class passengers. Although the accommodations were rarely first-class in fact, the United States Supreme Court soon affirmed the constitutionality of these so-called separate but equal accommodations.

  Wells began her activism suing railroads, but she built her legend fighting lynching. Early on, like many respectable black folk, she tried to distance herself from the terror of lynching by thinking about it as only a sort of disproportionate justice inflicted on black criminals. That changed in 1892 with the triple lynching of Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart.

  Moss was a good friend of Wells’s. He was president of People’s Cooperative Grocery, which served the predominantly black Memphis community along Walker Avenue, known as “the Curve.” People’s Grocery was new competition to a store run by W. H. Barrett. Barrett was white, but he relished the profits from selling to blacks in the racially mixed neighborhood around the Curve.

  The violence that ended in the lynching of Tom Moss started with a fight between black boys and white boys over a game of marbles. Angry that his son had come out badly, Cornelius Hearst took a horsewhip to one of the black kids. A group of angry black fathers then gathered outside Hearst’s home and incidentally next to People’s Grocery.

  As tension built, W. H. Barrett exploited rumors of impending black violence to convince a local judge to issue arrest warrants for “agitators” who gathered around People’s Grocery. Armed with the knowledge that the warrants would be served, Barrett then spread the rumor that a white mob was intending to raid the store.

  The managers of People’s Grocery got their guns and prepared for the attack. When they saw a group of armed men approaching the back of the store at around ten o’clock that night, their fears seemed confirmed. The advancing group, none of them in uniform, actually was deputized and charged with serving the warrant instigated by W. H. Barrett. There is dispute about who fired the first shot. But it is clear that three deputies were wounded in the exchange of gunfire.

  While bystanders fled, the remaining deputies sent for reinforcements, and the occupants of People’s Grocery were arrested. Tom Moss was not among them but was later described as the ringleader and the person who shot at least one of the deputies. Moss claimed to be at home with his wife during the gunfight, and another man was initially charged with firing the shot later blamed on Moss. The white press depicted the event as a bloody riot and ambush by a murderous band of Negroes. Scores of white men were deputized. They arrested at least thirty alleged conspirators.

  Fearing mob action, a black militia guarded the jail for two nights. But on the third night, the black guard dissolved. With the jail unguarded, a crowd seized Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, dragged them to a spot north of town, beat them, gouged their eyes, and finally—mercifully—shot them.

  Lynching was no
thing new in in this era. But the killing of Moss, McDowell and Stewart was different. It was the first time in Wells’s experience that “respectable” black folk had been lynched. None of the men had any sort of criminal record and all of them worked in jobs that were essentially middle-class. The killing of Tom Moss also was intensely personal for Wells. She was godmother to his daughter and she wrote later that Moss and his family were her best friends in Memphis.

  Black reaction to the lynching ranged from outrage to fearful talk of leaving the city for destinations as varied as Liberia and newly opening territory in Oklahoma. Wells was not in Memphis the night of the lynching, but when she returned, she wrote an angry editorial charging that Memphis had “demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he desires to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.” Wells condemned the city’s attempt to disarm black citizens and ban gun sales to blacks while deputizing white men and boys to enter black homes, seize firearms, and help themselves “to ammunition without payment.”2

  The lynching provoked wide outrage in the black press, with angry calls for justice and even vengeance. The Kansas City American Citizen editorialized that the lynching “called for something more than patient endurance—it calls for dynamite and bloodshed.” The Langston City Herald asked, “what race or class of people on God’s footstool would tolerate the continual slaughter of its own without a revolt?”

  Wells joined the charge, expanding her criticism to the federal government and black federal officeholders, asking, “where are our leaders when the race is being burnt, shot, and hanged?” This was partly a condemnation of vanishing federal support for blacks under the collapse of Reconstruction, but it also targeted the handful of Negroes on the public payroll who feared that agitation would jeopardize their positions.