Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  At a practical level, Wells responded in familiar fashion. Prompted by the inability of even well-intentioned public officials to stop eminent violent threats, she explained later, “I had bought a pistol first thing after Tom Moss was lynched.” She was in some sense tardy in this precaution. Over in Nashville, eighteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois, a freshman at Fisk University, observed in 1886 that his classmates, shaken by the rising tide of lynchings, were habitually armed whenever they ventured into the city.3

  Wells now developed a sharper critique of the nature and impulse for lynching. She had seen black criminals lynched. But this was different.

  I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved to die anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.

  But Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and [Will] Lee Stewart had been lynched . . . with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women. This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and keep the “nigger down.”

  During the period that white America dubbed the Gay Nineties, lynchings of blacks in the South averaged about two per week. Wells’s increasingly cutting assessment of the terror launched her into dangerous territory. She started suggesting that frequent claims of rape by white women proved too much. “Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech . . . on the same old racket, the alarm about raping white women. If southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”4 The implication here was incendiary. The Memphis Commercial fulminated that southern white men would not long tolerate “the obscene intimations” of Wells’s editorial. It was an accurate assessment.

  Wells was in New York when white men went on the warpath. Before it was over, Wells’s coeditor at the Memphis Free Speech was run out of town, and the paper’s offices were destroyed. Wells was warned that it would hazard her life to return. She decided to stay in New York after learning that some of the black men of Memphis were risking their lives by organizing an armed squad to protect her.

  Ironically, being exiled from Memphis launched Wells onto the broader stage of New York City and dramatically widened the audience for her work. With her investment in the Memphis Free Speech consumed by the mob, Wells joined T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age, where her reporting would garner national and international recognition.5

  From New York, Wells’s attack was unrelenting. She struck hard at the myth that lynching was the product of the lawless element. She hammered the shibboleth of black rapists, arguing that the facts clearly viewed would “serve . . . as a defense for the Afro-American Samsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.” Then, without the cover of euphemisms, she stated boldly that “there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law.”

  Her most blistering tactic was to use white sources and reporting to make her case. She reveled in the report of Mrs. J. C. Underwood, an Ohio minister’s wife who claimed she had been raped by a black man, then recanted, acknowledging the “strange fascination” the Negro had for her. She admitted to lying about the rape on the worry that she might have contracted venereal disease or become pregnant with a black child.

  Wells found plenty of other fodder in the southern papers. In one short spate, the white Memphis press covered six cases of white women taking black lovers. From all across the South, Wells gathered stories showing poor, middle-class, and affluent white women, the prostitute and the physician’s wife, as willing sexual partners with black men. She reprinted news of white women who had given birth to black children and refused to name the father. She gloried in a Memphis Ledger report in June 1892 decrying the circumstances of Lillie Bailey, “a rather pretty white girl, seventeen years of age, who . . . is the mother of a little coon” and refused to identify “the Negro who had disgraced her.” For Wells this demonstrated that the pretty white girl had some affection for the father of the “little coon.”6

  Along with her ever more incisive critique of lynch terror, Wells developed a keener sense of the necessity and value of defensive firearms. Celebrating the recent evidence of blacks defending themselves and preventing lynchings through armed self-defense in Jacksonville, Florida, and Paducah, Kentucky, she advanced her classic prescription for armed self-defense. “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”7

  It was a bold prescription, perhaps even foolhardy. But Wells was keenly aware of the hazards. She understood firsthand from the lynching of Tom Moss the danger of drawing guns, only to be outnumbered and finally outgunned. But she also saw clearly the potential utility of firearms and the moral case for fighting back against violent aggressors. The implications of this simple insight, ancient in its roots, would resonate throughout her life’s work.

  Like Frederick Douglass, who advised Negroes to acquire a good revolver against the threat of slave catchers, Wells seems to have avoided getting into any gunfights. Indeed, while we know that Wells purchased a pistol after Tom Moss was lynched, it is not clear whether she actually owned a Winchester rifle. But the circumstances of Wells’s purchase of part interest in the Memphis Free Speech newspaper are suggestive.

  Wells shared ownership in the paper with Reverend Taylor Nightingale. Pushed by the mounting anger over a Free Speech editorial applauding Negroes’ violent response to a lynching in Georgetown, Kentucky, Nightingale would flee Memphis for the Oklahoma Territory. The style of the editorial suggests that Wells actually wrote it:

  Those Georgetown Kentucky Negroes who set fire to the town last week because a Negro named Dudley had been lynched, show some of the true spark of manhood by their resentment. We had begun to think the Negroes—where lynching of Negroes has become the sport and pastime of unknown (?) White citizens—hadn’t manhood enough in them, to wriggle and crawl out of the way, much less protect and defend themselves. Of one thing we may be assured, so long as we permit ourselves to be trampled upon, so long we will have to endure it.8

  Although this was likely Wells’s work, the editorial was unsigned and the immediate blame was laid on Nightingale, whose known militancy included urging everyone in his congregation to buy Winchester rifles. Wells and Nightingale were sympathetic friends, and perhaps both of them found the idea of the Winchester simply a potent rhetorical tool. But at least one researcher concludes that Nightingale did in fact own a Winchester rifle. And given the times, it would be no surprise if both he and Wells counted Winchesters among their important possessions.

  The Winchester reference appears again in the public bickering between Wells and black leaders in Memphis. Writing from New York, Wells poked again at the rape theme, asking facetiously why white women of the South were so often in the position to cry rape so long after the supposed fact. Attempting to keep the city from exploding over the insult, black minister B. A. Imes published a letter criticizing Wells, including a gratuitous attack hinting at promiscuity. Wells answered with her own personal attack, demonstrating to all that Reverend Imes was overmatched. This actually built sympathy for Imes and raised the objection that it was unfair for Wells, sitting in New York, to criticize people like Imes, who remained “in a bloody city while looking along the barrel of a ready Winchester.”9

  The repeated references to the Winchester seem purposeful. It was the state-of-the-art repeating rifle of the day. One formal review of the Henry Model Winchester reported “
187 shots were fired in three minutes and thirty seconds and one full fifteen shot magazine was fired in only 10.8 seconds. A total of 1,040 shots were fired and hits were made from as far away as 348 feet at an 18 inch square target with a .44 caliber 216 grain bullet.” This gun was the assault rifle of its day. With its medium-range ballistic superiority (compare the Winchester’s .44 caliber, 216 grain projectile to the .22 caliber, 55 grain AR-15 round), it still surrenders little to its twenty-first-century progeny.10

  When Ida Wells advised black folk on the virtues of the Winchester rifle, one of her practical examples was the averted lynching in Paducah, Kentucky. She was referencing the episode in July 1892 where, following another lynching just a month earlier, a Negro was arrested for peeking into windows at white women. Primed for the threat, community men gathered to guard the jailhouse. As expected, a group of white toughs eventually showed up.

  With no attempt to parlay, the Negroes fired on them, fatally wounding one. For whites, this confirmed rumors that blacks had been stockpiling weapons and planning retaliation for the earlier lynching. Local papers warned of the race war to come.

  The governor sent in the state militia, and police seized guns from the hardware stores and distributed them among the white men of Paducah. For blacks, they took the opposite approach, searching black homes and confiscating firearms. In a natural survey of the scale of Negro gun ownership, they seized more than 200 guns from black homes. Eventually tensions subsided to an uneasy peace.11

  The second averted lynching occurred on July 4, in Jacksonville, Florida. In the early afternoon, a Negro teamster named Ben Reed and a white shipping clerk at the Anheuser-Busch brewery got into a row over Reed’s tardiness in making a delivery. The shipping clerk was a young man, excited to close down early and join the Independence Day festivities. Reed was pushing forty and resented the harsh talk from a white kid. They exchanged insults, then blows. The combat escalated as they attacked each other with the tools and hardware of the loading dock. By the end of it, Ben Reed was in police custody, charged with the murder of the young white man.

  As the news spread, so did the lynch rumors. Considering the times, the response of the black community was no overreaction. The Florida Times-Union provided the account that would soon make its way to Ida Wells.

  Every approach to the jail was guarded by crowds of negroes armed to the very teeth. The city was virtually under their control. . . . Sentinels stood on every street corner, and when a white man would pass they would question him about where he was going, etc. A whistle signal would then be passed on to the next corner and the pedestrian would be surrounded and followed. If he went in the direction of the jail, the Negroes would close in upon him and he would soon find himself covered by fifty or more cocked revolvers. He would be interrogated again and after being treated to abusive language would then be ordered to go back.

  Over the next three days, the crowd of armed Negroes surrounding the jail grew to nearly one thousand, and a counterforce of whites began pouring in from as far away as north Georgia. Finally, on July 7, a show of force by the governor’s militia, brandishing a Gatling gun, and a spate of torrential rains dispersed the crowds without bloodshed. Except for the cocksure young man who goaded Ben Reed, no one died in those tense moments at Jacksonville. Reed was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.12

  Other, similar episodes confirmed the potential for Negroes with guns to thwart lynch violence. In 1888, in the village of Wahalak, Kemper County, Mississippi, armed black men exchanged gunfire with an impromptu posse that pursued a black kid into the Negro quarters. The black boy had fought a local white kid to a draw. This prompted a band of Kemper County men to ride to the defense of white superiority. Two whites and several blacks were killed in gunfire. But the Negro boy who dared to come out even in a fair fight was not lynched.13

  In 1899, in the town of Darien, Georgia, a prominent black man was jailed on the familiar charge of rape. The rumor spread that the sheriff planned to turn him over to the mob. The blacks of Darien were numerous and organized enough to thwart the mob with armed sentinels posted at the jailhouse and an understanding that folk should rush to the jail if they heard the bell of the nearby Baptist church. These defensive efforts were a troublesome show of defiance to whites who dubbed it the “Darien Insurrection.”14

  Of course, these arguably salutary results are not the full story. Legitimate or not, violence can unleash a whirlwind. The background worry of armed blacks provoking white backlash is illustrated by a lynching in Mayfield, Kentucky, just thirty miles from Paducah. The spark was the fear of black retribution for earlier lynchings nearby.

  Jim Stone, one of the Negroes who would die in Mayfield, was rumored to be the leader of the conspiracy. The evidence of an impending Negro attack was the unusual insolence of Mayfield’s blacks and the fact that they were increasingly going about armed. That was enough to send the mob after Jim Stone, who was lynched in December 1896.

  There was no community intervention against the lynching of Jim Stone. But there was suspected retaliation in the form of mysterious fires and the shooting of a white man who boldly ventured into a black saloon. The violence culminated with the deputizing of one hundred white men who attempted to fully disarm the blacks of Mayfield. These deputies tore through the community, burned four homes, and shot up others. By the end of it, now mostly disarmed and cowed, the blacks who had not fled delivered a hundred-signature petition to the municipal government, praying to end hostilities and promising no more revenge for the recent lynchings. Their terms of surrender were accepted, and a peace of sorts was restored to Mayfield.15

  The ending was similar in Danville, Virginia, where a gunfight precipitated a cycle of violence. It was 1883, and tensions were already high in anticipation of upcoming elections when black and white men passed too close on the sidewalk. Arms touched. The white man took offense. They argued, and the black man’s insolence sent the white man for his revolver. They scuffled and that drew a crowd, and then there was gunfire. By the end of it, three black men and one white were killed, and six blacks and four whites were wounded. Armed whites then locked down the town, warning Negroes to stay off the streets. This climate suppressed the black vote on Election Day and helped Democrats to prevail.16

  Although diminished compared to the Civil War period, black political violence continued into the late nineteenth century. The populist movement of the era offers good examples. Ideally, populism subordinated racial distinctions to shared values and political concerns of the working class. In practice, race still trumped. But despite the failed ideals of racial harmony, the impulse toward collective action by working people still generated episodes of armed resistance that contribute to our thinking about the black tradition of arms.17

  In Jefferson County, Georgia, populist leader Thomas Watson made direct appeals to black voters and exhorted mixed-race audiences of populists. Although Watson rejected black and white social equality, he pressed the common political concerns of working men. Campaigning in 1892, Watson appeared on the stage with Negro populist Reverend H. S. Doyle. Doyle’s life was threatened several times during the campaign, and a shot fired at him during a Jefferson County meeting actually killed a white man in the crowd. When Doyle was subsequently targeted for lynching, he retreated to Watson’s farm, where two thousand armed populists, black and white, rallied to guard him.18

  In 1886, in Lasky County, Arkansas, about forty Negro workers affiliated with the populist Knights of Labor, struck the Tate plantation, seeking a wage increase. The Knights had enjoyed some recent organizing success, and that spurred the black men to further militancy. They boldly warned the local sheriff not to interfere with their strike. He dismissed the warning and rode with help to break them up. When one of the workers confronted him, the sheriff shot the man, wounding him. The gunshot drew attention, and soon the sheriff and his little squad were surrounded by 250 armed Negroes. The sheriff retreated but later returned with re
inforcements. By then, many of the black men had dispersed. The remaining strikers briefly resisted, but after a few volleys of gunfire, they scattered.19

  In Leflore County, Mississippi, Negro farmworkers of the Colored Alliance overplayed the power of bluff after one of their leaders was threatened. They drafted an angry letter, promising to defend their leader by force, and signed it “3000 armed men.” Then 75 of them assembled in military order and marched to town to deliver it. While many of them were armed, they were not three-thousand-strong. Their letter fueled rumors that blacks were massing for an attack. Soon, the call was out to the governor, who sent in three companies of Mississippi National Guard. This force, accompanied by a large group of armed civilians, plus the sheriff with his own force, rode out after the supposed conspirators. Before it was over, scores of Negroes were shot down.20

  In the modern debate, many approach armed self-defense empirically, extrapolating from general trends whether or not it is a good bet. Some object that this strips out variables that make every case unique and demand private choice. Others invoke higher principles and exalt even failed self-defense as heroism.

  Ida B. Wells fit into this last group. Where some saw foolish, fruitless acts of armed resistance, Wells saw the stuff of legend. This is nowhere more evident than in her 1900 paean to Robert Charles of New Orleans. The white press called Charles a lawless desperado. But Wells projected the evident black consensus that Charles was the “hero of New Orleans.”21

  Robert Charles was conceived in slavery but born into freedom in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was a decently hard worker, with a man’s fondness for liquor and women. Like many men of the time, he habitually carried a pistol.