Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  The white men objected to “taking orders from a nigger.” Then George fetched a bullwhip and threatened to show Mary her place. Mary ignored his taunts, walked to her cabin, and returned shouldering a shotgun. George went from taunting to yelling for help. John answered, running up beside him, rifle in hand. Before John could test Mary’s resolve, the mission foreman and Mary’s growing friend, Joseph Gump, ran in and diffused the scene. He dismissed the Mosney brothers and warned them against tangling with Mary, whose gun skills he appreciated from their many practice sessions out on the prairie.

  Two years later, another arrogant man who could not abide taking orders from Black Mary was not so lucky. This time, Joseph Gump was away fetching supplies and had left Mary in charge of a work group. As Mary was handing out tasks, one of the workers objected that “no white man should take orders from a nigger slave.” Mary made a brief attempt at diplomacy, telling a fellow that there were no slaves at the mission. This just provoked him, and he lunged in with a looping punch that sent her to the dirt.

  The other men laughed and hooted the way that men will when they see someone get knocked off their feet. And this was the high point for the man who sucker punched Black Mary. She told him to get his gun and meet her behind the barn.

  The nuns looked on in disbelief. The workmen took bets. Black Mary gave her tormentor the first move. Then she shot him twice in the chest. Those who bet the odds won money. And both winners and losers spread the legend of Black Mary Fields, who was fast, accurate, and fearless with a gun.91

  In many circles, her firearms prowess gained Mary the kind of respect that was rarely accorded to women in the Montana Territory. She bragged at the end of her life that she was the only woman, not counting prostitutes, who could drink in the territory’s typically all-male saloons. Of course the people at the mission were another matter, and soon after the shooting, Mary was ordered to leave.

  This actually launched her into the more storied phase of her life. Needing some way to support herself, Mary secured a job driving stages for the Wells Fargo company. She closed the job interview with a warning to the young fellow who was openly hostile to hiring a black woman driver. “I’m Mary Fields,” she said—“Black Mary, I can outshoot, outride any man trying for this job. You don’t want to try me.” It was an unlikely strategy for securing employment, and it is likely that the Wells Fargo agent only hired Mary as a favor to some of the sisters at the mission.

  The Wells Fargo job fueled the legend of “Stagecoach Mary,” shotgun at her side, revolver in her belt, wearing buckskins that she tanned herself. There was nothing else like her in the territory. Her legend grew when, one winter on haul from Helena to Cascade, she was attacked by wolves. She fought off the pack with shotgun and revolver fire and delivered her load intact and on time.

  Mary engaged life richly. She was generally armed while she drank, joked, gambled, and fought in the saloons of Cascade. But she did not always resort to the gun. She probably endured many insults. And legend says that she answered with fists and head butts, and once with a perfect-sized rock that turned her fist into a hammer. An admiring report in the Great Falls Montana Examiner said that Mary had “broken more noses” than anyone in Montana.”92

  Although we are always slightly skeptical of western tales of colorful characters (Mary reportedly kept a pet eagle) and prodigious marksmanship, there comes out of the saloons, where Mary drank shots and smoked foul cigars, another seemingly reliable report of her facing down a white cowpoke with her pistol. After some sort of insult led to drawn guns, Mary taught the fellow a lesson with a shot to the earlobe. Only Mary knew for sure whether that was the target.93

  Age was no obvious regulator on Mary Fields. In 1901, at age seventy-two, now making a living doing laundry, Mary was passing the afternoon in a local saloon. She looked up from her whiskey to spy a fellow whose payment for laundry services was long overdue. She pursued the deadbeat down the street, spun him around, and knocked him flat on his back. Then, figuring the punch was worth two dollars, she leaned in and told the man to forget about the bill.

  Some men were rightly afraid of Mary Fields, and some surely despised the powerful black woman in their midst. But many people in Cascade, Montana, apparently loved her. She was caretaker for many kids around Cascade and was an ardent fan of the local baseball team. When her house burned down in 1912, townsfolk got together and built her a new one. One of the people who knew and admired her at the end of her life was Hollywood legend Gary Cooper, who quipped that Mary Fields was “one of the freest souls to ever draw breath . . . or a .38.”94

  So what to make of this black woman who, at the low point of Negro life in America, strapped on a gun and rose to legend, fighting and beating white men in raw contests of violence. It is intriguing that her gunplay never provoked mobbing or backlash. Maybe she was so unusual that she is only some kind of exception that proves some general rule. Perhaps it is some version of the respect paid to those isolated souls who stand up under circumstances where there is no broader political threat. Maybe Mary Fields is like the Lumbee Indians, who routed Catfish Cole’s Klan rally in 1958, to the chuckles of the white establishment—no threat to the existing order so no need for the lynch mob.

  Fig. 4.9. Mary Fields in Cascade, Montana.

  Consider, too, how within our broader matrix, the story of Black Mary fits against Martin Luther King’s assessment of individual self-defense. King said that standing up in self-defense might actually gain Negroes some level of respect and admiration for the courage it shows. And that is one way to understand the legend of Black Mary, who stood up alone against angry, violent men and bested them in fair fights. In that sense, it suggests something uplifting about America and signals some truth in the ideal of the American west, where personal courage and character mattered above all else.

  All of this is contestable. But at the very least, Mary Fields demonstrates the complexity and diversity of the black experience and adds texture to our understanding of the black tradition of arms. Despite the overhanging threats of the era, black folk did not just wallow in despair, clutching guns. Within diverse constraints, they managed to live their lives. They raised and loved their children, worshiped God, feasted on Sunday; and many of them, on Saturday night, celebrated their pleasures with an intensity that rivaled the privileged classes.

  For some Negroes more than others it was possible to coexist peacefully, building friendships and allies at the edges of white society. For the right kind of Negro, under the right circumstances, white folk might even take their part against a white man. Even where that white man ended up dead. Shadrack “Buddie” Shang and Moses Fleetwood Walker were such men.

  Moses Fleetwood Walker of the Syracuse Stars can be explained by the appeal of celebrity. He was a baseball player, a catcher, good enough to play in the early professional leagues. So when he killed a white man in 1891, fighting back against a violent attack, it was not startling when he was acquitted by a jury of white men who admired his prowess on the diamond.95 But how to explain Buddie Shang, fully named Shadrach Meshach Abed-Neo White? Born into slavery in Virginia around 1815, it is unclear how and when he picked up all the pieces of his prodigious appellation or when he began answering to the more easily navigated “Buddie Shang.”

  Even before a Shelby County, Ohio, jury exonerated him in the shotgun killing of a white man, Buddie Shang had already completed a remarkable journey. Shang and his people walked free out of Virginia, well ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, released from bondage in the will of their master, John Randolph. Legal squabbling cost them an extra thirteen years in slavery, as Randolph’s heirs contested the will. It occurred to no one that they might deserve compensation for those additional years under the yoke. When the courts finally upheld Randolph’s wishes, a bedraggled band of them struck out for Ohio, and the black settlement of Rumley.

  Buddie eventually gravitated to nearby Sidney, where he took up residence in the black shantytown of Lacyburg. By
the 1880s, he was a fixture in Sidney, operating a shoe-shine stand outside one of the local taverns. Within the boundaries of the time, he was more than tolerated. The tavern owner was generous with daily bonuses of spirits that Buddie carried home in an ever-present metal bucket.

  In the fall of 1889, Buddie was traveling along a canal bank with his bucket, fishing pole, and shotgun, when a local delinquent started to harass him. Buddie fired a warning shot that scared him off. But as the shot pattern spread in the distance, some of the pellets hit the house of Lewis “Soapstick” Nichols, one of the few downtrodden whites who lived in Lacyburg.

  Nichols stormed from his house, picked up a stack of bricks, and charged. Buddie ducked the first assault, and backed away with a contrite, “I was just foolin’.” Nichols was undeterred and launched another brick that barely missed. Figuring that his luck was about to run out, Buddie Shang fired another round from his shotgun, knocking Soapstick Nichols to the ground.

  In January 1890, the seventy-four-year-old bootblack stood on trial for his life, charged with the murder of Lewis Nichols. He was represented by a young court-appointed lawyer and judged by a jury of twelve white men. With the evidence in, the jury deliberated for just three minutes. Quick deliberations were familiar in these sorts of cases, often signaling results that reflect the worst tribal impulses. But for Buddie Shang, it took only three minutes for twelve white men to vote not guilty.

  Buddy Shang lived on in Lacyburg until 1917, when he died at age ninety-seven. He was revered to the point that his image survives on a period postcard over his stock phrase “Dry as a Hoss,” an evident reference to his pail being empty.96

  Fig. 4.10. Buddie Shang.

  We can fight about what lesson, if any, to draw from the story of Buddie Shang. He seems, by comparison to Black Mary Fields, a less threatening, more compliant character. The obvious critique here is that the Negro who knew his place, the kindly uncle, might get a measure of justice—although acquittal of the murder of a white man is extraordinary even within that framework.

  Perhaps Buddie Shang is more useful for thinking about the bigger, continuing question of whether guns are worth the trouble. A man died and Shang stood trial for murder because he was “just foolin’” with a shotgun. Wouldn’t Buddie Shang have been better off without the gun?

  If the answer is yes, then what? Should we jump from there to say that everyone would be better off without the damn things, and enforce that resolve with legal rules? But if Buddie Shang is the proof case for that approach, how do we square that lesson with all that came before him, with what was all around him, and with what was to come?

  “I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot. If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.”1

  Guts sprayed over the grass? Who would think such a thing, let alone say it? When we learn that it was the stiff-collared, Harvard PhD W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps still the preeminent intellectual of the race, the black tradition of arms gains new resonance.

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born into the relatively benign environment of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. His people had lived free there since the eighteenth century. An acknowledged prodigy, Du Bois demonstrated his gifts early in competitions with white classmates and eased gently into the cauldron of American racism when a little white girl nastily refused his offering in the school’s visiting-card exchange.

  Du Bois would become the leading voice for the higher aspirations of black folk, famously warring with Booker T. Washington’s strategy of uplift through industrial education. His energy and vision were a crucial force in the early development of the NAACP. Through the association’s flagship magazine, The Crisis, Du Bois spoke to and for the American Negro like no one else on the scene. A Pulitzer Prize–winning treatment of his life is aptly subtitled Biography of a Race.2

  By 1906 Du Bois was ensconced as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, one of the top Negro schools in the country. His shotgun threat was a response to the carnage of the 1906 Atlanta race riot. The riot was a piece with the times. The immediate catalyst was the claim of assaults by black men on white women. The local press fanned the flames with special editions carrying at least two specious reports of such attacks. These allegations caught hold in the context of widespread white angst about the real and imagined debaucheries of Atlanta’s “Decatur Street Dives” and the black criminality that their patrons represented.3

  This was a period in America where Negroes were regularly lynched. The Fulton County, Georgia sheriff’s spitting public assessment reflected the times: “Gentlemen we will suppress these great indignities upon our fair wives and daughters if we have to kill every Negro in a thousand miles of this place.”4

  By arming himself in Atlanta, Du Bois was something of an aberration, but only in the sense that he was late to the game. Many in his circle owned and carried guns, but he never had. As a freshman at Fisk University in 1886, Du Bois recorded that his classmates commonly carried guns whenever they ventured into Nashville.5 He was lucky that he was able to find a shotgun for sale and had the money to buy it when the Atlanta rioting broke out.6

  While no one of note appreciated it at the time, the Atlanta riot also was a formative experience for a young man who would become Du Bois’s comrade in arms, young Walter White, later the famous spokesman for the NAACP. With a mob advancing, thirteen-year-old Walter waited with his father, gun in hand, at the front windows of their Huston Street home. Shooting from a nearby building repelled the mob before he was forced to fire. But the episode seared in White’s memory and cemented his Negro identity.7

  Walter White’s time would come. But Du Bois was already in the thick of the dilemma that burdened blacks trying to navigate the political disenfranchisement and the private violence of early twentieth-century America. With the lessons of Confederate redemption still vivid, the folly of political violence was evident. But the draw of self-defense against personal threats remained powerful.

  The circumstances that sent Du Bois running for a gun held lessons about the danger of armed self-defense spiraling into political violence. Reaction to the riot from outside Atlanta made the boundary against political violence seem quite tenuous. Although Booker T. Washington, ever cautious in his public statements, vaguely urged “the best people” white and black to come together to prevent such episodes of disorder, many folk embraced the more militant thinking that fueled Du Bois’s armed stand.8 Among the rising national organizations, the Afro American Council, the Niagara Movement, and the Constitution League, the reaction was openly militant. At a meeting of the Afro American Council in New York, Dr. William Hunter raised the roof with a speech urging blacks to prepare for self-defense on a national scale, “not with brickbats and fire sticks but with hot lead.” To the issue of Negroes chafing under the malevolent authority of officials like the Fulton County sheriff, he advised, “Die outside of jail and do not go by yourself.”

  Reverend George Lee of the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, DC, cast off the restraints of his guild, declaring that the attacks in Atlanta dissolved any obligation of turning the other cheek. “I preached peace after the Atlanta riots,” said Lee, “But don’t misunderstand me, it was prudence, not my religion. If I had the power to stop that kind of thing, even by force, I’d use it. The trouble is all one-sided now, [but] trouble never stays one-sided for long. There’s going to be trouble on the other side soon.” The New York Times caricatured this militant chorus, but still captured the general sentiment with the headline “Talk of War on Whites at Negro Conference.”9

  Fig. 5.1. The front cover of Le Petit Journal, covering the 1906 Atlanta riot. (Le Petit Journal, October 7, 1906, “The Lynchings in the United States: The Massacre of Negroes in Atlanta.”)

  The ostensible militancy of the emerging leadership class was rooted in candid acknowledgement of daily threats and
hazards. Most would reject political violence as strategically foolish. But it was hard to deny that arms for self-defense were a crucial private resource for blacks.

  Du Bois projected this dichotomy in various ways. In his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois argued that organized violence was folly, noting that “the death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defense.” At the same time, in the chapter titled “Of the Coming of John,” a tale of violence and private honor, Du Bois championed self-defense as a core private interest.10

  Responding to real-world threats, Du Bois was adamant about the legitimacy and perhaps the duty of self-defense, even where there was danger of spillover into political violence. Consider his 1916 editorial in the Crisis excoriating Negroes in Florida who submitted without resistance to the depredations of a lynch mob.

  No colored man can read an account of the recent lynching at Gainesville, Fla., without being ashamed of his people. . . . Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder their women, shoot down innocent men entirely unconnected with the alleged crime, and finally to cap the climax, they caught and surrendered the wretched man whose attempted arrest caused the difficulty.

  No people who behave with the absolute cowardice shown by these colored people can hope to have the sympathy or help of civilized folk. . . . In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop in the South when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.11