Like many rural areas, Washington Parish had a cattle-dipping ordinance to combat parasites. Joe Magee was the range rider charged with enforcing the ordinance. Somehow he heard that the Wilsons’ old mule had not been dipped. He rode onto their farm, ignoring the Wilson boys sitting on the porch, and headed to the stockyard. One of the boys asked him, “Mister what’s your business?” Magee was not accustomed to explaining himself to Negroes and answered vaguely that he was going into the livestock lot. Jerome Wilson told him, “Hell no, you can’t go in there if you can’t tell us your business.” Magee, now on edge, demanded of Jerome, “What is your name, boy?” Jerome said, “You didn’t tell me yours—I ain’t goin’ to tell you mine.”
Magee huffed off, but soon returned with two deputies and another man. The Wilson boys were still sitting on the porch and Magee pointed to the ones who sassed him. One of the deputies, Delos Wood, told them to get up and get in the car. Jerome was the first to object. “Go with you for what. . . . We haven’t done anything. We’re home. Show us your authority.”
Deputy Wood responded with the prerogatives of his class and time. “We don’t have to have no authority to take you goddamned niggers to jail.” Then he drew his gun and advanced. One of the Wilson boys, Moise, grabbed at Wood’s gun as he came up the steps. Wood shot Moise in the stomach. The other deputy and a third man fired as well, wounding Jerome and his brother Felton.
Tracking blood through the house, Jerome ran to the gun rack, grabbed a shotgun, and fired out the window, hitting Delos Wood. With Wood down, the range rider, Joe Magee, picked up Wood’s pistol and fired at Luther Wilson, wounding him.
The entire Wilson family was eventually carted off to jail. Moise, bleeding from two gunshot wounds to the stomach, died on the cell-room floor. Eventually, the authorities focused on Jerome, and it is some signal of progress that he was not immediately lynched. Indeed, it took nearly six months from the shooting until a mob, unhappy with the pace of the legal proceedings, dragged Jerome Wilson from the Washington Parish jail and killed him.3
Roy Wilkins could have used the Wilson saga or any number of other incidents to make all of the points that he pressed in “Two against 5,000.” He could have used the shootout in Camp Hill, Arkansas, between a budding black sharecropper’s union and a local sheriff that provoked retribution and resulted in the death of at least one black man and the arrest of sixty others. He could have used the gunfight in Fort Dix, New Jersey, spurred by southern MPs who dragged back-of-the-bus protocols north, and a white commander’s notice that Negro liaisons with white women would be considered rape per se. There was plenty of fodder for the mill.4
Wilkins’s primary tools of combat over the years would be intellectual, his battles detached from the violence and blood. But even as he moved pieces across the chess board, lessons about the risks and benefits of defensive firearms were always looming. This was particularly so for an incident in Columbia, Tennessee, that might have changed the trajectory of the entire modern movement.
Aggressive storytellers might say that Negroes with guns nearly cost the life of Thurgood Marshall. Others would say that the armed black community saved Marshall from being lynched. Roy Wilkins was intimately familiar with the situation, so his account seems a fair version.
It started with a dispute between a white counter clerk and two black customers at the Castner Knott Electric Company. Gladys Stephenson and her son came to complain about the quality and price of a radio repair. Negroes carping about slipshod work was outside the boundaries of racial etiquette, and the counterman slapped Gladys Stephenson as a reminder.
But this was 1946, and Stephenson’s son James, a Navy veteran with three years’ service in World War II, would not abide the old rules. With the brawling instinct of a sailor, James Stephenson set upon the clerk with fists and feet and then pitched him through the plate-glass window of the shop. The police arrested both James and Gladys, punching Gladys in the eye for good measure.
With his prisoners secure, the sheriff recognized the danger of mob violence and moved the Stephensons out of town. He was prescient in this. Because before the day was over, a mob of seventy-five men descended on the jail, unaware that the prisoners had already been moved.
In the black section of town, pejoratively dubbed and then embraced as “Minkslide,” word of the frustrated jailhouse mob spread and folk prepared for the worst. In a vivid demonstration of the potential for armed violence to spin out in unintended ways, the next turn was something that most everyone wished they could take back.
Anticipating the mob, the neighbors of Minkslide sat like Du Bois and Walter White before them—lights out, crouching next to doors and windows with rifles, pistols, and shotguns ready. When a group of four white men crossed into the neighborhood, someone shouted, “Here they come.” Then there was gunfire. No one knows who fired first. But the result was four white policemen limping away from Minkslide, bleeding from gunshot wounds.5
The official response confirmed the long worry about the aftermath of Negroes taking up guns. A force of local and state police along with National Guard troops and armed local men marched in and shot up Minkslide. They destroyed the offices of the black doctor and the insurance company. They shot up the barbershop and pool hall and scrawled KKK on the walls of the funeral home. Every Negro home was searched for weapons, and more than one hundred blacks were arrested on charges of insurrection. Two detainees died in custody.
The NAACP denounced the episode in the Crisis but championed the residents of Minkslide, who showed, “that Negroes, even in small communities like Columbia where they were outnumbered almost three-to-one do not intend to sit quietly and let a mob form, threaten and raid their neighborhood.” Thurgood Marshall, then an NAACP attorney, was assigned to represent the detainees.
Arguing that the defendants could not get a fair trial in Colombia, Marshall got the proceedings moved to Lawrenceburg. But Lawrenceburg posed its own challenges. A professionally appointed sign planted prominently at the city limits warned, “Nigger, read and run. Don’t let the sun go down on you here. If you can’t read, run anyway.” Marshall and his legal team did not chance defying this warning. They stayed in Nashville and drove the two hundred miles back and forth every day.6
By some accounts, Marshall escaped lynching only because the black community was already mobilized against mob violence. As the litigation proceeded, Marshall and his co-counsel Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver were headed back to Nashville when they were stopped by police who claimed to have a warrant to search for whiskey. They searched and found no whiskey. Two minutes down the road, they pulled the car over again. This time they accused Marshall of being drunk. Then they loaded him into the squad car and told Looby and Weaver to get along.
Fearing for Marshall’s life, Looby and Weaver refused to abandon him. As a squad car screeched off, Looby and Weaver pursued it along windy back roads to no clear destination. The cruiser finally circled back to Columbia to the magistrate’s office. They hauled Marshall inside to an old judge who came in close, sniffed, and declared, “This man isn’t drunk, he hasn’t even had a drink.” The story among black folk was that Thurgood Marshall had been targeted for murder, but “the lynchers failed to carry out their plan because they were cowardly men and they knew . . . the entire Columbia Negro community [was] mobilized.”7
So what should we think about the violence at Minkslide? Wouldn’t it have been better if nervous Negroes with guns had not shot policemen? Then again, the violence that sparked the mob, a bigot getting thrown through a window, did not involve guns. And what about the risk to Thurgood Marshall? Black folk claimed that the armed community was a brake on plans to lynch him.
Wondering how our world might be different without Thurgood Marshall’s gigantic influence prompts broader questions that shadow analysis of any social movement. How much was the black freedom struggle driven by giants, the great men and women familiar to history? How much can we discern about the freedom movement and
the black tradition of arms just by reference to the words and deeds of those famous folk? What do we lose by failing to credit the stories of the countless souls who have faded into obscurity?
Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD, is of this latter class. Howard evokes comparisons to Ossian Sweet. Both were physicians. Both played significant but underacknowledged roles in the freedom struggle. And both are exemplars of the black tradition of arms. Sweet had notoriety thrust upon him. But Howard made an affirmative, aggressive choice to become a race man. Sweet carried a duffle bag full of guns into his new home in Detroit. Howard built a small empire in the Mississippi Delta and accumulated an arsenal of firearms.
He was born Theodore Roosevelt Howard in March 1908 in Calloway County, Kentucky. His parents scratched out a living picking tobacco. Like many stalwarts of the modern civil-rights movement, Theodore grew up in a rural gun culture where firearms were as common as shovels. People who know that culture will attest that there were countless young boys who ventured out into the fields with guns on assignments like those that ten-year-old Ted got from his mother. On Sundays, she gave him twenty cents to buy four shotgun shells and told him to bring back two rabbits or squirrels for the pot. He wrote later how he was prohibited from wasting shots on quail because “there wasn’t enough meat on ’em.” This prosaic slice of the black tradition of arms is recorded only incidentally, and some will be dissatisfied with the intermittent written record and the stories of people who were there for the hog killing, chicken-hawk shooting, groundhog sniping, raccoon blasting, and midnight-bump investigation.8
Howard’s rise was unlikely, much of it owed to the beneficence of his white mentor, Dr. William Herbert Mason. Mason smoothed Howard’s road to higher education and actually paid for much of it. When the young Theodore officially adopted the third name Mason and started signing his name T. R. M. Howard, folk whispered, “I told you so,” about the long rumors that Dr. Mason actually was Howard’s father.
Howard built his professional life in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in the town of Mound Bayou. Mound Bayou, recall, hosted the attempt at enlightened American slavery by Joseph Davis, brother of the Confederate president. By the first half of the twentieth century, Mound Bayou was a haven for black self-determination and an exemplar of black self-help. Booker T. Washington praised it as a model for black economic development. It drew talented folk who had other options, including Benjamin Green, an early black graduate of Harvard Law School who served as mayor from 1919 to 1961.9
From his base in Mound Bayou, T. R. M. Howard built a thriving medical practice and a series of lucrative businesses, including a thousand-acre farm, a restaurant, a construction company, and an insurance brokerage. Among Howard’s many employees were Medgar and Myrlie Evers, who worked at his insurance agency and would take their lead from Howard into the civil-rights movement.
Later in the movement, Medgar’s brother, Charles, said, “People call Martin Luther King Jr. the Negro orator of the century. T. R. M. Howard was as good or better and I heard both of them in their prime.” As much as Howard was exalted by blacks, he was reviled by whites. When his civil-rights activism accelerated, Howard responded to mounting threats by preparing to defend himself in the fashion of generations of Negroes before him.
As a young man in the 1930s, Howard treaded gingerly against the backdrop of episodes like the lynching of Tom Robinson that were still a worry in America. Robinson eked out a living working other people’s land in the countryside around Emelle, Alabama. His downfall was a contested transaction over a car battery. He had the misfortune of trading with the son of a wealthy white planter. The dispute escalated to a feud and then to a gun battle that left the scion, Clarence Boyd, facedown dead. It was the familiar circumstance where a black combatant won a battle but not the war. A gang of armed men attacked the Robinson clan, killing two of Tom Robinson’s sons. Although some in the Robinson family escaped, a mob killed two other blacks in the process of tracking them. Two mutilated bodies were left hanging as a lesson for other defiant Negroes. T. R. M. Howard was traveling through Emelle after this incident and never shook the image of two corpses dangling from tree limbs.10
This is the America where Howard came of age and accumulated more guns than he could easily count. When racist administration of Mississippi firearms laws denied Howard a permit to carry a concealed weapon, he had a secret compartment built into his car to hide a pistol. Then he put a gun rack in his car window to exploit the allowance for openly carrying a long gun. A gun rack in a pickup truck is the familiar image. Howard fitted one in his Cadillac.
In 1947, Howard was stopped for speeding. There were five other men in the car. As patrolmen approached, the five passengers drew their pistols and laid them on the floor, hoping to avoid a concealed weapons charge on the argument that the guns were in the open. That tactic failed, and each was fined $100 for carrying a concealed firearm without a permit. Howard was not charged. The story goes that his handgun remained hidden in its secret compartment.11
A car full of blacks speeding down the highway illegally carrying concealed handguns conjures modern nightmares. But for men like T. R. M. Howard it was a reasoned, rational calculation. We really can only speculate how widespread the practice was. But we know that Howard and his traveling companions were not unique.
The community attitude about carrying a gun without approval from authorities is suggested in a 1939 report from the Crisis that the head of the Greenville, South Carolina, branch of the NAACP was facing charges of illegal concealed carry. The report expressed no surprise that he was carrying a gun and seemed to recognize it as a well-considered tactic and a legitimate act of civil disobedience. According to the Crisis, “J. A. Briar, 69, President of Greenville South Carolina branch is the latest victim of the terror the Klan and other groups are using against Negroes in Greenville and vicinity. Mr. Briar was arrested December 1 charged with carrying a concealed weapon.”
Briar had been leading a voter-registration fight since early summer. This precipitated a wave of intimidation and threats. According to the Crisis, “The first movement to frighten the NAACP was the arrest of William Anderson, president of the Youth Council on the trumped up charge of telephoning a white girl. . . . The arrest of Mr. Briar was the next step. The situation reached a crucial stage early in December when it was reported that all the hardware stores in Greenville were sold out of guns and ammunition and that Negroes were determined to protect themselves in the event any assault was made upon them by the Klan.”12 J. A. Briar faded into obscurity, and who knows how many other such men were never noted at all. T. R. M. Howard is emblematic of such men. We are fortunate that he left a richer record.
In a long career of activism, Howard is most celebrated for his efforts surrounding the Emmett Till murder trial. Howard helped search for witnesses, developed evidence, and opened his home as a safe haven for journalists, witnesses, and visitors. A variety of observers confirm that guns were everywhere. One reporter records “a long gun, a shotgun or rifle, in every corner of every room.” Howard typically carried a pistol openly in a belt holster. Every day of the trial, Howard and a caravan of armed men escorted Maime Bradley (Till’s mother) and others, including Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, to the courthouse.
Journalist Cloyte Murdock, writing for the black monthly magazine Ebony, described arriving at Howard’s home and having trouble getting her luggage through the front door. She finally wedged in and found the problem. A cache of guns stacked behind the door had fallen over and blocked her entry. Another visitor identified a .357 Magnum revolver and a .45 automatic in holsters looped over the headboard in Howard’s bedroom. A Thompson submachine gun rested at the foot of the bed.
If accurate, the report of the submachine gun raises the question of whether Howard had fully complied with the 1934 National Firearms Act, which requires owners of fully automatic firearms to jump through a series of regulatory hoops that would have invited interference by the same local aut
horities who denied him a permit to carry a concealed handgun. We are left to wonder whether the machine-gun report is just a familiar case of someone ignorant about the technology, misreporting what they saw or another example of Howard defying gun laws.
Some contend that the acquittal of the men charged with Emmett Till’s murder marked the beginning of the civil-rights movement in Mississippi. It certainly propelled Howard onto a bigger stage. From that platform, in speeches and in commentary, Howard presented armed self-defense as an essential private resource for blacks. On several occasions, Howard recounted the story of his friend George L. Jefferson, head of the Vicksburg, Mississippi, NAACP. The Klan had burned a cross in front of Jefferson’s funeral home. According to Howard, Jefferson called to alert the sheriff that the logistics of Jim Crow required tending:
They have burned a cross in front of my funeral home. I’m sure that you and everybody in Vicksburg knows where my wife and my family lives. I understand that they are going out there to burn a cross. And, Mr. Sheriff, I just want to tell you that Mississippi law requires separate ambulances for transportation of colored and white persons and inasmuch as the white hearse can’t carry a colored man or a colored hearse can’t carry a white man, I’m telling you that when that group comes out to my home to burn a cross, I have already got my colored ambulance standing by. I want you to send a white hearse along because somebody’s going to be hauled away.
The punch line, rendered to thunderous applause by black audiences, was that no cross was burned at Jefferson’s home. The white establishment was less enthused. The Jackson Daily News reprinted the full text of Howard’s speech and in three separate editorials condemned his “incendiary” language and his “poison tongue.”13
Throughout his activism, Howard confronted the reality of state failure and overt malice. It fueled his natural stance and political philosophy of self-sufficiency and self-help. The folly of relying on the state for protection was especially evident in an episode where FBI agents were sitting in his office just as a fresh threat came in. The agents were there investigating whether Howard had been the target of extortion. The interview was interrupted by a telephone caller who threatened to kill Howard if he continued to press for integration. Although they had just observed a threat to his life, the agents rebuffed Howard’s request for protection and suggested that he contact local authorities. The governor of Mississippi already had refused the NAACP’s plea to investigate the roadside shotgun murder of Reverend Henry Lee, with the retort that he did not answer letters from the NAACP. That alone might explain why Howard kept “a small arsenal” in his home.14
Negroes and the Gun Page 28
