Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Medgar Evers’s practice of arms is confirmed by John Salter, an American Indian activist who taught sociology at the predominately black Tougaloo College, in Jackson. Salter stopped by Medgar’s house one night in 1962 and was greeted by the muzzle of a gun. Inside the house, Salter recalls, “at least half a dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen.” While traveling with Evers to work on voter registration, Salter said that Evers kept a .45 caliber automatic pistol under the pillow he used on the driver’s seat and a rifle in the trunk.82 Salter would subsequently acknowledge his own preparations, explaining:

  Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 Special Smith & Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine. The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay. Years later, in a changed Mississippi, [this deterrent value] was confirmed by a former prominent leader of the White Knights of the KKK when we had an interesting dinner together at Jackson.83

  Medgar Evers’s murder casts critical light on John Salter’s assessment. Claims of averted violence are far less evocative than bloody incidents where violence runs unchecked. We are left wondering how to value the statements of John Salter and Charles Evers that guns saved their lives, against the bloody fact that a man with a gun extinguished the life of their beloved brother and friend. One clear lesson is that having a gun is no guarantee of safety. And some will argue further that the gun only introduces new dangers, especially where black self-defenders are left to deal with biased local authorities.84 But none of this diminished either Charles or Medgar Evers’s resolve to arm themselves for self-defense.85

  For Charles, even the worrisome boundary against political violence did not counsel against the gun. In 1959, he pressed hard against that boundary after a car-bomb attack on Natchez, Mississippi, NAACP leader George Metcalf. Like Robert Williams before him, Evers claimed to reject political violence as fruitless, acknowledging, “the only way we have is through nonviolence. There’s no other way.”86 But following the attack on Metcalf, Evers channeled the rage of the community, venting, “We’re not going to take it any longer. . . . We’re not going to start any riots, but we’ve got guns and we’re going to fight back.” A day later, after Governor Paul Johnson ordered guardsmen to Natchez, Evers was again urging the community that group violence was counterproductive.87

  From the national office, Roy Wilkins scolded Evers, “We have never authorized you, as our representative, to state either privately or publicly, ‘we are armed, we have taken all we will take, we will fight’ . . . or any sentiments approximating that language. [We cannot] afford these damaging statements in a nationally syndicated newspaper column.”88 Wilkins demanded that Evers issue a statement making this clear. After a follow-up by Evers in the New York Post that Wilkins considered unsatisfactory, he drafted a letter demanding that Evers resign. For reasons that remain unclear, Wilkins never sent this letter.89

  Wilkins already had navigated a similar conflict with St. Augustine, Florida, activist, Robert Hayling, a black dentist who led local voter registration and desegregation efforts. After a shotgun attack on his home, Hayling organized an armed defense squad. He warned the Klan publicly that his guards would “shoot first and ask questions later.”90 Here, Roy Wilkins responded harshly, as he had to Robert Williams. Hayling broke ties with the NAACP. But in a familiar turn, when Martin Luther King came to St. Augustine in 1964, he consented to Hayling’s deployment of armed guards for protection.91

  The movement spills over with lesser-known folk like Robert Hayling whose preparations to defend themselves with guns survive as remnants within a larger story. In South Carolina, a solitary reverend, J. A. Delaine, fired back with effect when terrorists shot into his house.92 The home of local activist Amzie Moore, of Cleveland, Mississippi, who mentored young activists who would rise to form SNCC, was well stocked with arms and ammunition. A young white activist spending the night at Moore’s was “startled when Moore placed a pistol on the night table and suggested that he and his friends use it to repel [intruders].” Not only was his home well fortified, “like most politically active Blacks in the Delta,” Moore carried a gun when he traveled.93

  Shortly after Medgar Evers’s murder, Aaron Henry, a Clarksdale, Mississippi, pharmacist and intermittent president of the state NAACP, led a series of protests in Clarksdale, where segregation still reigned and the voting rolls remained tightly restricted. Local folk worried about Aaron Henry’s safety after threats on his life circulated. Later, an affidavit to the Justice Department claimed that Clarksdale police chief Ben Collins had offered to pay a Negro named Charlie Black to kill Henry. Henry himself recounts how Collins chided, “Let me take out some life insurance on you. Somebody’s gonna kill your ass.”

  Fearing for Henry’s safety, the local NAACP hired professional guards. When the bills came due, folk realized that paying a professional force was unsustainable. So they established a volunteer force of a dozen rotating guards drawn from community men like Reverend Willie Goodlow, whom Henry describes sitting up nights in the living room with a shotgun in his lap. On one occasion as Henry’s guards were changing shifts, police chief Ben Collins pulled up, poked around, and then confiscated the pistol that one of the men had laid on his car seat. By Aaron Henry’s account, that was the end of the incident. But it is illuminating to consider the additional detail from Charles Evers.94

  We know from multiple accounts that Aaron Henry and Charles Evers had very different temperaments. And that may explain why Henry fails to mention what Evers describes as a deluge of guns flooding in from black Clarksdale to the Aaron Henry defense effort. According to Evers, when police arrested Henry’s guard and confiscated his gun, “that made Negroes of Clarksdale so mad they gave Aaron guns enough for ten lifetimes.”95 Evers’s version suggests that Henry was no passive beneficiary of risks taken by other men and actively prepared to defend himself with guns. Anthony Lewis of the New York Times confirms Evers’s intimation, writing that “after the bombing of his home, Mr. Henry obtained a permit for a revolver.” (This evidently refers to a permit to carry a concealed firearm because no permit was needed simply to own the gun).

  Charles Evers’s richer account of the Aaron Henry episode leaves us wondering what other details have been excluded over the years from judicious recollections of Negroes with guns. Given the abundant surviving evidence of so many of the sober stalwarts of the freedom movement owning and using guns and advocating armed self-defense, it is a fair surmise that the available record shows only a slice of a broader phenomenon populated by a legion of unknown and lesser-known folk.

  Among the lesser known and briefly recorded are men like Dr. Emmett Stringer, who served as president of the Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches in 1954. For the sin of taking seriously the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Stringer suffered economic reprisals and then physical threats. His wife’s master’s degree from Columbia University was no shield against retaliatory firing from her teaching job. Stringer was unapologetic about his response to the growing pressure. “I had weapons in my house. And not only in my house, I had weapons on me when I went to my office. . . . I would take my revolver with me and put it in the drawer, right where I worked.”96

  Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer are the famous names, but many other black women picked up guns to defend themselves and their friends during the freedom struggle. In one dramatic example in 1962, Rebecca Wilson, of Dallas, Georgia, defied terrorists with pistol fire. It was well past visiting time when she rose to the commotion of seven hooded men on her porch. One of them teased that they wanted to “sell a little politics and leave a card.” Then they fired a shotgun through the door. Wilson fired back, five rapid shots, killing one man and wounding a second. Apparently surprised by the return fire, the other men fled.

  Wilson later explained, “It was the idea of the masks, I guess. I was scared. I didn
’t know what I was shooting at. I just had my hand out the door.” Even though the dead and wounded men were politically prominent, Wilson’s shooting was acknowledged as an act of self-defense, and several of the hooded men were charged with violation of Georgia’s KKK-targeted anti-masking law. Fearing retaliation, Wilson accepted an offer of protective custody and then left Georgia for Indiana.97

  Not every episode ended in gunfire and dead terrorists. But the evidence of armed black women in the modern movement abounds. During the Freedom Summer Project, one student volunteer was shocked to find that her host, “Mrs. Fairly, was armed to the teeth.” In a letter home, the student wrote, “I met Mrs. Fairly coming down the hall from the front porch carrying a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.” In 1965 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the wife of local activist Robert Hicks used her pistol to fend off Klansmen who had chased a CORE98 worker to her home. In nearby Ferriday, a rural farmer’s wife returned fire when a group of Klansmen shot into her home. And after the brutal beating of her nephew by police in Tuscaloosa, activist Ruth Bolden recounts, “I called my friends . . . to come over here and stay with me that night ’cause I was really scared to death. . . . We had to talk in codes. I said ‘come and bring a lot of sandwiches’ and he knew what that meant: it was guns and a lot of bullets.” Afterward, Bolden began carrying a pistol . . . hidden in her Bible.99

  In Carroll County, Mississippi, Leola Blackmon invoked faith, fearlessness, and firearms against midnight terrorists who tried to crush local voter-registration efforts. Activists were caught in a bureaucratic game that demanded multiple trips to the registration office. This exposed them to harassment on the roadway by cars full of armed men. Their response was pragmatic. “So some blacks just went home and got their trucks and came back with their guns. . . . We had mens who guarded us, and they was standing out with high power guns. They began to shoot back at this car, and they hit it. . . . That car left there on a flat ’cause they shot the tires out. The laws didn’t try to find out who did it.”

  Later, when someone lit a cross in her yard, Leola Blackmon’s reaction was rooted in two different worlds. “I don’t feel like I oughta have feared mens,” she said, “The one I feared’s Jesus Christ. That night when they set that cross afire at my house . . . I thought to cut ’em down, but I didn’t. I just let some bullets through behind ’em. I had a rifle. It would shoot sixteen times, and I just lit out up there and started shooting.” Leola Blackmon saw her actions as fully consistent with the nonviolent movement, explaining, “Well, we said nonviolent when we was protesting the school buses; nobody not s’posed to fight. But that fight was brought on because we were looking for them to hit us.”100

  Women like Leola Blackmon defy the intuition that the black tradition of arms was an exclusively male phenomenon. But there is no doubting the dominant role of black men. Just one county over, grassroots activist Hartman Turnbow, was a full-blown exemplar of black male defiance. Turnbow distilled the importance of private self-defense and the basic impulse fueling the black tradition of arms in phrasing unmatched before or since.

  Startled awake one spring night in 1963 by crashing glass, flames from a firebomb, and the sound of gunshots, Turnbow proceeded on instinct. He jumped out of bed, grabbed his sixteen-shot semiautomatic rifle, and ran toward the threat. He repelled two armed men from his porch and continued firing as they fled to a waiting vehicle. Turnbow and his family managed to extinguish the flames and save their home. The next day he was arrested on the charge that he had attempted to burn down his own house.101 The talk among black folk was that that Turnbow actually killed one of the attackers, but the death was called a heart attack in order to cover the identities of the terrorists. Suspicions mounted when SNCC workers surveyed the scene and found a dropped license plate that matched to the sheriff’s car.102

  Turnbow explained his gunfire as perfectly consistent with the nonviolent philosophy of the movement declaring, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent, I was protecting my wife and family.”103 While Turnbow answered the worries of northern pacifists with the double negative of non-nonviolence, local folk required no such apologies, and in the Delta, Turnbow was considered a hero.104

  By the time of the next attack, Turnbow had augmented his arsenal. He described it this way: “The next year when they shot over here, I got a automatic shotgun, Remington, 12 gauge, and them high-velocity buckshot. So I jumped up and run out and turn it loose a time or two. . . . I reported to the FBI in Jackson. . . . First words they said to me was, ‘Don’t kill nobody. Don’t kill nobody.’ . . . I said now here y’all two Mississippi FBI’s, talkin bout don’t kill nobody. How to you think I feel and they just shootin’ all through my house and I got a wife and a 14-year-old daughter?”105

  Fig. 7.4. Hartman Turnbow speaking at a Holmes County Mississippi church meeting. (The image of Hartman Turnbow, photographed by Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner, was previously published in Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi by Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner with Cheryl Reitan [2013, University Press of Kentucky].)

  Hartman Turnbow was not unique in either word or deed. When armed Klansmen attacked the all-black community of Milestone, Mississippi, in 1965, World War II veteran Robert Cooper and other movement activists responded with gunfire of their own. Cooper explained slightly less poetically than Hartman Turnbow, “I don’t figure that I was violent. All I was doin’ was protectin’ myself.”

  After a cross burning in front of his house, Cooper told the sheriff, “The very next one come up and do something in front of my house, I will be calling the undertaker.” The next episode was not a cross burning but a firebomb and then gunshots. When the bomb was tossed, Cooper reports, “I just happened to be out there, and I fired right back on ’em. That’s the way I caught ’em ’cause I got the word they was coming by that night to get me. . . . I had my automatic shotgun settin’ right at the front door, and I fired up through that oak tree there to let ’em know I was at home.”

  The terrorists were not easily dissuaded. “Bout an hour after that,” Cooper recalled, “I had gone out, got myself stationary. . . . They fired into the house. Then they came right on by me, and just as they got to me, I started firin’ on them. Some of them shots hit ’em. One boy, I know, got a load.”

  Cooper recounts a conversation the next day when the sheriff showed up to arrest him, charging, “‘You done shot them fellows, and we gonna put you in jail.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but I was at home tended to my business when they come shootin into my house. I wasn’t out there meddlin; they come there meddlin me. I think I had a right to shoot back at them done shot into my house.’ So finally they up and let me out.”

  Later Cooper explained his decision this way. “I felt that you’re in your house, ain’t botherin nobody, the only thang you hunting is equal justice. An they gonna sneak by night, burn your house, or shoot in there. And you gonna sit there and take all of it? You got to be a very li’l man with no guts at all.”106

  One wonders from these sorts of accounts whether and how often Hartman Turnbow, Robert Cooper, and folk of similar dispositions carried guns in public. Did they take them to town, to the fields, to church? Certainly the dangers they armed against did not disappear when they ventured from home out into the world.

  Although we can never know exactly how widespread it was, there are hints within the culture that creative concealed carry was a minor art form. Recall T. R. M. Howard’s rumored secret compartment in his Cadillac. Fannie Lou Hamer’s mother, Lou Ella Townsend, carried a gun concealed in a bucket. Medgar Evers hid his pistol in a driver’s seat pillow. Fred Kirkpatrick in Louisiana and Ruth Bolden in Alabama capitalized on the practice of church folk to carry around their bibles in big leather covers with room for extras that would fill a decent purse. In with that jumble, Kirkpatrick and Bolden both kept pistols.107

  But the prize for minimalist creativity goes to the lyrically named Sweets Turnbow, Hartman Turnbow’s life mate. In 1964, Hartman and
Sweets traveled to Atlantic City, where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would challenge the whites-only State Democratic Party for representation at the national convention. Fannie Lou Hamer stole the show with wrenching stories of suffering and the uplift of song. But in the wings, Sweets Turnbow schmoozed and cajoled national Democrats to confront the fact that their Mississippi brethren were running a party that would have been a comfortable home to a nineteenth-century Confederate veteran.108

  People must have thought the rube from Mississippi had brought her lunch or was stuffing buffet leftovers into the brown paper bag she carried up and down the boardwalk. Years later, those who knew the truth would tell that inside the bag was a loaded pistol and how “Sweets never went anyplace without her brown paper bag and gun.”109

  Sweets and Hartman Turnbow no doubt consulted on strategies for concealing and carrying firearms. Although it is unclear whether Hartman was carrying a gun at the Atlantic City convention, Julian Bond records that in Mississippi, Turnbow “used to carry an army automatic in a briefcase, and it’s funny to see a man who looks like a farmer and is dressed like a farmer in coveralls and boots and let’s say an old hat, with a briefcase. And he opens the briefcase and nothing’s in it but an automatic.”110

  SNCC activist James Forman confirmed that keeping and carrying guns was consistent with community norms. Commenting on Hartman Turnbow, Forman observed that “self-defense—at least of one’s home—was not a concept new to Southern blacks in 1963 and there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.”111 Julian Bond echoed the observation: “Almost everybody with whom we stayed in Mississippi had guns, as a matter of course, hunting guns. But you know, they were there for other purposes too.”112