Nixon called a dozen more ministers before ringing King back. This time the twenty-six-year-old King, newly installed at Dexter Avenue and still preoccupied with finishing his doctoral dissertation, told Nixon that he was interested in the boycott. “I’m glad to hear you say so,” Nixon said, “because I’ve talked to eighteen other people and told them to meet in your church tonight. It would’ve been kind of bad to be getting together there without you.”155
Nixon later explained that the choice of Dexter Avenue had less to do with King than the location of the church. “If we’da met in the suburbs, insurance mens and doctors and things who were working downtown wouldn’t leave the office to go way out. But with it right downtown in the heart there wasn’t no question they would walk right around the corner to it, and that’s why the meeting was set up there.”156
As plans for the boycott coalesced, the ministers of Montgomery met at the Holt Street Baptist Church to arrange logistics and elect officers. Black churchmen had long been a relatively conservative force in the community, and this was evident in the Holt Street meeting. As the pastors dithered and schemed how to initiate a boycott so “nobody will know how it happened,” E. D. Nixon leapt to his feet so mad, he forgot he was in church. “What the hell you people talkin’ bout? . . . How the hell you gonna have a mass meeting, gonna boycott a city bus line without the white folks knowing it? You guys have went around here and lived off these poor washer women all your lives and ain’t never done nothing for ’em. And now you got a chance to do something for ’em you talkin’ bout you don’t want the white folks to know it.” Nixon then made it a question of manhood, chiding, “either admit you are a grown man or concede to the fact that you are a bunch of scared boys.” This was too much for King, who jumped up and shouted that he wasn’t a coward. “That was the moment,” said Nixon, “that he got nominated.”157
Soon after King assumed leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the formal organization that would press the boycott, black folk in Montgomery started to worry about his safety and organized a staff of drivers and bodyguards for him. They brought the guns they had, and fortunately never had to rely on Reverend Richman Smiley’s diminutive .25 caliber Beretta, which modern trainers would dismiss as inferior to a bludgeon.158
On January 30, 1956, nearly a year into the boycott, King’s house was bombed. King had been speaking at a protest meeting and rushed home to Coretta and their two-month-old daughter. He found them unharmed and the parsonage guarded by a loose assembly of armed black men that soon grew into the hundreds. As police pushed through the crowd, one black man brimming with anger was set off by their rough entry to the scene. He challenged the cops, “now you got your .38 and I got mine. So let’s shoot it out.” King diffused things, telling the crowd, “My wife and baby are all right. I want you to go home and put down your weapons.” The armed black men dispersed. But the situation edged toward chaos, and one of the cops later told a reporter, “I’ll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life to that nigger preacher.”159
King dispersed the men with the message, “I want you to love our enemies.” But he was at this stage still quite practical about the surrounding threats. Reverend Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery First Baptist Church recalls asking King “if he had any means of protection for himself and his family.” King said that all he had was a butcher knife and they decided that “we should go downtown together and buy some weapons for our protection.”160
King even sought a permit to carry a concealed gun in his car. But local authorities determined that he had not shown “good cause” for needing a permit to carry a firearm. A generation later, protests against the caprice and cronyism that pervaded these types of discretionary permit systems would spark a movement toward nondiscretionary, “shall issue” concealed-carry permits that would become the American norm.161
Inflamed by the bombing of the parsonage and another bombing at E. D. Nixon’s house, members of King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church redoubled efforts to protect him. The churchmen came with guns and sat up in shifts guarding his house.162 Arriving at King’s home to assist in the struggle, pacifist Bayard Rustin recalled that the parsonage was “a virtual garrison” with pistols, rifles, and shotguns in every corner of the living room. When Rustin’s friend, journalist William Worthy, sat down on a pistol wedged into a chair, King assured them that the weapons were only defensive precautions.163 Reverend Glenn Smiley, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, visited Dr. King’s home in 1956 and reported back to his employer:
[King] had Gandhi in mind when this thing started, was aware of the dangers to him inwardly, wants to do it right, but is too young and some of his close help is violent. King accepts as an example, a body guard and asked for permits for them to carry guns. This was denied by the police, but nevertheless, the place is an arsenal. King sees the inconsistency, but not enough. He believes and yet he doesn’t believe. The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what I must convince him to see as the greatest evil.164
According to Bayard Rustin, a potentially tragic close call shocked King into a more cautious mind-set about the armed guards. The story goes that a delivery boy had ducked behind the hedges near King’s home to pee, and was mistaken by one of King’s guards as a threat. The armed man almost killed the boy. According to Rustin, the incident pushed King to ban guns from the house.165
King is such an iconic figure that we lose the sense of his daily struggle, of how much day-to-day courage his work demanded, and how much pressure he labored under moment to moment. We talk now about King falling to an assassin’s bullet, numb to the trauma and outrage of the time. But it sharpens our sense of the angst surrounding King’s daily decision making to consider a lesser-known attack that he survived in 1958 in Harlem. He was signing copies of his book Stride toward Freedom, when a deranged black woman rushed from the crowd and stabbed him. The attack left a thin, razor-sharp blade lodged in his chest. At Harlem Hospital, a team of doctors removed the blade from flush against King’s aorta. They mended the wound, which healed into the shape of a cross over his heart.
We will never know exactly the toll that such things took on King’s psyche and resilience. With dangers all around, he leaned heavily on his faith, though we can never really know the extent of his doubts. But ten years later, close to the day he was murdered, the wear and tear was evident in his brief exchange with Roy Wilkins in the Cleveland airport. Wilkins was alone. But King “had three very large men at his side.” He called to Wilkins and asked him if he was traveling alone. Wilkins said yes, and King’s response reflected his own calculations, “I don’t think you should do that. It’s too dangerous. You should always have someone with you.”166
The various influences buffeting King on questions of personal security and self-defense are illuminated by the decision making following the shooting of James Meredith at the inception of his Mississippi March against Fear. The swirling debate demonstrates the powerful self-defense impulse that King would navigate as he attempted to steer the freedom movement through multiple hazards with just the loose controls of rhetoric.
A veteran of the freedom struggle, James Meredith broke boundaries at the University of Mississippi in 1962, on a platform of nonviolence.167 On the first day of his 1966 Mississippi March against Fear, Meredith was ambushed by a white gunman. Interviewed from his hospital bed, after doctors had picked a mound of shotgun pellets from his flesh, Meredith made national headlines, railing, “He shot me like I was a goddam rabbit. If I had a gun I could have got that guy. I’m not going to get caught in that situation again.” Asked how this statement squared with the philosophy of nonviolence, Meredith snapped, “Who the hell ever said I was nonviolent? I spent eight years in the military and the rest of my life in Mississippi.”168
In some sense, Meredith’s rant conveyed a simple intent to defend himself. But in context, the danger that it would incite political violence is plain. Out of the hospital, Meredith maintained his milit
ant stance, confirming that he intended to return to the March against Fear, but this time carrying a gun. Martin Luther King considered Meredith’s statement a dangerous flirt with political violence and urged Meredith publicly not to come back armed to the march. This worry about political violence would take center stage in the debate and decisions to come.169
Fig. 7.7. James Meredith wounded by a shotgun blast at the beginning of his 1966 March against Fear. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell.)
Meredith’s “march” had started as essentially a solo affair to urge black voter registration. By 1966, the protest march was a well-worn tool. Some saw Meredith’s march as an empty gesture, and his allies from the days of integrating Ole Miss basically ignored it. There were only four people with him when they crossed into Mississippi and Abrery James Norvell stepped from the brush and laid Meredith flat with a shotgun blast.
Movement leaders raced to the scene and vowed to continue the protest. There was obvious concern about safety. And there was a corresponding worry that security measures would be considered provocative. It was a pointed example of the long-standing worry that security precautions could be construed as battle preparations and self-defense might spill over uncontrollably into political violence.
Those involved were acutely aware that they were walking a tightrope. And the debate about security eventually fractured the coalition that had rallied in support of Meredith. All of the familiar organizations were there: Floyd McKissick, CORE’s new director; Martin Luther King, for SCLC; Stokely Carmichael of SNCC; Roy Wilkins for the NAACP; and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.
A primary bone of contention was whether the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black self-defense organization that had established chapters throughout the South, would be used to protect the marchers. The Deacons, as we will see, were aggressive advocates of armed self-defense and had deployed firearms effectively against terrorists.
The alignment here of King, McKissick, and Carmichael against Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young in the security strategy for the march offers a snapshot of King’s thinking about the issues that frame the black tradition of arms. Although there are different accounts of the episode, King, it seems, was the decisive vote in favor of including the Deacons. But the decision was contentious.170
As people were arriving for a strategy session at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a van full of Deacons pulled up and unloaded, some of them carrying ammunition bandoliers and semiautomatic .30-06 caliber M-1 Garand rifles—the World War II infantry rifle that George Patton called the greatest battle implement ever devised. The leader of the group, Earnest Thomas, was on relatively cordial terms with King, who referred to Thomas as “Deac.” Hosea Williams, one of King’s aides, objected immediately to the Deacons, scolding Thomas, “Well I’m going to tell you right now, there ain’t going to be no Deacons on the March.” Thomas countered that the national organizations risked losing the allegiance of grassroots folk “because you getting people hurt, and you get back on them god-damn planes and you fly off and forget about them.”171
Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young agreed with Hosea Williams. The NAACP had long supported compelling cases of private self-defense. But using the Deacons as security for the march posed real risks of political violence. And that was something that cautious leaders like Wilkins and Young had always worked hard to avoid.
While everyone argued, King sat on the bed, eating his dinner and listening. Finally he interjected with a question to Thomas, “Deac, you mean you’re going to march?” It was a judicious move. Thomas responded, “I don’t have no intention of marching one block in Mississippi. But we’re going to be up and down the highways and byways. If somebody gets shot again, they’re going to have somebody to give account to for that.”
King’s handling of the matter shows a deft political touch. With one question he fashioned a subtle compromise. The March against Fear would remain officially nonviolent. There would be no photographs of Deacons marching with guns. The theme of nonviolence would be projected across the airwaves. But in the background, Negroes with guns would be ready.
King was walking a fine line. It was too close to the edge for Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, who stormed out of the meeting and withdrew from the march. Two decades later, Andrew Young characterized King’s approach this way:
SCLC was aggressively nonviolent. But Martin made distinctions between defensive violence and retaliatory violence. He was far more understanding of defensive violence. Martin’s attitude was you can never fault a man for protecting his home and his wife. He saw the Deacons as defending their homes and their wives and children. Martin said he would never himself resort to violence even in self-defense, but he would not demand that of others. That was a religious commitment into which one had to grow.172
There was a powerful element of pragmatism in King’s approach. This was evident in the days before the meeting when King stayed at Charles Evers’s Queens Road home in Jackson. The place was brimming with pistols and rifles. Evers reports that King never “preached down” to him about the guns and teasingly complimented him, “Charles, I’m nonviolent, but I never feel safer anywhere, with anybody, than in your home.”173
When the march recommenced, armed Deacons were in the wings. At night, they guarded the campsites. In the mornings while the marchers were assembling, the Deacons were in the vanguard, checking along the road and in adjacent woodlots for threats and questioning whites who lingered too long at the edges of the route. Deacon Charles Sims recalls, “I was carrin’ two snub-nosed .38s and two boxes of shells and had three men ridin’ down the highway with semiautomatic carbines with 30 rounds apiece.”174
But the Deacons were not invisible. And some of the reporting of their participation confirmed the worries of Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. For the marchers on the ground, though, the Deacons were a comfort. Cleveland Sellers recorded that the marchers dismissed the media criticism of the Deacons and made their own practical assessment. “Everyone realized that without them, our lives would have been much less secure.” His view was not unanimous.
Fig. 7.8. Deacon Earnest Thomas with a two-way radio, on guard at a church meeting in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1965. (© Ed Hollander.)
Among the whites in the march was a minister from Woodbridge, New Jersey. He recoiled at the sight of a big pistol laying on Earnest Thomas’s car seat. The New Jersey vicar was “astounded” and advised the misguided black folk that “the movement is no place for guns.”175 Earnest Thomas responded by explaining the basics of the black tradition of arms. No one could demand that blacks surrender their basic right of self-defense. In the same breath, Thomas assured the cleric and skittish journalists that the marchers in the movement were in fact, and would remain, nonviolent. Thomas was a simple man, not an intellectual. But he forcefully articulated for the divinity PhD and the glib journalists the distinction between self-defense and political violence that black folk from the leadership class to the grassroots had been pressing for generations.176
Still, the Deacons presented a mixed bag for Martin Luther King. In tense moments he might have appreciated the defensive force they brought to a dangerous scene. But the Deacons also operated much closer to the boundary of political violence than King, and that was a pulsing danger. Even rhetorically they played a more dangerous game. Witness Earnest Thomas’s speech at a rally in Yazoo City following the March against Fear: “We plan to practice nonviolence,” said Thomas. So far so good.
Then Thomas pushed hard on the contradiction that many others had soft-pedaled. “But we do not intend for any redneck to abuse any black people anymore. . . . If they do, there’ll be a blood red Mississippi.” People would do their own calculations, but a “blood red Mississippi” conjures images of more than isolated acts of private self-defense.177 As things escalated, following a blistering speech by Stokely Carmichael that thrust the phrase “black power” into the national lexicon, King warned against use of the “unfortunate” term. He declared weari
ly, “I’m sick and tired of violence,” and pleaded with SNCC and CORE to abandon the black power slogan and to send the Deacons home.178
CORE chairman James Farmer had his own difficulties incorporating and explaining the work of the Deacons who were openly protecting CORE workers in the South. His efforts ranged well beyond the ideology of the predominantly white pacifists who founded CORE in 1942. Offering his own version of the boundary central to the black tradition of arms, Farmer distinguished between armed self-defense “outside” the movement and CORE’s nonviolent demonstrations. “You must understand,” said Farmer, “when a man’s home is attacked that’s not the movement, that’s his home.”179
Pressed on the point that CORE demonstrations involving the Deacons happened in the streets, not in homes, Farmer was unprepared to explain that the boundary against political violence was not a bright line but grey zone sliding toward mounting risks. He deflected the question bluntly, stubbornly repeating that armed self-defense and political violence were fundamentally different.180 He would eventually retreat to a sharper rendition of the political-violence boundary, arguing in the Amsterdam News, “If violence is on the horizon, I would certainly prefer to see it channeled into a defensive discipline than the random homicide and suicide of rioting.”181
Much like King, Farmer wrestled with the self-defense impulse at a deadly practical level. For Farmer the challenge came in the summer of 1963 in Plaquemine, Louisiana. He was there to support local activists who were fighting against segregated public facilities. When the third of a series of protest marches spun into chaos and then a threat to lynch Farmer, armed black men snatched him from the tumult, guarded him from mobbers, and smuggled him out of town in the back of a hearse.182
James Farmer’s experience is one confirmation that even before its radical turn, CORE operated against the backstop of local folk with guns. And legendary among that group was Canton, Mississippi’s C. O. Chinn, who was sometimes affectionately and sometimes guardedly called, “Bad-ass C. O. Chinn.”
Negroes and the Gun Page 35
