Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  The response to the Jet article suggests that many folk were intrigued by the Deacons. Following the story, the Bogalusa chapter was flooded with calls, offers of support, and queries about starting satellite chapters. In towns across the South, Deacons chapters and other sympathetic but unaffiliated groups sprang up. The actual numbers are hard to pin down because various public statements about membership were deliberately inflated. Still, there is abundant hard evidence of Negroes with guns, under the banner of the Deacons, doing dangerous work.215

  In Ferriday, Louisiana, a Deacons chapter guarded CORE activists and on January 29, 1966, repelled a bomb attack with gunfire. Across the river in Natchez, the Deacons wrestled with the same questions that had burdened their Mississippi counterparts. Reprising Martin Luther King’s March against Fear strategy, Otis Firmin of the Natchez chapter explained his vision, “We don’t participate in any demonstrations, any marches, anything like that.” But if needed, said Firmin, the Deacons were ready. “We be around, we watch, and we observe and we protect them if they need protecting.” And with a candid appreciation of the special and sometimes-unspoken legal barriers that applied to Negroes with guns, Firmin answered a recruit’s question about getting permits to “tote a weapon.” With the same practical approach that had governed generations before him, Firmin explained that they would not dignify the legal charade of the permitting process. Instead, he advised, “We just going to tote weapons.”216

  In Centreville, Mississippi, a fledgling Wilkinson County chapter accompanied a protest march of about two hundred folk who were actually agitating against black teachers who refused to support the voting-rights agenda. Along the route, they passed by a rural gas station whose owner figured that whatever the Negroes were marching for, he was against, and he was willing to press the point with gunfire. As the man stepped from his doorway with a rifle, he faced the muzzles of more than twenty guns pointed by Deacons who accompanied the marchers. The man retreated back into his store and perhaps never learned how little he actually cared about the thing the Negroes were protesting.

  There are at least two reports of the familiar dangers of firearms striking fledgling Deacons chapters. In one incident, a young recruit got into an argument with the Woodville chapter leader, drew his gun, and wounded the older man. In another incident, a Deacon from the Woodville chapter shot a black deputy sheriff, confessed his crime, and went to prison.

  With the increased publicity and hyperbolic media characterizations of their militancy, the Deacons’ star rose among the radical set. A month after Charles Sims raised hackles in Los Angeles, Deacon Earnest Thomas traveled to San Francisco to solicit funds through the Friends of the Deacons Network. He actually met with future Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, who talked about starting a Deacons chapter in California. Thomas was polite but concluded that Seale was too radical for the Deacons. Other groups like the Workers World Party, the Spartacus League, and the Socialist Workers Party proposed alliances with the Deacons and offered financial support.

  But leftist politics did not appeal to the Deacons who encountered them. Earnest Thomas’s reaction was typical: “I’m not a left-winger. I’m just a capitalist that don’t have a damn thing.” Charles Sims was of the same mind, declaring that the radical pursuit of “black power didn’t do a damn thing but hurt the movement.”217

  If the Deacons had been the most radical force on the scene, the next turn of the black tradition of arms might not have been so dramatic.

  In the spring of 1976, Maynard Holbrook Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta, urged the United States to “immediately ban the import, manufacture, sale and possession of all handguns.” It was a stark departure from the policy and practice of previous generations. The handgun is the quintessential self-defense tool and the black tradition of arms championed self-defense.1

  Something plainly had changed, because Maynard Jackson was no lone voice in the wind. He was channeling the emerging orthodoxy of the bourgeoning black political class. Beyond his duties as mayor, Jackson chaired the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. He also was president of the Association of Local Black Elected Officials, which was populated by men like Gary, Indiana’s Richard Hatcher, one of the new crop of black mayors who rose on the tide of the civil-rights movement. When drug-trade fighting between old-line gangsters and rising black street gangs left twenty-two bodies on the streets of Gary in the span of a few weeks, Hatcher answered with a program of gun controls. Although it mattered little to the gangsters, Hatcher loudly declared that he would deny all future concealed-carry applications and invited objectors to take him to court. Appreciating the weakness of such local measures, black congressmen in Washington proposed national gun confiscation and a constitutional amendment repealing the right to keep and bear arms.2

  This trend continues strongly into the current conversation. The National Urban League is a sustaining member of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, previously the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. In 2003, the NAACP sued gun manufacturers on the theory of tortiously “oversupplying” guns to black people. In 2007, Jesse Jackson was proudly arrested while protesting legal gun sales in the suburbs of Chicago. In 2008 and 2010, the NAACP filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court, supporting blanket gun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Losing those arguments, one of the association’s lawyers wrote in a prominent journal that recrafting the constitutional right to arms to allow targeted gun prohibition in black enclaves should be a core plank of the modern civil-rights agenda.3

  So what happened? Certainly, many things have changed over the long development of the black tradition of arms. But three broad currents explain the dramatic shift to the modern orthodoxy of stringent gun control. First, as the modern civil-rights movement boiled over, black radicals undercut the core distinction that had sustained the black tradition of arms. By invoking self-defense as a justification for overt political violence, they forced black moderates, already buffeted by urban tumult, either to expend precious political capital to brace up the tradition of arms or to back away from it. Second, concurrent with the radicals’ apostasy, a strong black political class rose on the wave of a progressive coalition. The newly minted national gun-control movement rested firmly within that coalition and captured the allegiance of the rising black political class, who now faced the challenge of actually governing their recently won domains. Third, as black-on-black gun violence commanded increasing attention, gun bans promised a solution with the compelling logic of no guns equals no gun crime. These three currents explain how, in less than a decade, the robust black tradition of arms was supplanted by the modern orthodoxy of stringent supply controls.

  The modern orthodoxy grows from a particular strand of civil-rights advocacy and political strategy that prevailed over competing approaches within the modern freedom movement. By the 1960s, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE (the “big five”) vied for influence and funding. Out of that mix, the moderate, integrationist NAACP and National Urban League model, capitalizing on coalitions with white progressives, emerged as the dominant form. This triumph was substantially a consequence of the radicalization of the competing organizations.4

  There was evidence of the divide fairly early on. SNCC and CORE took a more militant path and were viewed as troublemakers by the Kennedy administration. According to one source, John F. Kennedy was pleased that the SCLC rather than SNCC was leading the 1963 desegregation campaign in Birmingham. Kennedy woefully concluded that the “SNCC has got an investment in violence.” Contrasting philosophies also were evident in the responses to Lyndon Johnson’s request for suspension of demonstrations during the 1964 presidential elections. The NAACP, the SCLC and the National Urban League all granted President Johnson’s request in support of his reelection efforts. SNCC and CORE refused.5

  By 1966, both CORE and SNCC had flirted with violence as a political tactic in the struggle to achieve civil and human rights.6 CORE, a formally interracial organizati
on founded on Gandhian principles of nonviolence, whose members and leadership were predominately white well into the 1960s, transformed into an almost entirely black organization that threw off its pacifist constraints. SNCC became racially exclusive during the 1966 Atlanta Project. SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown became more widely known as part of the Black Power movement.7

  Ultra-radicals like the Black Panthers obliterated traditional boundaries, invoking self-defense as a justification for political violence and confirming the generations-old worry that the approach would trigger overwhelming backlash. This was a tipping point in the development of the modern orthodoxy.8 The risk of spillover from self-defense into political violence had always shadowed the black tradition of arms. But now radicals upended the distinction.9 Although some argue that the radicals unwittingly strengthened the hand of moderates, the sharp downward trajectory of the radical organizations shows that political violence as a direct strategy was a failure. The Black Panther Party is emblematic.10

  Initially designated the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Panthers pushed political violence under the umbrella of self-defense to justify the kinds of tactics that Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver described in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. “We put together a little series of events to take place that next night, where we basically went out to ambush the cops. But it was an aborted ambush because the cops showed up too soon.” The interruption did not prevent Cleaver and his accomplices from firing nine shots at Officer Richard Jensen, who pulled up as they were loading into vehicles on the way to the ambush site.

  The Panthers’ blazing downward arc confirmed long-standing fears. The group was decimated by federal, state, and local responses to its open campaign of political violence. Confrontations with the state led to incarceration and deaths of party members. Huey Newton later acknowledged that political violence was counterproductive and launched the Panthers into an unwinnable war with the state that destroyed their outside support.11 But in 1967, Newton was insistent, “If I’m talking about self-defense, I’m talking about politics; if I’m talking about politics, I’m talking about self-defense. You can’t separate them.”12 Writing in the Panthers’ weekly newspaper, one member was even more graphic, claiming that “sniping, stabbing, bombing, etc. . . . can only be defined correctly as self-defense.”13

  Splinter groups like the Black Liberation Army were equally extreme advocates and practitioners of political violence under the banner of self-defense. The BLA urged political warfare through the killing of police, both black and white. They claimed credit for the murder of at least two policemen at a Harlem housing project and for the attempted murder of two others who were guarding the home of a lawyer who was prosecuting black revolutionary organizations.14

  The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which rose to infamy after a bungled attempt to blow up the Statue of Liberty, seemed to recognize no boundaries at all in its plot to kill NAACP head Roy Wilkins. They planned to blame the killing on white assassins with the hope of provoking a race war. The conspiracy fizzled. But testimony in the subsequent prosecution exposed a shocking ruthlessness. Discussing how to respond if Wilkins was with his wife, the triggermen resolved, “We will just have to burn him in her presence.”15

  Official response to the radicals confirmed long assessments of the folly of political violence. From 1966 through 1967, shootouts with police left a line of Black Panthers dead, wounded, and imprisoned. The BLA and RAM withered under similar pressures.16

  This period is crucial in the development of the modern orthodoxy. Radical organizations were in decline. Urban riots marked a failure of the traditional civil-rights leadership to harness the energy that fueled the violence. Roy Wilkins recounts how “Dr. King was practically run out of Watts when he went to California to see what was going on. . . . Dr. King and the rest of us suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a two-front war. In one direction we had to keep the South from making a Jim Crow comeback in Congress; in the other we had to do something about the ghettos in the cities. No one was really prepared with a strategy or a workable program. We seemed more and more often to fall out among ourselves.”17

  Burning cities drained black political capital, fueled white backlash, and pressed moderate blacks more firmly into the camp of progressive allies. In this environment, it was politically treacherous for moderates to defend the black tradition of arms. When radicals defied the boundary against political violence, more conservative organizations had little to gain by stepping in to repair the damage. Even the attempt would risk the perception of agreement with the radicals, and that would threaten crucial alliances with white progressives. So the voices of moderation—the rising political class and the NAACP, which had cut its organizational teeth defending Negroes who protected themselves with guns—backed away from the generations-old tradition of arms.

  There is an early marker of this in 1966. On August 16, representatives from along the spectrum of black politics appeared on the nationally syndicated political talk show Meet the Press to address the newly minted slogan “Black Power.” It was a high-profile airing of the radical attack on the boundary against political violence.

  Opposing the militant implications of Black Power were Martin Luther King of the SCLC, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Whitney Young of the National Urban League. Defending it were James Meredith and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Floyd McKissick of CORE. Carmichael is generally credited with launching the phrase in June 1966 in a Greenwood, Mississippi, speech, marking resumption of the March against Fear.18

  Host Lawrence Spivak’s opening to Floyd McKissick was an opportunity for the new director of CORE to affirm his commitment to the boundary against political violence. “There is a difference,” said Spivak, “between self-defense and non-violence. . . . Everybody believes in self-defense. . . . Am I to understand then that you and Dr. Martin Luther King really are not in disagreement on [this]?” McKissick responded that self-defense and nonviolence are “not incompatible,” but he equivocated on whether he agreed with King.

  Unable to draw a direct answer from McKissick, the panel put the question to King, whose cautious response reflected the circumstances. Recall King’s solid embrace of self-defense in the Robert Williams controversy as “moral,” “legal,” and a signal of black “courage and self-respect.” Now, in the shadow of radical invocations of Black Power, King offered a barely recognizable rendition of the structure he had articulated in the Williams debate and steered hard away from the boundary against political violence. Here is King:

  I believe firmly in nonviolence. . . . I think a turn to violence on the part of the Negro at this time would be both impractical and immoral. . . . If Mr. McKissick believes in that, I certainly agree with him. On the question of defensive violence, I have made it clear that I don’t think we need programmatic action around defensive violence. People are going to defend themselves anyway. I think the minute you have programmatic action around defensive violence and pronouncements about it, the line of demarcation between defensive violence and aggressive violence becomes very thin. The minute the nomenclature of violence gets into the atmosphere, people begin to respond violently and in their unsophisticated minds they cannot quite make the distinction between defensive and aggressive violence. [Emphasis added.]

  Spivak pressed the political violence boundary again in an exchange with James Meredith. The result was a raw, open endorsement of political violence that obliterated the traditional boundary. Referencing Meredith’s criticisms of King, Spivak asked,

  Mr. Meredith, don’t you think we ought to get straight on the difference between non-violence and self-defense? . . . I think that when Dr. King and others speak about nonviolence they say that groups of Negroes shouldn’t take to arms. . . . I don’t think that there are many of us who don’t believe in the right of self-defense of any Negro against anyone who attacks him. . . . When we talk about non-violence, we are saying that the Negro ought not in grou
ps or alone take up a gun . . . in order to take what he believes belongs to him.

  Meredith, perhaps still nursing his gunshot wounds, plunged headlong into forbidden territory.

  MEREDITH: The Negro has never entertained the idea of taking up arms against the whites. . . . But now I think the Negro must become part of this mainstream, and if the whites— now in you take Mississippi, for instance—I know the people who shot in my home years ago. They know the people that killed all of the Negroes that have been killed. . . . The Negro has no choice but to remove these men, and they have to be removed.

  SPIVAK: Are you suggesting then that if several Negroes are killed or any white men are killed and the law does not punish them, as happens very often in the case of white men too, that people ought to organize as vigilantes and go out and take the law into their own hands and commit violence? You are not saying that, are you Mr. Meredith?

  MEREDITH: That is exactly what I am saying. Exactly. [Emphasis added.]

  CARMICHAEL: If you don’t want us to do it, who is going to going to do it?

  . . .

  SPIVAK: Mr. Meredith, do you mean to tell me that you believe Negroes in this country ought to organize, take up guns?

  MEREDITH: This is precisely, I will tell you why, because the white supremacy is a system.

  SPIVAK: Mr. Meredith, this doesn’t even make sense against 180 million people. If you do it, they are going to do it.

  . . .

  CARL ROWAN: Mr. Carmichael, do I detect that you agree with Mr. Meredith that the Negro may have to take up arms.

  CARMICHAEL: . . . I agree 150 percent that black people have to move to the position where they organize themselves and they are in fact a protection for each other. . . . If in fact 180 million people just think they are going to turn on us and we are going to sit there, like the Nazis did to the Jews, they are wrong. We are going to go down together, all of us.