More Advance Praise for This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed
“What most of us think we know about the central role of nonviolence in the long freedom struggle in the South is not so much wrong as blinkered. Or so Charles Cobb says in this passionate, intellectually disciplined reordering of the conventional narrative to include armed self-defense as a central component of the black movement’s success. Read it and be reminded that history is not a record etched in stone by journalists and academics, but a living stream, fed and redirected by the bottom-up witness of its participants.”—Hodding Carter III, Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Popular culture washes the complexity out of so many things. Charles Cobb works mightily against that torrent. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed shows that the simplistic popular understanding of the black Freedom Movement obscures a far richer story. Cobb defies the popular narrative with accounts of the grit and courage of armed stalwarts of the modern movement who invoked the ancient right of self-defense under circumstances where we should expect nothing less. This book is an important contribution to a story that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.”—Nicholas Johnson, Professor of Law, Fordham Law School, and author of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
“This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed is the most important movement book in many years. Charles Cobb uses long-standing confusion over the distinction between violence and nonviolence as an entrée to rethinking many fundamental misconceptions about what the civil rights movement was and why it was so powerful. This level of nuance requires a disciplined observer, an engaged participant, and a lyrical writer. Cobb is all these.”—Charles M. Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
“Any book that has as its central thesis that armed self-defense was essential both to the existence and the success of the civil rights movement is bound to stir up controversy. But Charles Cobb, combining the rigor of a scholar with the experience (and passion) of a community organizer, has made his case. This book is a major contribution to the historiography of the black freedom struggle. More than that, it adds a new chapter to the story of the local people who, often armed, protected the organizers and their communities during the turbulent civil rights years.”—John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
“Charles Cobb’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed is a marvelous contribution to our understanding of the modern black freedom struggle. With wonderful storytelling skills and drawing on his unparalleled access to movement participants, he situates armed self-defense in the context of a complex movement and in conversation with both nonviolence and community organizing. Cobb writes from personal experience on the frontlines of SNCC’s voter registration work while also using the skills of a journalist, historian, and teacher. The result is a compelling and wonderfully nuanced book that will appeal to specialists and, more importantly, anyone interested in human rights and the freedom struggle.”—Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and editor of Civil Rights History from the Ground Up
“This long overdue book revises the image of black people in the South as docile and frightened. It tells our story, demonstrating that black people have always been willing to stand their ground and do whatever was necessary to free themselves from bondage and to defend their families and communities. This is a must-read for understanding the southern Freedom Movement.”—David Dennis, former Mississippi Director, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Director, Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project
THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET YOU KILLED
ALSO BY CHARLES E. COBB JR.
On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail
No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists
Over a Half Century, 1950–2000
(edited with William Minter and Gail Hovey)
Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project
(with Robert P. Moses)
Copyright © 2014 by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000,
or e-mail [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cobb, Charles E., Jr.
This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed : how guns made the civil rights movement possible / Charles E. Cobb.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-465-08095-3 (ebook)
1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 2. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. 3. Self-defense—United States—History—20th century. 4. Firearms—Law and legislation—United States—History—20th century. 5. Gun control—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
E185.61.C633 2014
323.1196‘073—dc23
2013045809
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This book is dedicated to
Ella Baker, Herbert Lee, Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, Victoria Gray Adams, Aaron Henry, Hartman Turnbow, C. O. Chinn, Hazel Palmer, Vernon Dahmer, Laura McGhee, Robert Burns, Cleveland Jordan, Joe and Rebecca McDonald, Janie Brewer, Henry Sias, E. W. Steptoe, Alyene Quin, Curtis Conway “C. C.” Bryant, Webb “Super Cool Daddy” Owens, George Metcalfe, Wharlest Jackson, Joseph Mallisham, Harry T. and Harriet Moore, Henry J. Kirksey, Annie “Mama Dolly” Raines, Ernest “Chilly Willy” Thomas, Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Robert Hicks, Charles Sims, A. Z. Young, Vernon Johns, Golden Frinks, Annie Lee Cooper, Amelia Boynton, John Hulett, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Septima Clark, Reverend Samuel Wells, Robert Williams, Jim Forman, Ann Braden, Myles Horton, and all the other strong elders who kept a-comin’ on, kept us safe, taught us much, and made us better.
It is also dedicated to the memory of these freedom fighters of my generation:
Cynthia Washington, Ed Brown, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Mants, George Raymond, Lawrence Guyot, Sam Block, John Wilson, Ralph Featherstone, Prathia Hall, Richard Haley, Oretha Castle Haley, Sammy Younge, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Fay Bellamy, Mimi Shaw Hayes, Mendy Samstein, Hellen O’Neal McCray, Willie McCray, Cordell Reagon, James Orange, Jimmy Travis, Annelle Ponder, John Buffington, Matthew Jones, June Johnson, George Ware, Amanda Bowens Perdew, Jim Bevel, Billy Stafford, James Peacock, Randy Battle, Lafayette Surney, Mario Savio, Ralph Allen, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, James “J. E.” Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Bill “Winky” Hall, Patricia Stevens Due, L. C. Dorsey, Sam Shirah, Frank Cieciorka, and Butch Conn.
Their life force remains with us, strengthening us. Ashe!
I never was a true believer in nonviolence, but was willing to go along [with it] for the sake of the strategy and goals. [However] we heard that James Chaney had been beaten to death before they shot him. The thought of being beat up, jailed, even being shot, was one kinda thing
. The thought of being beaten to death without being able to fight back put the fear of God in me. Also, I was my mother’s only child with some responsibility to go home in relatively one piece and I decided that it would be an unforgivable sin to willingly let someone kill my mother’s only child without a fight. [So] I acquired an automatic handgun to sit in the top of that outstanding black patent and tan leather handbag that I carried. I don’t think that I ever had to fire it; I never shot anyone, but the potential was there. And I still would hurt anyone if necessary to protect my son and grandson and his wife.
—Cynthia Washington, former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Introduction
Prologue: “I Come to Get My Gun”
1. “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air”
2. “The Day of Camouflage Is Past”
3. “Fighting for What We Didn’t Have”
4. “I Wasn’t Being Non-Nonviolent”
5. Which Cheek You Gonna Turn?
6. Standing Our Ground
Epilogue: “The King of Love Is Dead”
Afterword: Understanding History
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Illustrations begin following page 148.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One of the crucial but mostly ignored aspects of the freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s is how near we were in time and collective historical memory to slavery and the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. Each generation of black people carries a memory of the struggles taken on by the generations that preceded it, and that memory settles in the collective soul and becomes the foundation for the struggles of one’s own generation. To borrow words from author and professor Jan Carew, we are haunted by “ghosts in our blood.”
I was born in 1943, just eighty years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation—a nanosecond in historical time. I was told stories of my family’s enslavement by my great aunt Hattie Kendrick, who was told them by her father and other relatives who had been born into slavery. My grandmother Ruby Moyse Kendrick, whose mother was born into slavery, was a publicist for the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs founded by Mary Church Terrell, who was born the year Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1950—when I was seven and she was eighty-six—Mrs. Terrell was leading sit-ins and pickets protesting segregation and employment discrimination in Washington, D.C.
These stories represent but tiny drops in the great pool of black historical memory, yet they greatly affected people who, like me, joined the Freedom Movement with the winds of history at our backs. Indeed, most of the adults we worked with in the South were only two or three generations removed from slavery or its immediate aftermath. For example, the grandparents of Fannie Lou Hamer were born into slavery. Others we worked with were children during the violent horrors that followed the destruction of Reconstruction governments and the “redemption” of white supremacy, an era that spilled over into the early years of the twentieth century. Yet these men and women could also remember that even during this time of terror, there were pockets where black authority lingered. They could point to instances of courage, rebellion, and resistance as well as to moments of brutal oppression.
This book, although analytical and carefully researched, is not “objective” in the strictest sense of that word; rather, it is a fleshing out and contextualizing of the stories I began hearing in childhood, continued to hear as a young Freedom Movement activist in the South, and have been reflecting on all my adult life. Importantly, this book is also more than a collection of stories and personal reminiscences about the southern Freedom Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. It is an effort to think carefully about the past and to understand its lessons, recognizing that, as William Faulkner once put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” My goal has been to help us understand ourselves as a nation, cutting through platitudes and romance about the southern Freedom Movement as well as persistent stereotypes about black people. I have wished to demonstrate in an unexpected way how black people and their responses to white-supremacist oppression continue and advance the struggle that was articulated as a constitutional ideal in the formation of the United States: “to form a more perfect union.”
I draw on and embed in this story reflections and analyses rooted in my experiences as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary from 1962 to 1967. This book is neither a memoir nor an autobiography, yet in some respects it is my story. SNCC was unusual in placing its field secretaries in rural southern communities to work from the bottom up instead of from the top down. Living among the downtrodden but resilient black men and women of the Deep South, I underwent a subtle conversion. The principles and illusions I had brought with me—of nonviolence, of the uniformity of the southern black experience—were reshaped by the men and women I encountered there.
Especially important among these life-changing adults was Ella Josephine Baker, a name that should be much better known, for we young people in the Freedom Movement were and are in many ways her political children. Of all the adults we encountered, she did the most to steer us into grassroots organizing. We in SNCC were radicalized by working with people in their homes and communities much more than by ideology. Dimensions of black culture and black community experience opened up and became clearer to us. The real story of the southern Freedom Movement lies with this work, and neither what took place in the South nor what the United States is today can be fully comprehended without it.
THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET YOU KILLED
INTRODUCTION
The struggle of black people in America for freedom, justice, and self-definition stretches from the colonial and antebellum slaveholding eras to the twenty-first century, but its intensity has varied from one period to the next. One of the most intense periods occurred in the 1950s and ’60s, when the struggle was usually associated with the tactical and strategic use of nonviolence. Scores of Afro-Americans, many of them still too young to vote, took to the streets to peacefully assert their rights as citizens. In retaliation, men, women, and children were surrounded by raging mobs or assaulted by helmeted white policemen wielding batons and fire hoses. The photographs and film footage of these events shocked the American public and rallied popular support for such historic legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, laws that to varying degrees continue to protect Americans of every color and creed.
But although nonviolence was crucial to the gains made by the freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, those gains could not have been achieved without the complementary and still underappreciated practice of armed self-defense. The claim that armed self-defense was a necessary aspect of the civil rights movement is still controversial. However, wielding weapons, especially firearms, let both participants in nonviolent struggle and their sympathizers protect themselves and others under terrorist attack for their civil rights activities. This willingness to use deadly force ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself.
This was nothing new. Armed self-defense (or, to use a term preferred by some, “armed resistance”) as part of black struggle began not in the 1960s with angry “militant” and “radical” young Afro-Americans, but in the earliest years of the United States as one of African people’s responses to oppression. This tradition, which culminates with the civil rights struggles and achievements of the mid-1960s, cannot be understood independently or outside its broader historical context. In every decade of the nation’s history, brave and determined black men and women picked up guns to defend themselves and their communities.
Thus the tradition of armed self-defense in Afro-American history cannot be disconnected from the successes of what today is called the nonviolent civil rights movement. Participants in that movement always saw themselves as part of a cent
uries-long history of black life and struggle. Guns in no way contradicted the lessons of that history. Indeed, the idea of nonviolent struggle was newer in the black community, and it was protected in many ways by gunfire and the threat of gunfire. Simply put: because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic for effecting change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement. Although it is counterintuitive, any discussion of guns in the movement must therefore also include substantial discussion of nonviolence, and vice versa. This book does that.
I should note that although I sometimes seem to use “civil rights movement” and “Freedom Movement” interchangeably, they in fact have two quite separate though closely related meanings. By “civil rights movement” I mean the efforts to secure equal rights under the law, as with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The “Freedom Movement” is a larger idea whose goal is the achievement of civil rights, civil liberties, and the liberated consciousness of self and community. It recognizes that law alone cannot uproot white supremacy, ever creative and insidious in its forms and practices, and that civil rights law alone cannot create a new liberated sense of self and human capacity. In my thinking on the differences between the “civil rights movement” and the “Freedom Movement,” I have been greatly influenced by the “freedom rights” postulation laid out by historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries:
Framing the civil rights movement as a fight for freedom rights acknowledges the centrality of slavery and emancipation to conceptualizations of freedom; incorporates the long history of black protest dating back to the daybreak of freedom and extending beyond the Black Power era; recognizes the African Americans’ civil and human rights objectives; and captures the universality of these goals. Moreover, it allows for regional and temporal differentiation, moments of ideological radicalization and periods of social movement formation.
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