The southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s was broad in its objectives and its strategies, which helps explain the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of guns and nonviolence within it. As noted in 1964 by Robert P. “Bob” Moses, director of the Mississippi project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): “It’s not contradictory for a farmer to say he’s nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder’s head off.” A story Stokely Carmichael liked to tell was of bringing an elderly woman to vote in Lowndes County, Alabama: “She had to be 80 years old and going to vote for the first time in her life… . That ol’ lady came up to us, went into her bag, and produced this enormous, rusty Civil War–looking old pistol. ‘Best you hol’ this for me, son. I’ma go cast my vote now.’”
The 1955–1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the student sit-in movement that began in 1960, and the Freedom Rides of 1961 all persuasively demonstrated that nonviolent resistance was an effective way of fighting for civil rights. These were not acts of hate or brutality toward white people, who were themselves ignorant of their imprisonment by a system that led them to believe in white supremacy. They were, instead, aggressive confrontations that challenged the system, and recognizing this refutes the notion that nonviolence was a passive tactic. Nevertheless, it was startling to see the willingness of southern civil rights activists to put themselves in harm’s way and their refusal to respond with violence when assaulted. Almost immediately nonviolent resistance was criticized as dangerous foolishness that reflected weakness, even cowardly submission. Writing in 1957 about the Montgomery bus boycott, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed great skepticism about nonviolence: “No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back … but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less.” Six years later Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, showed greater hostility and less restraint than Du Bois: he denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a modern Uncle Tom subsidized by whites “to teach the Negroes to be defenseless.”
Their reactions suggest that neither Dr. Du Bois nor Malcolm X could grasp the fact that nonviolence—although risky, as any challenge to oppression always is—was not passive, that it provided an effective means of directly challenging white supremacy with more than just rhetoric. Acts of nonviolent resistance contributed mightily to ending the mental paralysis that had long kept many black people trapped in fear and subservient to white supremacy, reluctant to even try to take control over their own lives despite the fact that slavery had ended roughly a century earlier. The principled, militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people.
Early proponents of nonviolence—such as Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, or James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—embraced its dynamism and militancy. By the 1960s others also embraced it for these reasons, especially students attending historically black colleges and universities, giving the southern Freedom Movement new force. Former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, because of his 1966 Black Power speech, is not usually associated with pacifism or nonviolence. Yet in his autobiography, he credits nonviolent activism for marking the path he followed from Howard University into political engagement: “[It] gave our generation—particularly in the South—the means by which to confront an entrenched and violent racism. It offered a way for large numbers of [African Americans] to join the struggle. Nothing passive in that.” Extending this thought, historian Vincent G. Harding, who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) he founded, emphasizes,
Our struggle was not just against something, but was trying to bring something into being. Always at the heart of nonviolent struggle was, and still is, a vision of a new society. Nonviolence enabled people to see something in themselves and others of what could be; they had been captured by the possibility of what could be.
Few involved with the southern Freedom Movement would deny that nonviolence was a creative and proactive way of challenging the status quo, or that it succeeded in doing so even if every problem was not solved.
By no means, however, were most in the black community committed to nonviolence as a way of life. To be sure, in a significant portion of the southern black community, nonviolent resistance tapped deeply into a vein of righteousness that was rooted in Afro-Christian values and provided moral guidance in a political struggle where hate and anger could easily blind and become overwhelming. But an idealized acceptance of the kind of redemptive love and suffering expressed in the New Testament is the closest black people have come to embracing the philosophy of nonviolence en masse. Black Christians, however, have also readily embraced the Old Testament, with all its furies and violence. A pre–Civil War black spiritual that has always been sung hopefully, even exuberantly, in black churches and by black gospel groups vividly illustrates this:
If I could I surely would
Stand on the rock where Moses stood.
Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded.
Oh Mary don’t you weep.
It is not difficult to understand Afro-Americans’ skepticism. The courage and discipline required for a total commitment to nonviolence was and still is alien to U.S. culture—a culture created as much by black people as by white people, and one driven by the principle that might makes right. And although black people (like Native American peoples) have often suffered as a result of this principle, they have never had much moral objection to the idea of armed self-defense. Indeed, self-defense was a crucial part of life for many black Americans, especially in the South. The prevailing system of white supremacy in the South was enforced by violence, and black people sometimes used the threat of an armed response to survive. Nonviolent organizers had to come to terms with this reality when they attempted to make inroads with southern black communities in the 1950s and ’60s. There was always resistance to the idea of nonviolence, even though it won some acceptance as a sometimes useful tactic. Bob Moses in 1964 expressed the futility of expecting black communities to surrender their right to protect themselves from terrorists: “Self-defense is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can’t affect it.”
Willingness to engage in armed self-defense played an important role in the southern Freedom Movement, for without it, terrorists would have killed far more people in the movement. “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” recalled activist John R. “Hunter Bear” Salter in 1994. In the early 1960s, Salter, of Native American descent, was a professor at historically black Tougaloo Southern Christian College in Mississippi and adviser to students nonviolently sitting in at segregated lunch counters and other public facilities in downtown Jackson. But he always “traveled armed,” said Salter. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.” And the knowledge that guns would be used to defend his Tougaloo campus, well-known as a launching pad for civil rights protest and thus always a target of terrorists, also helped deter assaults against it, although it could not prevent them completely. In one campus attack, Salter remembers a bullet narrowly missing his daughter. Yet neither the local nor the federal government offered help to people targeted by this sort of terrorism, so, says Salter, “we guarded our campus—faculty and students together… . We let this be known. The racist attacks slackened considerably. Night-riders are cowardly people—in any time and place—and they take advantage of fear and weakness.”
It cannot be emphasized enough that by asserting their right to defend themselves when attacked, the students and staff of Tougaloo were laying claim to a tradition that has safeguarded and sustained generations of black people in the United States. Yet this tradition is almost completely absent from the conventional narrative of southern civil rights struggle. The fact that individuals and organized groups across the South were willing to provide armed protection to
nonviolent activists and organizers as well as to black communities targeted by terrorists is barely discussed, although organized self-defense in black communities goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War, and white fear of rebellion and weapons in black hands dates to colonial America. Guns were an integral part of southern life, especially in rural communities, and—as Moses noted in 1964—nonviolence never had a chance of usurping the traditional role of firearms in black rural life; although many rural blacks respected protesters’ use of nonviolence, they also mistrusted it. Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippi farmer and community leader, was a case in point. Turnbow welcomed the presence of movement organizers in Holmes County and even invited organizers to the area himself, but like Salter, Turnbow also “traveled armed.” With tragic foresight, Turnbow bluntly warned Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, “This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed.”
Reverend King knew the risks. In fact, after the January 30, 1956, bombing of his home in Montgomery, he himself—a man of the South, after all—applied at the sheriff’s office for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He was denied the permit, but this did not stop him from having firearms in his house (although it is not clear whether or not he owned them). Journalist William Worthy learned as much on his first visit to the King parsonage in Montgomery. Worthy began to sink into an armchair, almost sitting on two pistols. “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” warned the nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin, who had accompanied Worthy to the King home. “You don’t want to shoot yourself.” When Rustin asked about the weapons, King responded, “Just for self-defense.” They apparently were not the only weapons King kept around the house for such a purpose; Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who during the Montgomery bus boycott advised King on techniques of nonviolent protest, described his home as “an arsenal.”
The fact that guns were present inside King’s home and were carried by the neighbors who took turns guarding his family and property should not be surprising. The easiest way to understand this is to begin with the basic fact that black people are human beings, so black people’s responses to terrorist attacks are the same as anyone else’s. As the civil rights struggle intensified in the 1950s, and with it attempts at lethal attacks, most black people did whatever they could to keep themselves and their friends and families safe and alive, and guns were never ruled out—reflecting a propensity for self-defense with weapons that has been basic to human beings since the first person stood upright and walked on the earth.
Indeed, there were few black leaders who did not seek and receive armed protection from within the black community. They needed it because both local law enforcement and the federal government refused to provide it. Daisy Bates, publisher of the Arkansas State Press newspaper and mentor to the Little Rock Nine (who in 1957 enrolled in Little Rock’s Central High School, desegregating it), recalled that after the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on her lawn and fired gunshots into her home, her husband Lucious Christopher “L. C.” Bates began staying up to guard their house with a .45-caliber pistol. Friends also organized an armed volunteer patrol to protect the Bates home and the surrounding neighborhood. Daisy Bates herself sometimes carried a .32-caliber pistol in her handbag. Canton, Mississippi, businessman and movement supporter C. O. Chinn (who usually carried a pistol in his pants pocket and sometimes wore one holstered in plain sight on his hip) went a step further: he instructed friends and family members to chaperone CORE organizers wherever they went in the rural areas of the county and sometimes even in town. Like Chinn, these chaperones routinely armed themselves. Recalled former CORE field secretary Mateo “Flukie” Suarez, they “watched over us like babies. I mean, it was like having your own bodyguards.”
Some black leaders were committed to nonviolence as a way of life. Borrowing from Mohandas Gandhi’s concept of “soul force,” they rejected the idea of harming another person even when their own lives might be at stake in civil rights struggle. King is perhaps the most prominent of these figures, although he came to this outlook slowly. Another is Reverend James M. Lawson, the mentor of the student movement in Nashville, Tennessee. The Nashville movement was a springboard for a small corps of young activists (including former SNCC chairman John Lewis, now a Georgia congressman) who were also firmly and philosophically committed to nonviolence as a way of life and who would find their way into leadership positions in SNCC and SCLC.
For most activists, however, nonviolence was simply a useful tactic, one that did not preclude self-defense whenever it was considered necessary and possible. Even King, his commitment to nonviolence as a way of life notwithstanding, acknowledged the legitimacy of self-defense and sometimes blurred the line between nonviolence and self-defense. “The first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of ‘self-defense,’” he wrote. “In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one’s home and one’s person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.” Ironically, on this point blacks and whites in the South tended to be in unexpressed general agreement. It was not uncommon for black adults to teach young whites how to use a weapon for hunting, and incidents of gunplay inside black communities were frequently ignored by white authority. Although many whites were uncomfortable with the idea of blacks owning guns—especially in the 1960s—the South’s powerful gun culture and weak gun control laws enabled black people to acquire and keep weapons and ammunition with relative ease.
Because guns are so common a part of southern culture, there was far less controversy about their use in the nonviolent Freedom Movement than one might imagine. Indeed, the characterizations that have so often pigeon-holed movement activists and activity—“militant,” “nonviolent,” “radical,” “left-wing,” “moderate”—really only apply to a very thin layer of leadership. Ordinary people, the local folk who made up the force that really shaped southern civil rights struggle, did not use such labels for themselves. They saw themselves and spoke of themselves as being “in” the movement. The categorizations so convenient to the media and to scholarship were not part of the natural language of their community, even when these expressions seeped into their speech. In one widely circulated movement story—usually repeated with laughter and almost certainly apocryphal—an older woman active in the movement in Mississippi (or Louisiana or Alabama or Georgia or somewhere in the South, depending on who is telling the story) responds to radio, television, or newspaper denunciation of some movement activity as a communist plot by saying to a movement worker, “I’m sure glad you Communists came in here.” Labels aside, it was what people encountered in everyday life that had the greatest impact on their thinking, and southern black people had a powerful incentive to arm themselves. Because the federal government was unwilling to protect southern freedom fighters, local law enforcement officers—many of them also members of the Ku Klux Klan—ignored their duty and frequently joined in terrorist acts themselves. People in black communities were willing to do what was necessary to protect fellow blacks who were risking their lives by speaking out against and actively challenging the status quo; the willingness of some to take armed defensive action enabled the civil rights movement to sustain itself during the mid-twentieth century.
Despite its importance to the southern Freedom Movement, the relationship between nonviolence and armed self-defense has been consistently overlooked and misunderstood. The dichotomy between violence and nonviolence so often imposed by historians and other analysts is not very helpful for understanding either the use of guns in local black communities or contemporaneous movement discussion and debate about self-defense. The use of guns for self-defense was not the opposite of nonviolence, as is commonly thought. Something more complicated but absolutely normal was at play. Hartman Turnbow precisely illustrates what when explaining why, without hesitation, he used his rifle to drive away night riders attacking his home: “I had a wife and I had a daughter and I loved my wife just like the white man lo
ves his’n and a white man will die for his’n and I say I’ll die for mine.”
How we interpret the role guns have played in the history of the United States and the ways they are woven into the fabric of life in this country—North and South—depends on when and where we look. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” declared SNCC’s fifth chairman, Hubert “Rap” Brown (now the Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), in 1967. Brown, like many other Afro-Americans before and since, recognized that violence has shaped much of U.S. life and culture; the Civil War is one good example, as is the highly romanticized westward expansion of the nineteenth century. Indeed, gunplay and the “taming of the West” (meaning the conquest of Native Americans through armed force and the seizure of their lands) have long been celebrated in that most influential segment of the U.S. media, Hollywood films. On the other hand, black rebellions—often poorly armed attempts to throw off the bonds of chattel slavery and escape to freedom in some other place—are largely ignored and are sometimes denounced when presented as a legitimate part of the black freedom struggle. There is no Spartacus in the romanticization of U.S. history.
All of this is to say that how we understand violence, its use, and its place in United States history depends on what sort of violence is being described and who is describing it. My view of slave revolts, for instance, is certainly colored by the fact that I am a descendant of Africans who were enslaved. And my specific view of the place of slave revolts in the continuum of the black freedom struggle is affected by my own awareness and understanding of my forebears’ desire for freedom.
This is not a book about black guerrilla warfare, retaliatory violence, or “revolutionary” armed struggle in the South, and I make no attempt to argue that such actions were either necessary or possible. In fact, I consider these notions political fantasy. Nor is this a book about nonviolence. Rather, it is about the people—especially the young people—who participated in a nonviolent movement without having much commitment to nonviolence beyond agreeing to use it as a tactic. As their involvement in the movement and with rural communities deepened, however, they found themselves in situations where they, their colleagues, and the people they were working with could get killed for even trying to exercise the ordinary rights of citizenship. What, then, would they do? This was in part a question of ethics and morality: Could you really kill someone? And at the same time it was also a question of responsibility: What obligations do you have to the people who are supporting you and whose lives are endangered because of it? But at its core, of course, it was also very much a question of practicality: What do you need to do to stay alive?
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed Page 2
