This book explores the choices movement activists and organizers made when confronted with these questions, and the circumstances underlying those choices. I try to look beyond some of the widely held assumptions in analyzing and reaching conclusions about these choices. For instance, I emphatically do not subscribe to the view that a black man established his manhood by picking up a gun. The notion that “real men” fight back and that “fight” only means responding to offense with violence is deeply embedded in U.S. culture (and in world culture, for that matter). Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote extensively about the mentally liberating effect on men who picked up guns and rebelled against French colonialism in Algeria, and he was widely read by movement activists. Colonialism was overthrown in Algeria in 1962, but that nation’s history since does not show much liberated thought. Guns get you only so far. Genuine political resistance, to be effective, has to be more creative than simply using lethal weapons. Movement men, their homes, and their communities were under attack because they were challenging white supremacy, and were thus acting like “men” in the first place. Picking up guns was only one of a range of possible choices that were always determined by the realities on the ground.
Many black women also kept guns within easy reach. But it is important to mention that women and their use of guns present the historian of the southern Freedom Movement with a particular problem. Many of the women from this era (like the men) have passed away and cannot be interviewed. And although a few of the men have written or been extensively interviewed about their role in self-defense, the women have publicly left little record and have generally been ignored in the discussion and debate over armed self-defense. Some of the male leaders of Louisiana’s Deacons for Defense and Justice were widely interviewed, and Robert Williams, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Monroe, North Carolina, wrote prolifically about armed self-defense and even guerrilla-like retaliation against Ku Klux Klan marauders. For the most part, however, we do not know what many women who were active in the movement were thinking, or whether and how they organized for self-defense. Historians are therefore dependent on males for portrayals and interpretations of women’s thoughts and actions. This disparity in the historical record weakens this book.
The narrative that follows does not move strictly chronologically. I prefer instead to examine the complex of time and events across the history of the southern freedom struggle, although some chronological order is necessary for coherence. Many of the ideas that informed the Freedom Movement emerge, then seem to disappear, and then reemerge with greater intensity or in more elaborate form. Therefore some flexibility with respect to chronology is needed in approaching the ideas embedded in black struggle, and this costs scholarship nothing.
My account ends in 1966, with the arguments over whether or not the Deacons for Defense and Justice should protect the James Meredith March against Fear in Mississippi. The period after that (more precisely, the period following Stokely Carmichael’s call during the march for Black Power) initiates a different dynamic of black struggle, much of it made possible by the events discussed in this book but set against a political and cultural backdrop involving the evolution of Stokely’s call for Black Power, the emergence of a national black politics as the number of black elected officials grew, the Black Arts movement, Pan Africanism, and various strands of black nationalism. The epilogue briefly discusses these developments and suggests that, notwithstanding the vital role of guns and self-defense in the civil rights movement, in today’s violently tumultuous world, nonviolence may be the movement legacy most worth looking at again.
A final caveat: in some respects, this book is a way to introduce readers to people and political currents that have never been particularly visible in the history of the civil rights movement. Although their attitudes toward self-defense were certainly important, the larger story, even more ignored in the conventional narrative than are guns and self-defense, is the story of black communities organizing and fighting for change, unwilling to live under white supremacy any longer. This is the story of lives and people at the grassroots. The story of guns in their hands simply commands your attention.
The history of the southern Freedom Movement is rooted in community organizing, an approach to struggle that began long before the mass demonstrations and public protests associated with the 1960s. Enslaved Africans were not marching on auction blocks or conducting sit-ins to secure a seat at the plantation manor dining-room table. Rather, they were organizing surreptitiously, out of sight of white people. They planned sabotage, escapes, rebellions, or, most often, the simple ways and means of survival in a new and hostile land. Still, their efforts and those of the movement participants of the 1950s and ’60s exist on the same continuum, and the struggles of black people and communities during the mid-twentieth century were certainly shaped by the centuries of oppressive history that preceded them.
Chapter 1, accordingly, is dedicated to the pre-twentieth-century history of black struggle and its significance to the southern Freedom Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. I begin with a discussion of the fear of slave rebellions and insurrections that accompanied the birth of the United States and that underlay almost all gun laws in colonial America. I also briefly examine some of the founding hypocrisies and contradictions of the United States, along with the social construction of race in the country’s earliest days. This first chapter also focuses on the post–Civil War era of Radical Reconstruction, when emancipated black people were poised at freedom’s threshold before savage violence beat them back and “redeemed” white supremacy.
This great injustice begins what historian Vincent Harding has called “the Great Tradition of black protest,” which sought rights that were newly promised by law and constitutional amendment but were betrayed at every level of government. Free at least from chattel slavery, African Americans began agitating for fulfillment of the promised freedoms. During Reconstruction, black Union Army veterans politicized by the Civil War and galvanized by their newfound freedoms aggressively pursued full citizenship, even though white America remained generally uncertain about how much black political power it would support. Meanwhile, the defeated Confederacy, using terrible violence, including lynching and mass murder, waged a ruthless, relentless, and ultimately successful campaign to restore white supremacy. Blacks resisted, however, and one unprecedented development after the Civil War was the formation of black militias, some integrated into the state militias of Reconstruction governments, and all of them striving to protect political activity aimed at securing the new promise of freedom. In this and subsequent community-organizing efforts, many black Union Army veterans took the lead (just as black veterans would do in the next century). As in every phase in the evolution toward greater democracy in the United States, however, their efforts were complicated and compromised by national irresolution over the status of people of color and by often hostile reaction to their struggles to secure freedom and justice.
The book’s remaining chapters extend the story of resistance and community organizing to the mid-twentieth-century southern Freedom Movement, beginning with the important role played by black veterans of World Wars I and II. Having fought overseas under the banner of democracy, they were determined to fight for democracy at home. If any single group within the black community should be highlighted for their importance to the Freedom Movement, it is these veterans. Although they cannot be defined entirely, or even mostly, in terms of armed self-defense, many were willing to resist terrorism with guns.
In my examination of the role guns played protecting the southern Freedom Movement, I focus on Mississippi, widely considered the most violently racist state in the South. As a SNCC field secretary, I spent most of my time in that state. The stories that have emerged from Mississippi introduce a set of extraordinary heroes and heroines who need to be better known: small farmers, sharecroppers, day laborers, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and church leaders. Many of these
men and women, chafing under white supremacist rule, chose to fight back. Like Salter and Turnbow, they often “traveled armed,” and they kept their homes organized for defense as well. Much of their story is set in rural communities and reveals an unexpected form of “black power” that was grounded in a collective determination to defeat white supremacy, manifested well before that term was popularized by Carmichael in 1966. Like the veterans who returned from Europe determined to fight for their rights, these ordinary people were attracted to the nonviolent movement because of its militancy. The movement in its turn welcomed and needed them because of their strength.
I devote considerable discussion to two formally organized self-defense groups that bear mentioning for the leading role they played in defending the southern Freedom Movement at its most vital yet vulnerable moments: the Deacons for Defense and Justice, formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and Robert Williams’s branch of the NAACP in Monroe and surrounding Union County, North Carolina. The Deacons protected nonviolent CORE workers under attack by the Ku Klux Klan; the Monroe NAACP, largely led by World War II veterans, also protected the black community from Klan attacks. I also examine the veterans organized in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, by Joseph Mallisham, an unnamed group less well-known than either the Deacons or Williams’s NAACP. Their 1964 protection of the nonviolent Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC), an SCLC affiliate, played an important role in bringing about the unexpectedly rapid elimination of segregation in the city’s public accommodations.
It is particularly interesting that nonviolent CORE organizers in Louisiana chose to integrate their efforts with the well-organized Deacons for Defense and Justice. This cooperation successfully reduced antiblack terrorism, but it also contrasted sharply with choices made by SNCC and CORE in Mississippi and Southwest Georgia. It was often stated at the time that organized self-defense groups who confronted police authority with weapons would endanger the movement by triggering a murderous response from the state. In Louisiana, this did not always, or even mostly, prove true.
These organized groups, of course, are hierarchical in structure, so it is easy to fall into the trap of defining them by using the top-down analysis that has dominated so much scholarship of the Freedom Movement. This analysis emphasizes prominent, visible leaders, seeing them as the key to understanding events. I present these organizations as organic parts of the community-organizing tradition, as entities that are incomprehensible if they are isolated from the broad dynamic of community life. In this context, I consider the question of how the attitudes and behavior of young organizers who emerged from the nonviolent student protest movement fit the older, more deeply rooted tradition of self-defense into their grassroots organizing work. I also trace the various ways that nonviolent activism, particularly in the form of sit-ins, marches, and other direct action protests, converged with grassroots community organizing.
Significantly, it was most often the relatively conservative adults involved with the movement, rather than the radical young “militants,” who organized armed self-defense in southern black communities. But in the latter part of the 1960s, guns were less important to political struggle in the South because for the most part whites had learned that antiblack violence was ineffective and counterproductive in stopping black political momentum. The conservative men and women who had kept movement organizers alive were in no way raising the banner of revolutionary change, even though the desegregation and voting rights they had fought for were radical ideas at the time. In Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1968 sanitation workers strike, King and his associates felt pressure from the Black Organizing Project (BOP) to sanction retaliatory violence. But generally in the South, despite some continuation of white violence, such as the Orangeburg massacre and the assault at Jackson State College (now University), the need for organized self-defense seemed to decrease after the early 1960s. By 1968 even the Deacons for Defense and Justice had disbanded. The rhetoric of revolution, violence, and retaliation (even covertly advocating the assassination of “conservative” black leaders) was more often heard above the Mason–Dixon Line. Breakthroughs won by movement struggle had also brought new forces, both local and national, into play in the South. Grassroots organizing for political change diminished as poverty-program money began pulling activists and many of their local supporters away. Furthermore, the tenor of movement protests became distinctly different when some leaders used threats and even guns to enforce boycotts. The presence of genuinely radical figures like Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, Mississippi—and they were few—led a political process that had heretofore excluded black people to worry that the southern movement was too “radical”; sharecroppers, day workers, and the like were insisting on being part of the political process. The opening up of the Democratic Party in the South following the flight of Dixiecrats to the Republican Party triggered a scramble among some black leaders to gain influence in the new political climate. This, of course, is not a gun story of the South; rather, ironically and perhaps unfortunately, it is a “success” story.
PROLOGUE
“I Come to Get My Gun”
The late-summer sun was broiling the already sunbaked floodplains of the Mississippi Delta on August 31, 1962, when Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and seventeen other men and women boarded an old school bus in front of the Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in the little town of Ruleville. The bus was normally used to haul day laborers to the cotton fields, but today it was headed for the Sunflower County courthouse twenty-six miles away in Indianola. The seat of Sunflower County, Indianola was also the birthplace of the Citizens’ Council—the white-collar, white-supremacist organization of prominent planters, businessmen, and politicians who professed to disdain the hooded garb and violence of the Ku Klux Klan.
At the courthouse, Mrs. Hamer and the others intended to register to vote, a radical and dangerous action for black people in Mississippi at the time, especially in this river-washed fertile cotton plantation land of northwest Mississippi known as the Delta. Here, black people formed an overwhelming majority of the population. If they gained voting rights, there was a very real possibility that black power could displace white power in local government. Local whites had proven themselves willing to fight that possibility in every way they could. In the 1950s and ’60s, white-supremacist terror besieged black communities in Mississippi and across the South. Black leaders had been assassinated or driven from the state; new laws were put in place both to maintain black disenfranchisement and to surveil the black community. Ku Klux Klan membership expanded and included policemen and civic leaders.
At the courthouse, the men and women from Ruleville crowded into the circuit clerk’s office and announced their intention. Cecil Campbell, the startled and decidedly hostile clerk, stated that only two of them were allowed in the office at the same time. Everyone except Mrs. Hamer and an older man named Leonard Davis went back outside to wait their turn. Sullen white men, some carrying pistols, milled about outside the courthouse; the group waiting to register stood uneasily on the steps and under the portico. Then, without giving a reason, the circuit clerk suddenly closed his office.
Despite the danger Mrs. Hamer and her fellow would-be registrants were facing, my coworkers and I were pleased that they had braved this hostile territory—and that no violence had taken place. I had boarded the bus with the group, and though I had only been in Mississippi for a few weeks, I was already well aware of the dangers of challenging white power in the state. The previous summer, SNCC had begun an intensive voter-registration effort in Southwest Mississippi, and white supremacists had unleashed murderous violence against it.
I was a freshman at Howard University in Washington, D.C., during the campaign in that region of Mississippi and did not plan to become part of the voter-registration effort in the Delta in the summer of 1962. Instead, I intended to participate in a civil rights workshop for young people organized by CORE in Houston, Texas, after finishing my spring semester. CORE had invited m
e and given me money for a bus ticket because at Howard I had been part of the sit-in movement.
I boarded a Greyhound bus for Houston, but when I reached Jackson, Mississippi—the state’s capital—I decided to try to meet students there who were sitting in at segregated public facilities. I could have disembarked in any southern city and met student protesters, but Mississippi was so notoriously racist and violent—wholly associated in my mind, and in the minds of many in my generation, with the brutal 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till—that it was difficult for me to imagine students anywhere in the state being brave enough to sit in. Yet I knew students were doing just that in Jackson. I thought they must have some kind of special courage gene to be protesting in Mississippi. As far as I was concerned, no place in the entire universe was more oppressive and dangerous for a black person. Sit-in protests in the segregated towns and cities of Maryland and Virginia were one thing; sit-in protests in Mississippi were quite another, I thought. So I felt compelled to meet them. I got off the bus and made my way to their headquarters.
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