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“The Day of Camouflage Is Past”
Today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches… . It disenfranchises its own citizens… . It encourages ignorance… . It steals from us… . It insults us… . We return. We return from fighting… . We return fighting… . Make way for democracy!
—W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919
On the cold Monday night of February 25, 1946, armed black men assembled on rooftops in Columbia, Tennessee, intently watching the streets below. Their eyes were focused on the first block of East Eighth Street, which housed small businesses and was the Main Street of the town’s black community. The area was called the Bottom by the black community and Mink Slide by whites. Lynch-mob fervor had been building in town all day, and when it finally blazed into fierce and furious fire, East Eighth Street would briefly be turned into a battleground.
The incident that caused that armed black mobilization had taken place that morning on Columbia’s town square when a young black navy veteran named James Stephenson and his mother Gladys had argued and fought with two white employees of the Castor–Knott Department Store. The disagreement seems simple on the surface: In early January Gladys Stephenson had left her radio with the department store’s repair shop. But when her youngest son, John Robert, returned for it over a month later, repair shop manager LaVal LaPointe told him that the radio had been sold to an employee of farmer John Calhoun Fleming. The store did, in fact, have a policy that items left longer than thirty days could be sold, but this was the first time the option had been exercised, and the store agreed to retrieve the radio.
Mrs. Stephenson did get her radio back. But when she got it home again, she discovered it still was not working. On the morning of February 25 she went back to the shop, accompanied now by her nineteen-year-old son James, who had just been discharged from the Navy. LaPointe and Mrs. Stephenson got into heated argument about what parts the radio needed and the higher price he was now quoting for the repair. She and her son stalked out of the shop. They were followed by LaPointe and William “Billy” Fleming, an apprentice at the shop and the son of the farmer whose employee had purchased the radio. Near the store’s entrance, they passed an elderly white man bringing in a radio for repair. At the same moment, Mrs. Stephenson was telling her son in a loud, irritated voice that the only thing the shop had done was ruin her radio.
Perhaps worried that the Stephensons were impugning the shop in front of its white clientele, or perhaps simply angry at getting an argument from black people, Fleming ordered mother and son out of the store. Apparently something in his tone or body language alarmed James, who placed himself protectively between his mother and Fleming. According to Fleming, James Stephenson looked back at him in a “threatening” manner as he and his mother left the store. That glance, or whatever Fleming read into it, seems to have been the final straw for the irritated radio shop apprentice. He charged through the door and lunged at James Stephenson, striking him in the back of the head with his fist. But Stephenson had been a welterweight boxer in the navy, and he spun around and knocked Fleming through a window next to the closed door.
LaPointe rushed to assist his apprentice, but Mrs. Stephenson grabbed him from behind. He twisted away, slapped her in the face, and tried to restrain her. She pulled herself free and attempted to stab Fleming in the back with a piece of broken window glass, but she missed and only scraped his shoulder. The melee, meanwhile, was attracting a great deal of attention. Another white man ran across the street and jumped into the fray, throwing Mrs. Stephenson to the ground, tearing her coat and giving her a black eye. James Stephenson tried to defend his mother, but the three white men subdued him and called the police.
Columbia’s police chief, Walter Griffin, arrived on the scene; mother and son were hustled off to the city jail, charged with breach of the peace, and fined fifty dollars each. They either paid or made arrangements to pay the fine (it is not clear which), but instead of being released as they expected, they were taken back to their cells, where they remained until early afternoon. Police then took them to the county jail; Billy Fleming’s father had obtained a warrant alleging they had attempted to murder his son. At the county jail, Sheriff James J. Underwood warned the two that white townspeople were furious and in a violent mood. Indeed, an increasingly inebriated crowd of white people had already begun gathering near the Maury County courthouse calling in loud voices for the Stephensons to be lynched. Fleming’s father was among them, but he became so drunk he passed out and had to be carried away.
When Gladys Stephenson’s mother, Hannah Peppers, heard that her daughter and grandson were in jail, she had appealed to two black businessmen for help paying the fine: black Columbia’s seventy-six-year-old patriarch, Julius Blair, who owned a soda fountain on East Eighth Street, and James Morton, the owner of a funeral parlor on the same street. Both men accompanied Peppers to the town magistrate, who told them that the Stephensons should remain in jail for their own safety. Nevertheless, Mrs. Peppers, Blair, and Morton proceeded to the county jail, and Sheriff Underwood reluctantly released the Stephensons. Mrs. Stephenson was taken home, and James was brought to the Bottom.
As it had in the white community, word of the arrests had spread rapidly through the black community, who felt that James’s life and possibly his mother’s life were in peril. Black people, many of them armed, streamed into the Bottom: “Probably one hundred-fifty negroes … forty to fifty or maybe more [with] guns in their hands, shotguns, rifles of different types and calibers,” noted one observer. Julius Blair, never known for bellicosity, declared, “We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County.”
Blair was referring to an event that lived vividly in the collective memory of the town’s black residents: in 1933, after a Columbia grand jury had failed to indict a black teenage boy on charges of molesting a white girl, a mob took him from jail, hanged him, and burned his body. Over the years, such atrocities were tinder for an easily combustible mix of fear and fury in Columbia’s black community. The town is only about thirty miles away from Pulaski, Tennessee, where in 1865 six young veterans of the Confederate army first organized the Ku Klux Klan. None of Columbia’s blacks doubted that the local white population was overwhelmingly hostile to them and to Afro-Americans generally. Although many blacks were afraid of the harm whites could inflict on them, they were angry, too. And on this winter night in early 1946, that anger flared with unexpected intensity.
When a police car entered the Bottom that evening, a crowd surrounded it and began to rock it, trying to overturn it. Someone near the bumper yelled out that he had “fought for freedom overseas and going to fight for it here.” The crowd even threatened Sherriff Underwood himself—a severe transgression of the white-supremacist culture of the time.
Blair, Morton, and other black business leaders tried to lower the temperature of a situation becoming increasingly heated. Morton told Underwood that they did not want any white people in the area. “Get rid of the white people on the square [and] the Negroes [here] would be all right,” he suggested. In their effort to quiet things down, Blair and Morton also escorted James Stephenson, who was in the crowd carrying a shotgun he had obtained from a nearby barbershop, out of the Bottom. The two men drove James and his mother to Nashville, about forty-five miles north of town.
As night fell, World War II veterans, a few in uniform, took command of the Bottom’s defenses. Around 10 PM, they ordered the lights of the district’s businesses turned off, and they shot out the street lights to provide complete cover of darkness. Hearing the gunfire, Chief Griffin and four of his policemen entered the Bottom in two cars. They rode with their lights out, and the Bottom’s defenders may not have recognized them as policemen—which may
help explain the unrestrained intensity of the defenders’ response.
“Here they come!” someone shouted as the two cars approached the Bottom. Shots rang out. The volley of gunfire wounded Griffin and all four of the policemen and may have caused other casualties as well; a white mob had followed the police into the Bottom, and years later a black carpenter, Raymond Lockridge, told writer Juan Williams that four or five of its members were killed in the exchange. Lockridge described “blood running in the gutters,” but he also told Williams that because the victims were white and the killers black, the deaths were covered up. Reporting on events in Columbia later, the Afro-American newspaper suggested something similar: “Whites whose obituaries stated [they] died suddenly of heart failures may also have suffered slight cases of Mink Slide bullet poisoning… . [Members of the mob] can’t admit even to this day that [they] took a beating when colored [people] decided to protect themselves.”
This unprecedented show of armed black resistance frightened Columbia’s white authorities, and Sheriff Underwood asked the state to intervene. Before the night was over, hundreds of heavily armed state police and National Guard members had arrived in Columbia. Like the white townspeople, they were enraged. They were also cautious, setting up a cordon around the Bottom but waiting until dawn before moving in.
What followed was an orgy of violence and looting. The troopers indiscriminately shot out windows, ripped up the floors of businesses and homes, and broke apart furniture—all under the pretense of searching for weapons, ammunition, and gunmen. They also stole cash and goods from the Bottom’s businesses and ransacked Morton’s funeral home, scrawling the letters “KKK” on one of the coffins. The NAACP’s Crisis magazine deplored the invaders’ “Gestapo-like vandalism” and reported that when the police and National Guard were finished in the Bottom, “not a single black-owned business in the first block of East Eighth Street was left unscathed. All were damaged through overzealous searching and ‘wanton destruction.’” The troopers removed arms found in any home they searched, and they arrested more than a hundred people, two of whom were killed while in custody.
The rampage in the Bottom was much more than a police action innocent of political purpose. After World War II, southern whites feared that black servicemen returning home from overseas would threaten the traditional white-supremacist order. The Mississippi-born editor of Kentucky’s Louisville Courier-Journal warned that “militant” blacks “were moving on every front.” With growing uneasiness, the southern establishment—planters, businessmen, politicians, and good ol’ boys in cities, rural towns, and counties—discerned winds of change rustling the political and social landscape. The widely publicized resistance in Columbia was yet more proof to many whites that if they were to remain supreme in the South, they would have to determine how best to quash any “dangerous Negroes”—especially armed black soldiers—who were trying to assert their opinions and rights in the postwar era.
Although the war was responsible for some of the changes that threatened southern whites, change had begun before the war. In the 1936 presidential election, black voters had deserted the Republican Party in large numbers, casting a majority of their votes for the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Three months before that vote, Senator Ellison Durant “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina had walked out of the Democratic Party National Convention, enraged over the participation of blacks. “The doors of the white man’s party have been thrown open to snare the Negro vote in the North,” he protested.
Expanded black participation in the Democratic Party meant that the party could not avoid at least speaking to some of the issues of concern to black people. As limited as the party’s interest in black concerns was, however, white southern Democrats were outraged that there was any interest at all. When Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, made a speech at the 1948 Democratic Party National Convention calling for greater commitment to civil rights, all of Mississippi’s delegation and half of Alabama’s walked out and formed a States’ Rights Party, which nominated South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate. Southern political leaders who did not join Thurmond’s party backed a rump presidential campaign by Georgia’s Senator Richard B. Russell to protest the nomination of Harry S. Truman, who had supported the civil rights plank in the party’s platform at the 1948 convention. However, these dissidents never really left the Democratic Party and were lumped together as “Dixiecrats.”
For obvious political reasons—in particular the growing number of black people in large cities—not everyone in the Democratic Party establishment was angered or fearful of black involvement. Differences over racial policies and practices would continue to alienate Dixiecrats from the national Democratic Party until finally, in 1964, southern whites fled to the Republican Party in overwhelming numbers.
A host of other factors also signaled white supremacy’s erosion: President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs; Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s; the rise of new activist organizations like the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC); the creation in 1941 of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, forced by A. Philip Randolph’s threatened March on Washington; the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling against the Democratic Party’s white-voters-only primaries in Texas; the Operation Dixie union organizing drive launched by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) after the war; the steady expansion of the NAACP, with its refocus on giving priority to attacking the legal underpinnings of segregation; and even the status of black athletes like Olympic track star Jesse Owens, boxer Joe Louis, and baseball great Jackie Robinson.
And the world itself was changing. World War II had brought a surge of antitotalitarian rhetoric trumpeting the merits of freedom and democracy. The Four Freedoms articulated by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address just a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—freedom of speech and of worship, freedom from want and from fear—were intended to illustrate what he felt best described American principles, yet they contravened the very essence of southern white power. Many a white supremacist saw fear as a necessary tool for keeping blacks in line; eliminating it was the first step to losing power. And though southern whites could perhaps accept speech and worship as constitutionally protected (though with regard to blacks, Jews, and Catholics, unclear), the U.S. Constitution made no promise of economic well-being, which reinforced argument from some—and not just southern whites—that Roosevelt’s New Deal programs crossed the boundary separating capitalism from socialism.
Southern white power recognized that the vision Roosevelt articulated for the country was inherently destabilizing to their way of life. Whatever the merits of establishing or reestablishing freedom and democracy in Germany, Italy, and Japan, they were still considered white-only prerogatives in Dixie, and in much of the rest of the United States, as well. “Are we fighting this war to destroy everything we inherited from our forefathers?” asked an alarmed Mississippi Delta planter. “This is a conservative war… . It is not a war for Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Socialism, New Dealism or Democracy [emphasis added].”
The white reaction to these changes was not just political; it was also deeply emotional. In a July 1943 speech, North Carolina governor Joseph Melville Broughton denounced “radical” black leaders who, he said, were “seeking to use the war emergency to advance theories and philosophies which if carried to their ultimate conclusion would result only in a mongrel race.” Miscegenation ranked alongside black men willing to kill white men as one of the southern white man’s two greatest fears. Cloaked in the language of resistance to “social equality” or presented as defense of southern white womanhood, the need to prevent “race mixing” became an emotional battle cry in charge after charge against the black Freedom Movement. Illustrating the power of this fear is the fact that not until 1967 were statutes outlawing interracial marriages declared unconstitutional—thirteen years after the Supreme Court declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, th
at school segregation was unconstitutional. During and immediately after the war, the idea of racial intermingling, whether casually social or romantic, rallied southern whites. It also focused hostility on returning black servicemen, who while overseas had been treated with appreciation and equality by male and female Europeans. Denouncing black troops from the Senate floor in 1945, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland declared, “There will be no social equality; there will be no such un-American measures when the [black] soldier returns.”
Deeper historical currents shaped the white reaction, as well. Spokesmen for white supremacy like Eastland and Broughton considered themselves Jeffersonian Democrats faithful to the country’s founding principles. They persuaded themselves that in calling for his Four Freedoms “everywhere in the world,” Roosevelt was deliberately undermining states’ rights, imposing federal authority on the South, as well as obligating the United States to international authority and values far removed from the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian republic in which most authority would be local authority.
The many white World War II veterans raging against the Stephensons almost certainly saw themselves as standing up not only for their southern way of life but also, more broadly, for the American way of life. Translated into the values and mores of their time and place, that meant that if a white man hit a black man, as Fleming did to James Stephenson, the black man was not to hit back. Nor was any black person to argue with any white person, as Gladys Stephenson had. Like the ideals of freedom and democracy, the right to stand one’s ground was held to be an exclusively white prerogative. Even when threatened by a mob, black people were to back down or submit—never to stand up for themselves.
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed Page 8
