Negroes and the Gun (34 page)

Shillady's replacement, James Weldon Johnson, the association's first black executive secretary, took a different stance. Following the July 1919 race riot in Washington, DC, Johnson investigated and offered this assessment of how and why peace was restored. “The Negroes saved themselves and saved Washington by their determination not to run but to fight, fight in the defense of their lives and their homes. If the white mob had gone unchecked—and it was only the determined effort of black men that checked it—Washington would have been another and worse East St. Louis.”

The violence in DC was sparked by a rumor that a white soldier's wife had been
raped by a Negro. The city was filled with military men back from World War I. It also had been filling for some time with blacks migrating out of the South in search of something better. On a hot Saturday in mid-July, hundreds of white veterans rampaged through DC's black neighborhoods. The violence continued two more days, peaking on Monday after an editorial from the
Washington Post
urged “every available serviceman to gather at Pennsylvania and Seventh Avenue at 9:00 p.m. for a cleanup that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”

White servicemen answered the call and stormed through black neighborhoods in the southwest and Foggy Bottom. But the going was tougher in northwest Washington, DC, where the forewarned community was barricaded in and well-armed. As the mob approached, Negroes answered with a barrage of gunfire. The mob scattered. In the aftermath, cars were found riddled with bullet holes. Dozens of people were seriously wounded and one black man died by gunshot.

Black gunfire certainly helped staunch the mob. But it also helped that Washington was drenched by torrential rains and that President Wilson deployed two thousand troops to secure the streets. James Weldon Johnson certainly knew this. So his celebration of the black resistance seems like more than just an objective description of the events. It actually reads like a general prescription for black resistance against mobbing.
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Fig. 5.5. Portrait of James Weldon Johnson. (Black-and-white photoprints [Series 1], Scurlock Studio Records, ca. 1905–1994, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.)

In subsequent commentary, the
Crisis
extolled the enduring value of the black resistance in Washington, DC, in reporting about a black professor from Howard University who managed to find someone to sell him a house in a “restricted” area of the district. He was told to get out. When he refused, “his new home was given a battering.”

Horrified, his intellectual friends at the college “recommended to him some interesting court procedures.” But the militant professor and at least one of his colleagues pursued an alternate strategy. They “took the pains to build a barricade. One of them got his guns together and installed himself in the barricade. The two, fortified further by sandwiches and milk, quietly sat, watched and waited.”

Local veterans who had been active in defending the community during the 1919 riots got wind of these rough tactics and sent word that they would keep watch over the militant professor's new home. Cause and effect are murky, but the reporting suggests that from this point, no further attacks occurred. The
Crisis
saw this as vindication. “The professor, using a rowdy principle, had opened up a new and decent area for Negro habitation. Thousands of fine Negroes live there now.”
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The disappointments and hazards of the early century fueled radical approaches to addressing the plight of black folk. Socialist A. Philip Randolph and Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey rejected any possibility of just treatment for Negroes in America. Disparate philosophies led to bitter personal attacks between Randolph, Garvey, and W. E. B Du Bois.

Randolph, a driving force in the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, criticized that the NAACP was a tool of middle-class blacks. Randolph also split with Du Bois on the question of black service in World War I. Du Bois urged blacks to serve, arguing that by fighting they would earn their freedom. Randolph quipped that he would not fight to make the world safe for democracy but was more than willing to die at home to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.” Philosophical disagreement led to personal attack, with Randolph calling Du Bois a “handkerchief head . . . hat-in-hand Negro.”
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Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 with the ambition of massive Negro migration to Africa, advanced a homegrown nationalist philosophy. Garvey castigated the NAACP as an organ of light-skinned, upper-class Negroes and leveled his own personal attack at Du Bois, charging that the rising intellectual leader of the race actually preferred the company of whites to blacks.

Returning the favor, Du Bois and Randolph expressed their disdain for Garvey's
gaudy showmanship openly and in print. Both the
Crisis
and Randolph's signature publication, the
Messenger
, condemned Garvey and were sympathetic to established Negro leaders who reported mismanagement of Garvey's Black Star shipping line to the federal government.
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But despite their deep philosophical differences and personal animus, these stalwarts of competing factions in the early freedom movement found agreement on the point of individual self-defense.
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There was, of course, disagreement about root causes of the perils to black folk. Randolph thought the plight of Negroes in America was rooted in capitalism, declaring that “lynching will not stop until Socialism comes.”
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Randolph saw no promise in legislation around the edges, warning, “Don't be deceived by any capitalist bill to abolish lynching; if it becomes a law it would never be enforced. Have you not the Fourteenth Amendment which is supposed to protect your life, property and guarantee you the vote?”
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Randolph had a much broader assessment and a much grander plan:

No, lynching is not a domestic question, except in the rather domestic minds of Negro leaders, whose information is highly localized and domestic. The problems of the Negroes should be presented to every nation in the world and this sham democracy, about which American's prate, should be exposed for what it is—a sham, a mockery, a rape on decency and a travesty on common sense. When lynching gets to be an international question, it will be the beginning of the end. On with the dance!
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Fig. 5.6. Political cartoons from A. Phillip Randolph's
Messenger
, proclaiming the militancy of the “New Crowd Negro” and criticizing W. E. B. Du Bois and the “Old Crowd.” (
Left:
“The ‘New Crowd Negro' Making America Safe for Himself,”
Messenger
, 1919.
Right:
“Following the Advice of the ‘Old Crowd' Negro,”
Messenger
, 1919.)

Acknowledging that his grand political agenda would take time, Randolph's short-term remedy was reciprocal violence in self-defense. He reconciled this with a broader pacifism, explaining that pacifism controlled “only on matters that can be settled peacefully.” He did not equivocate about the legitimacy or utility of violence for people pressed to the wall, advising, “Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made between the sacrifice of your life and the loss of the lyncher's life, choose to preserve your own and to destroy that of the lynching mob.”
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Randolph's call resonated in the black press, even where people disagreed with his socialist agenda. The
Kansas City Call
celebrated Randolph's appeal to self-defense as the battle cry of the “New Negro,” who was done “cringing” and was prepared to fight back.
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Marcus Garvey offered his own variation on the theme with a peculiar version of the traditional dichotomy between self-defense and political violence. Garvey openly advocated large-scale political violence, arguing that “all peoples have gained their freedom through organized force. . . . These are the means by which we as a race will climb to greatness.”
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Garvey's hedge was that this violence would occur not in America or Europe but in Africa, where organized blacks would retake what was theirs.
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Fig. 5.7. Marcus Garvey
(center)
in full regalia. (Photograph by James VanDerZee, © Donna Mussenden VanDerZee, all rights reserved, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library.)

Domestically, Garvey embraced the traditional boundary against political violence, which he seemed to admit could not succeed in the United States. But on the point of private self-defense against imminent threats, Garvey was a traditionalist.
Although he was roundly criticized for acknowledging common ground with the racially separatist KKK, Garvey also challenged the Klan, writing, “They can pull off their hot stuff in the south, but let them come north and touch Philadelphia, New York or Chicago and there will be little left of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . Let them try and come to Harlem and they will really have some fun.”
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Du Bois, Randolph, and Garvey embodied the early twentieth-century factions of the rising freedom movement. They were divided by profound philosophical differences. But on the basic point of personal security and response to the hazards that plagued Negroes, they found common ground. Harlem poet and Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay captured the general sentiment in a poem that circulated broadly in Randolph's
Messenger
and was widely reprinted. It was a paean to Negro manhood that closes with this: “
If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. . . . Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back.
”

McKay was extolling and encouraging the fighting spirit of the New Negro. He might well have been celebrating the last violent stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopolis.
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