Negroes and the Gun (36 page)

It started with dice. There was a big gathering in the town of Arcola, with attendant drinking and gambling. Williams was shooting dice behind a boarding house when someone was called a cheat, and someone pulled a knife. Then one of the men ran to the sheriff, claiming that Anthony Williams drew a pistol on him.

In the habit of the times, the arrest of Anthony Williams was just the beginning. Intent on confiscating the pistol, sheriff's deputies decided to beat Williams until he coughed up the gun. They dragooned several men to hold him down. They kicked him with heavy boots. Then they stripped him and beat him with the buckle end of a belt until the brass lock broke off.

The beating worked, in a fashion. Williams pleaded for them to stop and promised to show where he hid the gun. They went back to the scene of the gambling and searched all around but did not find the pistol. Now frustrated by the impudent Negro and his elusive gun, the deputies decided to stake him out and give him a full and proper whipping.

As they were dragging him off to be hided, Williams jerked out of the way of a passing horse, prompting one of the deputies to take a shot at him. Williams then ran for his gun, which was hidden all along on his horse, saddled nearby. In the prosecution that followed, the court, quoting his trial testimony, projected Williams's
dilemma. “I said Lordy if I don't get it I am killed, and if I do get it I am killed. One mind said get your gun and that time I eased up to my horse and got my gun from under the pommel of the saddle.”

The deputies had better guns and more shooters. But Anthony Williams was more efficient, or at least more resilient. He was shot twice but managed to fire back, killing a deputy. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. After two trips to the Mississippi Supreme Court, Williams's conviction was overturned on the grounds that he shot the deputy in self-defense against an unlawful beating and whipping.
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The case is remarkable first because Williams was not simply lynched. The prosecutor's cynical praise of the nascent lynch mob for their restraint shows that this was a real possibility. Of greater long-term importance was the court's finding that the post-arrest brutality was illegal and sufficient to justify Williams's violent response. This sort of official affirmation is the essential final component of any fully successful act of self-defense and something that Negroes had seldom been able to count on.
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Before the decade ended, the Mississippi Supreme Court issued another decision that similarly defies the intuitions fueled by the horrors chronicled in
Rope and Faggot
. In
Byrd v. State
, the court reversed the conviction and dismissed the prosecution of Jack Byrd, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the Christmas Eve murder of Bilbo Cox in the town of D'Lo.

The first notable thing is that the prosecution miscalculated the influence of white privilege. Race still played significantly in the court's assessment. But here it tilted in favor of the accused Negro who was vouched for by numerous prominent white men. These same sponsors also commented on the low reputation of the dead man and his surviving companion, Burkett Neely.

The credible testimony depicted Cox and Neely as carousing drunks who descended on the “Negro Quarters” around midnight in search of whiskey and sport. They started a row in a colored café, assaulting Wes Byrd, while claiming that they were “the law.” The café operator fled to seek intervention from his white landlord, who demurred. Then someone ran to tell Jack Byrd that his brother was in trouble.

Jack Byrd grabbed his shotgun and headed to the café, where Cox and Neely turned to him as new and more interesting entertainment. In a stream of profanity and racial invective, they threatened to kill Byrd if he did not surrender his gun. When Byrd refused, they opened fire with revolvers, wounding but not disabling him. Byrd shot back, killing Cox.

Finding that the two white men “were aggressors from start to finish,” the Mississippi Supreme Court acknowledged and criticized the impact that race played
at the trial, and articulated the racial baseline against which adjudications of black self-defense were evolving. “We cannot escape the conclusion that if this had been a case where the white man had killed a white man, or a Negro had killed a Negro, or a white man had killed a Negro, there would never have been a conviction. We therefore reverse the verdict and judgment; and . . . we order the defendant discharged.”
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These types of cases show that things were changing. The viability of armed self-defense seemed greater now than a generation before. One is even tempted to consider that the residual terror of the lynch mob, its influence on the black psyche, perhaps exceeded the actual threat to any particular Negro. Of course, backwater lynch mobs were not the only worry.

Walter White's surreptitious reporting of hangings and burnings from river banks and oak groves demanded the nerve and courage of an undercover agent. But in other work, like his reporting on the Tulsa, Oklahoma race riot, White operated openly as an investigative journalist and social analyst.
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The Tulsa riot started with the arrest of a black man for allegedly assaulting a white woman in a downtown building. Dick Rowland was taking an elevator to one of the few places in that part of town where he could use the toilet. The alleged victim, Sara Page, first said that the nineteen-year-old bootblack grabbed her arm. Later she said that Rowland had stepped on her foot. Some surmised that Rowland stepped on her foot and reflexively grabbed her arm to stop her from falling back. Page refused to press charges and the case was dropped. But the mob would not wait for all of that.
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Tulsa was an unlikely venue for one of the worst race riots of the era. Walter White noted that “one could . . . find few cities where the likelihood of trouble between the races was as little thought of as in Tulsa.” Still, there were discernible seeds of conflict. The oil boom had dropped riches on enterprising blacks as well as whites. A formidable accumulation of wealth was displayed along Greenwood Avenue, known proudly as “Black Wall Street.” This was a source of jealousy from less enterprising whites.

Tulsa's Jim Crow practices also fueled tension. The black frontier types who settled the area were prickly in their opposition to Jim Crow and less obsequious than many folk in their dealings with whites. This sort of spirit fueled the rapid response to the rumor that a lynch mob had targeted Dick Rowland.

The rumor was perpetrated in part by the local white press. The
Tulsa Daily Tribune
ran a generally inaccurate story about the elevator incident and a forming mob, under the headline “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
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The black men of Tulsa were having none of it. On the rumor that a mob was headed for the jail, armed Negroes ran to protect Dick Rowland. They arrived to find the rumor exaggerated. After an
exchange with the sheriff, who promised that Rowland was safe, they dispersed.
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Later that evening, new rumors spread that a mob was staging to assault the jail. Black men assembled again, seventy-five strong, and headed to the courthouse.

The spark of the violence was a testosterone-fueled showdown between one of the black men, an army veteran, and a white man who could not abide the sight of Negroes with guns. The black veteran was carrying his GI Model 1911 .45 caliber, semiautomatic pistol. Eyewitnesses report the white man approaching and demanding, “Nigger where you going with that pistol?”

The black veteran replied, “I'm going to use it if I need to.”

“No, you give it to me,” said the white man.

“Like hell I will,” replied the veteran.

With the confident arrogance of a superior race, the white man strode forward to disarm the Negro. Then he confronted the force of a 230-grain, .45 caliber slug traveling at almost one thousand feet per second. It knocked him down flat even though fired from the hand of a lowly Negro. From there, the sheriff recorded, “the race war was on and I was powerless to stop it.”
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Like any such conflict, countless individual episodes and calculations go unrecorded. The stories of many of the people who perished will never be told. But from the survivors there is vivid detail of the fighting and dying.

Bill Williams was only sixteen when the rioting broke out. His parents had prospered during the oil boom, extracting from Jim Crow an opportunity to build a garage, a soda fountain, and a theater catering to blacks. Bill's father, John, was among the armed men who assembled to protect Dick Rowland.

Some reports say that the initial violence at the courthouse killed ten whites and a lesser number of blacks. This, of course, was not the end of things. John Williams returned home after midnight, expecting that things would get worse. When Bill awoke at 5 a.m., he found his father, having sat up all night, cradling his .30-30 lever-action rifle. A pump-action shotgun was propped against the wall. As the day progressed, the gunfire intensified and the mob advanced on Greenwood Avenue. For a while, the Williams family held up in the apartment over their business. John Williams fired on the mob from cover until they discerned his position and riddled the building with gunfire.

The Williams family ran out the back, then northward up Greenwood. John Williams left his wife and son with people who were sheltered at a funeral parlor. Then he ran next door to a pool hall, where he could get “a right-hand shot” at the advancing mob. With his rifle, John Williams shot men from the pool hall, aided by another black man who worked the shotgun.

The mob advanced again in another wave, sending John Williams, his wife, and their son, Bill, scattering in different directions. Unlike many families in Tulsa, they
reunited the next day with everyone uninjured. But many blacks had not survived the night. Over one thousand black homes were destroyed, and black Wall Street was ashes.
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Fig. 6.1. Coverage of the violence from
Tulsa World Daily
, June 2, 1921.

The death toll is contested. Various casualty estimates attempted to shape the story. And there are many possibilities. But one of particular note comes from America's preeminent black historian, John Hope Franklin. Franklin moved to Tulsa in 1925 at age ten. He observed that the black community viewed the 1921 riot as a manifestation of their courage, and as a lesson about the proper response to racist aggression. Franklin recounted the conventional wisdom within the black community that “many more whites were killed during the riot than many whites were willing to admit.” He also speculates about the details from his own experience. In the late twenties, Franklin was regularly at the courthouse, observing his father's law practice. He was especially attentive to cases involving the estate of “some white person who died on or about June 1, 1921. One was always tempted to conclude that the deceased lost his life in the riot.”

With the historian's careful eye, Franklin acknowledged that community assessments of white casualties were likely exaggerated. But he found that the embellished local lore still had “the desired effect.” The fighters at Tulsa were cast in the mold of heroes across the ages who had fought bravely against long odds—the immortalized light brigade charging artillery positions with swords, the Three Hundred Spartans dead to the last man at Thermopolis, and, dare one say, the countless Confederate boys who fell in service of the Lost Cause. Black folk, said Franklin, did not see the death and destruction at Tulsa as an episode of black victimization. According to Franklin, they cast it as a story of classic heroism and marshaled it to profound practical effect.

The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites. After 1921, an altercation in Tulsa between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident, even if there was a loss of life. It was just an incident. Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicating the fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might have felt in the years following the riot.
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