Negroes and the Gun (37 page)

Fig. 6.2. Photograph depicting the burning of black residences and businesses in Tulsa during the race riots. (“Running the Negro out of Tulsa,” June 1, 1921.)

The fighting at Tulsa is a piece with the storied 1923 conflict in Rosewood, Florida, an episode so dramatic it would provoke the attention of commercial filmmakers, who presented a story of heroes far more militant than the familiar brave folk who endured attack dogs, fire hoses, and baton charges with stoic nonviolence.

The violence at Rosewood had a familiar start. A white woman, named Fanny Taylor, had been assaulted. The suspect was a black escapee from a chain gang. Bloodhounds took a scent from Fanny Taylor's torn clothes and raced away, followed by a crowd of armed men that swelled as word spread. Soon the dogs were on him, or at least onto something, and they were headed straight to the black town of Rosewood.

The dogs chased the scent to the cabin of Aaron Carrier and stopped cold at fresh wagon tracks leading away from Carrier's back door. With the hounds stymied, the posse headed for Carrier's mother's house, where they found Aaron hiding upstairs. With his mother screaming on the porch, they dragged Aaron Carrier out of the house. Then they tied him to the back of a Model T Ford, and dragged him until he admitted that another man, Sam Carter, had helped the rape suspect escape.

The posse fanned out over Rosewood, warning curious Negroes to get out of sight. They broke into Sam Carter's house, put a noose around his neck, and pulled him outside to an old oak tree. They would torture the truth out of him. And after intermittent strangling and mutilation, Carter said that he had driven the suspect to a spot on the edge of the swamp.

They yanked Carter down and made him show them the spot. When the hounds failed to pick up a scent and it seemed that Carter had just said what they wanted after
torture, one of the frustrated men, stinking of moonshine, shot Carter point blank in the head. Then they hoisted his body up into a tree and riddled it with bullets.

The violence cycled from there. Rumor spread that blacks were planning to retaliate for the attacks on Sam Carter and Aaron Carrier. At the center of those rumors was a tall, dark-skinned Negro folk in Rosewood called simply, “Man.” His Christian name was Sylvester Carrier.

Sylvester Carrier was a quick and accurate rifle shot who lived on what he could harvest from the swamps, along with the occasional stolen head of livestock. He actually had served time for cattle rustling, the whole time arguing that he was set up by whites. And he carried an anger fueled by the claimed injustice of it. Black folk who saw him at church playing the organ and singing had a richer sense of Man. But they also did not doubt his disposition to fight, even against long odds.

Rumor said that blacks were massing at the home of Sarah Carrier, Man's mother. And that was enough to draw a band of armed men, about a dozen of them, to a railroad siding within hollering distance of Sarah's home. It was a cold night for Florida. They built a fire and planned their attack.

Sarah Carrier knew these white men. She actually had nursed two of them. As the men approached, she went out onto the porch and scolded them like she would her grandchildren. “Y'all go on home, get yourselves on home.” Someone in the group, no one would say who, didn't like Sarah's tone and shot her through the head. Then they descended on the house, where Sylvester Carrier was waiting with a Winchester lever-action rifle and a pump shotgun.

As the first man stepped foot on the porch, Man shot him through the face. An instant later, a second man up fell to a slug from Man's Winchester. Others retreated as Sylvester Carrier shot rapid-fire through the front and side windows, wounding another man who tried to climb to a second-floor window. After regrouping they attempted one more assault on the house that left two more of them wounded by Man's blistering gunfire.

The word spread like jungle drumming. White men came from across the region, one contingent from Gainesville, others from Jacksonville, and scores more from no-name places in between. Soon there were hundreds of them, aiming to wreak vengeance on the community that had spawned this Negro who raised his gun to such deadly effect against white men. In full froth, the mob raged through Rosewood, killing two blacks who had lingered—one old widow, and an old swamp man who called himself “Lord God.”

Finally, the mob descended on James Carrier, the old man of the clan. After a perfunctory interrogation, they dragged him to two fresh graves. There lay Man and his mother and Sarah. They forced James at gunpoint to dig his own grave. It wasn't much of a hole, and the dirt he managed to move with his one good arm before they killed him was washed away by the first rain.

The law, such as it was, arrived belatedly, to a scene of utter destruction. As far as structures, Rosewood was not much of a town in the first place—thirty homes, a few no more than shacks, but three churches, a general store, and a masonic lodge. Now it was just death and ashes.
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The white press depicted Rosewood as a riot stemming from the familiar poisonous root of sexual assault, exacerbated by Negroes with guns. But the black press cast the fighters of Rosewood as heroes. The
New York Age
compared the incident to recent acts of self-defense in Chicago where “the Negro was not afraid to fight back and when the fight was over he felt that he had something pretty near a fair chance before the law. Those are two conditions which the suffocating, damning atmosphere of the South does not permit.”

Sylvester Carrier was elevated as an exemplar of black manhood by the
Pittsburgh American
, which declared that Rosewood should “make Negroes everywhere feel proud and take renewed hope. For our people have fought back again! They have met the mob with its own deadly weapons, they've acquitted themselves like freemen and were not content to be burned like bales of hay.”

This was not just a general endorsement of self-defense, of the type that virtually anyone might make when pressed. The
Pittsburgh American
was talking pointedly about self-defense with guns. “Things have come to the place in this country that the only course for the Negro is armed resistance. Lynchers are free to prowl the earth and butcher any Negro who gets in their path. The only way for the black man then is to keep his powder dry and shoot back.”
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The
Kansas City Call
was equally resolute that “no man in his right senses expects to run, and run, and run forever. . . . Man created in God's image will always choose to die face to the fore—whenever it is sufficiently clear that he may not live in peace.” Leavening this militant stance was at least a rhetorical admonition against political violence. “We cannot establish rights by fighting,” said the
Call
, “But how under heaven can we urge our people to die like sheep. . . . How can we ask them to be cowards?”
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Walter White was among the many commentators on Rosewood, and he openly despaired that the American conscience was not shocked by the terror. But White was not crippled by despair. Indeed, by some measure, the brutality energized him to fight. Many fought back physically, and White had shown as a boy his courage for the physical fight. But his talents drew him to a subtler form of combat. He would soon become instrumental in building one of the vital institutions of the modern freedom movement. And that work was solidly rooted in the black tradition of arms.

Walter White confronted a multitude of challenges over his long career at the NAACP. But one of the most remarkable episodes began shortly after he was
recruited to the association by James Weldon Johnson.
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Johnson was a polymath—lawyer, educator, newspaper editor, novelist, classically trained musician, and composer whose “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is embraced today as the “Black National Anthem.” As a child growing up in the Williamsburg section of New York, Johnson and his friends played at the feet of militant journalist T. Thomas Fortune.
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As a young man studying at Atlanta University, Johnson gave a prize-winning speech that captured the early philosophy of the organization he would come to lead. Blacks should seek to rise through industry, education, and the accumulation of wealth, he said. But Johnson also cautioned strongly against submission to oppression, arguing that “half of the suffering of the race would be eradicated” if Negroes fought back against the terror of the lynch mob.
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Johnson was counsel to Nicaragua and Venezuela under Republican administrations and had deep personal and political animus for the southern-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson's reelection in a close contest with Republican Charles Evans Hughes that spurred Johnson to go work for the NAACP. Although blacks had many fair complaints about Republicans by 1916, Johnson was optimistic about the prospects under Hughes, who, as a Supreme Court Justice, had recently written an opinion overturning a discriminatory Oklahoma voting law. Against the backdrop of Democrats' dominance in the South, and Woodrow Wilson's recent praise of the newly released Klan paean,
Birth of a Nation
, Johnson cast his lot with the party of Lincoln. So when Wilson was returned to the White House, Johnson girded for battle.
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Johnson aimed to staff the NAACP with people like himself, men from the Talented Tenth. Walter White was firmly in that mold. Indeed, by almost any measure, White was in the top fraction of the Talented Tenth. And whatever resentments his talents and privilege might stir, he answered with a tireless commitment to justice for black folk.

Ossian Sweet was also a man of the Talented Tenth, though some would say just barely so. Sweet was born poor in the little town of East Bartow in rural Florida. His one advantage was hard-working, God-fearing parents who loved him. That turned out to be plenty.

It was a long road for Ossian Sweet from East Bartow into the ranks of the Talented Tenth. Some mixture of courage, prescience, and a lucky affiliation with Florida's African Methodist Church landed Ossian a spot at Wilberforce College in Ohio. Wilberforce had educated Negroes since before the Civil War, operating on the site of the old Tawawa Springs resort. Southern slavers had entertained their black concubines there and then helped repurpose the place as a school for their mulatto children.
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Sweet was a good but not exceptional student. So his ambition to become a doctor bordered on hubris. There were only two black medical schools in the country, and they only admitted about one hundred men per year. But Sweet's chances improved when the United States entered World War I.

The war was an opportunity, said the black leadership, to earn respect through service. Writing in the
Crisis
, W. E. B. Du Bois urged the men of the Talented Tenth to join the war effort. And many of them—class leaders at Howard, Fisk, and Lincoln, who would have competed for slots in America's two black medical schools—heeded the call. Ossian Sweet was not among them. Although he was willing to serve, his eyesight was so poor, he was deemed unfit. And in the fall of 1917, with the world at war, Sweet entered the college of medicine at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Sweet would graduate from Howard and head for Detroit with visions of life as a prosperous member of the Negro elite. But he carried with him an embedded tribal knowledge, the awareness of a race, and specific memories of his childhood in East Bartow, where in the summer of 1901, he saw sixteen-year-old Fred Rochelle burned alive by a mob. Sweet also worried about the more recent violence and risks of his times.

Like Ida B. Wells before him, Sweet was jolted to the reality that social standing was no protection against mobbing. For Wells, the lesson was in the lynching of Tom Moss. For Sweet, it came in reports about the four Johnson brothers who were found shot up in the backseat of a police car in an Arkansas woodlot in 1919. The bodies were still handcuffed. One of the brothers was a doctor and the other was a dentist. Ossian Sweet was a proud striver, but he had no illusions about the hazards of his time.

When Sweet's mother-in-law learned that Ossian and her overproud daughter Gladys had bought a house on Garland Avenue in an all-white section of Detroit, about midway between the inner-city enclave of “Black Bottom” and tony Grosse Pointe, she pulled Ossian close and tucked a pistol into his coat pocket. Sweet already owned a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, taken earlier as payment from a patient. These were two of the twelve guns that he carried into the Garland Avenue bungalow on moving day.

In the modern gun debate, it is common to talk about what guns and how many guns people need. In that light, Ossian Sweet's twelve guns may seem excessive. But Sweet took a different view. Thinking hard about his exposure, Sweet asked his brothers, a cousin, and several other solid men to stay through the night and carried in two canvas sacks weighted down with a shotgun, rifles, six pistols, and four hundred rounds of ammunition.

Sweet was familiar enough with firearms that the mechanics of self-defense were comfortable, and for his brother Henry, so were the tactics. Henry Sweet
had followed Ossian to Wilberforce, where he enrolled in the Cadet Corps. The marching, drilling, and uniforms appealed to him. And in one case, there was an opportunity to put the discussions of strategy and tactics to work when a local black farmer, William Martin, became a target of midnight terrorists.

First, Martin's hayrick was torched. Then shots were fired into his house. This prompted the Wilberforce Cadet commander to put theory into practice, with an ostentatious display of armed drills, a march to Martin's farm and deployment in a defensive perimeter. With this display of force, the attacks on William Martin stopped. Ossian Sweet might have hoped that a similar show of force would earn him a grudging peace in his new neighborhood. But it would not be that easy.
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