Negroes and the Gun (41 page)

Wilkins's restraint here sharpens a crucial point. The boundary against political violence is not a bright line. Rather, it is a contestable zone of action and rhetoric that people under disparate influences will navigate differently. It is a zone that prudent men will approach with caution. But some things will push even prudent men into the breach.

One expects a more detailed consideration of whether William Wales's shootout ranged into the forbidden zone of political violence. But Wilkins was now channeling the rage of the community. He was speaking for William and Cora Wales, burned to a cinder, bits of their remains “reposed now on the mantelpieces of many a Virginia home . . . preserved in a jar of alcohol to remind children and grandchildren of the indomitable courage of a brother, father or son of the family who battled to the death to prevent two Negroes from overcoming 5,000 white Virginians.”

It was plain desperation, said Wilkins, that explained William Wales's violent stand. Wales “had had his fill of [injustice]. He probably decided that he did not intend to stand anymore from the system set up and maintained to exploit, humiliate and crush him. . . . He probably felt that in this matter he was right and that he was not going to knuckle under to the white folk no matter what happened. Death was preferable to life as he had been forced to live it.”

From here, Wilkins engages the range of evils that the NAACP would spend decades fighting in the courts.

As Wales looked back upon his 60 years what did he see? He saw courts controlled by whites, responsive to whites, giving verdicts pleasing to whites. He saw his race's children cheated out of the schooling for which their parents pay taxes to the state. He saw the separation of the races everywhere, with his having always the little end of the deal. He saw jobs, health, opportunity, prestige, family life and success denied upon the flimsy excuse of skin color. He saw his people hanged, roasted and mutilated by mobs while legislators called points of order and an aspirant to the Presidency fiddled with clauses, phrases, periods and commas in the so-called Bill of Rights.

Confronting the final act of violence, William Wales's gun blast to the chest of a lawman clothed in the authority of the state, Wilkins diverts the blame. William Wales might have pulled the trigger, but American apartheid was the real culprit. “The system killed that Sheriff,” Wilkins declared, “Wales was the agent.”

Finally, with the worry about respect for badges of authority fully submerged, Wilkins directly answers the starting question: “Yes,
The Crisis
defends William and Cora Wales
.
” But that was not all. Wilkins not only defended William and Cora. He cast them as heroes, boldly celebrating the act of “stubborn, thrilling, crazy bravery by an aging colored man and his sister.”
2

It would be many years before the case of Jerome Wilson earned the kind of attention that Roy Wilkins gave to William and Cora Wales. But the basic scene was the same. Jerome Wilson of Washington Parish, Louisiana, came from a relatively prosperous black family. They owned land, livestock, and guns. Perhaps that made Jerome Wilson proud, a little too willing under the circumstances to claim that he was a man equal to any other. Perhaps if the Wilson clan had been more willing to bow and scrape, Jerome would not have gotten lynched.

Jerome was one of eleven children of John Wilson and Tempe McGee. As the Wilson boys grew older, John bought an adjacent farm for them to make their start. With John's accumulated resources and his boys' energy and ambition, the family thrived. But their relative prosperity rested on a fragile foundation of wavering protection for Negro property and Negro interests that would worry black strivers for years to come.

Like many rural areas, Washington Parish had a cattle-dipping ordinance to combat parasites. Joe Magee was the range rider charged with enforcing the ordinance. Somehow he heard that the Wilsons' old mule had not been dipped. He rode onto their farm, ignoring the Wilson boys sitting on the porch, and headed to the stockyard. One of the boys asked him, “Mister what's your business?” Magee was not accustomed to explaining himself to Negroes and answered vaguely that he was going into the livestock lot. Jerome Wilson told him, “Hell no, you can't go in there if you can't tell us your business.” Magee, now on edge, demanded of Jerome, “What is your name, boy?” Jerome said, “You didn't tell me yours—I ain't goin' to tell you mine.”

Magee huffed off, but soon returned with two deputies and another man. The Wilson boys were still sitting on the porch and Magee pointed to the ones who sassed him. One of the deputies, Delos Wood, told them to get up and get in the car. Jerome was the first to object. “Go with you for what. . . . We haven't done anything. We're home. Show us your authority.”

Deputy Wood responded with the prerogatives of his class and time. “We don't have to have no authority to take you goddamned niggers to jail.” Then he drew his gun and advanced. One of the Wilson boys, Moise, grabbed at Wood's gun as he came up the steps. Wood shot Moise in the stomach. The other deputy and a third man fired as well, wounding Jerome and his brother Felton.

Tracking blood through the house, Jerome ran to the gun rack, grabbed a shotgun, and fired out the window, hitting Delos Wood. With Wood down, the range rider, Joe Magee, picked up Wood's pistol and fired at Luther Wilson, wounding him.

The entire Wilson family was eventually carted off to jail. Moise, bleeding from two gunshot wounds to the stomach, died on the cell-room floor. Eventually, the authorities focused on Jerome, and it is some signal of progress that he was not immediately lynched. Indeed, it took nearly six months from the shooting until a mob, unhappy with the pace of the legal proceedings, dragged Jerome Wilson from the Washington Parish jail and killed him.
3

Roy Wilkins could have used the Wilson saga or any number of other incidents to make all of the points that he pressed in “
Two against 5,000
.” He could have used the shootout in Camp Hill, Arkansas, between a budding black sharecropper's union and a local sheriff that provoked retribution and resulted in the death of at least one black man and the arrest of sixty others. He could have used the gunfight in Fort Dix, New Jersey, spurred by southern MPs who dragged back-of-the-bus protocols north, and a white commander's notice that Negro liaisons with white women would be considered rape per se. There was plenty of fodder for the mill.
4

Wilkins's primary tools of combat over the years would be intellectual, his battles detached from the violence and blood. But even as he moved pieces across the chess board, lessons about the risks and benefits of defensive firearms were always looming. This was particularly so for an incident in Columbia, Tennessee, that might have changed the trajectory of the entire modern movement.

Aggressive storytellers might say that Negroes with guns nearly cost the life of Thurgood Marshall. Others would say that the armed black community saved Marshall from being lynched. Roy Wilkins was intimately familiar with the situation, so his account seems a fair version.

It started with a dispute between a white counter clerk and two black customers at the Castner Knott Electric Company. Gladys Stephenson and her son came to complain about the quality and price of a radio repair. Negroes carping about slipshod work was outside the boundaries of racial etiquette, and the counterman slapped Gladys Stephenson as a reminder.

But this was 1946, and Stephenson's son James, a Navy veteran with three years' service in World War II, would not abide the old rules. With the brawling instinct of a sailor, James Stephenson set upon the clerk with fists and feet and then pitched him through the plate-glass window of the shop. The police arrested both James and Gladys, punching Gladys in the eye for good measure.

With his prisoners secure, the sheriff recognized the danger of mob violence
and moved the Stephensons out of town. He was prescient in this. Because before the day was over, a mob of seventy-five men descended on the jail, unaware that the prisoners had already been moved.

In the black section of town, pejoratively dubbed and then embraced as “Minkslide,” word of the frustrated jailhouse mob spread and folk prepared for the worst. In a vivid demonstration of the potential for armed violence to spin out in unintended ways, the next turn was something that most everyone wished they could take back.

Anticipating the mob, the neighbors of Minkslide sat like Du Bois and Walter White before them—lights out, crouching next to doors and windows with rifles, pistols, and shotguns ready. When a group of four white men crossed into the neighborhood, someone shouted, “Here they come.” Then there was gunfire. No one knows who fired first. But the result was four white policemen limping away from Minkslide, bleeding from gunshot wounds.
5

The official response confirmed the long worry about the aftermath of Negroes taking up guns. A force of local and state police along with National Guard troops and armed local men marched in and shot up Minkslide. They destroyed the offices of the black doctor and the insurance company. They shot up the barbershop and pool hall and scrawled
KKK
on the walls of the funeral home. Every Negro home was searched for weapons, and more than one hundred blacks were arrested on charges of insurrection. Two detainees died in custody.

The NAACP denounced the episode in the
Crisis
but championed the residents of Minkslide, who showed, “that Negroes, even in small communities like Columbia where they were outnumbered almost three-to-one do not intend to sit quietly and let a mob form, threaten and raid their neighborhood.” Thurgood Marshall, then an NAACP attorney, was assigned to represent the detainees.

Arguing that the defendants could not get a fair trial in Colombia, Marshall got the proceedings moved to Lawrenceburg. But Lawrenceburg posed its own challenges. A professionally appointed sign planted prominently at the city limits warned, “Nigger, read and run. Don't let the sun go down on you here. If you can't read, run anyway.” Marshall and his legal team did not chance defying this warning. They stayed in Nashville and drove the two hundred miles back and forth every day.
6

By some accounts, Marshall escaped lynching only because the black community was already mobilized against mob violence. As the litigation proceeded, Marshall and his co-counsel Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver were headed back to Nashville when they were stopped by police who claimed to have a warrant to search for whiskey. They searched and found no whiskey. Two minutes down the road, they pulled the car over again. This time they accused Marshall of being drunk. Then they loaded him into the squad car and told Looby and Weaver to get along.

Fearing for Marshall's life, Looby and Weaver refused to abandon him. As a squad car screeched off, Looby and Weaver pursued it along windy back roads to no clear destination. The cruiser finally circled back to Columbia to the magistrate's office. They hauled Marshall inside to an old judge who came in close, sniffed, and declared, “This man isn't drunk, he hasn't even had a drink.” The story among black folk was that Thurgood Marshall had been targeted for murder, but “the lynchers failed to carry out their plan because they were cowardly men and they knew . . . the entire Columbia Negro community [was] mobilized.”
7

So what should we think about the violence at Minkslide? Wouldn't it have been better if nervous Negroes with guns had not shot policemen? Then again, the violence that sparked the mob, a bigot getting thrown through a window, did not involve guns. And what about the risk to Thurgood Marshall? Black folk claimed that the armed community was a brake on plans to lynch him.

Wondering how our world might be different without Thurgood Marshall's gigantic influence prompts broader questions that shadow analysis of any social movement. How much was the black freedom struggle driven by giants, the great men and women familiar to history? How much can we discern about the freedom movement and the black tradition of arms just by reference to the words and deeds of those famous folk? What do we lose by failing to credit the stories of the countless souls who have faded into obscurity?

Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD, is of this latter class. Howard evokes comparisons to Ossian Sweet. Both were physicians. Both played significant but underacknowledged roles in the freedom struggle. And both are exemplars of the black tradition of arms. Sweet had notoriety thrust upon him. But Howard made an affirmative, aggressive choice to become a race man. Sweet carried a duffle bag full of guns into his new home in Detroit. Howard built a small empire in the Mississippi Delta and accumulated an arsenal of firearms.

He was born Theodore Roosevelt Howard in March 1908 in Calloway County, Kentucky. His parents scratched out a living picking tobacco. Like many stalwarts of the modern civil-rights movement, Theodore grew up in a rural gun culture where firearms were as common as shovels. People who know that culture will attest that there were countless young boys who ventured out into the fields with guns on assignments like those that ten-year-old Ted got from his mother. On Sundays, she gave him twenty cents to buy four shotgun shells and told him to bring back two rabbits or squirrels for the pot. He wrote later how he was prohibited from wasting shots on quail because “there wasn't enough meat on 'em.” This prosaic slice of the black tradition of arms is recorded only incidentally, and some will be dissatisfied with the intermittent written record and the stories of people who were there for
the hog killing, chicken-hawk shooting, groundhog sniping, raccoon blasting, and midnight-bump investigation.
8

Howard's rise was unlikely, much of it owed to the beneficence of his white mentor, Dr. William Herbert Mason. Mason smoothed Howard's road to higher education and actually paid for much of it. When the young Theodore officially adopted the third name Mason and started signing his name T. R. M. Howard, folk whispered, “I told you so,” about the long rumors that Dr. Mason actually was Howard's father.