Negroes and the Gun (48 page)

By the time of the next attack, Turnbow had augmented his arsenal. He described it this way: “The next year when they shot over here, I got a automatic shotgun,
Remington, 12 gauge, and them high-velocity buckshot. So I jumped up and run out and turn it loose a time or two. . . . I reported to the FBI in Jackson. . . . First words they said to me was, ‘Don't kill nobody. Don't kill nobody.' . . . I said now here y'all two Mississippi FBI's, talkin bout don't kill nobody. How to you think I feel and they just shootin' all through my house and I got a wife and a 14-year-old daughter?”
105

Fig. 7.4. Hartman Turnbow speaking at a Holmes County Mississippi church meeting. (The image of Hartman Turnbow, photographed by Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner, was previously published in
Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi
by Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner with Cheryl Reitan [2013, University Press of Kentucky].)

Hartman Turnbow was not unique in either word or deed. When armed Klansmen attacked the all-black community of Milestone, Mississippi, in 1965, World War II veteran Robert Cooper and other movement activists responded with gunfire of their own. Cooper explained slightly less poetically than Hartman Turnbow, “I don't figure that I was violent. All I was doin' was protectin' myself.”

After a cross burning in front of his house, Cooper told the sheriff, “The very next one come up and do something in front of my house, I will be calling the undertaker.” The next episode was not a cross burning but a firebomb and then gunshots. When the bomb was tossed, Cooper reports, “I just happened to be out there, and I fired right back on 'em. That's the way I caught 'em 'cause I got the word they was coming by that night to get me. . . . I had my automatic shotgun settin' right at the front door, and I fired up through that oak tree there to let 'em know I was at home.”

The terrorists were not easily dissuaded. “Bout an hour after that,” Cooper recalled, “I had gone out, got myself stationary. . . . They fired into the house. Then they came right on by me, and just as they got to me, I started firin' on them. Some of them shots hit 'em. One boy, I know, got a load.”

Cooper recounts a conversation the next day when the sheriff showed up to arrest him, charging, “‘You done shot them fellows, and we gonna put you in jail.' I say, ‘Yeah, but I was at home tended to my business when they come shootin into my house. I wasn't out there meddlin; they come there meddlin me. I think I had a right to shoot back at them done shot into my house.' So finally they up and let me out.”

Later Cooper explained his decision this way. “I felt that you're in your house, ain't botherin nobody, the only thang you hunting is equal justice. An they gonna sneak by night, burn your house, or shoot in there. And you gonna sit there and take all of it? You got to be a very li'l man with no guts at all.”
106

One wonders from these sorts of accounts whether and how often Hartman Turnbow, Robert Cooper, and folk of similar dispositions carried guns in public. Did they take them to town, to the fields, to church? Certainly the dangers they armed against did not disappear when they ventured from home out into the world.

Although we can never know exactly how widespread it was, there are hints within the culture that creative concealed carry was a minor art form. Recall T. R. M. Howard's rumored secret compartment in his Cadillac. Fannie Lou Hamer's mother, Lou Ella Townsend, carried a gun concealed in a bucket. Medgar Evers hid his pistol in a driver's seat pillow. Fred Kirkpatrick in Louisiana and Ruth Bolden in Alabama capitalized on the practice of church folk to carry around their bibles in big leather covers with room for extras that would fill a decent purse. In with that jumble, Kirkpatrick and Bolden both kept pistols.
107

But the prize for minimalist creativity goes to the lyrically named Sweets
Turnbow, Hartman Turnbow's life mate. In 1964, Hartman and Sweets traveled to Atlantic City, where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would challenge the whites-only State Democratic Party for representation at the national convention. Fannie Lou Hamer stole the show with wrenching stories of suffering and the uplift of song. But in the wings, Sweets Turnbow schmoozed and cajoled national Democrats to confront the fact that their Mississippi brethren were running a party that would have been a comfortable home to a nineteenth-century Confederate veteran.
108

People must have thought the rube from Mississippi had brought her lunch or was stuffing buffet leftovers into the brown paper bag she carried up and down the boardwalk. Years later, those who knew the truth would tell that inside the bag was a loaded pistol and how “Sweets never went anyplace without her brown paper bag and gun.”
109

Sweets and Hartman Turnbow no doubt consulted on strategies for concealing and carrying firearms. Although it is unclear whether Hartman was carrying a gun at the Atlantic City convention, Julian Bond records that in Mississippi, Turnbow “used to carry an army automatic in a briefcase, and it's funny to see a man who looks like a farmer and is dressed like a farmer in coveralls and boots and let's say an old hat, with a briefcase. And he opens the briefcase and nothing's in it but an automatic.”
110

SNCC activist James Forman confirmed that keeping and carrying guns was consistent with community norms. Commenting on Hartman Turnbow, Forman observed that “self-defense—at least of one's home—was not a concept new to Southern blacks in 1963 and there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.”
111
Julian Bond echoed the observation: “Almost everybody with whom we stayed in Mississippi had guns, as a matter of course, hunting guns. But you know, they were there for other purposes too.”
112

Margaret Rose was a northern SNCC activist whose particular experience confirms Julian Bond's generalization. After a series of midnight attacks in neighboring counties, Holmes County, Mississippi, Negroes set up armed nightly patrols. Rose reports that the family she stayed with “were up all night. . . . Mr. on the road patrolling with his new rifle and Mrs. walking from room to room in the house with a shotgun.” In the room where one of the children was sleeping, Rose recalled, “was a large shotgun, waiting.” Rose was a pacifist, but under the circumstances she acknowledged, “I cannot help feeling more secure knowing that they are armed.” In her first letter home, another young CORE volunteer reported, “the first thing that her host family taught her was how to shoot the shotgun which the family kept for protection.”
113

Holmes County grassroots activists Vanderbilt Roby and Bee Jenkins report firsthand their preparations in anticipation of night riders. “I was layin' for 'em,” said Roby, “layin' in the bushes for 'em many a night. If they made a shot, I was intending
to let 'em have it.”
114
Bee Jenkins recalled first the preparation, and then the follow-through: “Oh yeah, they had fire. Ready to shoot lead! They . . . started to burning crosses out there and shooting while we would be on the inside meetin'. . . . So the black men would go and buy them some high-powered rifles and started shooting at those cars. They took off and didn't come back out there.”
115

In Leake County, Mississippi, just over the line from the turmoil in Neshoba, the tradition of arms thrived in the all-black town of Harmony. One of the best firsthand accounts comes from a sturdy, copper-colored woman with the incomparable name of Anger Winson Gates Hudson, to her friends, simply Winson.
116
People who knew the story called her one of the most extraordinary of the many underacknowledged fighters in the civil-rights movement. She played a crucial role in voter registration and served as president of the Leake County NAACP from 1962 through 2001.
117

As the predictable backlash began, Harmony closed ranks and turned decades of government neglect into a tactical advantage. The roads into Harmony were limited and in abysmal condition. Comparing the Harmony experience to other places plagued by terrorist drive-bys, Winson Hudson described Harmony's ironic advantage. “We had such bad roads so they couldn't just fly in and out like it was a highway.”

Harmony was a community of poor folk. With everyone living close to the edge, people were more willing to help their neighbors because they might need it next time. Most folk did not have telephones. But the alternative was in some ways better. “We didn't have no phone,” Hudson explained, “but my husband had an old pickup truck, and others did, and plenty of shotguns. When whites came through here, from Frog Bottom, where we lived, to any border, the Harmony men gave a sign. They'd blow that whistle twice, riding through the community, or else they'd shoot in the air and let 'em know to get on board someone was coming in. The Klan never did come in here or get out without being marked or being known.”

When Winson Hudson and fifty stout neighbors huddled with Medgar Evers in 1961 to establish the Leake County NAACP, Medgar warned them of the risks and that the government would be no help. When someone asked, “Well, who can we look to for help?” Medgar advised what had long been true, “Nobody—you all will have to stick together.”
118

This advice proved prescient as local terrorists sparked to the arrival of NAACP lawyers Derek Bell and Constance Baker Motley, who came to help on school desegregation. After a newspaper article publicizing the Negroes' grand educational ambitions, a motorcade of angry white men sped through Harmony, firing shots at houses along the road. They made one pass unscathed, Hudson recalled. But “they came through again and that time, some of Dovie's boys—and some more here—were ready for 'em. . . . They ran the whites out of here. They followed 'em back to
their homes and shot into them. This stirred things up so bad that even Governor Ross Barnett came out to Harmony and offered to build a junior college up here.”
119

As branch leader, Hudson was specifically targeted for a firebomb, but her diligent preparations thwarted the attack. “I was night watching until 12:00 that night, and the Klan was backing into our driveway. My daughter was living with us while her husband was in Vietnam. . . . I told her to get up and rush into the back room. My husband Cleo and I got ready to start shooting, but by this time, the German Shepherd dog had forced the Klan to move on.”

Stymied at Winson's, the bomb throwers drove down the street and launched a flaming missile at her sister Dovie's house. Winson's husband, Cleo, heard the blast and ran up the street to the fight. Winson recalled, “Cleo was shooting, emptying every gun.” Dovie survived the attack, which confirmed for the citizens of Harmony the importance of arming and fighting back. It would pay off again when the men of Harmony responded to an attack on the Harmony community center and “shot the Klan truck all up.”
120

Another terrorist tactic was to place bombs in rural mailboxes. If a house was far enough from the road, this could be done without alerting the residents, at least until they opened the box the next morning. When a group of bombers was detected, the word spread quickly and Dovie Hudson put her sons on the lookout.

Fig. 7.5. Winson and Cleo Hudson, 1946, around their tenth wedding anniversary. (From the personal collection of Ms. Hudson.)

“One got one gun and one got the other. And just as they drove up and put the bomb in the mailbox, my boys started shooting. They just lined that car with bullets up and down.”
121
Although bravado is generally the province of men, Winson Hudson staked her share in an assessment of the community reaction to continued terrorist attacks. “The more they did to us, the meaner we got.”

We have to be cautious about inferring too much from the recorded evidence about the full practice and sentiments of the community. But reports and correspondence of outsiders confirms that the armed stance of Winson Hudson was far from unique. Jane Addams, a white student volunteer from Illinois, lived and worked in Harmony during the summer of 1964. She recorded this in her journal, “Went to Winson and Cleo Hudson's house, helped (sort of) milk the cows, rode the horse. . . . The whole community was tense the weekend of July 4. Everyone here is armed, but it is a tension of caution, not of fear. . . . Navy teams are scouring the area [for the missing Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner].”
122