Negroes and the Gun (49 page)

There is a similar report from the mother of a white summer volunteer who came south to see firsthand the risks her daughter was taking. She was initially worried by a letter that the host family's house was an “armory with rifles in every room.” But ultimately she was comforted by the widely armed black folk, writing, “Cars stopped here last night; prowlers had been seen. Luckily, no trouble has ensued, because at least one of the homes has four rifles ready, and its owner, a Negro farmer, was quite determined to use them in defense of his home.”
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White law student William Holdes expressed similar sentiments in a letter to concerned relatives back north. Holdes was among a group of summer volunteers staying with a black farmer who “hurries us into the house as soon as we get home . . . [and] has four pistols in the house and certainly has enough fight to use them on an intruder.”
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By the end of her eighty-six years, Winson Hudson would be feted for her civil-rights heroism. She could joke then about coming up rough and how as a young tomboy she could “ride a bucking horse, and . . . kill a hog or anything just like a man.” She was an exemplar of the black tradition of arms. And we can fairly wonder whether, absent the gun, she would have survived to enjoy the accolades.
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Like any cultural phenomenon, the black tradition of arms filtered through the diverse views and experiences of countless individuals. Many people no doubt eschewed firearms and some were quite literally committed to turning the other cheek regardless of the circumstances. Movement stalwart John Lewis is emblematic. His uncompromising pacifism was grounded in deep religious faith, innate sensitivity, and early trauma.

Lewis was certainly familiar with black gun culture, writing, “My brothers all grew up hunting, just like my father. They still love to hunt, every one of them.”
Lewis was the exception within the family, admitting, “I've never been hunting in my life, never fired a gun, never even held one in my hands. . . . I'd always had a visceral aversion to violence of any sort.” Lewis speculates that his ardent pacifism may have been rooted in an episode that he describes this way:

One of my earliest memories—I couldn't have been older than four—was of my mother pleading with my father one afternoon not to leave the house. He had a shotgun in his hand, his face was full of anger, and he was trying to push past my mother toward the door. I don't know to this day what it was about, what had happened out there, beyond that door. But I knew what I saw in my mother's face. It had anguish and terror written all over it. “Don't do it!” I remember watching her plead with my father as she pushed her body full-up against his. “Buddy,
please
don't do it!” . . . I've never heard my mother beg for anything from anyone my entire life, but she was begging my father that day.
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Although he disdained the gun, Lewis exhibited a special kind of courage, even as a very young man. This was evident in his resolve to reject armed guards for the SNCC Freedom House in Greenwood, Mississippi, after a series of terrorist attacks. Lewis seems exceptional here, in that his position about protecting the house ultimately was overruled.
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The public shift within SNCC toward greater tolerance of violence was evident as early as June 1964, when an activist who had been chased by three carloads of men with bad intentions explained in a
Jet
magazine interview, “I had a shotgun and I'll tell you if they had come in to get me, I would've used it.” The young man emphasized that he was still committed to nonviolence during group demonstrations. But even on this point, views were changing.
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Informants paid to spy on SNCC reported an increasing tolerance for armed self-defense. Soon journalists were reporting that some SNCC and CORE members had retreated from nonviolence and actually were “urging the contrary.” Although many argued that fighting back would only escalate the dangers, some claimed that the capacity for armed self-defense actually reduced the nature and extent of the violence they faced.
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Through all of this, John Lewis remained a fierce advocate of unalloyed nonviolence.
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But it seems he was part of a dwindling minority. One movement historian argues that by the end of the summer of 1964, almost every SNCC worker in the field was armed.
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Based on his own observations, famous pacifist Bayard Rustin wrote about the period that “young people who formerly were preaching nonviolence in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, are now advocating quite openly limited forms of violence.” Julian Bond disputed Rustin's report, insisting that SNCC did not advocate violence on any scale.
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In April 1965, a SNCC worker was arrested in Georgia for carrying three
pistols in his car. The discussion of how to respond prompted talk within the group about the philosophy of nonviolence. Some considered any violence counterproductive. Others argued that SNCC faced different and more direct challenges than Martin King and the SCLC,
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arguing, “They don't do the kind of work we do nor do they live in the areas we live in. They don't ride the highways at night.”

Ultimately, the group resolved to hire a lawyer to aid their jailed colleague in Georgia. The broader policy remained officially unchanged, although some accounts say this was just a capitulation to the fact that their nonviolent image was essential to fundraising. Perhaps the true sentiment of the group is measured by a report that most of the members at the meeting were already carrying guns and by the fact that in May 1966, pacifist John Lewis was replaced as SNCC chairman by the more militant Stokely Carmichael.
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In Neshoba County, Mississippi, SNCC search teams accompanied by local black men carrying rifles and shotguns searched the woods for evidence of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. At night, the students stayed with local farmers who, with a keen appreciation of the risk that came with sheltering the northern activists, guarded their homes with guns. The coming militancy of SNCC is indicated by the decision of Cleveland Sellers and Stokely Carmichael to take their turns on armed watch.

In an account published in 1973, Sellers was still reluctant to identify the farmer who had sheltered them. He described their “hideout” as a remote country place owned by “an old farmer whom I'll call Jones [since] his life would be in danger if I revealed his name.” Jones told Carmichael and Sellers, “I believe that the peckerwoods burned the church and then killed them boys because us church folks was working with the COFO voter registration people. . . . Y'all welcome to stay here and search as long as you want though.” Then, with somber practicality, he told them, “I'll be sitting on the front porch with my shotgun every night and there'll be a man in the barn behind the house with a rifle.” As the conflict swirled in Neshoba County, bands of angry white men drove through the black section, shooting randomly. In at least two recorded instances, blacks returned fire and wounded one man.
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One Mississippi activist whose parents also hosted SNCC workers argued that being protected by Negroes with guns transformed Stokely Carmichael's views on nonviolence. John Jackson was just a young man when Carmichael stayed in Lowndes County with his family. According to Jackson, Carmichael was struck by the idea that “my father had guns and that's why white people didn't mess with [Carmichael] when he was here.”
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Just like John Lewis, SNCC field secretary Bob Moses was a committed pacifist, his views informed partly by his graduate degree in philosophy from Harvard. Setting policy
for student volunteers, Moses adamantly opposed anyone carrying weapons. But Moses was pragmatic about the prospects of drawing grassroots folk to his rigorous pacifism.
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In a strategy session discussing how to react to self-defense preparations of local folk, Moses advised that they simply had to accept the fact that “self-defense is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can't affect it. It's not contradictory for a farmer to say he's nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder's head off.”
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This was essentially Hartman Turnbow's philosophy wrapped in better grammar.

Later, Moses acknowledged, “I don't know if anyone in Mississippi preached to local Negroes that they shouldn't defend themselves. Probably the closest is when I asked Mr. E. W. Steptoe not to carry guns when we go out together at night. So instead he just hides his gun and then I find out later.”
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E. W. Steptoe was from an earlier generation than the young activists. He might have privately scoffed at their naïveté but was too kind to openly deride their pacifist idealism. He simply ignored it.

One student reported that Steptoe “never went out of the door unarmed,” carrying a variety of concealed weapons and at a minimum a derringer in his boot. Inside the house, the abundance of guns evoked a kind of wonder on the part of one activist who recounted, “It was just marvelous. . . . Steptoe was always so wonderfully well-armed. . . . You'd go to Steptoe's and as you went to bed he would open up the night table and there would be a large .45 automatic sitting next to you. Just guns all over the house, under pillows, under chairs.”

Fig. 7.6. Amite County NAACP President E. W. Steptoe, 1963. (Used with permission from the Harvey Richards Media Archive.)

This was an extension of the family practice where Steptoe's brothers, five sons, and men of the extended family stood armed watch around the farm during tense periods.
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And as the details accumulate, it is easier to sympathize with Steptoe's practice of arms.
New York Times
reporter Claude Sitton noted that Steptoe, like many folk, lived out on a rural road where neighbors were farther away than hollering distance. And sometimes neighbors themselves were a worry.

Steptoe's closest neighbor was a white man named E. H. Hurst. He and Steptoe had been childhood friends. But when Steptoe became president of the Amite County NAACP, Hurst, now a state legislator, turned on a dime. At one point, he threatened Steptoe's life. Then in the fall of 1961, Hurst shot and killed NAACP voter-registration activist Herbert Lee. Lee was unarmed, but the sheriff pressured black witnesses to say the shooting was self-defense. Hurst was exonerated without spending a day in jail.
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Although he never articulated any grand statements about state failure or malevolent bureaucracies, E. W. Steptoe's actions spoke his assessment of the situation. While there were surely people of goodwill out there, they were irrelevant to his immediate safety. For that, he was on his own. His personal arsenal and practice of arms reflected that simple truth.

In Forrest County, Mississippi, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer adhered to the E. W. Steptoe school of armed preparedness. Dahmer had pushed the NAACP agenda since the early 1950s when he sued the county sheriff for interfering with black voting efforts. Just like Steptoe, Dahmer was relatively safe against economic reprisals. He owned 200 acres free and clear and drew income from cattle, a sawmill, and a little grocery store.

When northern students came to help with voter registration, some of them stayed with Dahmer and reported back about the “guns, pistols and rifles . . . placed throughout his house.” As a demonstration of his preparedness and as a hopeful deterrent against night riders, Dahmer would periodically “just take one of his guns and shoot in the air, just to let folks know he was alive, well and intended to protect his property.” When tensions escalated through the early 1960s, Dahmer and his bride, Ellie, sometimes supplemented by local NAACP members, would switch off during the night, between sleeping and sitting up with guns. They continued this practice for several years, up through 1965.
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The scene repeats in Leflore County, Mississippi, with NAACP president Dewey Green. After terrorists shot into his home in March 1963, he went to the sheriff and explained that he had made preparations to shoot back next time and that any further attacks would mean a gunfight.
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Dewey Green was clearly not alone in his philosophy or his preparations.

Within the Leflore branch membership, Mrs. Laura McGhee was also the target of threats after allowing activists to use her farm as a meeting site. Aided by her three sons, Laura McGhee sat watch from the front porch of her rural farmstead, cradling a Winchester repeating rifle of the same style that Ida Wells had recommended to black folk generations earlier. When midnight terrorists stuck an explosive in her mailbox, her boys opened fire on the car. The FBI and local police came out the next day and gave the boys a warning. Laura McGhee answered “fine,” that next time
she
would do the shooting.
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