Negroes and the Gun (52 page)

In some sense, Meredith's rant conveyed a simple intent to defend himself. But in context, the danger that it would incite political violence is plain. Out of the hospital, Meredith maintained his militant stance, confirming that he intended to return to the March against Fear, but this time carrying a gun. Martin Luther King considered Meredith's statement a dangerous flirt with political violence and urged Meredith publicly not to come back armed to the march. This worry about political violence would take center stage in the debate and decisions to come.
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Fig. 7.7. James Meredith wounded by a shotgun blast at the beginning of his 1966 March against Fear. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell.)

Meredith's “march” had started as essentially a solo affair to urge black voter registration. By 1966, the protest march was a well-worn tool. Some saw Meredith's march as an empty gesture, and his allies from the days of integrating Ole Miss basically ignored it. There were only four people with him when they crossed into Mississippi and Abrery James Norvell stepped from the brush and laid Meredith flat with a shotgun blast.

Movement leaders raced to the scene and vowed to continue the protest. There was obvious concern about safety. And there was a corresponding worry that security measures would be considered provocative. It was a pointed example of the long-standing worry that security precautions could be construed as battle preparations and self-defense might spill over uncontrollably into political violence.

Those involved were acutely aware that they were walking a tightrope. And the debate about security eventually fractured the coalition that had rallied in support of Meredith. All of the familiar organizations were there: Floyd McKissick, CORE's new director; Martin Luther King, for SCLC; Stokely Carmichael of SNCC; Roy Wilkins for the NAACP; and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.

A primary bone of contention was whether the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black self-defense organization that had established chapters throughout the South, would be used to protect the marchers. The Deacons, as we will see, were aggressive advocates of armed self-defense and had deployed firearms effectively against terrorists.

The alignment here of King, McKissick, and Carmichael against Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young in the security strategy for the march offers a snapshot of King's thinking about the issues that frame the black tradition of arms. Although there are different accounts of the episode, King, it seems, was the decisive vote in favor of including the Deacons. But the decision was contentious.
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As people were arriving for a strategy session at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a van full of Deacons pulled up and unloaded, some of them carrying ammunition bandoliers and semiautomatic .30-06 caliber M-1 Garand rifles—the World War II infantry rifle that George Patton called the greatest battle implement ever devised. The leader of the group, Earnest Thomas, was on relatively cordial terms with King, who referred to Thomas as “Deac.” Hosea Williams, one of King's aides, objected immediately to the Deacons, scolding Thomas, “Well I'm going to tell you right now, there ain't going to be no Deacons on the March.” Thomas countered that the national organizations risked losing the allegiance of grassroots folk “because you getting people hurt, and you get back on them god-damn planes and you fly off and forget about them.”
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Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young agreed with Hosea Williams. The NAACP had long supported compelling cases of private self-defense. But using the Deacons as security for the march posed real risks of political violence. And that was something that cautious leaders like Wilkins and Young had always worked hard to avoid.

While everyone argued, King sat on the bed, eating his dinner and listening. Finally he interjected with a question to Thomas, “Deac, you mean you're going to march?” It was a judicious move. Thomas responded, “I don't have no intention of marching one block in Mississippi. But we're going to be up and down the highways and byways. If somebody gets shot again, they're going to have somebody to give account to for that.”

King's handling of the matter shows a deft political touch. With one question he fashioned a subtle compromise. The March against Fear would remain officially nonviolent. There would be no photographs of Deacons marching with guns. The theme of nonviolence would be projected across the airwaves. But in the background, Negroes with guns would be ready.

King was walking a fine line. It was too close to the edge for Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, who stormed out of the meeting and withdrew from the march. Two decades later, Andrew Young characterized King's approach this way:

SCLC was aggressively nonviolent. But Martin made distinctions between defensive violence and retaliatory violence. He was far more understanding of defensive violence. Martin's attitude was you can never fault a man for protecting his home and his wife. He saw the Deacons as defending their homes and their wives and children. Martin said he would never himself resort to violence even in self-defense, but he would not demand that of others. That was a religious commitment into which one had to grow.
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There was a powerful element of pragmatism in King's approach. This was evident in the days before the meeting when King stayed at Charles Evers's Queens Road home in Jackson. The place was brimming with pistols and rifles. Evers reports that King never “preached down” to him about the guns and teasingly complimented him, “Charles, I'm nonviolent, but I never feel safer anywhere, with anybody, than in your home.”
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When the march recommenced, armed Deacons were in the wings. At night, they guarded the campsites. In the mornings while the marchers were assembling, the Deacons were in the vanguard, checking along the road and in adjacent woodlots for threats and questioning whites who lingered too long at the edges of the route. Deacon Charles Sims recalls, “I was carrin' two snub-nosed .38s and two boxes of shells and had three men ridin' down the highway with semiautomatic carbines with 30 rounds apiece.”
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But the Deacons were not invisible. And some of the reporting of their participation confirmed the worries of Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. For the marchers on the ground, though, the Deacons were a comfort. Cleveland Sellers recorded that the marchers dismissed the media criticism of the Deacons and made their own
practical assessment. “Everyone realized that without them, our lives would have been much less secure.” His view was not unanimous.

Fig. 7.8. Deacon Earnest Thomas with a two-way radio, on guard at a church meeting in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1965. (© Ed Hollander.)

Among the whites in the march was a minister from Woodbridge, New Jersey. He recoiled at the sight of a big pistol laying on Earnest Thomas's car seat. The New Jersey vicar was “astounded” and advised the misguided black folk that “the movement is no place for guns.”
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Earnest Thomas responded by explaining the basics of the black tradition of arms. No one could demand that blacks surrender their basic right of self-defense. In the same breath, Thomas assured the cleric and skittish journalists that the marchers in the movement were in fact, and would remain,
nonviolent. Thomas was a simple man, not an intellectual. But he forcefully articulated for the divinity PhD and the glib journalists the distinction between self-defense and political violence that black folk from the leadership class to the grassroots had been pressing for generations.
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Still, the Deacons presented a mixed bag for Martin Luther King. In tense moments he might have appreciated the defensive force they brought to a dangerous scene. But the Deacons also operated much closer to the boundary of political violence than King, and that was a pulsing danger. Even rhetorically they played a more dangerous game. Witness Earnest Thomas's speech at a rally in Yazoo City following the March against Fear: “We plan to practice nonviolence,” said Thomas. So far so good.

Then Thomas pushed hard on the contradiction that many others had soft-pedaled. “But we do not intend for any redneck to abuse any black people anymore. . . . If they do, there'll be a blood red Mississippi.” People would do their own calculations, but a “blood red Mississippi” conjures images of more than isolated acts of private self-defense.
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As things escalated, following a blistering speech by Stokely Carmichael that thrust the phrase “black power” into the national lexicon, King warned against use of the “unfortunate” term. He declared wearily, “I'm sick and tired of violence,” and pleaded with SNCC and CORE to abandon the black power slogan and to send the Deacons home.
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CORE chairman James Farmer had his own difficulties incorporating and explaining the work of the Deacons who were openly protecting CORE workers in the South. His efforts ranged well beyond the ideology of the predominantly white pacifists who founded CORE in 1942. Offering his own version of the boundary central to the black tradition of arms, Farmer distinguished between armed self-defense “outside” the movement and CORE's nonviolent demonstrations. “
You must understand
,” said Farmer, “
when a man's home is attacked that's not the movement, that's his home
.”
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Pressed on the point that CORE demonstrations involving the Deacons happened in the streets, not in homes, Farmer was unprepared to explain that the boundary against political violence was not a bright line but grey zone sliding toward mounting risks. He deflected the question bluntly, stubbornly repeating that armed self-defense and political violence were fundamentally different.
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He would eventually retreat to a sharper rendition of the political-violence boundary, arguing in the
Amsterdam News
, “If violence is on the horizon, I would certainly prefer to see it channeled into a defensive discipline than the random homicide and suicide of rioting.”
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Much like King, Farmer wrestled with the self-defense impulse at a deadly
practical level. For Farmer the challenge came in the summer of 1963 in Plaquemine, Louisiana. He was there to support local activists who were fighting against segregated public facilities. When the third of a series of protest marches spun into chaos and then a threat to lynch Farmer, armed black men snatched him from the tumult, guarded him from mobbers, and smuggled him out of town in the back of a hearse.
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James Farmer's experience is one confirmation that even before its radical turn, CORE operated against the backstop of local folk with guns. And legendary among that group was Canton, Mississippi's C. O. Chinn, who was sometimes affectionately and sometimes guardedly called, “Bad-ass C. O. Chinn.”

Chinn was personally committed to providing security for CORE workers who came to press the movement in Canton. He carried a revolver openly, and, when folk gathered for strategy sessions and rallies, Chinn sat outside the venues in his truck with a gun, scanning the terrain.
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When Canton police stalked an organizing meeting and menaced one of the female activists, C. O. Chinn's wife walked out to the squad car and scolded them, “You cops don't have anything better to do than sit in front of this office all the time? If you don't, I wish you would find something. I get tired of looking at you.” People who witnessed it and knew the culture explained how remarkable this was. The cops “looked at Mrs. Chinn and didn't say a word. Had any other Negro woman in Canton said that, they would've beaten her down to the ground. But they knew she was C. O. Chinn's wife, and no one, black or white, insulted C. O. Chinn's people and got away with it.”
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