Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  In another Crisis editorial, following the 1919 Chicago race riot, Du Bois sharpened the point, pushing the boundaries of legitimate self-defense but still warning against violence as a political strategy.

  Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self-Defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns. But we must tread here with solemn caution. We must never let justifiable self-defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence.12

  Du Bois nurtured the Crisis from its inaugural issue into the conscience, ambition, and voice of black America. It circulated far beyond its subscription base, passed from hand to hand and left in barbershops, in beauty salons, and on church pews. The Crisis offered a deeply textured critique of Negro life, carrying news ignored by the white press. It was superior to most of the black dailies partly because it was a periodical, which allowed more time to perfect the product. But the bigger difference was Du Bois.

  The Crisis recorded the common news, culture, and hazards that fueled Du Bois’s stance on armed self-defense. There were many contributions by talented guests, but it is doubtful that anything appeared in the Crisis that Du Bois did not scrutinize. There were uplifting segments titled Industry, Education, and Social Progress. Other more somber sections like Crime, The Ghetto, and Lynching chronicled the indignities and threats that drove countless decisions by black folk to keep and carry firearms and the many episodes where Negroes fired guns in self-defense. Many of these probably were written by Du Bois, and a sampling of them helps us understand his stance on personal and political violence and the line between them.

  In 1911 at a hotel in Indian Springs, Georgia, a tussle between a white clerk and a black bellboy led to a shootout between blacks and whites where two white men were killed. Four black men were snatched up by a mob but retrieved by authorities and sent to the relative safety of Atlanta. Assaults in retribution continued throughout the countryside around Indian Springs.13

  In the summer of 1912, white neighbors attempted to block Negroes from moving into the Cook Avenue section of St. Louis. A house purchased by Negroes was pelted with stones and its windows were broken out. Police were called and managed only to arrest a Negro man, Robert Watson, who was patrolling the street in front of the house. He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon.14

  On June 18, 1912, in Mangham, Louisiana, George Clayton was lynched for the murder of his employer, Ben Brooks. Before dying, Clayton gamely fought off the mob with a hail of gunfire that wounded six men in the mob.15

  In Pineville, Louisiana, a private conflict boiled over into public violence after a Negro shot a white man in an argument. This sparked a wave of retribution along with warnings that blacks should leave Pineville. When blacks resisted, rioting ensued. Six blacks were shot. Two died.16

  In Durant and Caddo, Oklahoma, lynch talk was precipitated by the shooting of a white man by a black man. The shooting victim’s companions claimed that they were simply passing by a house in the Negro section and were randomly fired upon. The blacks claimed that the white men were trying to blow up their house and they fired in self-defense.

  In Rocky Comfort, Arkansas, a “plantation Negro” shot a white man in self-defense. Incensed by the Negro having sassed him, the white man was in chase, screaming threats to kill, when the Negro ran to the cabin of a friend, retrieved a gun, and shot his pursuer dead. He was almost immediately laid upon by a mob and lynched. The next night, the mob returned to lynch the owner of the cabin where the black killer had borrowed the gun.17

  The Crisis applauded Hugh M. Burkett, a successful real-estate broker credited with placing black families on some of the better streets in Baltimore. Burkett was celebrated for furnishing bail to a colored man who fired in self-defense against a mob and had been released with the aid of lawyers hired by the NAACP.18

  The praise for Hugh Burkett refers to the case of George Howe, “A colored resident of 95 Hartford Ave., Baltimore [who] in an attempt to protect his home, fired into the mob attacking the house and injured four men.” He was arrested as the mob threatened to lynch him. “When tried, he was given a sentence of two months each for the first three offenses, but through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People these decisions were appealed and he is now under $500 bail awaiting a jury trial for the fourth case. None of his white assailants in the mob were arrested.”19

  Mrs. Lily Hill of Washington County, Tennessee, was pardoned by the governor after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. “The pardon record says it appears from the statement of the Attorney General that this colored woman is a respectable and well behaved married woman and had been previously molested by the prosecuting witness in the case, and that she was assaulted . . . in a public street because she resented his attentions a second time and when she was pressed by him, drew a pistol from her handbag and shot him in the arm.”20

  In 1912 in Hamilton, Georgia, three men were lynched after being arrested on suspicion of murder. They were taken from the custody of the local sheriff, who was the uncle of the murder victim. The dead white man, a planter named Hadley, apparently expressed affection for a black woman named Bertha Hathaway. He was killed by gunshot inside Bertha’s home, allegedly by Henry Anderson, who counted Bertha as his future bride. Anderson and two Negroes accused of aiding him were lynched.21

  In Hickman, Kentucky, competition for work prompted two white laborers to assault a black man. He defended himself with a gun, killing both of them. In retaliation, a group of white men then shot two Negro boys. No arrests were made.22

  Ordinary negligence precipitated the lynching of a black farmer named Ralston in Wichita, Kansas, in 1913. Ralston fired his shotgun to scare away a group of white boys who were raiding his watermelon patch. His warning shot killed one of the boys, and a lynch mob soon formed. Ralston initially eluded the mob and turned himself in to authorities who “lost custody” of him to the mob and watched him die.23

  Three incidents from November 1917 show the daily risks of interracial encounters. Rueben Mason, a Negro truck driver in Atlanta, was shot and killed by J. B. McElroy because he was slow in moving his vehicle out of the way. In Moultrie, Georgia, Will McRae, a Negro farmhand, was shot and killed by a white overseer because of insolence. In England, Arkansas, that same week, Sam Cates was shot and killed by a group of white men for “annoying white girls.”24

  A colored woman in Augusta, Georgia, “shot and killed Earl Harmon, a white private, for robbery.”25

  These examples demonstrate the stream of incidents that Du Bois distilled for reporting to the national community. They put his thinking and writing about armed self-defense in context. And they demonstrate how odd it would have been if he had taken a more pacifist view.

  Du Bois was not alone. The Crisis included contributions from many other talented folk. Writing in 1921, Mordecia Johnson was unapologetic about black resistance against the backdrop of abandoned Reconstruction and the violent triumph of Confederate redemption. “The swift succession and frank brutality of all this was more than the Negro people could bear. Their simple faith and hope broke down. Multitudes took weapons in their hands and fought back violence with bloody resistance. If we must die, they said, it is well that we die fighting. And the American Negro world looking on their deed with no light of hope to see by, said it is self-defense; it is the law of nature, of man, of God, and it is well.” 26

  In 1918, Walter White, future executive secretary of the NAACP, reported on a series of lynchings in Georgia precipitated by the revenge shooting of a white planter, Hampton Smith. Smith was notorious for mistreating blacks, and most would not freely work for him. This sent him dredging the convict labor system for men who could not pay their fines, and thus could be “bought” for however long it took to work off the debt. Hampton Smith used t
his system to “buy” a Negro named Sydney Johnson. After Johnson had worked off his debt with some excess, he demanded payment for the additional time and then refused to work further. Smith responded by coming to Johnson’s home and beating him. As they parted, Johnson reportedly threatened Smith. Within a few days, Smith was dead, shot twice as he was sitting near the window in his parlor.

  The reflex was vicious. Over a period of seven days, white mobs lynched at least four men and one woman (the eight-months-pregnant wife of one of the initial victims who dared to complain about the injustice and whose killing was so gruesome that one cannot bear to repeat the details). Johnson was finally cornered in Valdosta, armed with a shotgun and a revolver. He wounded two of his pursuers before dying in a hail of rifle fire.27

  A 1921 editorial reporting on the NAACP’s twelfth annual conference exhibits familiar reverence for self-defense along with a caution against political violence: “Lynching and mob violence against Negroes still loom as our most indefensible national crime. Increasingly the Negro . . . has been forced to give his life in self-defense. No man can do less for his family and people and it is a cruel campaign of lying that represents this fight for life as organized aggression. Negroes are not fools. Eleven million poor laborers do not seek war on 100 million powerful neighbors. But they cannot and will not die without raising a hand when the nation lets its offscourings and bandits insult, harry, loot and kill them.”28 In the same volume, under his own byline, Du Bois asked facetiously, “Why is it that only Negroes must be meek and wait and wait! Why is it that only Negroes should not organize for self-defense against mobs?”29

  Reports and editorials from the Crisis show that armed self-defense, though no guarantee of success, was considered a vital resource for blacks. It was an important component of the broader program for Negro advancement that Du Bois expressed this way in 1921:

  The migration of Negroes from South to North continues and ought to continue. The North is no paradise. . . . But the South is at best a system of caste and insult and at worst a hell. With ghastly and persistent regularity, the lynching of Negroes in the South continues—every year, every month, every day; . . . the outbreaks occurring daily . . . reveal the . . . determination to keep Negroes as near slavery as possible. . . . Can we hesitate? COME North! . . . Troubles will ensue with white unions and householders, but remember that the chief source of these troubles is rooted in the South; 1 million Southerners live in the North. . . . This is a danger, but we have learned how to meet it by un-wavering self-defense and by the ballot.30

  Fig. 5.2. W. E. B. Du Bois at work, early in the 1900s. (Atlanta University, 1909.)

  The Crisis is only one source of the sentiment of the times. Some things surely escaped Du Bois’s attention but fueled the self-defense assessments of the people who witnessed them. These incidents elicited a range of reactions and critiques that expand our understanding of the black tradition of arms.

  One reaction to racist terrorism was to move away from areas of risk. In Kentucky, for example, documented movements show that lynch violence pushed many rural blacks toward the protection of burgeoning black communities in Louisville and Lexington. Capitalizing on this trend, some rural towns installed neatly painted signs warning, “Niggers don’t be here when the sun goes down.” A sign with that warning stood in Corbin, Kentucky, until the 1960s.31

  While flight was one reaction to the threat of violence and racism, another was to take up arms, pray for the best, and know that someday a fight might come. The precise calculations, the guns acquired, and the way they were kept or carried, cannot be fully retrieved. Still, there is abundant evidence of Negroes with guns fighting back against Judge Lynch and lesser threats.

  Some of this evidence raises worries about accuracy that afflicts oral histories. The account by former slave Richard Miller is one of these. But it is independently useful for what he presumes people would credit about the black culture of arms. Miller proudly recounted to an interviewer the heroics of George Bland, a former slave living in Danville, Kentucky. Some offense led to the lynching of Bland’s wife by Klansmen, who forced him to watch. Bland asked the terrorists if he could retrieve a blanket to wrap her body. Then, according to Miller, Bland walked into his cabin, “got his Winchester rifle, shot and killed 14 of the Kluxers.”32

  Researchers worry that the tale seems too fantastic to credit, especially the killing of fourteen Klansmen. This is a fair skepticism. On the other hand, the feat was certainly within the capabilities of available technology. Fourteen Klan casualties comports with the capacity of the Winchester Henry rifle, an early test of which records fifteen shots fired in roughly ten seconds.

  The era of lynching and nightriders is filled with gruesome tales of hapless victims, running, hiding, and cowering under waves of violence. But there are also plenty of verifiable episodes that track Richard Miller’s tale of George Bland. Sometimes, as in the case of George Dinning, these self-defense efforts were even deemed legitimate by the ruling bureaucracy. George Dinning was born a slave, was illiterate, and had at least twelve children. But he also was industrious and frugal. He worked and saved to buy a small farm, and by 1897 he had added more acreage and built up a heard of livestock.

  Some of his white neighbors were irritated by Dinning’s growing prosperity. In the winter of the new year, twenty-five of them marched to his homestead and demanded that Dinning leave the county within ten days. Their pretext was that Dinning was a thief of chickens and hogs. Dinning protested that he had sponsors, white men of status who would vouch for his honesty. This was taken as impudence that led to harsher words and then shots fired at a backpedaling Dinning. Bullets riddled his house. Dinning was hit twice.

  But Dinning was not helpless. He had guns and knew how to use them. Bleeding from his wounds, Dinning scrambled to his rifle and opened fire, hitting and killing one man. With one of their company wounded, the mob scattered off. Expecting them to regroup and return, Dinning fled his home and turned himself in to authorities at the county seat. Learning that Dinning was in custody, the mob went back to his farm, drove off his wife and children, ransacked his house, and then burned it to the ground.

  Dinning was tried for murder after two changes of venue and the deployment of state troopers to avert a rumored lynching. On the testimony of the mobbers, Dinning was found guilty of manslaughter by a white jury and sentenced to seven years of hard labor.

  It was some flicker of progress that Dinning’s story did not end here. Black support for Dinning was overwhelming. Black churches and political clubs bombarded the governor with letters urging him to pardon Dinning. Governor William Bradley, a rare surviving southern Republican, reviewed the trial transcript and published his findings: Twenty-five armed men had attacked George Dinning as he was working peacefully on his own property. They had fired first. Bradley concluded that Dinning, “in protecting himself . . . did no more than any other man would or should have done under the same circumstance and instead of being forced to wear convict’s garb he’s entitled not only to acquittal but to the admiration of every citizen who loves good government and desires the perpetration of free institutions.”

  Upon release, Dinning was under no illusion that the Republican governor reflected the sentiments of the broader community. His Kentucky homestead destroyed, Dinning moved his family west to Indiana. Once settled, he hired a lawyer to bring a civil suit in federal court against his attackers. He won a $50,000 verdict against six of them, including a lien on the estate of the mobber he killed.33

  George Dinning’s luck, perseverance, and the measure of justice he scratched from the legal system are remarkable. On the other hand, Dinning’s basic fighting instinct, his resolve to arm himself, and his willingness to use his gun in righteous self-defense are far from unique.

  Moving into the new century under the shadow of lynch law, Negroes were wary of the sounds and signs of mob violence. The signals were glaring in 1902, when a black man named Charles Gaskins sat in jail, awa
iting trial for the murder of a Flemingsburg, Kentucky, police officer. On a raw winter evening, roughly sixty white men rushed the jail and attempted to batter down the cell door with a sledgehammer.

  They were quickly distracted from their quarry by shotgun blasts from across the street. Local papers reported, “this had the effect of scattering the mob which left as quickly as it came.” The gunfire was rumored to have come from a clutch of black men who were loosely related to the prisoner. But no one was ever definitively named as the savior of Charles Gaskins. And the assumption that Gaskins would eventually be executed anyway turns out to be wrong. He is not in the generally reliable records of executed criminals.34

  While the armed defenders of Charles Gaskins remain unknown, the case of Jacob McDowell confirms the intuition that relatives of lynch targets would be among the first wave of resistance to mobbers. Jacob McDowell was a “hard-working colored man of mature years” who eked out a living within the boundaries of the opportunities allowed to blacks in western Kentucky in 1908.

  We know of him because of a conflict that started over a black girl. McDowell confronted Smith Childress, a deputy marshal, objecting to Childress’s relationship with the girl. It is unclear exactly what they said, but the tone was surely hostile. On one account, after McDowell had his say and started to walk away, Childress took a shot at him. McDowell fled into one of the stores on Main Street with Childress in pursuit. They scuffled, and McDowell ended up shooting Childress with his own gun. With Childress lying wounded, McDowell ran to the jailhouse to explain what happened. Familiar with the local history of mob violence, the police judge removed McDowell to the next county, where he could be better protected.

  Kentucky officials were not the only ones wary of the mob. McDowell’s son, Harve, had seen this scenario unfold before and was skeptical about how much risk jailers would take to protect his father. So he gathered eleven trusted men to help stand guard. They were on foot, traveling toward town, when angry men on horseback approached from behind. Accounts differ about what happened next. Whites said that Harve had hidden on the side of the road with a plan to ambush them. Harve McDowell and his cohorts said they moved off the road to hide so that the whites would pass without confrontation.35