According to McDowell, the shooting started as his group was climbing over a fence into the cover of an adjoining field. One of the black men got snagged on the fence and his gun went off, shooting McDowell in the leg. This revealed their position and drew fire from the whites. McDowell and some of his men fired back. Others ran away.
When the smoke cleared, one white man was dead and another one seriously wounded. Both of these men, it turns out, were simply traveling through the area and had come along for the adventure of seeing a lynching. The aftermath was familiar. For the next two days, a mob roamed the countryside, threatening and interrogating Negroes until they learned the identities of the men who had gathered to protect Jacob McDowell.
Meanwhile, Jacob McDowell was returned back to the venue of his original confrontation with Smith Childress. It was a curious decision, because the danger that caused authorities to move him the first place seemed clearer than ever. This was confirmed when a group of masked gunmen entered the jail, dragged Jacob McDowell to the outskirts of town, and riddled his body with gunfire. In a subsequent assessment of the McDowell lynching, a pamphleteer claimed that Smith Childress, the deputy marshal who fired the first shot in the saga, actually led the lynch mob. The suspicion was that Childress feared that a trial of Jacob McDowell would publicize his tryst with a black girl.36
The McDowell case confirms that state agents were sometimes complicit in mob violence. But as we saw in the case of George Dinning, state agents were not always villains. This was decidedly the case in Stanford, Kentucky, where a white jailer acted boldly against type.
The conflict started when an argument between two black boys and three white farmers left a white man down from gunfire, and the two young Negroes behind bars. Word of the shooting, the arrest, and the impending mob traveled quickly. Within hours, armed Negroes from Macksville, a neighboring all-black settlement, arrived in Stanford to guard the jail. They planned for gunplay in dim light by wearing white ribbons on their left sleeves to avoid casualties from friendly fire.
Unlike Charles Gaskins’s unknown defenders who fired from the shadows, the Macksville men stayed boldly in the open, building a bonfire in the street behind the courthouse and shooting out at bumps in the night. The effect of this show of force on the white jailer was remarkable. He took uniquely aggressive action, placing his son in the cell with the black prisoners and handing guns to all three of them. This was enough to dissuade the mob.
It is unclear whether Negroes who ran to defend their neighbors in this fashion were calculating the odds of success in any serious way. The Macksville defenders could not have known that a show of force would diffuse the mob without a fight. Neither could the defenders of Dollar Bill Smith, in Wiggins, Mississippi, have predicted trading five hundred shots with a looming mob. Smith was a known “bad nigger,” at least according to the mobbers. So they were inflamed by the idea that local Negroes would stand up to save him from the noose. With blacks massed in the Negro section, the mob rolled in to teach them a lesson. The Negroes gave as good as they got. There were multiple casualties on both sides, but evidently no one died.37
Of course, there is plenty of evidence from the early twentieth century that armed self-defense could end badly for Negroes. Witness the episode in Sunflower County, Mississippi, home to infamous segregationist Senator James O. Eastland. The senator’s uncle James owned a 2,300-acre plantation near Doddsville. In the winter of 1904, he rode to the cabin of one of his sharecroppers, Luther Holbert. He aimed to mediate a conflict between Holbert and one of Eastland’s favored workers. The trouble stemmed from a love triangle involving Holbert’s woman. Eastland was armed with a revolver. Holbert had a gun in his cabin.
We don’t know the words they exchanged, but it is clear that Holbert shot James Eastland, who died on the cabin floor, with two shots fired from his revolver. A posse combed the countryside for Holbert, and in the process killed two Negroes who ran at the sight of furious, armed men on horseback. Holbert was tracked down and lynched, along with his woman, who fled with him.38
The progression of gunplay surrounding Charles Gaskins, Jacob McDowell, Dollar Bill Smith, and Luther Holbert leaves us wondering what sorts of calculations people who witnessed these events made about the risks of owning, carrying, or using guns. Did news of the bloodless Negro triumph in defense of Charles Gaskins embolden Negroes and prompt folk to acquire guns? What about the lynching of Luther Holbert? Did it convince Negroes that armed self-defense was just folly? Or did that also counsel keeping and carrying firearms?
Answers are suggested in the tilt of local lore surrounding the 1901 “Balltown Riot” in Washington Parish, Louisiana. The violence sparked on rumors that blacks were stockpiling weapons in preparation for an attack on local whites. Whether this was a real fear or just an excuse is unknown. But we know for sure that a white mob surrounded and then shot into a black church whose members were at the root of the rumors. The Negroes were prepared for conflict. They returned fire, killing three white attackers. Fifteen blacks died.
The Balltown Riot is ostensibly a story of black defeat, perhaps confirming for modern skeptics the folly of armed self-defense. But the fifteen-to-three body count is the “white” record of the violence. Among the local black folk, the accounting was different. Years later, those who lived through it said that the body count was closer to even, but that white officials had doctored the story. As the details grew into legend, witnesses recounted that three white casualties was a vast undercount. One man, recalled proudly how “old man Creole [himself] killed about six.”39
This sort of account demonstrates a kind of tribal pride that appears frequently in stories of armed self-defense against terrorists. As we will see in the next chapter, America’s preeminent black historian, John Hope Franklin, offers a similar critique of the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These kinds of assessments suggest the cast of the black tradition of arms. Armed self-defense was often embraced as a matter practical philosophy, undiminished by utilitarian balancing.
There were many incidents where black defenders, armed with the guns of poor folk, were outclassed by better technology. Economics was one driver of these results. But we already saw under the Black Codes, and will see again in the Jim Crow era, how gun laws administered by an overtly hostile state also impaired Negro self-defense. A lynch episode from 1916 demonstrates a small scale, ad hoc version of this.
The first lesson is in the lynching itself. The location was Paducah, Kentucky, where, in 1892, armed Negroes fought off a lynch mob and earned the praise of Ida B. Wells. Perhaps it was memory or legend of that fight that moved Luther Durrett to a desperate act in aid of his cousin Brack Henley.40
Henley was arrested on the charge of assaulting a white farm girl. A mob stormed the jail and dragged him to the victim’s house, where she nodded that yes, he was the one. As they were about to yank Henley up by the neck, Luther Durrett stormed from the brush, waving a pistol and threatening to fire into the crowd. He was vastly outnumbered, quickly overpowered, and strung up on a limb next to his cousin.
The lynchings of Henley and Durrett left blacks seething and fueled white rumors that they were planning a retaliatory attack. Those rumors seemed confirmed when scores of Negroes attempted to buy guns from local hardware stores. They were thwarted by Paducah police, who ordered local merchants not sell guns to blacks.41 At least fifty Negroes were turned away on these orders.
This ad hoc gun prohibition and the fact that black rage here never resulted in gunfire allows several speculations. One is that blacks were unable to get guns, and that diffused what might have become a swirling cycle of violence. But that assumes that blacks were not already widely armed. And given the other signals of black gun ownership, that would be surprising. The alternate speculation is that the lynch violence in Paducah spurred unfilled black demand for additional firearms consistent with the modern “fear and loathing” hypothesis, which says that incidents of violence spur acquisition of firearms for self
-protection.42
It turns out in any case that the community was not entirely pacifist in its response to the Henley and Durrett lynchings. One of the lynch instigators, George Ross, fled Paducah after multiple threats to his life. The anger of the community seeped out again against a white police officer who was beaten after responding roughly to complaints about a loud Halloween celebration.43
While hostile state actors loom large in the lynch era, that story is complicated by men like Augustus E. Willson, Republican governor of Kentucky, who administered the state in the early twentieth century. Elected in 1907, Willson was, for the time, remarkably aggressive in his criticisms of lynch law and his willingness to combat midnight terrorists. His reaction to the mob murder of David Walker and his family in Hickman, Kentucky, matches our modern outrage.
The Walkers were attacked because they were “uppity” Negroes who did not know their place. One account described David Walker as a “surly Negro” who had cursed a white woman in some commercial transaction and threatened a white man who came to her defense. Later, masked by darkness, midnight terrorists rode to Walker’s cabin, crept in close, and yelled for Walker to come out. When Walker refused, they doused the structure with kerosene and set it afire. With his house in flames, Walker fired on the mob and then wilted under a barrage of return fire. His wife ran from the house with a baby in her arms. She and the child were shot down. Three of Walker’s other children tried to flee but were also killed. Walker’s oldest son refused to leave the burning structure or perhaps was already dead by gunshot.
Governor Willson’s response distills the scene. “If two or three men had gone to this poor man’s cabin and murdered his family, the crime would’ve shocked humanity with its revelation of incredible weakness, brutality and dastardly cowardice. That a larger number—some fifty men—joined in such a crime, multiplies its cowardliness and wickedness fiftyfold, and makes every member of the band guilty of murder in the first-degree.”44 Willson rejected the argument that nightriders were just good people frustrated by black criminality, and he castigated public officials who countenanced terrorism on that excuse. The epidemic of lynchings in Kentucky, he said, was “the logical [result] of the toleration of nightrider crimes in the state.”
Willson’s policy response to terrorist violence had wide appeal among blacks and fits comfortably within the black tradition of arms. In addition to offering a $500 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone complicit in lynch violence, Willson urged Negroes to defend themselves and promised to pardon anyone who shot a nightrider in self-defense. In a speech to the American Bar Association, Willson declared that “every man who is a member of a lawless band that goes with the double cowardice of those who enter upon lawlessness with the protection of the night and of overwhelming numbers against one poor and helpless man . . . takes his life in his hands and if the victim in despair kills him, no one has any right to complain.”
The Kentucky Courier-Journal subsequently reported various accounts of nightriders killed by blacks in Birmingham, Golden Pond, and other western Kentucky towns. A judge in Lyon County wrote to Willson that many blacks eventually were driven from the area, but not without taking their share in blood and flesh. “I have learned that a man in this county saw the gang on its march to Birmingham counted them, saw them as they returned . . . and one man was lying on his horse, head hanging to one side feet on the other, another was held in the saddle by a man riding behind . . . four others are visited by a doctor from Kuttawa. . . . There were three secret burials [of nightriders] in this County and one in Marshall.”
Willson sent troops to western Kentucky and kept them there for more than a year. He used state funds to provide guns and ammunition to people who were under threat of attack. His pressure on local leaders led to the arrest and trial of several lynch-mob instigators. Finally, though, Willson confronted the boundaries of his power. He could press for arrests and trials, but he could not convict terrorists and murderers. Ultimately, all of the men arrested under pressure from Willson were acquitted by juries of their peers.
The Walker lynchings that so animated Governor Willson demonstrate the uncertain curve of armed self-defense, its potential for making things worse, and the difficulty of making sound after-the-fact-judgments about it. Some reports say that the mob descended on David Walker intending just to horsewhip him. But “when he fired into their midst he so aroused their indignation that their thirst for blood was not sated until the last member of the Walker family had been shot.”45
So did Walker’s gun just make things worse? Was he a fool who provoked the deaths of his entire family when he could have avoided it all by taking a whipping? Or was Walker a hero who deserves admiration for his defiant last stand? And is there some inherent value to desperate but failed defiance? Or is it better to surrender and live another day under the yoke? One would pay to hear David Walker’s answers to these questions.
The black tradition of arms grew out of countless decisions by men like David Walker to own and carry guns. These decisions were necessarily calculated. Acquiring guns required balancing of scarce resources. Carrying guns from one situation to the next demanded estimates of oscillating risks and rewards. On the other hand, the decision to actually use the gun in self-defense often seems like just a spontaneous reflex. That probably explains the episode in 1908, in Logan County, Kentucky, where Rufus Browder, a black sharecropper, fought with and ultimately killed his landlord.
They argued over some trifle. Then Browder turned his back to James Cunningham and walked away. This affront, a clear violation of racial etiquette, provoked Cunningham to violence. Cunningham cursed Browder for his insolence and slashed him with a whip.
Browder’s immediate response is unrecorded. But he probably struck back, because Cunningham went from the whip to a pistol and shot Browder in the chest. Wounded, but ambulatory, Browder pulled his own pistol and killed Cunningham. Browder was arrested for murder and moved to a jail in Louisville, Kentucky.
Browder escaped lynching, but four of his lodge brothers did not. Browder was a member of one of the many fraternal organizations that blacks developed as surrogates for absent social-services networks. These groups administered burial funds, pooled emergency assets, and were sometimes the organizational base for vigilance and self-defense groups. Rumor spread among whites that Rufus Browder’s lodge brothers were plotting a preemptive attack on whites who had threatened to mob Browder.
Four lodge brothers were meeting in a private home when police entered and arrested them for disturbing the peace. While they were sitting in the jail in Russellville, Kentucky, a mob of nearly one hundred men descended and demanded that the jailer give them up. He handed over the keys, and the four men were summarily hanged. The mob pinned the message on one of the corpses, “Let this be a warning to you niggers to let white people alone or you will go the same way.”46
Negro men were the primary victims of lynch law. But black women were also targets of mobs and sometimes beneficiaries of the armed community. Marie Thompson was both. Around 1904, in Lebanon Junction, Kentucky, Marie Thompson was arrested for murder of a white farmer. The humanized picture of Marie is lost. White press reports caricature her as a “Negro Amazon,” an evident attempt to explain how she had managed to kill a stout white farmer who chastised her son over some missing tools. Thompson claimed that she had acted in self-defense.
Anticipating the mob, black men from the community assembled with guns to guard the jail. They repulsed a late-evening attack, and apparently concluded that the danger had abated. But deep into the night, Marie Thompson was snatched from her cell by men who seem to have gotten access without resistance from the jailer.
Bolstering the Amazon legend, Thompson was dangling from a rope, seemingly dead, when one of the mob ventured too close. Thompson sprang to life, grabbed the man by his shirt, snatched a knife from his hand and cut herself free. Now wielding the blade, she waded into the mob. Unwilling to engage her hand-to-hand, the m
obbers killed Marie Thompson with a volley of gunshots.47
The self-defense impulse played out badly for Marie Thompson. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that everyone would have been better off if she had just stayed out of the conflict between the white man and her son, which might have ended with just harsh words and her boy submitting to a light beating. But the difficulty of translating that insight into general policy is illustrated by the murder of Kentucky farmer Jim Hill.
Jim Hill got into a scrape with a white man named L. J. Swift that left Hill missing three front teeth. Hill sought redress through the legal system, asking the county prosecutor to issue a warrant for Swift. County bureaucrats went through the motions. But Hill’s complaint ultimately was dismissed on Swift’s testimony that Hill had talked back and made threats.
Unsatisfied with the victory in court, Swift lead a group of men to Hill’s farm about a week later. With guns drawn, they forced a sack over Hill’s head and dragged him from his home. They did not announce their intentions. Perhaps they planned a beating, perhaps a whipping. Perhaps they only intended to frighten Jim Hill enough that he would never again invoke the law against a white man.
Jim Hill’s wife had only seconds to make a decision. And if she had drawn a lesson from Marie Thompson, she might have decided just to let them drag her husband off into the night. She hesitated, and then, fighting off a kind of fear that is difficult for us to imagine today, she pursued the mob with a rifle in one hand and a lantern in the other. She was willing, but the results leave one wishing she had been more effective. The lantern turned out to be a tactical mistake that made her a target. Ducking under gunfire, she lost her lantern and her gun. With Jim Hill’s only defender subdued, the mob dragged him into a field and beat him to a gel.48
Negroes and the Gun Page 21