Individual calculations about the wisdom of owning or carrying guns surely varied. Even today gun ownership rates and the data about how many people carry concealed firearms are only estimates from surrogate information. The early twentieth century offers its own sinister surrogate for estimating the frequency with which Negroes carried guns. A study of the southern convict labor system shows that it was quite common for black men of the era to travel armed. It is contestable whether the convict labor system was more about crime control or more about dragooning cheap labor. There is a strong argument for the latter, given the frequency with which black men were roped into the system on charges like “idleness,” “using obscene language,” “selling cotton after dark,” and “violating contract” with white employers in places where true crime was almost trivial.
Men arrested on these specious charges were jailed and fined. If they could not pay, and many couldn’t, their term was extended and their fines and fees compounded. Now even further in debt, they were essentially sold to anyone who paid their fines and were required to work off the debt. The case of Green Cottenham is emblematic. He was arrested for vagrancy in March 1908, spent three days in jail awaiting trial, then was found guilty and sentenced to a fine or thirty days hard labor. Green Cottenham had no money, so he did the thirty days. But this meant he racked up an array of fees for his keep. Soon his debt equaled one year of hard labor, and the obligation was purchased by a railroad subsidiary of the northern industrial giant US Steel.
Perhaps as many as two hundred thousand black men were snared into the convict labor system on a variety of pretexts. One of the most common charges was carrying a concealed firearm. This was era when many southern men carried side arms. But the crime of carrying a concealed weapon was enforced mainly against Negroes. By the turn of the century it had become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration. The indications that arrests for carrying a concealed gun were more frequent than arrests for things like idleness and using obscene language suggests a robust culture of keeping and bearing firearms that thrived despite the risk that it was a pathway into the convict labor system.49
Labor supply was the seed of racial violence in East St. Louis, Illinois. And the aftermath brings another appearance from the storied advocate of the Winchester rifle, Ida B. Wells, now married to Chicago striver Ferdinand Barnett. Negroes had been migrating to East St. Louis for at least a decade. This rising population was either a threat or an opportunity, depending on whom you asked. Democrats saw the influx of likely Republican voters as a threat. Woodrow Wilson worried aloud that the rising black population of East St. Louis was a Republican plot.50
On the other hand, Negro labor was an important strategic asset for industrialists in contests with the bourgeoning local labor movement. The country had just entered World War I when white unionists struck local meatpacking and metal-refining companies. Management responded by hiring black replacements who crossed picket lines.
In the spring of 1917, more than three thousand union men marched to City Hall to protest the unfair labor competition. Riled by angry speeches and fearing permanent displacement by cut-rate black labor, the crowd raged through the streets, destroying property and assaulting any Negroes they could lay their hands on. The governor sent troops to quell the rioting, at least for the moment.
But the underlying source of the conflict, Negroes who would work cheaper than whites, remained. And the black folk of East St. Louis knew to prepare for more violence. Black defense preparations also raised the perennial dilemma about whether arming in anticipation of conflict actually elevates the risk. Is it better to avoid such preparations on the worry that they escalate the risk and spur cycle of violence? Or do violent aggressors prey on weakness?
The rioting in East St. Louis ultimately prompted a congressional investigation. The conclusions were contested, but the formal findings laid much of the blame on black defense preparations. The precise focus was community leader Leroy Bundy, a relatively affluent black dentist. After the initial attacks in May, Bundy urged Negroes to keep their guns in good order and to acquire more where they could. According to the congressional report, this set East St. Louis on edge and sparked the conflagration.51
Fig. 5.3. Reporting on the East St. Louis riot. (Springfield Republican, Springfield, Massachusetts, July 3, 1917.)
The community was armed and primed for conflict when a car full of men drove through, shooting at shop windows and bystanders. When the car returned a short time later, Negroes with guns were prepared and fired preemptively, killing two men inside. But there was a mistake. This was not the same car. This was a car full of plainclothes policemen. And now Negroes had shot and killed two of them.52
Whites responded in a rampage that killed at least forty Negroes and destroyed multiple blocks of East St. Louis’s black enclave. The NAACP pleaded with President Wilson to condemn the mobbing. Wilson said nothing. Investigators called the black defense preparations a conspiracy to riot instigated by Leroy Bundy. Bundy was charged with the murder of the two slain officers.53
Through the intervention of Ida B. Wells and her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, Leroy Bundy ultimately was cleared of the murder charges. In the aftermath, Ferdinand Barnett’s advice reflected a common assessment of whether preparing for armed self-defense was a worse option than disarming and hoping for protection from the government. At a mass meeting of Negroes following the riot, Ferdinand Barnett advised his roaringly sympathetic audience, “Get guns and put them in your homes. Protect yourselves. Let no black man permit a policeman to come in and get those guns.” Perfectly in sync with her husband’s advice, Ida Wells urged that “Negroes everywhere stand their ground and sell their lives as dearly as possible when attacked.”54
Fig. 5.4. A family portrait of Ferdinand Barnett and Ida B. Wells Barnett. (Photograph from 1917.)
Looking back, we know that things would improve for blacks over the twentieth century. But one wonders how W. E. B. Du Bois thought about the prospects for American Negroes in private moments of candor. Did he question the wisdom of staking his future here? Unlike many black folk, he had options and made a conscious bet on the United States of America.
Du Bois had lived and studied abroad. He had fallen for a German girl, or at least she had fallen for him. He could have stayed in Europe. But he returned, resolved to fight both politically and, if we credit his rhetoric, physically. His writing in the Crisis demonstrates that resolve.
But Du Bois was no isolated, intellectual radical. While he extolled self-defense rhetorically in the Crisis, the NAACP as an organization expended time, talent, and treasure to uphold the principle on behalf of black folk who defended themselves with guns. That fight consumed much of the young organization’s resources.
From our vantage point today, the NAACP’s work in support of armed self-defense seems remarkable. What, indeed, to make of the fact that armed self-defense was at the core of the first major case the organization supported? The year was 1910, and Pink Franklin, a South Carolina sharecropper, was accused of murder.
Considering the times, it was fortunate that Pink Franklin was not summarily lynched. His initial offense, the “crime” that started it all, was a basic breach of contract. Today this sends people to court in civil actions, seeking a stingy measure of damages to compensate for their disappointed expectations. Even in 1910, for white folk complaining about breach of contract, that was the remedy. But for a black sharecropper, the stakes were far higher.
Pink Franklin violated a special category of agricultural contract that was regulated under the South Carolina Criminal Code. It was a species of the peonage contracts that defeated Confederates attempted to enforce immediately after the Civil War under the Black Codes. The law said that sharecroppers who breached these agreements with planters could be punished by fines and imprisonment. The injured planter could secure his remedy through an arrest warrant enforced by the local magistrate. Negro contract breakers who could not pay their fine
s and mounting fees from incarceration might then be sold off under the convict labor system into a life that was just a step away from slavery.
Pink Franklin had indeed breached his contract. He signed on as a tenant farmer with one planter and then left for a better deal at another farm. The first planter claimed that Franklin still owed him money. That was enough to secure a warrant for Franklin’s arrest. Lawyers would quibble later over whether the law authorizing the warrant was unconstitutional. But that grand illegal question would not be settled in time to shield Pink Franklin from the wrath and caprice of a jilted employer and a malevolent government agent.
In the dark of the early morning, around 3:00 a.m., armed men descended on Franklin’s shanty, dubious warrant in hand. Stories conflict about the details. Franklin said that he was surprised in the middle of the night by strange men in his bedroom. When one of them shot him in the shoulder, Franklin dived to the floor, rolled to the gun he kept in the corner, and came up shooting.55
A surviving constable claimed that both the front door to Franklin’s home and Franklin’s bedroom door were ajar; that they knocked, entered, and then were surprised by gunfire from Franklin, an ax attack by Franklin’s woman, and a flying tackle by Franklin’s young son. There is no record of exactly what type of gun Franklin used. But it certainly was something more advanced than the single-shot technology often employed by poor folk, because two constables fell to Franklin’s gunfire. One of them, Henry Valentine, eventually died from his wounds.
Franklin was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The NAACP supported the case through an appeal to the United States Supreme Court and then, with the aid of Booker T. Washington, lobbied the governor of South Carolina to commute Franklin’s death sentence to life imprisonment. In 1915, Franklin’s case was reopened, and he was paroled in 1919.56
Shortly after taking on the Pink Franklin case, the NAACP assisted another tenant farmer charged with murder under similar circumstances. Steve Green of Arkansas walked off from his peonage contract after his landlord doubled his rent. On no legitimate authority, the planter forbade Green from ever working in the county again. It was the kind of arrogant demand that only makes sense in that time and place.
Bristling with racial entitlement, Green’s jilted landlord came gunning for him after learning that Green was working for a neighbor. He did not come to negotiate. He just rode over to Green’s new job and opened fire. The attack left Green bleeding but alive. Green retreated home, briefly tended his wounds, then grabbed his Winchester and went after his attacker.
Green turned out to be a better shot than his former boss, killing him efficiently and then fleeing. With the aid of friends and neighbors who hid him and then pooled money for a train ticket, Green made it to Chicago. Fresh in the big city, he managed to get arrested on a specious charge of petty larceny. From there, police connected him to the incident in Arkansas. Through the NAACP and with the assistance of Ida B. Wells, Green contested extradition to Arkansas. With extradition proceedings pending, Green fled to Canada.57
In 1919, a cash-strapped NAACP took on another armed self-defense case, coming to the aid of Sergeant Edgar Caldwell, an active-duty soldier stationed at Fort McClellan, Alabama. In December 1918, Caldwell was traveling into Anniston by streetcar when he provoked the wrath of a white conductor, Cecil Linton. Caldwell had dared to sit in the white section of the car. Linton figured to drag Caldwell from the forbidden zone. But Caldwell had a different idea. With the advantage of either strength or technique, Caldwell launched Linton through a glass divider between the cars. Linton called for help to the motorman, Kelsie Morrison, and they managed to throw Caldwell off the car. As Caldwell lay in the street, the two trolley-men advanced to give him a beating for good measure. Morrison, in his motorman’s boots, stomped Caldwell, landing solid blows to the ribs.
Criminologists tracking mid-twentieth-century homicides would document that beating equaled and sometimes surpassed shooting and stabbing as a mode of criminal homicide.58 Edgar Caldwell had no PhD in criminology, but he was a decorated veteran of World War I. He understood that death could come from hands and feet as well as knives and guns. Trapped on his back, writhing under the boot heels of Linton and Morrison, Caldwell drew his service revolver and shot twice, killing Linton and wounding Morrison.59 It is encouraging that Caldwell was not immediately lynched. But that is offset by the fact that, during the same period, the NAACP protested a spate of mob killings of returning black veterans who were hanged or burned while still wearing their uniforms.60
Due largely to the legal assistance and political maneuvering of the local and national NAACP, including a failed appeal to the United States Supreme Court, Sergeant Caldwell survived for almost two years on death row before being executed. Over this period, Caldwell became a household name among Negroes. Writing in the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois detailed the efforts to save Caldwell and framed the issue as whether blacks would be afforded the basic prerogatives of manhood. The legendary NAACP Legal Defense Fund had yet to be formed, so the cash-strapped organization made direct appeals in the Crisis for donations to fund Caldwell’s defense.
In the March 1920 edition, the Crisis published a full-length photograph of Caldwell with the appeal, “We want 500 Negroes who believe in Negro manhood to send immediately one dollar . . . for Caldwell’s defense.” The plea resonated with donors who responded not only with dollar bills mailed to NAACP headquarters in New York, but also notes and cards supporting the ideal of “Negro Manhood” exemplified by Caldwell’s armed stand.61
After Caldwell’s execution, Du Bois eulogized him as a martyr for black manhood and described the execution as, “one more addition to the long list of crimes which have been done in the manner of color prejudice.” Du Bois’s reaction was actually quite reserved by comparison to at least one other black intellectual of the day.62
Commenting on the class of hazards that snared Edgar Caldwell, Hubert H. Harrison wrote in 1921, “I advise you to be ready to defend yourselves. I notice that the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms, and one form of live [sic] insurance for wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements.” Harrison, described by A. Philip Randolph as “the father of Harlem radicalism,” was at the time, more militant than Du Bois. Although he is largely unknown today, one source calls Harrison “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time” and “one of America’s greatest minds.”63
In 1923, the NAACP took another armed self-defense case to the Supreme Court. In Moore v. Dempsey, the association came to the aid of a group of black World War I veterans who returned to Elaine, Arkansas, intent on building something better than what they left. Many of the men returned to sharecropping but now demanded fair treatment, fair wages, and accurate accounting.64
Organized under the banner of the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union, they had hired lawyers and were gathered outside the town of Elaine to plot strategy. The union threatened many entrenched interests. So it was no surprise when a Phillips County deputy sheriff and agents of the Missouri Pacific Railroad arrived to break up the meeting and discourage any more of them, with a little rough treatment.
Standing on the privilege of race and office, the head lawman fired preemptively on the Negroes. Perhaps he worried that he would kill or injure someone, perhaps not. Maybe he was surprised when the simple black farmers, now steeled by combat, fired back. Whether surprise or anger, it would be the deputy’s last emotion before he fell dead from Negro gunfire.
The white response was immediate and overwhelming. The sheriff deputized several hundred men and the governor mobilized troops. This force scoured the countryside ostensibly to find the shooters but ultimately in a campaign of retribution. But the going was harder than they expected, with black resistance yielding five more white casualties. The black casualty count, on the other hand, was at least twenty-five.65
Scores of Negroes were indicted for murder by an all-white
grand jury. A few perfunctory trials produced verdicts of first-degree murder, which carried the death penalty. After that, most of the defendants pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, with its lesser penalty of life in prison. One of these sham trials lasted less than an hour, with the defendant first meeting his lawyer in the courtroom.
The NAACP pursued the cases to the Supreme Court, buoyed by tens of thousands of dollars of donations from around the country. Writing for a divided court, Oliver Wendell Holmes reasoned that the convictions must be reversed because the so-called trials were essentially an extension of the mob, and a sentence of death or imprisonment driven by mob passions was a violation of due process. The case was a grand victory for the NAACP. The optimistic observer might have taken it as affirmation that at the rudiments of a fair trial would extend even to Negroes who took up guns against capricious state authorities.66
In the very early stages of NAACP activism, substantial work occurred in the branches. The Detroit branch was particularly active and pressed several pieces of litigation challenging discriminatory commercial practices. Most of those efforts focused on local problems. But in one case the Detroit branch stretched its reach and captured national attention. Like important cases that followed, it was rooted in an act of armed self-defense.
The violence started in Georgia, where tenant farmer Thomas Ray repelled the threats and assault by his landlord with deadly gunfire. It was 1920, and Ray had a sufficient sense of southern justice to know that he should flee. He almost made it into Canada when he was apprehended by Detroit police.
As word of Ray’s plight spread, the Detroit branch flew into action. The branch funded lawyers who blocked Ray’s extradition, arguing that he would be lynched if returned to Georgia. And although NAACP branches were often the bastions of the Talented Tenth, the Ray case captured the passions of the entire community.
Negroes and the Gun Page 22