Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  When rumors spread that whites had threatened to seize Ray from the jail, working-class men from the Negro enclave of “Black Bottom” ran to stand guard around the courthouse. The combination of formal legal proceedings and the community’s resolve to protect Ray from the mob ultimately succeeded. In June 1921, more than a year after Thomas Ray had fled Georgia, the governor of Michigan freed him on the determination that he had shot in self-defense.67

  At the close of World War I, W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed in the Crisis that “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.” This militant call was not shared by everyone at the NAACP. And it certainly did not reflect the views of John Shillady, the organization’s white executive secretary, a pacifist who abjured violence even at a personal level. After a mob attacked Negroes in Longview, Texas, in 1919, Shillady traveled to investigate. He was there only two days before he was assaulted by a white gang. He applied pacifist tactics and curled up into a little ball while they beat him senseless. Within a year, he had resigned from the NAACP.68

  Shillady’s replacement, James Weldon Johnson, the association’s first black executive secretary, took a different stance. Following the July 1919 race riot in Washington, DC, Johnson investigated and offered this assessment of how and why peace was restored. “The Negroes saved themselves and saved Washington by their determination not to run but to fight, fight in the defense of their lives and their homes. If the white mob had gone unchecked—and it was only the determined effort of black men that checked it—Washington would have been another and worse East St. Louis.”

  The violence in DC was sparked by a rumor that a white soldier’s wife had been raped by a Negro. The city was filled with military men back from World War I. It also had been filling for some time with blacks migrating out of the South in search of something better. On a hot Saturday in mid-July, hundreds of white veterans rampaged through DC’s black neighborhoods. The violence continued two more days, peaking on Monday after an editorial from the Washington Post urged “every available serviceman to gather at Pennsylvania and Seventh Avenue at 9:00 p.m. for a cleanup that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”

  White servicemen answered the call and stormed through black neighborhoods in the southwest and Foggy Bottom. But the going was tougher in northwest Washington, DC, where the forewarned community was barricaded in and well-armed. As the mob approached, Negroes answered with a barrage of gunfire. The mob scattered. In the aftermath, cars were found riddled with bullet holes. Dozens of people were seriously wounded and one black man died by gunshot.

  Black gunfire certainly helped staunch the mob. But it also helped that Washington was drenched by torrential rains and that President Wilson deployed two thousand troops to secure the streets. James Weldon Johnson certainly knew this. So his celebration of the black resistance seems like more than just an objective description of the events. It actually reads like a general prescription for black resistance against mobbing.69

  Fig. 5.5. Portrait of James Weldon Johnson. (Black-and-white photoprints [Series 1], Scurlock Studio Records, ca. 1905–1994, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.)

  In subsequent commentary, the Crisis extolled the enduring value of the black resistance in Washington, DC, in reporting about a black professor from Howard University who managed to find someone to sell him a house in a “restricted” area of the district. He was told to get out. When he refused, “his new home was given a battering.”

  Horrified, his intellectual friends at the college “recommended to him some interesting court procedures.” But the militant professor and at least one of his colleagues pursued an alternate strategy. They “took the pains to build a barricade. One of them got his guns together and installed himself in the barricade. The two, fortified further by sandwiches and milk, quietly sat, watched and waited.”

  Local veterans who had been active in defending the community during the 1919 riots got wind of these rough tactics and sent word that they would keep watch over the militant professor’s new home. Cause and effect are murky, but the reporting suggests that from this point, no further attacks occurred. The Crisis saw this as vindication. “The professor, using a rowdy principle, had opened up a new and decent area for Negro habitation. Thousands of fine Negroes live there now.”70

  The disappointments and hazards of the early century fueled radical approaches to addressing the plight of black folk. Socialist A. Philip Randolph and Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey rejected any possibility of just treatment for Negroes in America. Disparate philosophies led to bitter personal attacks between Randolph, Garvey, and W. E. B Du Bois.

  Randolph, a driving force in the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, criticized that the NAACP was a tool of middle-class blacks. Randolph also split with Du Bois on the question of black service in World War I. Du Bois urged blacks to serve, arguing that by fighting they would earn their freedom. Randolph quipped that he would not fight to make the world safe for democracy but was more than willing to die at home to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.” Philosophical disagreement led to personal attack, with Randolph calling Du Bois a “handkerchief head . . . hat-in-hand Negro.”71

  Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 with the ambition of massive Negro migration to Africa, advanced a homegrown nationalist philosophy. Garvey castigated the NAACP as an organ of light-skinned, upper-class Negroes and leveled his own personal attack at Du Bois, charging that the rising intellectual leader of the race actually preferred the company of whites to blacks.

  Returning the favor, Du Bois and Randolph expressed their disdain for Garvey’s gaudy showmanship openly and in print. Both the Crisis and Randolph’s signature publication, the Messenger, condemned Garvey and were sympathetic to established Negro leaders who reported mismanagement of Garvey’s Black Star shipping line to the federal government.72

  But despite their deep philosophical differences and personal animus, these stalwarts of competing factions in the early freedom movement found agreement on the point of individual self-defense.73 There was, of course, disagreement about root causes of the perils to black folk. Randolph thought the plight of Negroes in America was rooted in capitalism, declaring that “lynching will not stop until Socialism comes.”74 Randolph saw no promise in legislation around the edges, warning, “Don’t be deceived by any capitalist bill to abolish lynching; if it becomes a law it would never be enforced. Have you not the Fourteenth Amendment which is supposed to protect your life, property and guarantee you the vote?”75 Randolph had a much broader assessment and a much grander plan:

  No, lynching is not a domestic question, except in the rather domestic minds of Negro leaders, whose information is highly localized and domestic. The problems of the Negroes should be presented to every nation in the world and this sham democracy, about which American’s prate, should be exposed for what it is—a sham, a mockery, a rape on decency and a travesty on common sense. When lynching gets to be an international question, it will be the beginning of the end. On with the dance!76

  Fig. 5.6. Political cartoons from A. Phillip Randolph’s Messenger, proclaiming the militancy of the “New Crowd Negro” and criticizing W. E. B. Du Bois and the “Old Crowd.” (Left: “The ‘New Crowd Negro’ Making America Safe for Himself,” Messenger, 1919. Right: “Following the Advice of the ‘Old Crowd’ Negro,” Messenger, 1919.)

  Acknowledging that his grand political agenda would take time, Randolph’s short-term remedy was reciprocal violence in self-defense. He reconciled this with a broader pacifism, explaining that pacifism controlled “only on matters that can be settled peacefully.” He did not equivocate about the legitimacy or utility of violence for people pressed to the wall, advising, “Always regard your own life as more important than th
e life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made between the sacrifice of your life and the loss of the lyncher’s life, choose to preserve your own and to destroy that of the lynching mob.”77 Randolph’s call resonated in the black press, even where people disagreed with his socialist agenda. The Kansas City Call celebrated Randolph’s appeal to self-defense as the battle cry of the “New Negro,” who was done “cringing” and was prepared to fight back.78

  Marcus Garvey offered his own variation on the theme with a peculiar version of the traditional dichotomy between self-defense and political violence. Garvey openly advocated large-scale political violence, arguing that “all peoples have gained their freedom through organized force. . . . These are the means by which we as a race will climb to greatness.”79 Garvey’s hedge was that this violence would occur not in America or Europe but in Africa, where organized blacks would retake what was theirs.80

  Fig. 5.7. Marcus Garvey (center) in full regalia. (Photograph by James VanDerZee, © Donna Mussenden VanDerZee, all rights reserved, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library.)

  Domestically, Garvey embraced the traditional boundary against political violence, which he seemed to admit could not succeed in the United States. But on the point of private self-defense against imminent threats, Garvey was a traditionalist. Although he was roundly criticized for acknowledging common ground with the racially separatist KKK, Garvey also challenged the Klan, writing, “They can pull off their hot stuff in the south, but let them come north and touch Philadelphia, New York or Chicago and there will be little left of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . Let them try and come to Harlem and they will really have some fun.”81

  Du Bois, Randolph, and Garvey embodied the early twentieth-century factions of the rising freedom movement. They were divided by profound philosophical differences. But on the basic point of personal security and response to the hazards that plagued Negroes, they found common ground. Harlem poet and Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay captured the general sentiment in a poem that circulated broadly in Randolph’s Messenger and was widely reprinted. It was a paean to Negro manhood that closes with this: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. . . . Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back.”

  McKay was extolling and encouraging the fighting spirit of the New Negro. He might well have been celebrating the last violent stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopolis.82

  “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts a foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss.”

  That was the somber instruction from Walter White’s father in 1906 as race rioting rocked Atlanta. Walter was only thirteen and entirely unknown to W. E. B. Du Bois, who, not too far away, paced with a shotgun, ready to defend his own family against the mob.

  Years later, when they both were pulling heavy oars for the bourgeoning NAACP, Du Bois signaled the growing personal rift between them. Criticizing the ease with which White moved between two worlds, Du Bois complained, “He has more white companions and friends than colored. He goes where he will. . . . And naturally meets no color line, for the simple and sufficient reason he isn’t colored.”1

  Du Bois was right that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Walter White lacked the physical characteristics of the typical colored man. But the ability to pass for white was no shield for Walter and his family in Atlanta in 1906. While Du Bois was patrolling with his shotgun, Walter White crouched with a rifle, behind lace curtains in the parlor of his family’s neat bungalow.

  Walter White came closer to shooting a man that night than most people ever will. The mob approached near enough for him to hear the venomous threat, “That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in!” The only thing that prevented White from shooting that night was that his neighbors fired first. Like Walter and his father, they were armed and barricaded in. They also were quicker on the trigger, with some reports saying that their gunfire drove the mob away and others saying that it just drew them in a different direction.

  This early incident with a gun had a profound effect on Walter White and might be the best explanation for why he did not take the smoother path through America as a white man. The Atlanta riot was a hinge point where White was “gripped by the knowledge of [his] identity.”2

  Decades later, a biographer would doubt the veracity of White’s story about the gun. White was there, of course, so he should know. But it is still useful to consider that White might have made up the story. That sort of fabrication would suggest that he considered the account compelling, if not heroic, and expected it would resonate with his audience. Since he was writing at least in part to black folk, this would have been a fair surmise, especially considering that across town, Du Bois was doing basically the same thing. And it turns out that White and Du Bois were not the only future NAACP vanguards wielding guns in Atlanta that night.3

  Walter White rose to power and influence within the NAACP and ultimately butted heads with Du Bois, who resigned his post at the Crisis in 1934, having lost the battle of egos and vision. A year after Du Bois’s departure, the NAACP elected Dr. Louis T. Wright as chairman of the board. Wright was the first Negro ever to serve in the post. He was a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a Georgia native. Just like Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Wright survived the 1906 Atlanta riot. And just like White and Du Bois, his reaction demonstrated the core self-defense concern that fueled the black tradition of arms. Roy Wilkins, future steward of the NAACP, who observed Walter White, Louis Wright, and W. E. B. Du Bois during the association’s early development, reveals, “Louis came from Atlanta. Like Walter he had been through the Atlanta race riot of 1906, and like Walter he had watched through the darkened windows of his home, gun in hand.”4 Louis Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White were among the cream of the Talented Tenth. They reflected a culture where the best people in the community unapologetically owned and carried firearms. They were part of a broader tradition in which the importance of armed self-defense seemed plain.

  Like James Weldon Johnson, who recruited him to the NAACP, Walter White was abundantly gifted. He sacrificed greater financial success to pursue the work of a race man. Still, his prodigious talents spilled over into efforts that gained him a measure of fame as a literary figure. His popular novel The Fire in the Flint depicted of a black doctor and war veteran who returned to Georgia, aiming to do good work. In the novel’s closing scene, the hero succumbs in a fashion that captures the theme of the New Negro, fighting desperately against long odds, outnumbered, plainly destined to die but committed to die fighting.”5

  Walter White’s more remarkable achievement in print was the book Rope and Faggot, which distilled his firsthand accounts of more than forty lynchings. Passing for white, he witnessed the murderous rage, carnival atmosphere, and unfathomable barbarism of the mob. With few discernible Negro characteristics, Walter White stood in the crowds and reported back on the very worst mob violence of the early twentieth century. Some of the details are so gruesome, they read like slasher fiction, doubly horrifying against the new prosperity of the Industrial Revolution and happy images of flappers dancing the Charleston.

  But Rope and Faggot is not just a chronicle of the macabre. White offers cutting social, psychological, and political critiques of lynching. He also demonstrates the visceral draw of the self-defense impulse. From Nodena, Arkansas, White reported the case of Henry Lowery, who worked under a contract that made him a virtual slave. Lowery’s landlord treated him accordingly. On Christmas Day, 1920, Lowery boldly demand his overdue wages. His landlord responded with curses and kicking. As the two men scuffled, the landlord’s son drew a gun and shot Lowery. Wounded, Lowery pulled his own gun. In the exchange of shots, Lowery killed the landlord and the man’s daughter (hit by a stray bullet). Lowery ran as far as Texas, where he was captured. On his retu
rn, he was seized by a mob, chained to a log, doused with gasoline, and roasted alive.

  White’s account of the Lowman family in Aiken, South Carolina, demonstrates the typical self-defense scenario where folk were desperate and had no clearly better choices. It was 1925 and Prohibition was in full swing. Sam’s whiskey making drew the sheriff and four deputies out to his rural cabin. Sam was gone when they arrived, which left them to concentrate on his wife, Bertha. Bertha must have sassed them because the sheriff punched her square in the mouth. Bertha’s mother ran to intervene, and one of the deputies shot her through the heart. Hearing the gunshots, Bertha’s brother and cousin came running from the field. They evidently had guns on them or laid nearby, because the next thing was a gunfight that left the sheriff dead and the two black men wounded.

  Like all of the episodes in Rope and Faggot, this one ended in Negroes killed by a mob. This time it was a crowd of two thousand, and they made a game of it. Jailers helped the mob remove the Lowmans to a tourist camp on the outskirts of Aiken. They set them free and told them to run. Then they shot them down like feral dogs. Prominent in the crowd were local lawyers, businessmen, and several members of the South Carolina legislature.6

  James Weldon Johnson said that the federal government bore part responsibility for the mobbing in Aiken. The Senate’s refusal to act on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, he argued, “was equivalent to serving notice on the lynchers that they could pursue their pastime virtually unmolested.”7 Johnson’s mentor, Charles W. Anderson, leveled a similar criticism at Woodrow Wilson’s policy of segregating the federal workforce, arguing that Wilson’s policy had “the reflex influence of giving anti-Negro elements across the country the feeling that they would not be punished by federal authorities.”8