Walter White reported another episode in Rope and Faggot that prompts us to think again about people who pick up a guns in defense of others. White did not witness this incident, but he drew the details from a report by Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey. The case demonstrates a category of violence where black men tried to protect wives, daughters, and girlfriends from carousing white men. It ended in a fashion that White claimed was typical.
Two drunk white men were roaming the Negro section, trolling for sport. An elderly Negro grabbed his gun and ran to the defense of black womanhood. Before it was over, one of the white men lay dead in the street. The Negro was arrested, broken out of jail, and lynched before he got a decent meal. It is an open question whether this fellow was a selfless hero or just a meddler who transformed a sex prowl into a cycle of death.9 And we might even ask why violence in defense of others fits under self-defense at all.
The questions that plague violent defense of others are even more poignant where people deploy guns in defense of an idea. One is tempted to say that this kind of violence is inherently political, exactly the kind of thing that the black tradition of arms disdained. Walter White’s account of Robert Moton complicates that assessment. Moton succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute and was an unlikely advocate of the gun. Tuskegee was a conservative, some said accommodationist, force in the freedom movement. Robert Moton exhibited that approach. But even an innately conservative and gentle man like Moton could retreat only so far. We learn from Walter White about Moton’s preparations in 1923 when the local Klan threatened to destroy Tuskegee.
The conflict sparked over Veterans Administration plans to build a Negro hospital on the grounds of Tuskegee. The NAACP had protested construction of any new segregated hospitals. But Moton welcomed the project because he would have influence over the jobs it brought. Local whites also wanted control over the hospital jobs and deployed the Klan to help them take it. In a show of force designed to quell Negro opposition, the Klan paraded and assembled on the grounds of Tuskegee. Walter White’s brother, George, was in Alabama at the time. Passing for white, he gained entry to the Klan assembly, where men talked of torching Tuskegee and killing Moton if necessary.
With the plot brewing, Walter White rushed to Washington to seek intervention by the Veterans Administration, and then to Alabama to strategize with Moton. There he found a changed man. “I sat with him in his home in Tuskegee during the height of the trouble,” White recalled. “He pointed to a rifle and a shotgun well-oiled and grimly businesslike, that stood in the corner of the room. Although his words in cold print sound overheroic, they did not sound so to me as he said quietly, ‘I’ve got only one time to die. If I must die now to save Tuskegee Institute, I’m ready. I’ve been running long enough.’”
The conflict at Tuskegee was defused without gunfire by an army general who commandeered the hospital staffing decisions. But we are left to ponder Robert Moton’s movement to the gun. He had plenty of warning that danger was lurking. He could have guaranteed his personal safety by running away. But Moton took up the gun and stood his ground in defense of place and principle. And it is illuminating to imagine the fallout if he had fired his guns and killed someone under the umbrella of self-defense. A narrow conception of self-defense might say that Moton’s failure to retreat on fair warning should block any subsequent self-defense claims; that by laying in wait with guns, Moton was courting violence that was easily avoided. The alternative instinct would affirm Moton’s resolve to run no more and leads to a broader conception of legitimate self-defense. These competing impulses illuminate disparate philosophies and the divergent American rules about retreat and the boundaries of self-defense.10
The black tradition of arms evolved through a long period where, at least for interracial conflicts, the law was overwhelmingly hostile to Negro self-defense claims. But on this score the odds for black self-defenders actually improved during the lynch era. The Mississippi Supreme Court’s intervention in 1919 to save Anthony Williams from the gallows demonstrates the trend. Williams is a proof case because he was not some harmless uncle or a community favorite. Anthony Williams was a common Negro who shot and killed a Mississippi deputy sheriff.
It started with dice. There was a big gathering in the town of Arcola, with attendant drinking and gambling. Williams was shooting dice behind a boarding house when someone was called a cheat, and someone pulled a knife. Then one of the men ran to the sheriff, claiming that Anthony Williams drew a pistol on him.
In the habit of the times, the arrest of Anthony Williams was just the beginning. Intent on confiscating the pistol, sheriff’s deputies decided to beat Williams until he coughed up the gun. They dragooned several men to hold him down. They kicked him with heavy boots. Then they stripped him and beat him with the buckle end of a belt until the brass lock broke off.
The beating worked, in a fashion. Williams pleaded for them to stop and promised to show where he hid the gun. They went back to the scene of the gambling and searched all around but did not find the pistol. Now frustrated by the impudent Negro and his elusive gun, the deputies decided to stake him out and give him a full and proper whipping.
As they were dragging him off to be hided, Williams jerked out of the way of a passing horse, prompting one of the deputies to take a shot at him. Williams then ran for his gun, which was hidden all along on his horse, saddled nearby. In the prosecution that followed, the court, quoting his trial testimony, projected Williams’s dilemma. “I said Lordy if I don’t get it I am killed, and if I do get it I am killed. One mind said get your gun and that time I eased up to my horse and got my gun from under the pommel of the saddle.”
The deputies had better guns and more shooters. But Anthony Williams was more efficient, or at least more resilient. He was shot twice but managed to fire back, killing a deputy. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. After two trips to the Mississippi Supreme Court, Williams’s conviction was overturned on the grounds that he shot the deputy in self-defense against an unlawful beating and whipping.11
The case is remarkable first because Williams was not simply lynched. The prosecutor’s cynical praise of the nascent lynch mob for their restraint shows that this was a real possibility. Of greater long-term importance was the court’s finding that the post-arrest brutality was illegal and sufficient to justify Williams’s violent response. This sort of official affirmation is the essential final component of any fully successful act of self-defense and something that Negroes had seldom been able to count on.12
Before the decade ended, the Mississippi Supreme Court issued another decision that similarly defies the intuitions fueled by the horrors chronicled in Rope and Faggot. In Byrd v. State, the court reversed the conviction and dismissed the prosecution of Jack Byrd, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the Christmas Eve murder of Bilbo Cox in the town of D’Lo.
The first notable thing is that the prosecution miscalculated the influence of white privilege. Race still played significantly in the court’s assessment. But here it tilted in favor of the accused Negro who was vouched for by numerous prominent white men. These same sponsors also commented on the low reputation of the dead man and his surviving companion, Burkett Neely.
The credible testimony depicted Cox and Neely as carousing drunks who descended on the “Negro Quarters” around midnight in search of whiskey and sport. They started a row in a colored café, assaulting Wes Byrd, while claiming that they were “the law.” The café operator fled to seek intervention from his white landlord, who demurred. Then someone ran to tell Jack Byrd that his brother was in trouble.
Jack Byrd grabbed his shotgun and headed to the café, where Cox and Neely turned to him as new and more interesting entertainment. In a stream of profanity and racial invective, they threatened to kill Byrd if he did not surrender his gun. When Byrd refused, they opened fire with revolvers, wounding but not disabling him. Byrd shot back, killing Cox.
Finding th
at the two white men “were aggressors from start to finish,” the Mississippi Supreme Court acknowledged and criticized the impact that race played at the trial, and articulated the racial baseline against which adjudications of black self-defense were evolving. “We cannot escape the conclusion that if this had been a case where the white man had killed a white man, or a Negro had killed a Negro, or a white man had killed a Negro, there would never have been a conviction. We therefore reverse the verdict and judgment; and . . . we order the defendant discharged.”13
These types of cases show that things were changing. The viability of armed self-defense seemed greater now than a generation before. One is even tempted to consider that the residual terror of the lynch mob, its influence on the black psyche, perhaps exceeded the actual threat to any particular Negro. Of course, backwater lynch mobs were not the only worry.
Walter White’s surreptitious reporting of hangings and burnings from river banks and oak groves demanded the nerve and courage of an undercover agent. But in other work, like his reporting on the Tulsa, Oklahoma race riot, White operated openly as an investigative journalist and social analyst.14
The Tulsa riot started with the arrest of a black man for allegedly assaulting a white woman in a downtown building. Dick Rowland was taking an elevator to one of the few places in that part of town where he could use the toilet. The alleged victim, Sara Page, first said that the nineteen-year-old bootblack grabbed her arm. Later she said that Rowland had stepped on her foot. Some surmised that Rowland stepped on her foot and reflexively grabbed her arm to stop her from falling back. Page refused to press charges and the case was dropped. But the mob would not wait for all of that.15
Tulsa was an unlikely venue for one of the worst race riots of the era. Walter White noted that “one could . . . find few cities where the likelihood of trouble between the races was as little thought of as in Tulsa.” Still, there were discernible seeds of conflict. The oil boom had dropped riches on enterprising blacks as well as whites. A formidable accumulation of wealth was displayed along Greenwood Avenue, known proudly as “Black Wall Street.” This was a source of jealousy from less enterprising whites.
Tulsa’s Jim Crow practices also fueled tension. The black frontier types who settled the area were prickly in their opposition to Jim Crow and less obsequious than many folk in their dealings with whites. This sort of spirit fueled the rapid response to the rumor that a lynch mob had targeted Dick Rowland.
The rumor was perpetrated in part by the local white press. The Tulsa Daily Tribune ran a generally inaccurate story about the elevator incident and a forming mob, under the headline “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”16 The black men of Tulsa were having none of it. On the rumor that a mob was headed for the jail, armed Negroes ran to protect Dick Rowland. They arrived to find the rumor exaggerated. After an exchange with the sheriff, who promised that Rowland was safe, they dispersed.17 Later that evening, new rumors spread that a mob was staging to assault the jail. Black men assembled again, seventy-five strong, and headed to the courthouse.
The spark of the violence was a testosterone-fueled showdown between one of the black men, an army veteran, and a white man who could not abide the sight of Negroes with guns. The black veteran was carrying his GI Model 1911 .45 caliber, semiautomatic pistol. Eyewitnesses report the white man approaching and demanding, “Nigger where you going with that pistol?”
The black veteran replied, “I’m going to use it if I need to.”
“No, you give it to me,” said the white man.
“Like hell I will,” replied the veteran.
With the confident arrogance of a superior race, the white man strode forward to disarm the Negro. Then he confronted the force of a 230-grain, .45 caliber slug traveling at almost one thousand feet per second. It knocked him down flat even though fired from the hand of a lowly Negro. From there, the sheriff recorded, “the race war was on and I was powerless to stop it.”18
Like any such conflict, countless individual episodes and calculations go unrecorded. The stories of many of the people who perished will never be told. But from the survivors there is vivid detail of the fighting and dying.
Bill Williams was only sixteen when the rioting broke out. His parents had prospered during the oil boom, extracting from Jim Crow an opportunity to build a garage, a soda fountain, and a theater catering to blacks. Bill’s father, John, was among the armed men who assembled to protect Dick Rowland.
Some reports say that the initial violence at the courthouse killed ten whites and a lesser number of blacks. This, of course, was not the end of things. John Williams returned home after midnight, expecting that things would get worse. When Bill awoke at 5 a.m., he found his father, having sat up all night, cradling his .30-30 lever-action rifle. A pump-action shotgun was propped against the wall. As the day progressed, the gunfire intensified and the mob advanced on Greenwood Avenue. For a while, the Williams family held up in the apartment over their business. John Williams fired on the mob from cover until they discerned his position and riddled the building with gunfire.
The Williams family ran out the back, then northward up Greenwood. John Williams left his wife and son with people who were sheltered at a funeral parlor. Then he ran next door to a pool hall, where he could get “a right-hand shot” at the advancing mob. With his rifle, John Williams shot men from the pool hall, aided by another black man who worked the shotgun.
The mob advanced again in another wave, sending John Williams, his wife, and their son, Bill, scattering in different directions. Unlike many families in Tulsa, they reunited the next day with everyone uninjured. But many blacks had not survived the night. Over one thousand black homes were destroyed, and black Wall Street was ashes.19
Fig. 6.1. Coverage of the violence from Tulsa World Daily, June 2, 1921.
The death toll is contested. Various casualty estimates attempted to shape the story. And there are many possibilities. But one of particular note comes from America’s preeminent black historian, John Hope Franklin. Franklin moved to Tulsa in 1925 at age ten. He observed that the black community viewed the 1921 riot as a manifestation of their courage, and as a lesson about the proper response to racist aggression. Franklin recounted the conventional wisdom within the black community that “many more whites were killed during the riot than many whites were willing to admit.” He also speculates about the details from his own experience. In the late twenties, Franklin was regularly at the courthouse, observing his father’s law practice. He was especially attentive to cases involving the estate of “some white person who died on or about June 1, 1921. One was always tempted to conclude that the deceased lost his life in the riot.”
With the historian’s careful eye, Franklin acknowledged that community assessments of white casualties were likely exaggerated. But he found that the embellished local lore still had “the desired effect.” The fighters at Tulsa were cast in the mold of heroes across the ages who had fought bravely against long odds—the immortalized light brigade charging artillery positions with swords, the Three Hundred Spartans dead to the last man at Thermopolis, and, dare one say, the countless Confederate boys who fell in service of the Lost Cause. Black folk, said Franklin, did not see the death and destruction at Tulsa as an episode of black victimization. According to Franklin, they cast it as a story of classic heroism and marshaled it to profound practical effect.
The self-confidence of Tulsa’s Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites. After 1921, an altercation in Tulsa between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident, even if there was a loss of life. It was just an incident. Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicating the fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might have felt in the years following the riot.20
Fig. 6.2. Photograph depicting the burning of black residences and businesses in Tulsa during the race riots. (“Running the Negro out of Tulsa,” June 1, 1921.)
The fighting
at Tulsa is a piece with the storied 1923 conflict in Rosewood, Florida, an episode so dramatic it would provoke the attention of commercial filmmakers, who presented a story of heroes far more militant than the familiar brave folk who endured attack dogs, fire hoses, and baton charges with stoic nonviolence.
The violence at Rosewood had a familiar start. A white woman, named Fanny Taylor, had been assaulted. The suspect was a black escapee from a chain gang. Bloodhounds took a scent from Fanny Taylor’s torn clothes and raced away, followed by a crowd of armed men that swelled as word spread. Soon the dogs were on him, or at least onto something, and they were headed straight to the black town of Rosewood.
The dogs chased the scent to the cabin of Aaron Carrier and stopped cold at fresh wagon tracks leading away from Carrier’s back door. With the hounds stymied, the posse headed for Carrier’s mother’s house, where they found Aaron hiding upstairs. With his mother screaming on the porch, they dragged Aaron Carrier out of the house. Then they tied him to the back of a Model T Ford, and dragged him until he admitted that another man, Sam Carter, had helped the rape suspect escape.
The posse fanned out over Rosewood, warning curious Negroes to get out of sight. They broke into Sam Carter’s house, put a noose around his neck, and pulled him outside to an old oak tree. They would torture the truth out of him. And after intermittent strangling and mutilation, Carter said that he had driven the suspect to a spot on the edge of the swamp.
They yanked Carter down and made him show them the spot. When the hounds failed to pick up a scent and it seemed that Carter had just said what they wanted after torture, one of the frustrated men, stinking of moonshine, shot Carter point blank in the head. Then they hoisted his body up into a tree and riddled it with bullets.
Negroes and the Gun Page 24