T. R. M. Howard’s practice of arms was not unusual. Witness for example the response when news spread that Howard had received a particularly credible death threat. Howard’s nearby neighbor was quickly on the scene with the assurance, “Don’t worry about a thing, Doc. Me and a gang of fellows will surround your house tonight and we all have guns.” Later, just on the rumor that Howard’s wife had been accosted by bigots, fifteen cars full of armed black men sped to Howard’s home.15
Following the Emmett Till trial, Gus Courts, a black grocer and president of the Belzoni branch of the NAACP, was wounded in a drive-by shooting. Courts had been warned to remove his name from the voting rolls on the pain of economic reprisals and then threats of violence. Howard prodded investigation of the case with the threat of a mass march on Washington. He traveled to Baltimore, New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, agitating for a “freedom March to Washington.”16
Howard’s first stop on this tour was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The event was hosted by the newly installed pastor, twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. Also in the room were two other freedom fighters, Rosa Parks, still just an obscure member of the Montgomery NAACP, and Autherine Lucy, who walked the gauntlet to integrate the University of Alabama.
Each of the three storied figures in the room with Howard that night offers a layer to the evolving black tradition of arms. We already know something about King and will see much more. But Rosa Parks and Autherine Lucy open the chapter of the women whose words and deeds illuminate the tradition of arms in the modern freedom movement.
Fig. 7.1. Representative Charles Diggs (second from right), T. R. M. Howard (third from right), and Mamie Bradley (fourth from right, and held by Howard) at the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.)
Justly famous for the act of defiance that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks confirms the black tradition of arms in the context of her earliest memories:
By the time I was six, I was old enough to realize that we were actually not free. The Ku Klux Klan was riding through the black community, burning churches, beating up people, killing people. At the time I didn’t realize why there was so much activity, but later I learned that it was because African-American soldiers were returning from World War I and acting as if they deserved equal rights because they served our country. . . .
At one point the violence was so bad that my grandfather kept his gun—a double barreled shotgun—close by at all times. And I remember we talked about how just in case the Klansmen broke into our house, we should go to bed with our clothes on so we would be ready to run if we had to. I can remember my grandfather saying, “I don’t know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, but I’m getting the first one who comes through the door.” . . . My grandfather wasn’t going outside looking for any trouble, but he was going to defend his home. I remember thinking that whatever happened, I wanted to see it. I wanted to see him shoot that gun. I wasn’t going to be caught asleep. I remember that at night he would sit by the fire in his rocking chair and I would sit on the floor right by his chair, and he would have his gun right by just in case.17
The tradition of arms is further evident in Parks’s recollection of the first stages of her activism. When Parks’s husband, Ray, started attending late-night meetings of budding activists, the men came with guns and there was always an armed lookout. Initially Ray sheltered Rosa from these meetings. But eventually the couple started hosting groups in their home on Huffman Street. The culture of arms was plainly in evidence. Parks describes it this way. “It was the first meeting we ever had at our house, and it was in the front room. There was a little table about the size of the card table that they were sitting around. . . . The table was covered with guns. I didn’t even think to offer them anything—refreshments or something to drink. But with the table so covered with guns, I don’t know where I would’ve put any refreshments. No one was thinking of food anyway.”18
After her storied defiance helped spring the movement in Alabama, threats and harassment drove Parks out of the state. But before she headed north, the gun was a crucial interim tool. “We did suffer some harassment,” Parks recalls, “The threatening telephone calls continued even after the Supreme Court decision. My husband slept with a gun nearby for a time.”19
Autherine Lucy also sat listening to T. R. M. Howard and Martin King that night at Dexter Avenue Baptist. Lucy had already been snagged by fate. Her desire to go to college required the deployment of big guns, both figuratively and literally. For the legal fight, the already-legendary Thurgood Marshall and his young assistant, future federal court judge Constance Baker Motley, would demand compliance with America’s constitutional promises. But before they could appear to wage rhetorical warfare, Motley and Marshall had to survive the night. And here again the gun was an important tool. Judge Motley recalled it this way:
When Autherine Lucy registered in February 1956 and was finally on campus, a riot broke out. . . . We then went to court with a motion to hold the dean of admissions and members of the board of trustees in contempt for failing to secure Miss Lucy’s peaceful attendance. While in Birmingham for this hearing, we stayed in Arthur Shores’ spacious new home on the city’s outskirts. This house had been bombed on several occasions, but because we could not stay in a hotel or motel in Birmingham, we had to take up Shores’ offer of his bomb-prone abode. . . .
When Thurgood and I arrived, the garage door was wide open. Inside were six or eight Black men with shotguns and machine guns who had been guarding the house since the last bombing. . . . When we went to court the next day, the driver of our car and one other man in the front passenger seat carried guns in their pockets.20
It is likely that some of the same men came to the rescue after Autherine Lucy was pelted with eggs and gravel as she tried to attend her first class at the University of Alabama. Friends wrapped her up and retreated to a salon in the black section of Tuscaloosa where beauticians washed her hair and cleaned her clothes. As a mob gathered outside, the shop owner called for help and a group of black men armed with rifles and shotguns quickly arrived. This show of force dispersed the crowd. The black men then gave Lucy an armed escort to Birmingham.21
In Birmingham, legendary movement leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was protected by a group of armed “Civil Rights Guards” after being threatened and attacked by terrorists.22 But Shuttlesworth was not simply a passive beneficiary of armed protection. When Freedom Riders from his congregation were attacked in Anniston, Alabama, word spread that many of the injured had been taken to a local hospital. Freedom Rider Hank Thomas recalls, “the people at the hospital would not do anything for us.” Then, says Thomas, “a crowd started forming outside . . . and the hospital told us to leave.” Reverend Shuttlesworth had already heard this news and was riding to the rescue with a fifteen-car caravan of armed men spurred by Shuttlesworth’s promise, “I’m going to get my people. I’m a nonviolent man, but I’m going to get my people.”
Transportation was the secondary issue. The primary concern was getting folk out of the hospital and safely through the angry crowd. Here the threat value of the gun was important. As Shuttlesworth’s caravan rolled to a stop, the show of force parted the crowd. Thomas recalled how, “each one of them got out with their guns and everything. . . . They had rifles and shotguns and that’s how we got back to Birmingham.”23
Although Fred Shuttlesworth enjoys a higher historical profile, Reverend Ed Gardner was right by his side. In 1956, after multiple pressures forced the Birmingham NAACP office to close, Gardner and Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement to fill the gap. While national attention was focused on the Montgomery bus boycott, Gardner and Shuttlesworth protested bus segregation in Birmingham. More than five hundred protesters went to jail, and Gardner and Shuttlesworth became open targets.
Looking back, Gardner recalled, “they came by my place shooting and all like that, so I had two guards to guard
my house. Reverend Shuttlesworth had guards guarding his house. We had a lot of laughs about that. I had a Winchester and I told ’em, this is a nonviolent Winchester.”24
Reverend Gardner’s quip about the nonviolent Winchester reflects the long-standing dichotomy between self-defense and political violence. Grassroots activist Austry Kirklin elaborates the two themes in an oral-history account, describing how “We was nonviolent. Nobody never did fight back.” Then, without missing a beat and with no worry about inconsistency, she reveals that “Mr. Sims, he used to always carry his gun—him and Joe Smith.” Her claim was verified by at least one occasion after a protest march when “they jailed Mr. Sands down there. Kept him three weeks when they found he had a gun.” Noting the danger and describing his own preparations, activist T. C. Johnson recalled, “Yes we had little Saturday Night Specials that we’d hide; you couldn’t let ’em be caught on you.”25
After the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four little black girls, novelist John Killens, future Pulitzer Prize nominee, erupted, “Negroes must be prepared to protect themselves with guns.” The neighborhood of black strivers that would come to be known as “Dynamite Hill” needed no advice on this point. They set up a community guard system of armed patrols.26
Birmingham native and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice writes vividly about the night in 1963 when a firebomb crashed through the window of a house down the block. Her father gathered the family with the intent of heading to the police station but was reminded by his wife exactly who and where he was. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “They probably set off the thing in the first place.”27
One is tempted to dismiss Angelena Rice’s warning as exaggerated fear, perhaps embellished on recollection. On the other hand, the white man sent to investigate the Birmingham bombings said later, “I had an interview in the state of Georgia since my retirement with the former number one Klansman in Alabama, who stated that former Commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor paid $500 to get Reverend Shuttlesworth’s church dynamited in Birmingham.”28
The neighborhood bombing chased Condoleezza Rice and her parents temporarily to the home of friends in nearby Hooper City. When they returned late that night, Secretary Rice recalls that her father “didn’t say anything more about the bomb. He just went outside and sat on the porch in the springtime heat with his gun on his lap. He sat there all night looking for white night riders.” And one wonders here whether Reverend Rice suddenly had a keener appreciation for the long practice of the family matriarch, Condoleezza’s great-grandmother, Julia Head, who “to the day she died, would sit on our porch with a shotgun in her lap.”
Eventually, Condoleezza Rice recalls, her father and the neighborhood men formed an organized watch. “They would take shifts at the head of the two entrances to our streets. There was a formal schedule, and Daddy would move among them to pray with them and keep their spirits up. Occasionally they would fire a gun into the air to scare off intruders, but they never actually shot anyone.” Those tense nights in Birmingham still resonate in Rice’s assessment of firearms policy. “Because of this experience, I’m a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or even worse.”29
There is abundant evidence that merely having a gun is only one component of a successful act of armed self-defense and is a guarantee of nothing. That list grows with the recollection of Arthur Shores, who had hosted Thurgood Marshall and Connie Motley in his home on Dynamite Hill not far from the Rice family. In September 1963, his house had been dynamited once already. Shores was on edge. “I was sitting in my living room and said . . . I’m goin’ sit out on the porch a little with my double barrel shotgun and kinda watch out. And the moment I got up out of my seat, my front door was blown in and if I’d been a second or two earlier, it would’ve caught me full in the face.”
Shore’s story captures multiple facets of the self-defense dynamic. People keep guns because in the critical seconds when violence sparks, outside help, even from well-meaning governments, is at least minutes away. But violence is a whirlwind and launching into it armed, even justly armed, courts unpredictable hazards. The “what if” and “but for” calculations are varied enough to leave us vacillating on questions of policy.
The “what if” calculation looms large in the brutal official response to the 1965 march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, remembered now in infamy as “Bloody Sunday.” The baton charge and tear-gas assaults on black folk dressed in church clothes form some of the most poignant images of the modern freedom movement. But eyewitnesses report how those images might easily have been a record of carnage wrought by political violence.
Wilson Baker, Selma’s director of Public Safety, and John Nixon, of the Justice Department, were both on the ground that day in Selma. Baker blames the familiar images of violence on hot-tempered state troopers and a “posse” of private citizens including “a lot of Ku Klux Klan types.”30 According to Baker, the police were instructed not to follow the marchers into Selma city limits. “We were not going to have any part of that thing,” Baker recalls, “because I thought at the time that it was time to let them go to Montgomery, if they wanted to go to Montgomery. One reason was I wanted to get them out of Selma. It was selfish, let’s be honest about it. . . . I had a thorough understanding . . . that whatever happened across that bridge, once the blacks got back into city limits no one was to follow them back in here. But the posse did follow them back . . . to the church and down in that area and that’s where it really got scary.”
Once the conflict spilled into the neighborhood around Brown’s Chapel, what Baker calls the “civil-rights area,” the potential for dramatic shift over from nonviolence into chaos and gunfire was plain. “People were coming out of those houses with shotguns and rifles and pistols,” says Baker, “and the horses were running in there and they were trying to ride horses up on the steps of the church and every place else. And Congressman Andrew Young [future UN ambassador and mayor of Atlanta], he played such an important part of saving a bloodbath. He was just running wild up-and-down these apartment units: ‘Get back into the house with this weapon. . . . We’re not having any weapons out.’” Baker worked the other side of the conflict. “I was there with him helping him. . . . I went to Jim Clark, the Sheriff and told him you get your cowboys, and you get them out of here.”31
Imagining an alternate scenario in Selma puts a sharp point on an enduring dilemma within the black tradition of arms. How exactly does one mark the line between legitimate self-defense and foolish political violence? Even if coherent in theory, can the distinction be sustained in the heat of conflict? Were those Negroes in Selma who emerged from their homes with guns bent on political violence? Or were they simply reacting in legitimate defense of friends and neighbors? And what if it was really some mixture of both? Does that render the distinction at the heart of the black tradition of arms incoherent?
Certainly claims of self-defense always involve close and complicated factual questions. But for individual self-defenders the stakes are simply exoneration or punishment. In a case like Selma, on the other hand, the stakes were far higher. What if Selma had devolved into a gunfight? The possibilities illustrate a worry that sharpens our definitions of self-defense and political violence, as well as our understanding of the concept of “nonviolence” in the modern freedom movement.
Martin King’s response to Robert Williams captured the point. Essential self-defense by individuals pressed to the wall by violent aggressors is the model case. Beyond that model case, where people gather in groups, marching and protesting in ways likely to provoke violent opposition, carrying arms for protection poses a clear hazard. Although we might technically classify this violence as defensive, in the sense that folk in Selma were responding to aggression rather than initiating it, the risk of dramatic political effect is plain. King’s formulati
on respected the model case of individual self-defense but steered well clear of the boundary-land bordering political violence.
Despite Martin Luther King’s cautions, the movement’s various organized defense groups stepped more aggressively toward the boundary against political violence. As we will see, the Deacons for Defense became the most prominent, but in many other places, organized groups took up arms in defense of their families, communities, and the movement.32
In Meridian, Mississippi, a defense group drawn from Porter and Union Baptist Church members guarded the home of NAACP leader Claude Bryant. In April 1964, after an explosion rocked his house, Bryant himself ran into the street with his rifle and shot at the car full of fleeing bombers. It is not clear precisely what type of gun he used. But soon after that incident, Bryant purchased a “high-powered” rifle better suited to the surrounding threats. He would need it.33
Three months later, bombers attacked the home of Claude Bryant’s brother Charlie. Charlie and his wife Ora were staunch activists in the Macomb County movement. With the front windows blown from her house, Ora Bryant emerged out of the smoke with a shotgun and fired on the fleeing terrorists. Ora Bryant was not the only one on guard that night.
Negroes and the Gun Page 29