One neighbor described the scene this way: “That car was fired on so many times coming out of there . . . by people straight up the street all through there. . . . And he was shot at when he turned the curve, coming back towards town. . . . And you could hear people hollering ‘here he come.’” When the car passed his house, Claude Bryant ran out with his new rifle and fired a full magazine at the fleeing bombers. Afterward, the rumor spread that wounded terrorists were taken out of state for treatment in order to suppress the story of Negro triumph.
The Bryants and their neighbors understood that the fight was not over and followed up by organizing regular armed watches. Annie Reeves, whose husband also helped guard Claude Bryant, recounted sitting in her living room with the lights out, a rifle clutched in her lap. Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Nobles, active members in Claude Bryant’s NAACP branch, made their own preparations and stood ready to protect their neighbors. During the worst of it, Matthew Nobles camped on the roof of his house with a rifle while his wife slept fitfully, listening for trouble through an open window, her own rifle at the ready.34
In Cambridge, Maryland, several seasons of black protest fueled a backlash in 1963 when white mobs roved through black neighborhoods. Negroes responded with gunfire, and a defense group formed to guard the home of local leader Gloria Richardson.35 SNCC36 activist Cleveland Sellers arrived to assist in the Cambridge movement and found that “guns were carried as a matter of course.” When one of the local folk offered Sellers a pistol to carry, he was torn between philosophy and practicality. “I decided when I accepted a gun that it was just as necessary to the work we were doing as stirring speeches, picket signs and marches against blatantly racist presidential candidates.” (George Wallace was scheduled to appear at the Fairgrounds.)37
The same year in St. Augustine, Florida, Korean War veteran and NAACP activist Robert Hayling organized a defense squad after voter registration efforts and protests of continuing segregation prompted shotgun attacks on his home. Hayling bought a cache of rifles and shotguns and made them available to the group of local men who guarded his home and the surrounding neighborhood.38
In Natchez, Mississippi, armed Negroes guarded NAACP leader George Metcalf.39 In Hattiesburg, community men led by army veteran James Nix guarded the homes of Dr. C. E. Smith and J. C. Fairly.40 A similar defense squad was formed by war veterans in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Tuscaloosa defense squad protected the homes of movement activists, rescued teenage demonstrators from a mob, and repelled a Klan attack.41 And in October 1963, when a carload of Klansmen assaulted activist Goldie Eubanks, Negroes with guns repelled the attack and killed one white man.42
The defense groups are only slice of the story of the modern movement. From the leadership to the grassroots, individual preparations for armed self-defense were pervasive. In Arkansas, Daisy and L. C. Bates fought at the forefront of the Little Rock integration struggle. Daisy Bates served as president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP Branches. She was mentor and advisor to the “Little Rock Nine,” who put their skins on the line to integrate Central High School, calling them “her children.” Daisy and L. C. Bates were also clear-eyed on the utility of armed self-defense.
Daisy Bates pleaded for federal protection after a firebombing and cross burnings at her home. Federal officials declined to intervene on the argument that they had no jurisdiction. Local law enforcement was overtly hostile and put their primary effort into harassing the armed black men who gathered to guard the Bates home. Against the backdrop of state failure and malevolence, Daisy Bates stood on ancient prerogatives. During the worst of the conflict in Little Rock, the NAACP leader herself repelled a midnight assault with a “volley of gunshots.”
Firearms were a familiar tool for the Bateses. In 1934, Daisy and L. C. were stopped by the police in Monroe, Louisiana, on a “Negro Law” charge of “investigation.” It came to nothing, except for the record of L. C.’s pistol in the glove compartment. In this, L. C. Bates channeled both community and family tradition. At the end of his life, L. C. listed among his heroes his grandfather who, a generation earlier, in Mississippi, intervened to stop an assault on two of his workers and ended up shooting a white man.43
Daisy Bates confirmed the surrounding culture of arms in a 1959 letter to Thurgood Marshall. She confided that that she and L. C. were under continuing threat and “keep ‘Old Betsy’ well oiled and the guards are always on alert.”44 This would not have surprised Marshall, who found the Bateses’ home “an armed camp” when he stayed there in September 1957 while litigating the Little Rock School Board’s delay of court-ordered integration.45
Today we talk casually about the sacrifices of the civil-rights era. But except for going through it, there is no way to really appreciate what the Bateses endured. Even if we rolled back the clock and could see Daisy on television, perfectly turned out in the latest fashion, we would fail to appreciate that she was sleepless after a new cycle of death threats and that L. C. had sat all night by the window with a shotgun in his lap.
Fig. 7.2. Daisy Bates, “the First Lady of Little Rock.” (Courtesy of the University of Arkansas, Special Collections.)
Putting up a strong front was a calculated strategy that masked the wilting effects of economic reprisals and continuing physical threats. People would hear about the firebombs and bricks through the window of the neat ranch home that Daisy and L. C. had saved so long for. But only when Daisy disclosed it in her memoir would the public appreciate that she regularly carried a pistol and came perilously close to firing with effect in the fall of 1958 when a carload of toughs rammed into the rear of her station wagon.
When she stopped to survey the damage, they jumped out and threatened to drag her into the street. Daisy Bates’s next action demonstrates the tenuous line between legitimate self-defense and something else. An angry young man banged the hood of her car and spit, “You and those damn coons are responsible for the closing of our school. I ought to pull you out of that car and beat you to a pulp.” From a casual look at her (she was stunningly beautiful), the young man might have failed to appreciate that Daisy Bates was boiling over with rage, fully sick and tired of threats and plots and the indignities of a lifetime.
Recounting it later, she admitted, “I was so infuriated that I released the lock on the door and simultaneously released the safety catch of my pistol.” Like Du Bois and Walter White before her, Daisy Bates stepped right to the edge. It would be worth money to know what caused the young bigot’s companion to grab his jacket sleeve and pull him back with a wary, “Leave her alone. C’mon, we’ll get her later.”
Calculating avoided hazards in a precise way is difficult. We have seen many instances where black folk were armed, but not very effectively. Reading Daisy Bates’s account, the intuition is that she was carrying a “woman’s gun,” a low-powered pistol of the type one army colonel derided as inferior to a hatchet. And, looking at her, one would certainly expect Daisy Bates to carry a lady’s gun. But her account of a subsequent early-morning change of guard at her home belies that intuition.
Armed black men were now guarding the Bates home around the clock. But they had jobs and families, so it was not easy. Daisy Bates understood the sacrifice. One morning around daybreak, she went out to her car, where the man on the midnight shift had camped and told him, “You can go now. It will be daylight soon. I can’t sleep, so I’ll sit in the car for a while.” In the thin light of dawn she found a moment of peace, and later described how she, “rested the .45 automatic pistol in my lap while Skippy our cocker spaniel went to sleep on the seat beside me.”46
Although it is unclear what gun she was carrying the day the car full of toughs crashed into her station wagon, the .45 automatic pistol in her lap that subsequent calm morning was no dainty lady’s gun. From 1911 through 1985, this was the gun that left legions of scrawny GIs flinching and complaining about the stout recoil from launching 230-grain slugs at almost a thousand feet per second.
We don’t know whether it was her
.45 automatic or something else that Daisy Bates fired in October 1957, after she was jerked awake by something crashing through a side window. She rose, gun in hand, to spy a seething little man in her driveway, poised with a vaguely lit missile. She loosed five quick shots that sent him running to a waiting car that sped off.47
Following the victory in Little Rock, Daisy Bates traveled around the country, speaking to various audiences, and sometimes recounted episodes of armed resistance by the Negroes of Little Rock. She told about the mother of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, who sent her husband to town to “buy me a gun with plenty of bullets.” And depending on her audience, Bates also revealed that she carried her own pistol and knew how to use it.48
One biographer says that Daisy Bates shaped her stories to the circumstances. For some groups, she became more judicious and claimed she and L. C. never actually aimed at anyone.49 Her appreciation of the need to craft her gun stories to the audience was evidence of the savvy that made her a potent political foe and a valued ally.
When Robert Williams asked the NAACP board to reverse Roy Wilkins’s decision to discharge him from leadership of the Monroe NAACP, Wilkins anticipated the political fight and knew that Daisy Bates’s support would be vital. On one telling, Wilkins bought the Bateses’ allegiance with a promise of $600 per month into the coffers of their ailing newspaper.50
Even with such blandishments, Daisy and L. C. Bates were initially equivocal about criticizing Robert Williams. They also remained firm on the importance of private self-defense. Their newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, editorialized in May 1959 that “nonviolence never saved George Lee in Belzoni, Miss., or Emmett Till, nor Mack Parker at Poplarville, Miss.”51 But by July, when the NAACP gathered in New York for its annual meeting, Daisy Bates supported Roy Wilkins and provided what some gauged as the decisive condemnation of Robert Williams.52
The importance of Bates’s support of Wilkins in the Robert Williams affair is underscored by the turnout for the opposition. As we saw in the first chapter, Williams drew considerable support from the grassroots and from the leaders of the branches. He also recruited a formidable ally from the old guard. Now, toward the end of his life, the old lion, W. E. B. Du Bois, entered the fray in support of Williams. As always, Du Bois’s sharpest tool was his pen. He deployed it deftly in what was nominally a review of an early biography of Martin Luther King. The review was a platform for Du Bois’s criticism of King and endorsement of Williams. “I was sorry,” said Du Bois, “to see King lauded for his opposition to the young colored man in North Carolina who declared that in order to stop lynching and mob violence, Negroes must fight back.”53
Daisy Bates’s stance at the NAACP convention was ironic considering what awaited her at home in Little Rock. A few days after returning from New York, the Bateses were again victims of harassment and a bomb attack. Daisy sent the obligatory telegram to the Justice Department in Washington, describing burning crosses, smashed windows, and an explosion. Then, at a more practical level, she supplemented the private guards by taking her own turn in the armed watch, again wielding the .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol.
She would have known by then that this was the same model gun that Robert Williams had strapped to his hip during the conflicts in Monroe, North Carolina. The irony was not lost on Williams, who wrote her a sympathetic letter with a touch of sarcasm. “I’m sorry to hear that the white racists have decided to step up their campaign of violence against you. I deeply regret that you took the position you did on my suspension. It is obvious that if you are to remain in Little Rock you will have to resort to the method I was suspended for advocating.”54 Strong community support for Williams was still in evidence two years later, at a rally in Harlem, celebrating the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. People still angry about Williams’s dismissal hooted down Daisy Bates and pelted Roy Wilkins with an egg.55
Fannie Lou Hamer is exactly the right name for the iron-willed sharecropper’s daughter who, after getting death threats for daring to register to vote, quipped, “Well, killing or no killing, I’m going to stick with civil rights.” Hamer shared little with Daisy Bates in appearance, deportment, diction, or other markers of class stratification that have long been part of the black American experience. But she surrendered nothing to Bates in her commitment to the freedom struggle.56
Fannie Lou Hamer personified the grassroots of the movement. She grew up chopping cotton in the Mississippi Delta and told wrenching stories of how tenuous and desperate that existence could be. The despair is palpable in her account of the whole family scouring picked fields, hoping to find enough cotton scraps to buy dinner. Worse was the episode where a jealous neighbor poisoned the family’s three precious mules. “We were doing pretty well. . . . That poisoning knocked us right back down flat. We never did get back up again. That white man did it just because we were getting somewhere.”57 Fannie Lou Hamer would indeed get somewhere. She would stick with civil rights through the storms of the 1960s, registering folk to vote, pressing the struggle as a leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, capturing the hearts of callous politicians at two national political conventions, and founding the National Women’s Political Caucus.
In some ways, Hamer epitomized the nonviolent theme of the movement. After discrimination, abuse, and beatings, she still urged a scriptural response, “Baby you gotta love ’em. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But Fannie Lou Hamer also exhibited an earnest practicality that epitomizes the black tradition of arms.58 Asked how she survived so many years of racist aggression, Hamer responded, “I’ll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” In this approach, Hamer followed the example of her mother, Lou Ella Townsend, who as a fieldworker at the turn of the century had been threatened, assaulted, and raped. Unbowed, Townsend soldiered on, comforted by a pistol concealed in a bucket.59 There is some chance that this is the same pistol that Fannie Lou handed to her overnight guest, Stokely Carmichael, when he stayed at her home during a SNCC voter-registration campaign.60
Fig. 7.3. Fannie Lou Hamer, circa 1964. (Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, August 22, 1964. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)
After-the-fact claims like Hamer’s “I had a gun and was ready” are easily second-guessed. Who knows what would have happened on the alternate timeline. But on the basic preparations, Hamer’s assertions are confirmed by other observers in at least one case where the community responded to a death threat against her. Neighbor Len Edwards recalled how, shortly after the Williams Chapel adjacent to Hamer’s home was firebombed, the threat came that Hamer would be killed. Friends hustled Fannie Lou to a neighbor’s house and “got shotguns and waited for the cars to drive by.”61
The image of a shotgun in every corner of Fannie Lou Hamer’s bedroom may seem implausible until we consider that she was probably talking about a typical gun of poor folk—that is, the single-shot shotgun, which was generally cheap, durable, and, with the appropriate loads, versatile enough for self-defense, hog killing, and hunting everything from rabbits to deer.
We don’t know whether Hamer’s guns were passed down, bartered, or bought with scarce cash. But for people familiar with the culture, the image of a couple of single shots leaning in the corner or behind a door is quite common. And many folk, even poor folk, would save and sacrifice to buy or trade for superior tools.
Annie Colton Reeves of Pike County, Mississippi, describes this kind of saving and sacrifice. The Reeveses were as poor as anyone but had invested in a heavy-caliber Winchester rifle, a light-caliber .22 rifle, a shotgun, and two handguns. Annie recalled her father’s advice that “it’s better to have ammunition than to have food.” This was perhaps a calculation that with ammunition one could get food. And that calculation was evident in the training of the six Colton kids to be as familiar with guns as they were with the tools of the fiel
d. On the other hand, everyone understood the additional possibilities. This was apparent when Annie brandished a gun and chased off a party of menacing young men with the warning “whenever you get ready to go to hell, you come back.”62
Women like Annie Colton Reeves and Fannie Lou Hamer offered no high theories about armed self-defense versus political violence. They projected the black tradition of arms in simple words and deeds and in stories passed down of armed black heroes and defiant last stands. Prominently in the first biography of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer proudly recounted a tale from her childhood that had been repeated many times before.
The year was 1924. Fannie Lou was only eight, but the episode kept a hold on her for decades. The venue was a delta plantation where many black men were still working in essential peonage. Joe Pullum was one of them. Pullum was good enough with numbers to know that he had been underpaid. When the plantation owner handed him a wad of cash to recruit more workers from the countryside, Pullum took the money as his due and fixed up his house. The planter tracked down Pullum at his cabin, confronted him, and then shot him. Bleeding from his wounds, Pullum ducked into his house, got his Winchester, and killed the planter where he stood. As Hamer tells it, “a white man that was sitting out in the buggy saw this and he lit out for town. . . . The Negro knew what this meant. As soon as that man got to town, he be coming back with a lynch mob and they would hang him. So he got all the ammunition he had and went on out to Powers Bayou and hid in the hollow of a tree.”
The mob did indeed pursue Joe Pullum. “But he was waiting for them,” said Hamer. “Every time a white man would peek out, he busted him. Before they finally got him, he’d killed 13 and wounded 26. . . . The way they finally got him was to pour gasoline on the water of the Bayou and set it afire. . . . When they found him, he was . . . lying with his hand on his gun.”63
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