Margaret Rose was a northern SNCC activist whose particular experience confirms Julian Bond’s generalization. After a series of midnight attacks in neighboring counties, Holmes County, Mississippi, Negroes set up armed nightly patrols. Rose reports that the family she stayed with “were up all night. . . . Mr. on the road patrolling with his new rifle and Mrs. walking from room to room in the house with a shotgun.” In the room where one of the children was sleeping, Rose recalled, “was a large shotgun, waiting.” Rose was a pacifist, but under the circumstances she acknowledged, “I cannot help feeling more secure knowing that they are armed.” In her first letter home, another young CORE volunteer reported, “the first thing that her host family taught her was how to shoot the shotgun which the family kept for protection.”113
Holmes County grassroots activists Vanderbilt Roby and Bee Jenkins report firsthand their preparations in anticipation of night riders. “I was layin’ for ’em,” said Roby, “layin’ in the bushes for ’em many a night. If they made a shot, I was intending to let ’em have it.”114 Bee Jenkins recalled first the preparation, and then the follow-through: “Oh yeah, they had fire. Ready to shoot lead! They . . . started to burning crosses out there and shooting while we would be on the inside meetin’. . . . So the black men would go and buy them some high-powered rifles and started shooting at those cars. They took off and didn’t come back out there.”115
In Leake County, Mississippi, just over the line from the turmoil in Neshoba, the tradition of arms thrived in the all-black town of Harmony. One of the best firsthand accounts comes from a sturdy, copper-colored woman with the incomparable name of Anger Winson Gates Hudson, to her friends, simply Winson.116 People who knew the story called her one of the most extraordinary of the many underacknowledged fighters in the civil-rights movement. She played a crucial role in voter registration and served as president of the Leake County NAACP from 1962 through 2001.117
As the predictable backlash began, Harmony closed ranks and turned decades of government neglect into a tactical advantage. The roads into Harmony were limited and in abysmal condition. Comparing the Harmony experience to other places plagued by terrorist drive-bys, Winson Hudson described Harmony’s ironic advantage. “We had such bad roads so they couldn’t just fly in and out like it was a highway.”
Harmony was a community of poor folk. With everyone living close to the edge, people were more willing to help their neighbors because they might need it next time. Most folk did not have telephones. But the alternative was in some ways better. “We didn’t have no phone,” Hudson explained, “but my husband had an old pickup truck, and others did, and plenty of shotguns. When whites came through here, from Frog Bottom, where we lived, to any border, the Harmony men gave a sign. They’d blow that whistle twice, riding through the community, or else they’d shoot in the air and let ’em know to get on board someone was coming in. The Klan never did come in here or get out without being marked or being known.”
When Winson Hudson and fifty stout neighbors huddled with Medgar Evers in 1961 to establish the Leake County NAACP, Medgar warned them of the risks and that the government would be no help. When someone asked, “Well, who can we look to for help?” Medgar advised what had long been true, “Nobody—you all will have to stick together.”118
This advice proved prescient as local terrorists sparked to the arrival of NAACP lawyers Derek Bell and Constance Baker Motley, who came to help on school desegregation. After a newspaper article publicizing the Negroes’ grand educational ambitions, a motorcade of angry white men sped through Harmony, firing shots at houses along the road. They made one pass unscathed, Hudson recalled. But “they came through again and that time, some of Dovie’s boys—and some more here—were ready for ’em. . . . They ran the whites out of here. They followed ’em back to their homes and shot into them. This stirred things up so bad that even Governor Ross Barnett came out to Harmony and offered to build a junior college up here.”119
As branch leader, Hudson was specifically targeted for a firebomb, but her diligent preparations thwarted the attack. “I was night watching until 12:00 that night, and the Klan was backing into our driveway. My daughter was living with us while her husband was in Vietnam. . . . I told her to get up and rush into the back room. My husband Cleo and I got ready to start shooting, but by this time, the German Shepherd dog had forced the Klan to move on.”
Stymied at Winson’s, the bomb throwers drove down the street and launched a flaming missile at her sister Dovie’s house. Winson’s husband, Cleo, heard the blast and ran up the street to the fight. Winson recalled, “Cleo was shooting, emptying every gun.” Dovie survived the attack, which confirmed for the citizens of Harmony the importance of arming and fighting back. It would pay off again when the men of Harmony responded to an attack on the Harmony community center and “shot the Klan truck all up.”120
Another terrorist tactic was to place bombs in rural mailboxes. If a house was far enough from the road, this could be done without alerting the residents, at least until they opened the box the next morning. When a group of bombers was detected, the word spread quickly and Dovie Hudson put her sons on the lookout.
Fig. 7.5. Winson and Cleo Hudson, 1946, around their tenth wedding anniversary. (From the personal collection of Ms. Hudson.)
“One got one gun and one got the other. And just as they drove up and put the bomb in the mailbox, my boys started shooting. They just lined that car with bullets up and down.”121Although bravado is generally the province of men, Winson Hudson staked her share in an assessment of the community reaction to continued terrorist attacks. “The more they did to us, the meaner we got.”
We have to be cautious about inferring too much from the recorded evidence about the full practice and sentiments of the community. But reports and correspondence of outsiders confirms that the armed stance of Winson Hudson was far from unique. Jane Addams, a white student volunteer from Illinois, lived and worked in Harmony during the summer of 1964. She recorded this in her journal, “Went to Winson and Cleo Hudson’s house, helped (sort of) milk the cows, rode the horse. . . . The whole community was tense the weekend of July 4. Everyone here is armed, but it is a tension of caution, not of fear. . . . Navy teams are scouring the area [for the missing Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner].”122
There is a similar report from the mother of a white summer volunteer who came south to see firsthand the risks her daughter was taking. She was initially worried by a letter that the host family’s house was an “armory with rifles in every room.” But ultimately she was comforted by the widely armed black folk, writing, “Cars stopped here last night; prowlers had been seen. Luckily, no trouble has ensued, because at least one of the homes has four rifles ready, and its owner, a Negro farmer, was quite determined to use them in defense of his home.”123 White law student William Holdes expressed similar sentiments in a letter to concerned relatives back north. Holdes was among a group of summer volunteers staying with a black farmer who “hurries us into the house as soon as we get home . . . [and] has four pistols in the house and certainly has enough fight to use them on an intruder.”124
By the end of her eighty-six years, Winson Hudson would be feted for her civil-rights heroism. She could joke then about coming up rough and how as a young tomboy she could “ride a bucking horse, and . . . kill a hog or anything just like a man.” She was an exemplar of the black tradition of arms. And we can fairly wonder whether, absent the gun, she would have survived to enjoy the accolades.125
Like any cultural phenomenon, the black tradition of arms filtered through the diverse views and experiences of countless individuals. Many people no doubt eschewed firearms and some were quite literally committed to turning the other cheek regardless of the circumstances. Movement stalwart John Lewis is emblematic. His uncompromising pacifism was grounded in deep religious faith, innate sensitivity, and early trauma.
Lewis was certainly familiar with black gun culture, writing, “My brothers all grew up hunt
ing, just like my father. They still love to hunt, every one of them.” Lewis was the exception within the family, admitting, “I’ve never been hunting in my life, never fired a gun, never even held one in my hands. . . . I’d always had a visceral aversion to violence of any sort.” Lewis speculates that his ardent pacifism may have been rooted in an episode that he describes this way:
One of my earliest memories—I couldn’t have been older than four—was of my mother pleading with my father one afternoon not to leave the house. He had a shotgun in his hand, his face was full of anger, and he was trying to push past my mother toward the door. I don’t know to this day what it was about, what had happened out there, beyond that door. But I knew what I saw in my mother’s face. It had anguish and terror written all over it. “Don’t do it!” I remember watching her plead with my father as she pushed her body full-up against his. “Buddy, please don’t do it!” . . . I’ve never heard my mother beg for anything from anyone my entire life, but she was begging my father that day.126
Although he disdained the gun, Lewis exhibited a special kind of courage, even as a very young man. This was evident in his resolve to reject armed guards for the SNCC Freedom House in Greenwood, Mississippi, after a series of terrorist attacks. Lewis seems exceptional here, in that his position about protecting the house ultimately was overruled.127
The public shift within SNCC toward greater tolerance of violence was evident as early as June 1964, when an activist who had been chased by three carloads of men with bad intentions explained in a Jet magazine interview, “I had a shotgun and I’ll tell you if they had come in to get me, I would’ve used it.” The young man emphasized that he was still committed to nonviolence during group demonstrations. But even on this point, views were changing.128
Informants paid to spy on SNCC reported an increasing tolerance for armed self-defense. Soon journalists were reporting that some SNCC and CORE members had retreated from nonviolence and actually were “urging the contrary.” Although many argued that fighting back would only escalate the dangers, some claimed that the capacity for armed self-defense actually reduced the nature and extent of the violence they faced.129
Through all of this, John Lewis remained a fierce advocate of unalloyed nonviolence.130 But it seems he was part of a dwindling minority. One movement historian argues that by the end of the summer of 1964, almost every SNCC worker in the field was armed.131 Based on his own observations, famous pacifist Bayard Rustin wrote about the period that “young people who formerly were preaching nonviolence in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, are now advocating quite openly limited forms of violence.” Julian Bond disputed Rustin’s report, insisting that SNCC did not advocate violence on any scale.132
In April 1965, a SNCC worker was arrested in Georgia for carrying three pistols in his car. The discussion of how to respond prompted talk within the group about the philosophy of nonviolence. Some considered any violence counterproductive. Others argued that SNCC faced different and more direct challenges than Martin King and the SCLC,133 arguing, “They don’t do the kind of work we do nor do they live in the areas we live in. They don’t ride the highways at night.”
Ultimately, the group resolved to hire a lawyer to aid their jailed colleague in Georgia. The broader policy remained officially unchanged, although some accounts say this was just a capitulation to the fact that their nonviolent image was essential to fundraising. Perhaps the true sentiment of the group is measured by a report that most of the members at the meeting were already carrying guns and by the fact that in May 1966, pacifist John Lewis was replaced as SNCC chairman by the more militant Stokely Carmichael.134
In Neshoba County, Mississippi, SNCC search teams accompanied by local black men carrying rifles and shotguns searched the woods for evidence of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. At night, the students stayed with local farmers who, with a keen appreciation of the risk that came with sheltering the northern activists, guarded their homes with guns. The coming militancy of SNCC is indicated by the decision of Cleveland Sellers and Stokely Carmichael to take their turns on armed watch.
In an account published in 1973, Sellers was still reluctant to identify the farmer who had sheltered them. He described their “hideout” as a remote country place owned by “an old farmer whom I’ll call Jones [since] his life would be in danger if I revealed his name.” Jones told Carmichael and Sellers, “I believe that the peckerwoods burned the church and then killed them boys because us church folks was working with the COFO voter registration people. . . . Y’all welcome to stay here and search as long as you want though.” Then, with somber practicality, he told them, “I’ll be sitting on the front porch with my shotgun every night and there’ll be a man in the barn behind the house with a rifle.” As the conflict swirled in Neshoba County, bands of angry white men drove through the black section, shooting randomly. In at least two recorded instances, blacks returned fire and wounded one man.135
One Mississippi activist whose parents also hosted SNCC workers argued that being protected by Negroes with guns transformed Stokely Carmichael’s views on nonviolence. John Jackson was just a young man when Carmichael stayed in Lowndes County with his family. According to Jackson, Carmichael was struck by the idea that “my father had guns and that’s why white people didn’t mess with [Carmichael] when he was here.”136
Just like John Lewis, SNCC field secretary Bob Moses was a committed pacifist, his views informed partly by his graduate degree in philosophy from Harvard. Setting policy for student volunteers, Moses adamantly opposed anyone carrying weapons. But Moses was pragmatic about the prospects of drawing grassroots folk to his rigorous pacifism.137
In a strategy session discussing how to react to self-defense preparations of local folk, Moses advised that they simply had to accept the fact that “self-defense is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can’t affect it. It’s not contradictory for a farmer to say he’s nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder’s head off.”138 This was essentially Hartman Turnbow’s philosophy wrapped in better grammar.
Later, Moses acknowledged, “I don’t know if anyone in Mississippi preached to local Negroes that they shouldn’t defend themselves. Probably the closest is when I asked Mr. E. W. Steptoe not to carry guns when we go out together at night. So instead he just hides his gun and then I find out later.”139 E. W. Steptoe was from an earlier generation than the young activists. He might have privately scoffed at their naïveté but was too kind to openly deride their pacifist idealism. He simply ignored it.
One student reported that Steptoe “never went out of the door unarmed,” carrying a variety of concealed weapons and at a minimum a derringer in his boot. Inside the house, the abundance of guns evoked a kind of wonder on the part of one activist who recounted, “It was just marvelous. . . . Steptoe was always so wonderfully well-armed. . . . You’d go to Steptoe’s and as you went to bed he would open up the night table and there would be a large .45 automatic sitting next to you. Just guns all over the house, under pillows, under chairs.”
Fig. 7.6. Amite County NAACP President E. W. Steptoe, 1963. (Used with permission from the Harvey Richards Media Archive.)
This was an extension of the family practice where Steptoe’s brothers, five sons, and men of the extended family stood armed watch around the farm during tense periods.140 And as the details accumulate, it is easier to sympathize with Steptoe’s practice of arms. New York Times reporter Claude Sitton noted that Steptoe, like many folk, lived out on a rural road where neighbors were farther away than hollering distance. And sometimes neighbors themselves were a worry.
Steptoe’s closest neighbor was a white man named E. H. Hurst. He and Steptoe had been childhood friends. But when Steptoe became president of the Amite County NAACP, Hurst, now a state legislator, turned on a dime. At one point, he threatened Steptoe’s life. Then in the fall of 1961, Hurst shot and killed NAACP voter-registration activist Herbert Lee. Lee was unarmed, but the s
heriff pressured black witnesses to say the shooting was self-defense. Hurst was exonerated without spending a day in jail.141
Although he never articulated any grand statements about state failure or malevolent bureaucracies, E. W. Steptoe’s actions spoke his assessment of the situation. While there were surely people of goodwill out there, they were irrelevant to his immediate safety. For that, he was on his own. His personal arsenal and practice of arms reflected that simple truth.
In Forrest County, Mississippi, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer adhered to the E. W. Steptoe school of armed preparedness. Dahmer had pushed the NAACP agenda since the early 1950s when he sued the county sheriff for interfering with black voting efforts. Just like Steptoe, Dahmer was relatively safe against economic reprisals. He owned 200 acres free and clear and drew income from cattle, a sawmill, and a little grocery store.
When northern students came to help with voter registration, some of them stayed with Dahmer and reported back about the “guns, pistols and rifles . . . placed throughout his house.” As a demonstration of his preparedness and as a hopeful deterrent against night riders, Dahmer would periodically “just take one of his guns and shoot in the air, just to let folks know he was alive, well and intended to protect his property.” When tensions escalated through the early 1960s, Dahmer and his bride, Ellie, sometimes supplemented by local NAACP members, would switch off during the night, between sleeping and sitting up with guns. They continued this practice for several years, up through 1965.142
The scene repeats in Leflore County, Mississippi, with NAACP president Dewey Green. After terrorists shot into his home in March 1963, he went to the sheriff and explained that he had made preparations to shoot back next time and that any further attacks would mean a gunfight.143 Dewey Green was clearly not alone in his philosophy or his preparations.
Within the Leflore branch membership, Mrs. Laura McGhee was also the target of threats after allowing activists to use her farm as a meeting site. Aided by her three sons, Laura McGhee sat watch from the front porch of her rural farmstead, cradling a Winchester repeating rifle of the same style that Ida Wells had recommended to black folk generations earlier. When midnight terrorists stuck an explosive in her mailbox, her boys opened fire on the car. The FBI and local police came out the next day and gave the boys a warning. Laura McGhee answered “fine,” that next time she would do the shooting.144
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