Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Laura McGhee’s quip might be dismissed as just bluster until one considers other manifestations of her ferocious commitment to basic justice for herself and her family. After one of her boys was arrested during a SNCC protest, Laura McGhee went to the police station with lawyer Bob Zellner. When the desk officer directed Zellner behind closed doors, Laura McGhee wanted to go too. The deputy pushed her back and told her to wait outside. Bob Zellner’s account of what happened next cannot be improved upon.

  She says, “The hell I can’t [go in]. I come down here to get my son. . . .” He says “You can’t go in there” and she says Boppp! hit him right in the eye, right in the eye as hard as I’ve ever seen anybody hit in my life. . . . I remember his eye swelling up and I remember thinking to myself “God, I didn’t know you could see something swell up. . . .” And he’s losing consciousness, sliding down the door. Meanwhile, Mrs. McGhee is following him on the way down. She’s not missing a lick—boom, boom, boom!—and every time she hits him, his head hits the door. Meantime . . . he’s going for his gun reflexively, but the man is practically knocked out. . . . They’re trying to get from inside the office. The chief is going, “What the hell’s going on? Let us out.” By this time the cop is slumped down on the floor. When he started going for his gun I . . . pounced on him, simply holding his gun hand. . . . In the meantime I’m saying to Mrs. McGhee, . . . “I think you’ve got him enough now,” cause she was trying to get around me to give him another pop. Meantime . . . every time the chief would try to open the door it would hit the man—whomp—in the head again. I said, “Chief, Ralph is trying to shoot Mrs. McGhee.”

  Laura McGhee was promptly arrested. But she escaped prosecution after Bob Zellner convinced the police chief that it would be bad for everyone if the story got out. It was a signal of an important turn, said Zellner, evidence that “a new day is coming when a black woman can just whip the yard-dog shit out of a white cop and not have to account for it.”145

  It is not clear whether Bob Zellner ever learned about Mae Catherine Falls, who worked the cotton fields for a northern textile concern for two dollars a day and in 1967 finally had her fill of an abusive field boss who goaded and threatened workers with his walking stick. After Mae Catherine sassed him, a witness reports, “Mr. Waites got out like he gonna hit at her . . . she got that stick and beat him nearly to death. He left there runnin’. Run off and left his truck. She was the only black woman ever whooped a white man back in the 60s.”146

  Laura McGhee and Mae Catherine Falls were probably more volatile than most. Many folk recoiled from confrontation and gunplay not on philosophical grounds but simply because it was dangerous. And if we need a reminder about the hazards of jumping into that cauldron, even fully armed and committed to self-defense, the death of Forrest County NAACP head Vernon Dahmer is a stark reminder.

  In 1966, Dahmer was spearheading the NAACP’s voter-registration drive. He collected and delivered the poll taxes for people who were afraid to go down to the courthouse. Then he got on the radio and announced that he would pay the tax out of his own pocket for any Negro who could not afford it. The next night, his home was bombed. Dahmer stormed from the flames, gun in hand, and laid down a hail of lead at the fleeing bombers. But Dahmer’s gun did not save him. He died from burn wounds shortly after the attack, his last words, an admonition to black folk about the duties of citizenship. “People who don’t vote,” he chided, “are deadbeats on the state.”147

  People would draw different lessons from episodes like the murder of Vernon Dahmer. For committed pacifists it was evidence of the futility of violence. But for many black folk on the ground, it was either a neutral signal or actually cut the other way. These contrasting views were evident when Amzie Moore of Cleveland, Mississippi, set down a pistol on the night table in the room where a young white activist was staying overnight. The young man recoiled, stood on principle, and rejected the gun on the argument that violence would imperil the movement. Moore said that he might need it to deal with more immediate dangers during the night.148

  The multiple unpredictable hazards of armed confrontation are illustrated richly in the circumstances that finally sent Monroe, North Carolina’s Robert Williams fleeing the country, charged with kidnapping. The charges eventually were dropped. But the circumstances that provoked them show how guns are a volatile catalyst and how Williams’s brand of self-defense edged dangerously close to and perhaps over the boundary against political violence.

  After the national leadership ousted him as president of the Monroe branch of the NAACP, fueling his storied debate with Martin Luther King, Williams actually stepped up his activism and formed connections with a variety of more radical groups. With the following he garnered in his fight with the NAACP, Williams expanded his newsletter, the Crusader, to national circulation, garnering new friendships and financial support. When Williams wrote in the Crusader that the spring of 1961 would witness the payoff of four years of protests to integrate the publicly funded Monroe Country Club swimming pool, supporters in Harlem raised money to buy guns for the “TOTAL STRUGGLE AT THE POOL.”

  While Williams would say that he never intended to initiate violence and therefore remained under the umbrella of legitimate self-defense, he surely was pursuing group political goals and planning to shield that effort with guns. This was not the easy case of self-defense that most people in the movement would find sympathetic. It was a step in to the treacherous territory of angry, tribal confrontation where just a spark might lead to conflagration.

  In June, Williams began leading protests outside the Monroe pool. First they were ignored. But by the fourth day, patience had worn thin and threatening crowds gathered. They hurled the standard litany of epithets, and then several white men fired guns into the air. Williams and the protesters retreated but promised that the next day they would stage a “wade in.”149

  The threat of Negroes in swimsuits, pushing their way into white people’s water was explosive. On the afternoon following announcement of the wade-in, a car tried to run Williams off the road. The next day, Williams and three other protesters headed to the pool. At an intersection known as Hilltop, they encountered a crowd of several hundred whites. From across the road, a man driving an old demolition derby car with all the window glass removed floored the accelerator and crashed into Williams’s car. The crowd surged.

  Williams had a rifle, a 9 millimeter pistol, and his .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol in the car. As he worked a round into the chamber of the rifle, a police car pulled up and one of the officers jumped out and demanded that Williams surrender the gun. For standard episodes of self-defense, the arrival of police ends the claim of legitimate self-help. So it complicates things that Williams pushed the cop back with the butt of the gun and then aimed the muzzle straight in his face. Williams’s nightmares were filled with scenes of state agents abetting and even leading lynch mobs. He told the officer basically that.

  From the other side of the car, another officer approached and started to draw his gun. But Jay Vann Covington picked up the .45 and beat him to the draw. Both cops backed off. The police report records the episode as “displayed a 45 automatic pistol. No arrest was made.” Williams and his passengers escaped the Hilltop intact. But the hysterical cry of an old man in the crowd would resonate over the coming days. “God damn,” he cried, “God damn, what is this Goddamn country coming to that the niggers have got guns.”150

  Williams reported the Hilltop incident to the FBI and asked for protection. But given his recent associations, including an acquaintance with the Friends of Cuba, the agents were more interested in his politics than in protecting him. But the FBI was at least paying attention. Internal reports record an upsurge in racial violence following the Hilltop episode, including a black man named Strand being pulled out of his car and beaten and two carloads of men chasing an unnamed black man who emptied his revolver at them.

  Monroe officials attempted to diffuse things by draining the swimming pool and passi
ng an ordinance limiting public protests to ten pickets. Municipal bureaucrats also met to discuss a restraining order prohibiting Williams from carrying firearms.

  In the meantime, Williams busied himself delivering the latest edition of the Crusader newsletter. Police followed him all over the county as he made deliveries. As he finally turned back to Monroe, they pulled him over and said he was under arrest for a broken taillight. Since they had been following him all day, Williams feared that the stop was just a ruse to carry him off someplace and beat him or worse. Pinched in between two cruisers, Williams followed them as instructed until he saw the chance to break away. Then he raced home, with two cruisers in pursuit.

  When the police pulled into Williams’s driveway, they faced Mabel at the kitchen door with a 12-gauge shotgun and Robert emerging from around her with a rifle. With their nine-year-old son, John, looking on, Mabel warned the cops that they would not take her husband without a warrant. The officers withdrew and nothing more was mentioned about taillights.151

  By now, Williams was getting daily death threats. And when a car full of men drove by and fired two shots at the house, the Crusader reports that they were surprised by “a quick, almost spontaneous retaliatory firing.” Shortly after that, a series of fires broke out at local businesses. All of these were white-owned, except for one owned by a black schoolteacher who had written to the Baltimore Afro-American, pleading with northern Negroes to stop sending guns to Robert Williams.

  The events in Monroe also drew attention from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and unaffiliated activists who were expanding the Freedom Rides and other desegregation work to North Carolina. The new activists in town provoked menacing drive-bys of armed white men and two cases where black men fired warning shots into the air.

  With tensions high, Williams’s home was constantly surrounded by members of his rifle club. There was a typical crowd of close to forty black men congregated outside one evening in late August, when up strode future United States senator Jesse Helms, son of “Big Jesse” Helms Sr., whose brutal arrest tactics Robert Williams witnessed up close as a boy.

  In a notable show of courage, or perhaps the hubris of a superior cast, Helms walked up alone, under the hard stares of the crowd of black men. Helms was working as a commentator for a Raleigh television station and had staked his territory with on-air criticisms of newspaper editors who were “so hostile to the Klan but so apologetic for racial extremists [like Martin Luther King] on the other side.” Helms had requested an interview with Williams. But most of his questions focused on whether Williams was a Communist and Williams cut it short. Before he left, Helms channeled the bewilderment of so many of his class, asking why Williams was such an agitator when his “father was a good man [who] never gave us any trouble.”152

  The next day, Sunday, the Monroe Nonviolent Action Committee sent several racially mixed groups to white church services. Then they planned a march to the courthouse for speechmaking. Word about Negroes and sympathizers barging into white chapels spread quickly. At the courthouse, an angry crowd of several thousand, including Klansmen from South Carolina and Georgia, was waiting. Any spark to set off the violence would do. The intolerable affront turned out to be Constance Lever, a white girl from the North, marching shoulder to shoulder with young black men. The crowd turned to a mob and surged. Armed black rescuers drove to the perimeter and ferried some of the protesters away. There were multiple exchanges of gunfire throughout the city.

  As night fell and rumors spread about a coming wave of Klan violence, people gravitated to Robert Williams’s house. Williams had long prepared for this sort of conflict. He assigned clusters of armed men at predetermined spots in the blocks surrounding his home. With preparations made, Williams gathered the crowd and preached his version of self-defense. They should fight gamely, he said, but respect the limits of their task. “They’ll come in here burning your homes, raping your women, and killing your children,” Williams warned. But then he cautioned, “The weapons that you have are not to kill people with—killing is wrong. Your guns are to protect your families—to stop them from being killed. Let the Klan ride, but if they try to do wrong against you, stop them. If we’re ever going to win this fight we got to have a clean record. Stay here, my friends, you are needed most here, stay and protect your homes.”153

  Williams’s instructions illustrate the long difficulty of navigating the boundary that defined the black tradition of arms. As conflicts moved from the extremes into the middle of the spectrum, the distinction between self-defense and political violence became muddied. The conservative counsel said to give the political violence boundary wide berth and avoid this perilous middle ground. But in every age, there had been aggressive men who pressed hard on the boundary and some who launched full over into it.

  Robert Williams was fully into the danger zone. He would continue to characterize his preparations as defensive. And defensive they were, in the sense of fixed emplacements set in anticipation of aggression. But as the organized work of a group engaged in political struggle, his preparations were manifestly plans for political violence. And but for the navigation error of a hapless white couple, the story of Monroe might have figured far more dramatically in our collective memory of the civil-rights movement.

  As dusk settled on Monroe, Bruce and Mabel Stegall, a white couple from nearby Marshville, drove unwittingly into the midst of Robert Williams’s defensive gauntlet. Mabel said later, “we were just surrounded by these niggers, and we couldn’t move. There were hundreds of niggers there, and they were armed. They were ready for war. I think they must’ve been expecting a bunch of white folks to come over through there and they was going to wipe them out.” According to one of the black eyewitnesses, Bruce Stegall was drunk and did not help his predicament by questioning, “What’s the matter with you niggers? Whatcha pointing those guns at me for? I likes niggers.”

  With the crowd closing in, Robert Williams fought through and pulled the Stegalls into his house. Mabel said later, “He acted like he wanted to be nice to us . . . Like he wanted to let us go.” And that was Williams’s claim as well. But the Stegalls wanted Williams to escort them out to safety. Williams had his own problems and responded frankly, “Look lady I didn’t bring you in here and I’m not going to take you out. You’re free to leave any time you get ready.” This statement, along with the decision to move the Stegalls’ car out of the street to Williams’s driveway, would fuel charges of a “hostage situation” and send Robert Williams fleeing into exile. Mabel Stegall said later, “I was not even thinking about being kidnapped, the papers of publicity and all that stuff is what brought in that kidnapping mess.” But at the time, with rumors swirling that the police chief had promised to hang him in the courthouse square, Williams weighed the risk of fighting and decided to flee.

  With his family in tow and four guns and five hundred rounds of ammunition between them, Robert Williams skulked out of Monroe through the closing circle of police, a fugitive on the run. They traveled to New York, then into Canada. From there they settled in Cuba, as personal guests of Fidel Castro, who quickly exploited the opportunity. Within a few weeks of his arrival on the Crocodile Island, Williams taunted his Yankee pursuers over the airwaves as host of a show called “Radio Free Dixie,” beamed from Cuba across the southern United States. It was not the result he planned, but given the risks he courted, things could have turned out far worse.154

  Considering that he is the embodiment of the nonviolent civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King is a surprisingly strong affiant of the black tradition of arms. One might be tempted to explain his seeming support of armed self-defense in the storied exchange with Robert Williams as just a reluctant accommodation of the practical and political fact that others in the movement did not have a pristine commitment to nonviolence. More telling are King’s personal decisions about armed self-defense. And on that score, at least in the early stages, King embraced defensive arms with the earnest practicali
ty of generations of black folk before him.

  King rose to prominence out of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which was sparked by Rosa Parks’s December 1955 defiance of segregated seating rules. The boycott was the brainchild of E. D. Nixon, who served intermittently as president of the Montgomery NAACP and as an organizer for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rosa Parks worked for Nixon. It was Nixon who retained white lawyer Clifford Durr to get her out of jail. On the evening of her release, Nixon sat at her kitchen table and prevailed on her to fight.

  With Parks on board, Nixon then estimated the revenue generated by Negroes using the bus lines and imagined wielding it as a sword. His wife thought it was a silly plan. It was December. Black folk would not walk to work and shopping in the cold. But E. D. Nixon persisted. His first impulse was to organize a boycott through the NAACP. But he was at that stage a past president of the organization, and the acting head of the Montgomery branch was reticent to undertake the protest without going through channels at the national office.

  Roy Wilkins offers a reliable account of what happened next. “Nixon decided on an alternative course of action: he turned to the city’s black churches for help. He got on the phone and started calling every minister in town. Reverend King was the third name on his list.” King listened politely to Nixon’s plan and said, “Brother Nixon, let me think about it for a while.”