This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  All these complex factors shaped the decision of exasperated blacks to pick up the gun in Columbia in February 1946. An editorial in the Columbia Daily Herald made it unmistakably plain that the local and state response was aimed at protecting white supremacy: “The white people of the South … will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realizes this, the better off the race will be.”

  Black Americans, however, interpreted what had happened in Columbia very differently. “Negroes even in small communities like Columbia where they were outnumbered almost three to one, do not intend to sit quietly and let a mob form, threaten, and raid their neighborhood,” editorialized Crisis magazine. Columbia’s black community agreed. Their resistance had changed the everyday experience of being black in Columbia and Maury County. Five years later, Sol Blair, a barber and the eldest son of Julius Blair, told journalist Carl Rowan, “Before, Columbia was a hellhole, but we’ve got a good city now. Used to be that when a Negro went into a store uptown, the clerks didn’t see him until he started to walk out. You go in [a store uptown] now and ask for a pair of galluses [suspenders] and those [white] clerks will button ’em up for you.”

  Blair was not alone in thinking that 1946 had been a turning point. A few days after speaking with him, Rowan traveled into the countryside of Maury County to meet and interview Henry Clay Harlan. In 1927, with the help of the sheriff, Harlan’s grandson, eighteen-year-old Henry Choate, had been seized from the county jail by a white mob and hanged from the courthouse’s second-floor balcony. When Harlan’s wife warned her husband against talking to Rowan about the murder, Harlan assured her,

  There won’t be no more trouble… . That’s the one thing I learned from 1946. They now know Negroes have guts. The Blairs and Mortons was the first Columbia Negroes ever to stand up like men. Blood was shed, but it paid off. I dare say times has changed. A colored man used to not have the chance of a sheep-killing dog. But 1946 changed that.

  It was no coincidence that Columbia’s sea change occurred so soon after World War II. Unprecedented numbers of black people had served in the U.S. military in the preceding decades: 380,000 in World War I and more than 1 million in World War II. They had encountered vicious racial discrimination at every level. Even blood was segregated by race during World War II, despite the fact that Charles R. Drew, the doctor whose research had made blood transfusions possible, was an Afro-American. But even though black soldiers faced enemies within the U.S. military, it was the experience of travel and combat that truly changed them. Warfare exposed black servicemen to a wider world, gave them the discipline and knowhow to organize and fight, and gave many of them the experience of killing white men. Black soldiers returned home changed and with a new willingness to fight for and defend their rights, with guns if necessary.

  To be sure, Afro-American soldiers have participated in warfare since the American War of Independence, and their experiences have always intensified the black fight for freedom. But the twentieth century was nevertheless exceptional. With World Wars I and II, a strong and sustained translation of war experience into black civil rights activism began to permanently change the political landscape of race. World War I began closing the doorway through which so much of the nineteenth century’s racial presumptions and practices passed into the twentieth century. Just four decades after the white-supremacist Redemption from Reconstruction, World War I began to make it plain that black silence and submission could not be guaranteed by violence alone. Yet this slowly closing doorway was still partially open as World War II approached, and even at that war’s end the door was not yet locked nor firmly shut.

  Both wars, however, helped a diverse range of organizations to put pressure on the South and on the federal government to recognize the civil rights of black people. Gaining civil rights did not mean simply ending discrimination and violence against black people in the South; rather, it meant establishing black people’s long-denied citizenship and granting their claim to all the accompanying rights and privileges—a claim that the southern Redemption of the past century had sought to deny. SNCC’s Bob Moses would later characterize the question of access to citizens’ rights as one of “constitutional personhood”: who gets to be a full citizen of the United States? As the twentieth century progressed, it became clear that this question not only remained unresolved but also applied to more than black people. It is also contingent on another question: does the federal government have the disposition and will to fulfill its duty of protecting the life and liberty of all its citizenry?

  For much of the twentieth century, local, state, and federal governments demonstrated little interest in guaranteeing either blacks’ safety or their political rights. They often, in fact, stubbornly resisted calls to do so and responded ruthlessly and brutally against those pressing them to meet their responsibilities. With World War I and World War II, however, it became increasingly apparent that the black community could no longer be ignored or silenced and whites’ claim to racial superiority and grip on power would face a powerful challenge and greater pressure to change.

  Prior to World War I, many southern whites also thought that the violence of Redemption and the continuing violence of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan had successfully tamped down threats to white supremacy. They had persuaded themselves that black people had come to accept their inferior standing in southern society. The fact that a new wave of antiblack mob violence surged after World War I can be attributed to white surprise, fear, and anger at discovering they were wrong, that blacks were not content with the southern white-supremacist system or, indeed, with discrimination in the North, for that matter. And this discovery led to more sophisticated and systematic attempts to restructure and reinforce white domination. Influential personages in the federal government shared the South’s alarm and joined southern authorities in blaming civil rights efforts—and even the kind of back talk engaged in by the Stephensons—on subversive ideology, individuals, and organizations. They believed that anarchism, communism, and unions explained black discontent.

  Worries about new black threats grew during World War I and World War II and frequently revolved around fears that whites would be outnumbered and that blacks would engage in armed rebellion. A federal official in Texas reported with alarm in 1917 that “Negroes are organizing all over the state under the name of the ‘National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ and are buying up all the high-powered rifles and ammunition they can possibly buy.” In Georgia during World War II a rumor spread that black soldiers were using the absence of white bosses to stockpile weapons in preparation for a general uprising. But perhaps most bizarre was the rumor that spread at the start of World War II, a rumor that had nothing to do with guns directly, except for what it reveals about the irrational fear held by many white southerners. It was said that black maids influenced by Eleanor Roosevelt—“Eleanorites”—were organizing Eleanor Clubs whose members planned to disrupt the existing social order by refusing to wear servants’ uniforms, work unlimited hours, or respond when addressed by their first names. Surly maids were supposedly going to try to enter white-owned homes by the front door instead of the back door. The alleged Eleanorite motto: “No colored maid in the kitchen by Christmas.” The FBI actually began a formal investigation into the supposed existence of these clubs in 1942.

  Though the American public had never had a problem with employing black women as domestic servants, the U.S. military had always been reluctant to use black men as soldiers. In World War I especially, the military would rather have used blacks behind the front lines than place them in combat. The old myth of black cowardice undoubtedly still prevailed as well, alongside the old fear of guns in black soldiers’ hands. Accordingly, even as Afro-American troops set about risking and often sacrificing their lives for the United States, they were constantly reminded of th
eir second-class status in it.

  A vivid illustration of the discrimination black soldiers faced during World War I is provided by the August 7, 1918, memorandum Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, which was issued to France’s military by the French mission that was liaising with American forces. The French mission had been pressured into issuing the memo by the headquarters of General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of U.S. expeditionary forces in Europe. He, along with other members of the U.S. military brass, objected to the fact that black U.S. soldiers under French command were being treated as the equals of French soldiers—especially because they were also comfortably associating with French civilians in their homes and in public places. The document stressed that French officers needed to understand the sensitivities of race in America and recognize that black people would pose a dire threat once they returned home unless they were consistently separated from whites while overseas. “The increasing number of negroes in the United States (about 15,000,000) would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them,” the document asserted. “The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.” To the credit of the French government, it ordered all copies of the document collected and burned.

  The experiences of black soldiers in World War I are intimately connected to several developments unfolding in the United States at around the same time, events that would recast the racial dynamic in the United States for the rest of the twentieth century. A Great Migration of black people from the South to the North began in 1910. It continued for more than half a century and gradually transformed the U.S. black population from primarily southern and rural to primarily northern and urban. Industrial cities like Detroit and Chicago began to swell with incoming black southerners. Although the migrants found greater opportunity outside the South, they did not escape discrimination and racial friction, especially with regard to housing and the workplace. “The South,” observes one historian, “was never another country even though for much of its history it may have felt and acted like one.”

  Blacks moving north may have found more freedom in terms of job opportunities and even political participation, but in many ways their plight remained the same. In a letter written just a few days after Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois reminded the new president that he had gained the office with the help of black voters. They had sided with him despite the fact that he was a Democrat, a leading member of a party notorious for its white-supremacist outlook. Wilson owed black people something in return, said Du Bois. “The forces of hell in this country are fighting a terrific and momentarily successful battle,” he wrote in his open letter to Wilson. “But the fight is on, and you, sir, are this month stepping into its arena.” Almost immediately, however, Wilson, a Virginian, began the racial segregation of Washington, D.C., starting with government buildings, dismissing many black government employees. In so doing, he sent a powerful signal that the highest level of U.S. authority was committed to white supremacy. It was yet another reminder that black people could expect little or no help from the federal government.

  World War I and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson are part of a period in post–Civil War black life in America that has come to be called “the nadir.” Stretching roughly from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the end of World War I in 1918 (and, some would say, several decades beyond that), these were the years in which race relations in the United States were at their lowest ebb. Stripped of the rights and political opportunities they had begun to enjoy during Reconstruction and rarely finding any white allies in the federal government, blacks either fled to the relative safety of the North or struggled to survive in the South in an almost unimaginable climate of antiblack terror. Between the end of Reconstruction and the U.S. entry into World War I, thousands of lynchings took place, mostly in the South, and often under the pretense of protecting southern white womanhood. Speaking from the Senate floor in 1919, Mississippi senator John Sharp Williams endorsed lynching, and particularly if a black man was accused of raping a white woman. “Race is greater than law now and then,” he asserted, “and protection of women transcends all law, human and divine.”

  Violence continued to be the main tool of white-supremacist authority during the first half of the twentieth century, because the white power structure had not yet completed construction of the more sophisticated legal edifice it would use to protect white supremacy from the 1950s on. Across the rural South, moreover, a system of debt peonage not far removed from slavery was firmly in place. Still, whites were perpetually wary of any black display of self-reliance or assertion of human rights, and their fears frequently erupted in hysterical rampages. In late July 1900, for instance, white rioting swept New Orleans for days during the manhunt for a black laborer and back-to-Africa advocate named Robert Charles. A white policeman had beaten and shot at Charles for sitting on the porch of a white friend; Charles had shot the officer in response but had not killed him. Charles battled infuriated whites alone, allegedly killing several policemen as well as a few vigilantes before being shot and killed himself.

  However, not everywhere was black resistance so successfully hunted down and crushed. In 1906 whites rioted in Atlanta, whose black population, more than most in the South, embodied black resilience. Walter White, who would eventually lead the NAACP, was a boy then and remembered black resistance to it. His family had learned that a mob intended to invade their Atlanta neighborhood, which was close to the city’s downtown, and “clean out the niggers.” There had never been guns in their house, but White’s father acquired some at the insistence of his wife. Recalls White:

  We turned out the lights early, as did all our neighbors. Toward midnight the unnatural quiet was broken by a roar that grew steadily in volume. Even today I grow tense in remembering it. Father told Mother to take my sisters, the youngest of them only six, to the rear of the house, which offered more protection from stones and bullets… . There was a crash as Negroes smashed the street lamp at the corner of Houston and Piedmont Avenue down the street. In a very few minutes the vanguard of the mob, some of them bearing torches, appeared… . In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, [my father] said, “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!”

  The mob moved toward the lawn. I tried to aim my gun, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man. Suddenly there was a volley of shots. The mob hesitated, stopped. Some friends of my father’s had barricaded themselves in a two-story brick building just below our house. It was they who had fired. Some of the mobsmen, still bloodthirsty, shouted, “Let’s go get the nigger.” Others, afraid now for their safety, held back. Our friends, noting the hesitation, fired another volley. The mob broke and retreated up Houston Street.

  White’s memory of the Atlanta riots reveals the same strategy—and many of the same tactics—that blacks used to protect their neighborhood in Columbia, Tennessee, some four decades later and throughout the Black-Belt South in the 1950s and ’60s. Yet even in 1906 this was not an isolated incident of blacks arming themselves for self-defense, nor was it unique to White’s neighborhood. During the same riots, W. E. B. Du Bois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, bought a double-barreled shotgun and sat on his front porch, determined to protect his wife and daughter. “If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived,” he wrote later, “I would without hesitation have spread their guts over the grass.”

  Across the country, with and without guns, black people like Du Bois were willing to resist white-supremacist power—especially violence—by any means necessary. If we exclude here the more complex Native American resistance to settlers seizing their land, it can easily be argued that today’s controversial Stand Your Ground right of self-defense first took root in black communities.

  Most se
lf-defense was personal rather than consciously political, and most was manifested as a local response to white terror rather than as any sort of national movement. Certainly, political modes of resistance cannot be disregarded, and even when white-supremacist terror raged at its worst during the nadir, blacks organized to repel it. In 1887, for instance, T. Thomas Fortune and AME bishop Alexander Walters formed the first national black civil rights organization, the Afro-American League (which changed its name to the National Afro-American League in 1890). Neither the Afro-American League nor later national organizations were organizing armed resistance. But they were organizing political struggle, which reinforced communities engaged in local struggles, where armed resistance was sometimes necessary.

  In these communities, where the law was generally weighted against them, armed self-defense was a natural response to white terror. This was illustrated most dramatically on the Georgia coast in August 1899, in an episode that has come to be known as the Darien Insurrection. A young white married woman in Darien, Georgia, gave birth to a nonwhite child and accused her black neighbor, Henry Denegale, of raping her. Denegale turned himself in, logically—if perhaps naively—thinking that jail would be the safest place for him. Fearful that their father might be seized from jail and lynched, Denegale’s sons mobilized blacks in the community, who then surrounded the jail to protect him. Every time the sheriff tried to move Denegale “for safekeeping,” his allies rang the bell of a nearby church, signaling that more armed men were needed to prevent his removal. Finally, claiming he was faced with “insurrection,” the sheriff appealed to Georgia’s governor, who sent in a state militia unit that placed Denegale on a Savannah-bound train—to the cheers of his black protectors. Denegale was later found not guilty of the rape charge and released, although twenty-three of the so-called insurrectionists were tried, convicted of rioting, fined, and given jail sentences of up to a year of hard labor. Interestingly, instead of the enraged antiblack violence that typically followed such acts of black resistance, a biracial committee was formed in Darien and began working to ease tensions in the town.