This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  “I’ll kill you, you black sonofabitch!” shouted the manager, and he began moving toward the counter to get the pistol he kept behind it. Jim Evers blocked his path, grabbed a large coke bottle from a crate nearby, smashed it on the counter, and thrust the bottle’s jagged edge at the clerk. “You better not go around that counter,” Evers told him. “Move another step and I’ll bust your damn brains in.”

  According to Charles, there were other “mean whites” in the commissary at the time, but they remained frozen in place. The clerk, terrified now, was “shaking like a leaf.” Jim Evers ordered his sons to leave the commissary. “Don’t run,” he told them; “they’re nothing but a bunch of cowards.” The elder Evers followed the boys, backing out of the commissary, his eyes never leaving the clerk or the other shocked patrons. It is amazing that Evers got out of the commissary—let alone made it home—alive, but, as Charles Evers explains it, “Daddy stopped them [because he] wasn’t scared and he’d have killed a few of them before he died. They knew that.” At home that night, Jim Evers sat up with his rifle. “Don’t ever let anybody beat you,” he advised his two sons. “Anyone ever kicks you, you kick the hell out of him.” Describing the character of men like James Evers and explaining how some of them survived in racist communities like Decatur, Charles Evers wrote of his father, “He didn’t smell like fear, he smelled like danger. White folks can be pretty dumb, but most of them leave danger alone. They couldn’t make daddy crawl, so they called him a ‘crazy nigger’ and let it go.”

  Medgar Evers’s wife, Myrlie Evers-Williams, says it is important to understand the impact of the commissary confrontation if one is to grasp a key aspect of her husband’s character: his pride, even in a state that sought to destroy it in black men. “That was one of the stories Medgar shared with me in terms of the respect, love and admiration for his father. He told it with great pride. Charles also has a very vivid memory of this and still tells this story. He told it to me again just the other day.”

  Yet acts of direct defiance like the ones that helped shape the characters of Mrs. Hamer and the Evers brothers were certainly the exception and not without risk—risk of death especially. Mississippi’s tradition of responding with violence to black demands for civil rights and human dignity endured throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Medgar Evers was ambushed and killed in the driveway of his Jackson home in 1963. In 1955, voting-rights activist Lamar Smith, like Evers a World War II veteran, was shot to death on the lawn of the county courthouse in Brookhaven, and Reverend George W. Lee, an NAACP leader, suffered a similar fate in Belzoni: gunfire from a carload of whites blew away the left side of his face. In 1961, NAACP leader Herbert Lee was gunned down by a state legislator, Eugene Hurst, in broad daylight at the cotton gin in Liberty, the county seat of Amite County; Louis Allen, a black witness willing to testify about the shooting, was shot and killed in front of his house after more than a year of harassment that included beatings and jailing. Five years later, on January 11, 1966, the NAACP leader and successful farmer Vernon Dahmer was killed when his farmhouse outside Hattiesburg was firebombed. Thirteen months after that, on February 27, 1967, Natchez NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson, a Korean War veteran, was killed when a bomb planted in his truck exploded. This hardly finishes the roll call of the many murdered across the South in the 1950s and ’60s because of their civil rights activities.

  Such violence frightened most blacks away from directly challenging the entrenched white-supremacist order. By the 1960s, however, the way white-supremacist terrorists were able to exercise violence was more limited than it had been in previous decades. Part of the reason for this was the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which established a Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice that, for all its shortcomings, helped create what Bob Moses has called “a little piece of legal crawlspace” in which blacks’ legal defenders could operate. The act gave the Department of Justice the right to intervene in areas like Sunflower County, where racist violence had previously fallen under the jurisdiction of local white authorities, who often had no interest in investigating it—and who in many cases even abetted or participated in it. Yet although the Department of Justice was permitted to intervene, it did not always exercise that prerogative.

  The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and the limited expansion of federal authority it represented, did not represent a newfound federal commitment to extending civil rights to black people. The federal government remained reluctant to rein in white supremacists and often allied with them. Mississippi politicians such as Senator James O. Eastland—indeed southern Democrats in general—were reelected over and over again precisely because blacks were denied voting rights. Their seniority made these Dixiecrats so politically powerful in Congress that even presidents—Democrats like Kennedy especially, but Republicans also—did not want to alienate them, for presidents often need such powerful personages to achieve their administrations’ legislative and policy goals.

  By the 1950s and ’60s, it had become amply evident that state and federal governments had little interest in supporting the black struggle for civil rights. The Kennedy administration constantly admonished nonviolent activists to “go slow,” be patient, and give southern racists a chance to change. Even some prominent figures in the national civil rights establishment, who were largely ensconced in northern offices, felt that parts of the Deep South were too difficult and dangerous to take on directly. Between this attitude and growing white violence, many southern blacks, especially in rural communities, increasingly felt alone and isolated. Into this vacuum—sometimes sooner and sometimes later, and for reasons as varied as they were—there stepped new political leaders, drawn disproportionately from the ranks of black veterans.

  Sometimes it was tragedy that galvanized brave black men and women to take up the Freedom Movement’s standard. In 1954, in a postwar climate that, at least to some degree, encouraged civil rights efforts, Medgar Evers attempted to gain admittance to the University of Mississippi law school and also became Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP—the organization’s first in the state. Charles Evers’s postwar ambition, by contrast, took him in an entrepreneurial direction, and he left Mississippi in the mid-1950s. Only after Medgar’s assassination in 1963 did Charles commit to full-time civil rights work in Mississippi, picking up his slain brother’s mantle as NAACP field secretary. Later he became a political leader in Jefferson County, Mississippi, where in 1969 he was elected mayor of the city of Fayette. Except for the all-black Delta town of Mound Bayou, Charles was the first black mayor of a Mississippi town since Reconstruction.

  World War I veteran and South Carolina native Osceola McKaine traveled an even more circuitous route to southern political activism and leadership. For a time he tried to organize veterans in Harlem, but he became angry, disillusioned, and alienated because of intransigent antiblack discrimination everywhere he looked in the country. He left the United States and became a cabaret owner in Belgium. In 1939, when Hitler invaded that country, McKaine returned home with what he described as “at least a splinter on my shoulder.” In 1944, he, South Carolina NAACP chairman James M. Hinton, and the editor of the Lighthouse and Informer newspaper, John Henry McCray, helped found a new political party in South Carolina, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). But although the party intended to galvanize black voters, the white-supremacist system blocked it from any meaningful participation in state politics. South Carolina’s General Assembly had repealed laws regulating primaries, and the state’s Democratic Party immediately excluded blacks from voting in them, thus effectively strangling the PDP in its cradle.

  Many veterans seem to have had prewar dispositions that, perhaps activated by military service, were manifested politically after the war. A good example is Aaron Henry, who would become president of the Mississippi NAACP in 1960 and president of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in 1962. Henry thought it was “a fortunate thing” that he was drafted into the army in 1943, shortly after he
turned twenty-one. He was already considered “uppity” by some whites because he wanted higher education and because, unusually, he worked as the night manager of a white motel in Clarksdale. Even in a paternalistic planter town like Clarksdale, where such ambitiousness might not normally have been considered a threat or an attempt to step above one’s place, Henry’s aspirations generated some hostile who-does-this-Negro-think-he-is grumbling. But Henry was also, as he put it, “good at avoiding trouble.” After the war he went to college on the GI Bill and became a pharmacist. He opened a drugstore in Clarksdale.

  Henry’s story was, up until this point, a familiar tale of determined upward mobility within the limitations of Jim Crow Mississippi. But he felt that, as a black man, he needed to do something more than own a drugstore. This sharpened racial consciousness—and its attendant ambition—began before his military service. Encouraged by a favorite high school teacher, Henry read Richard Wright’s Native Son, learned of historic black leaders like Frederick Douglass, and became a youth member of the NAACP. But military service deepened his understanding of both his own potential and the challenges he faced. “Three years in the army taught me that racial segregation and discrimination were not unique to Mississippi,” Henry recalled, “but confirmed my feeling that the situation was worse in my state.” As Henry encountered “separate but equal” in the army, he saw that although the U.S. military’s idea of “equal” was closer to equality than Mississippi’s, “it was still a sham. No matter how equal the facilities, the idea of white superiority and Negro inferiority remained, and we knew it was incongruous with the American idea of democracy that we were fighting for.”

  When he returned home after the war, Henry found that little had changed, but he “sensed undercurrents rising to the surface.” At Coahoma County’s annual black agricultural fair, for example, the crowd booed local newspaper editor J. D. Sneider when he declared in a speech that blacks would never vote in Mississippi. Sneider was followed onto the stage by the editor of a black newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas, who stated that black people would be voting soon and that gaining this right would be accomplished by bloodshed if necessary.

  As if to prove just how wrong Sneider was, Henry registered to vote. No mob had greeted him when he went to the Coahoma County courthouse in Clarksdale, but there had been resistance. The circuit clerk denied knowing that GIs were exempt from paying a poll tax. Henry borrowed a poll-tax-exemption certificate from a white veteran to prove the exemption existed and was finally permitted to register. He began working with the Progressive Voters League trying to get others to register, as well.

  Henry was the first black person in Coahoma County to vote in a Democratic Party primary election, and his experience at the poll may have been the tipping point that cleared the path for his emergence into active leadership in the civil rights movement. When he arrived at the courthouse on Election Day, several blacks he knew were standing around. Like Henry, they had recently registered to vote, but when he asked why they had not yet voted, they told him it was because they were trying to decide who would have “the honor” of being the first to go inside and cast his ballot. “Actually I believe they were waiting to see what would happen to the first Negro who tried to vote,” Henry wrote later. Some of the men were veterans like Henry, but at this moment his particular blend of experiences inside and outside the military seems to have set him apart from even his former comrades in arms. He walked inside the courthouse and voted. “There was no reaction from the whites,” he remembered, “and the other Negroes began to file in and vote.”

  The political assertiveness of men like the Evers brothers and Aaron Henry marked an important shift in America and in the white-supremacist South after World War II, but it was not the only change wrought by the war. The Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an escalating struggle for advantage. And the United States, which during the war had proclaimed it was fighting for the preservation of freedom and democracy, now found those claims being thrown back in its face from both inside and outside its borders. The plight of black people was being held up as concrete proof that America was not an all-inclusive democracy.

  America’s demonstrable racism, segregation laws, and antiblack violence were seriously undermining the image of democratic virtuousness that Washington wanted and needed to project around the world. In the wake of World War II, liberation movements were stirring in the colonies of European nations, many of them critically weakened by the war. America had the opportunity to take the lead in supporting and influencing these freedom struggles abroad by demonstrating a commitment to freedom at home. But if it did not, the Soviet Union could point to conditions in the United States and would have the advantage in the contest for influence in the emerging new nations. Much of the colonized world was populated by nonwhite peoples who took a decidedly dim view of America’s state-sanctioned racism. Meanwhile, many of these emerging Third World nations were discovering that playing the two powers against one another assisted their efforts to secure footholds in their bids for independence.

  Black leaders were quick to use geopolitics to advance the cause of civil rights. In 1945 NAACP leader Walter White, who had fallen out politically with W. E. B. Du Bois, brought him back into the organization’s fold as director of special research. Du Bois’s specific task was to ensure that the newly formed United Nations understood the connection between freedom for the colonized world and racial equality in the United States. All of this made Jim Crow an inconvenience and embarrassment to Washington in a way it had never been before.

  Below the Mason–Dixon line, these signs of global change triggered a fierce political argument among white politicians: on the one hand were those still spewing the coarse racist demagogy of the likes of Theodore Bilbo, and on the other were those trying to use more carefully modulated tones, such as Mississippi’s Senator John Stennis, Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell, and South Carolina’s Governor James F. Byrnes, who was also a former Supreme Court justice and secretary of state. These men had reached the conclusion that the South needed a more refined political rhetoric when it came to race. To do this, argued Senator Stennis, it was necessary to win national sympathy for the white South, and that would require white southerners, especially politicians, to downplay regional appeals and racist rhetoric. “I shall make no appeals based on prejudice or passion, even if the prejudice happens to be one that I share from my natural experience of growing into maturity in the South,” the Mississippi senator said in a 1948 press statement. “We must divorce our thinking from (a) the so-called racial question, (b) the war between the states, (c) the South as a geographic region.”

  Additionally, southern leaders like Stennis also felt it necessary to cultivate certain blacks and accord them the status of “responsible Negroes” whom white people would accept as nonthreatening political leaders—for black people, of course, not for whites. It is white power’s tolerance of these black “leaders” as political voices that makes this chosen few somewhat different from the traditional “house negro” of slavery or the obsequious “Uncle Tom” afflicted with what SNCC’s Courtland Cox, borrowing from Malcolm X, sometimes mockingly used to call the “Is we sick, Massa?” syndrome.

  The white establishment believed that the black leaders they selected actually reflected what the black community thought and wanted, which partly explains their angry surprise on discovering that black people still felt they were being treated unfairly and wanted independent leaders. Many whites found new ways to support their delusions about black satisfaction, placing the blame for blacks’ increasingly public discontent and escalating protest on “outside agitators,” who they imagined were stirring up and generally manipulating contented but ignorant blacks—“good niggers” or “our niggers,” to use the white southern idiom of the time.

  Following World War II a political rhetoric emerged that muted explicitly white-supremacist calls and began instead to incorporate phrases like “states’ rights” and “
protecting our American way of life” into the white-supremacist lexicon. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ordered desegregation of the nation’s schools, the federal government’s intrusion into states’ jurisdictions was regularly denounced in the South, and many whites supported the “nullification” of federal authority by state and local government—an old idea first forcefully argued by South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun as an intellectual argument for slavery’s legitimacy in the years leading up to the Civil War; the argument is that, as members of a confederation of sovereign states, individual states could constitutionally nullify federal actions that subverted their rights. A singing group, the Confederates, became the Barbershop Harmony Society’s 1956 International Quartet Champion with the song “Save Your Confederate Money, Boys; the South Shall Rise Again.”

  Although the southern white elite was growing less and less comfortable with crude redneck racism, it was also disquieted by a changing economic terrain. The war had created a great demand for labor, allowing tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and others on the bottom rungs of rural employment to abandon their jobs and pursue new, more promising opportunities. Many left for jobs in cities, and not just in northern and western cities but in southern cities as well. Labor unions, meanwhile, were growing in power. Union organizing had been quickening just before the war and continued afterward. Tens of thousands of textile workers had struck throughout the Southeast in 1934. The integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) had made some headway organizing in rural communities in the 1930s, and despite its internal difficulties in the 1940s, STFU influence lingered. Between 1946 and 1953 the CIO engaged in Operation Dixie, a union organizing campaign in twelve southern states. “White employers throughout the South complained that only the poorest quality of workers remained on the farms, and they noted that particularly Negroes (and in the Southwest, Mexicans) were becoming ‘too independent’ and having to be humored.”