Although antiblack violence and terrorism shot up dramatically after World War II, as it had after World War I, it was not working as a means of staunching black challenges to white supremacy. Those challenges were increasing and intensifying. In the political arena, especially, blacks were taking advantage of newfound strength. Afro-American migration to the North and West had made black voters increasingly important to the Democratic Party. And even in the South—in Georgia especially, but elsewhere in the region as well—following the war, it briefly seemed possible that white reformers, union members, veterans, and blacks, all seeking good government, greater fairness, and modernization, might form an effective political coalition. Ellis Arnall, who served as governor of Georgia from 1943 to 1947, had ended the state poll tax and did not resist when the Supreme Court ordered that the state’s historically all-white primary elections be opened to voters of all races. (The Democratic Party primaries had excluded blacks, which, in the one-party South, meant that they were effectively excluded from the electoral process.) In an effort at electoral reform, some white veterans even began working with the black veterans who had organized the Georgia Voters League, which aimed to increase voter-registration numbers and voter turnout in elections. In 1946, when Representative Robert Ramspeck resigned from Congress, a special election was held to fill his vacant seat in Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, and it was thanks in large part to Atlanta’s black voters that attorney Helen Douglas Mankin won; she had been the only one of seventeen candidates to actively seek black votes.
Still, this political progress had its limits. In Georgia, for instance, the state’s county unit system (similar to the presidential Electoral College) gave rural Georgia disproportionate power in primary elections. Even as blacks seemed to be gaining ground politically—at least in Atlanta—the county unit system remained the key determinant of Georgia elections until it was ended in 1962. It had not been used in the special election that Mrs. Mankin won in 1946, but it would cost her victory in the next election—even though, with significant help from black voters, she would win the popular vote.
For many whites in Georgia and other states in the South, any “representative democracy” that included black people did not, should not, and could not represent white people. Racist political campaigning continually raised the specter of communism and “mongrelization” or—as that deep southern white fear was sometimes more softly expressed—“social equality.” During the fiercely fought 1950 North Carolina senate race between the virulent racist Willis Smith and the prominent liberal Frank Porter Graham, Smith issued a flyer titled “White People Wake Up” that read in part, “DO YOU WANT Negroes beside you, your wife, and daughters in your mills and factories? Negroes eating beside you in all public eating places? … Negroes teaching and disciplining your children in schools?” By successfully fusing racial fear and anticommunism, Smith won the election by nearly 20,000 votes.
There really was no substantive white support for blacks’ freedom struggle in the South. Many white southerners who thought of themselves as liberal because of their opposition to old-school racial demagoguery and corruption were in truth liberals or progressives only in the most limited sense. Even many of those members of Georgia’s white community who—like Mrs. Mankin—were beginning to take meaningful steps away from the old racist order did so mainly because they needed black people in new and very specific ways. The “essence of the liberal position in Georgia in 1946,” wrote journalist Laura Wexler in her investigation of the lynching at Moore’s Ford Bridge of two black couples in Walton County, was that “black people didn’t deserve equal rights, but they did deserve a safe environment in which to work for white people.” The new, more moderate language of racism, meanwhile, made the ugly ideology and policies it was employed to defend more politically palatable to northern whites, winning wider and more open sympathy and support for segregation and white supremacy, especially from the radical right-wing fringe outside the South that described itself as “conservative.”
As the war decade drew to a close, the loud, angry race baiting of southern white demagogues quieted somewhat in the upper levels of the political establishment—on the floor of Congress, for instance—although Senator Eastland and others still delivered periodic inflammatory rants against blacks. Lower down on the political ladder, however, on the levels that affected everyday black life, not much had changed. Although the white-supremacist system of the old South was weakening in spite of Klan terrorism and other violent attempts to prop it up, it was still very much in place. But increasingly blacks were unwilling to abide it socially or politically. Furthermore, blacks had also been affected economically by significant changes that had been unfolding since before the war.
Following the war, black veterans were prepared to contribute to the labor force in new ways. The military had trained them, had provided many of them with the basic education they had not received at home, and had given them new skills. Mostly deployed in the army’s Quartermaster, Transportation, and Engineering Corps, a great many black soldiers had been employed in areas from which they had been excluded in civilian life. And although many of their jobs were officially designated as “unskilled,” the soldiers nevertheless got useful training and experience—as truck drivers, road builders, construction workers, and so on—that were transferable to civilian life. The Red Ball Express—trucks driven by black soldiers, often under heavy enemy fire, to supply combat units moving across Europe after D-day—is a good example of the way wartime experiences provided blacks not only with military training but also with technical and logistical knowhow that would give them an advantage in the civilian labor market after the war. According to Ulysses Lee, a member of the Office of the Chief of Military History from 1946 to 1952, the variety of ways black troops were employed in World War II “far outstripped” anything seen in World War I. The rank-and-file black soldier of World War II was also much better educated than his counterpart in World War I. “Not surprisingly,” Lee continued, “black soldiers anticipated parlaying [their] wartime training into better jobs when they returned home.” According to the Army Research Laboratory, 61 percent of black soldiers believed their military training would help them find a better job than they had before the war. Only 39 percent of white GIs shared this optimism.
The effects of this economic transformation were potentially just as earthshaking as blacks’ strengthened political presence in the United States. Many black soldiers, especially southerners, had been unskilled laborers before the war, but on returning home only a third planned to return to their previous occupations and employers; two-thirds planned to find other work. Such intentions and abilities—to say nothing of the desire for and anticipation of upward mobility that underlay them—threatened the southern agricultural system, for southern agriculture, although rapidly mechanizing, still depended on black labor. But these changes in the black workforce also threatened to disrupt the region’s dominant sociopolitical system, which assumed black servility. Many black veterans’ newfound ability to support themselves and their families with work that earned more than a minimal wage undermined the submissiveness on which the system depended. At the same time, it bolstered black veterans’ self-esteem and increased their demands for respect and a better life.
Even the guarded public posture of many veterans after the war could not hide their desire for something better than they had known before it. One Clarksdale, Mississippi, veteran described both his ambition and his caution on returning home: “We didn’t push anything in that time because [whites] was running everything… . I didn’t entertain the idea that I was going to change it. No, but I had the idea, look I’m trying to better myself.” However careful they were politically, he and many other veterans agreed of their military service that—as one veteran put it—“we were fighting for what we didn’t have.” Their military experiences gave black veterans a depth of determination whose importance to the oncoming southern freedom struggle cannot be ove
rstated. And it sometimes manifested itself in an aggressive assertiveness that stoked tensions with white supremacists back home. Doyle Combs, who was seriously wounded in the war and went on to become the leader of the Toccoa, Georgia, NAACP, recalled his feelings after returning home with a distinctly militant anger that would resonate mightily in the decade to come: “Since I lost a portion of my body to protect my own rights, I would die for my rights and I would kill for my rights. And I was going to vote if I had to kill somebody to vote.”
Monroe, North Carolina, does not usually feature prominently on the map of black political struggle, but in the two decades following World War II the town embodied these crucial trends in the black freedom struggle—and it was perhaps their most dramatic illustration. Whites there, as elsewhere in the postwar South, were worried both by small-scale black political insurgencies and by perceptible and growing changes in blacks’ attitudes toward the white-supremacist system. Defiance of the established order was becoming more and more common, and resistance to white rule seemed to be breaking out all across the region.
Monroe would come to represent not only black veterans’ refusal to submit to the old white-supremacist order once they returned from the war, but also their willingness and capacity to engage in well-armed and well-organized self-defense in the pursuit of their long-denied liberties. This vital aspect of the freedom struggle in Monroe lasted well into the era of nonviolent protest, and, perhaps more than in any other part of the South, it illustrates the complex relationship between nonviolence and armed self-defense. Sit-ins, or more precisely stand-ins, began in Monroe in 1957, almost three years before what is now generally considered the first instance of this form of student-led nonviolent direct action in the South, but that has been forgotten. Guns always accompanied nonviolent struggle in Monroe, and that is well-remembered and has always been a much more awkward subject.
Black political struggle in Monroe is often associated with the leadership of Robert Williams, whose dramatic expulsion from the NAACP and subsequent exile from the United States have overshadowed what should be the main focus of his and Monroe’s story: a strong black community that would not be pushed around by white supremacists. Leadership, after all, does not negate community, and although military veterans featured prominently in the black leadership that emerged in Monroe after the war, they were not the only important actors there. Williams would become the most visible personality among those veterans, but the story of the black campaign of armed self-defense in Monroe did not begin with him. Rather, it began in 1946 with what should have been a relatively inconsequential event: an argument between a white man and his black employee. As events in Columbia, Tennessee, and elsewhere in the postwar American South attest, however, nothing in the interactions between blacks and whites was inconsequential if it involved Afro-American defiance. And indeed, the argument in Monroe led to the most explosive of events: the murder of a white man by a black man.
Bennie Montgomery had served in the army during World War II and had been severely wounded. He came back to Monroe with a steel plate in his head, and according to Williams, his high school classmate, he was never the same after his injury. After the war he returned to work on the W. W. Mangum farm just outside Monroe. One Friday night at the end of May 1946, Montgomery, drunk, wrecked his father’s car. The next day, after half a day’s work, he asked for his wages so that he could go into Monroe and have his father’s car repaired. It has not been reported how Montgomery asked for his pay and half a day off, but Mangum seems not to have liked his tone or manner, and the farmer began kicking and slapping him. Montgomery fought back. At some point during the ensuing struggle, Montgomery pulled out a pocketknife and slit Mangum’s throat, killing him. Not long afterward he was arrested while sitting in a Monroe restaurant drinking beer, his clothes still covered in blood.
The local Klan wanted to lynch Montgomery, but he was rushed out of town, tried, found guilty of murder, and put on death row at the Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. On March 28, 1947, he was executed in the prison’s gas chamber.
That should have been the end of the story. However, when the state of North Carolina sent Montgomery’s body back to Monroe for burial, Ku Klux Klansmen—still angry that he had been whisked out of town before they could snatch him from jail—demanded that his body be turned over to them, not to his family. The Klansmen wanted to mutilate his body, probably by dragging it through Monroe’s streets as a public display of the fate that awaited black men who assaulted whites. They also threatened to kill the funeral parlor director if he dressed the dead soldier in his uniform for burial or allowed an American flag to be draped across the casket, as was customary in burial services for veterans.
As these threats mounted, a group of local black veterans met in the barbershop of Booker T. Perry, himself a World War I veteran, and decided that none of this was going to happen. They began planning for the defense of the funeral parlor, its director, and Montgomery’s body. Williams was among them. Like most of the other men who gathered at Perry’s barbershop, he was not long out of the army.
When the Klansmen approached the funeral parlor, three dozen rifles, including Williams’s carbine, were trained on their motorcade. No one fired a shot, but it was unmistakably clear to the Klansmen that the black men lined up in plain sight outside the funeral parlor were prepared to use the weapons they carried. Whatever plans the Klansmen had disintegrated. They fled. “That was one of the first incidents,” said Williams years later, “that really started us to understanding that we had to resist, and that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns.”
This may have been one of the first instances of concerted, armed self-defense by black people in Monroe, but it would not be the last. Monroe resident Dr. Albert E. Perry is not nearly as well remembered as Williams, but the next major confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan would center on him. In the summer of 1957, after a child drowned in one of the dangerous, unsupervised swimming holes the area’s blacks were relegated to using, Perry and Williams took a group of black children to Monroe’s municipal swimming pool. It was located on the grounds of the Monroe Country Club, which had been built with $200,000 of federal funds plus another $31,000 in local tax money. They were denied entrance but “stood in” wearing their swimming suits and holding towels. They repeated this over several days.
Dr. Perry was well-off and well-educated, and he had come to represent a renewed spirit of activism—and a revived NAACP—in Monroe. As president of the Union County Council on Human Relations, he had already written a mild letter to the city’s Recreation Board requesting that the board “provide supervised swimming for all citizens.” The World War II veteran was relatively new in town: a native of Austin, Texas, he had trained in Monroe at Camp Sutton during the war, fallen in love with a local girl, married her, and settled in the city as a doctor after finishing at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, following the war. He was also a member of the NAACP.
Perhaps because the Union County branch of the NAACP was rather like a social club for Monroe’s small black bourgeoisie, the town’s white population had tolerated it. But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision ended that tolerance; suspicion of and hostility to NAACP branches, regardless of their local character, intensified across the South. Under pressure from Monroe’s white powers and a resurgent North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, which reacted angrily to the Court’s decision, most of the middle-class members of the Monroe NAACP branch deserted. Only six members remained in 1955 when they voted the rough-hewn Robert Williams into the presidency of the dying branch; most of those remaining members then canceled their own memberships. Dr. Perry stayed with the organization as its vice president.
Perry and Williams slowly rebuilt the branch. They reached out to working-class blacks in Monroe and to other members of Union County’s grass roots—laborers, farmers, domestic workers, the unemployed—getting many of these people involved with the NAA
CP for the first time. They also reached out to ex-servicemen, several of whom had helped safeguard Bennie Montgomery’s body almost a decade earlier. “We ended up with a chapter that was unique in the whole NAACP,” Williams wrote later, “because of [its] working class composition and a leadership that was not middle class. Most important, we had a strong representation of returned veterans who were very militant and didn’t scare easily.” The Monroe chapter of the NAACP would prove itself unique in another way, as well. After becoming NAACP branch president, Williams took the unusual step of establishing a National Rifle Association chapter—the Monroe Rifle Club, also called “the Black Guard”—whose ranks soon filled with black members. Williams also secured “better rifles” via mail order and secondhand purchases.
Dr. Perry’s prominence in the black community, his education and relative affluence, and even his Catholic faith had all made him a target of white fear and resentment. But the swimming pool controversy raised the antipathy to a new level. From a Ku Klux Klan perspective, bare black skin in the water with bare white skin was akin to sexual assault. As the swimming-pool protests continued and white-supremacist anger mounted, the Klan stepped up its efforts at intimidation and began regularly driving through the black community, shouting insults and threats, and shooting randomly into the air—and sometimes at homes. Such piecemeal assaults on the black community were only the beginning.
On the night of October 5, 1957, after holding a rally complete with a cross burning, a heavily armed motorcade of Klansmen headed toward Perry’s home on the outskirts of Monroe. However, an attack had been anticipated. Helmeted men from the NAACP, with automatic weapons, were dug in behind sandbag fortifications and hidden in other strategic places around the house. When the Klan convoy arrived at Perry’s home and opened fire, they were immediately met with disciplined, withering volleys from the defenders. The men shooting back at the Klansmen were apparently not shooting to kill, for the gunfire was aimed low, but they were definitely determined to drive the Klansmen away with the threat of death. “We shot it out with the Klan and repelled their attack,” Williams recalled later. “And the Klan didn’t have any more stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community.” The next day Monroe’s City Council banned Ku Klux Klan motorcades.
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed Page 14