This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  Neither Williams nor Perry could possibly have imagined then how controversial—or how influential—their branch of the NAACP would become. Because of their leadership, the tactics and strategies of armed self-defense—as practiced by persons and communities under assault for their civil rights efforts—became nationally visible. It was in Monroe, moreover, that the principled practice of armed self-defense first converged with the modern civil rights movement’s emergent tactics and strategies of nonviolence. Yet this confluence has often been oversimplified as a clash between violent and nonviolent ideas and approaches to civil rights struggle. This oversimplification ignores the more complex tensions between the priorities of local black communities and the priorities of national civil rights organizations—tensions that are embedded in and that much more accurately describe events in Monroe between the swimming-pool protests of 1957 and Williams’s eventual exile from the United States in 1961.

  Williams’s militant self-defensive tactics quickly attracted the attention of the national civil rights establishment. Arguing for the necessity of organized self-defense in a September 1959 article in Liberation magazine, Williams praised Martin Luther King Jr. as “a great and successful leader of our race,” but he also insisted that black southerners often had to face “the necessity of confronting savage violence” with violence of their own. “I wish to make it clear that I do not advocate violence for its own sake, or for the sake of reprisals against whites,” he wrote. “Nor am I against the passive resistance advocated by Reverend Martin Luther King and others. My only difference with Dr. King is that I believe in flexibility in the freedom struggle.”

  Responding in the same magazine a month later, King acknowledged that nonviolence as a philosophy could be difficult for the average person to grasp, but he also worried that even the sort of restrained violence that Williams was advocating put the black struggle at risk because it could “mislead Negroes into the belief that [violence] is the only path and place them as a minority in a position where they confront a far larger adversary than it is possible to defeat in this form of combat.” In this, King was expressing a reality that southern blacks had long understood: overt or preemptive displays of force by black people—like that organized by black World War I veterans in Houston, Texas, in 1917—ran the risk of eliciting an overwhelming and brutal response by local and national authorities.

  But King also acknowledged that there could be value in armed self-defense. “When the Negro uses force [emphasis added] in self-defense,” the advocate of nonviolence wrote in his response to Williams, “he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects.” In this exchange, King seems to have misunderstood Williams as inviting blacks to kill whites with impunity. For his part, Williams may have equated nonviolence with pacifism, not fully understanding the forcefulness of nonviolent direct action.

  This exchange between Robert Williams, a gruff working-class leader, and Martin Luther King Jr., a prince of the black Baptist church who was rapidly rising to national prominence as a civil rights leader, forecast the political and class tensions that would be increasingly significant inside the southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. Tensions between local grassroots organizers and the national civil rights establishment were growing rapidly as the 1950s drew to a close. One telling episode was the infamous 1958 “kissing case” in Monroe, when a young white girl, six-year-old Sissy Marcus, playfully kissed a seven-year-old black boy, David “Fuzzy” Simpson, as nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson—also black—stood by. The two boys were quickly arrested for “molestation” and sentenced to reform school until they reached the age of twenty-one. After the boys had been detained for three months, North Carolina’s governor bowed to public outrage, international media attention, and outside legal assistance and pardoned them. The legal assistance came primarily from New York attorney Conrad Lynn, who became involved because the NAACP said it would not take the case, arguing that it did not take on “sexual” cases. Eventually, however, embarrassed by its lack of involvement, the organization did involve itself with the case.

  Whether because of political disagreements with Williams or because of his strategic choices, the national NAACP hierarchy simply had no respect or affection for the Monroe branch leader. NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins dismissively called him “the Lancelot of Monroe,” and NAACP counsel and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall even suggested to the FBI that the agency investigate Williams. Yet ironically, whatever the basis of the NAACP’s objection to Williams, it does not seem to have had anything to do with his use of guns. In 1959, at the very convention that suspended Williams from the NAACP, the organization passed a resolution affirming the right of self-defense.

  4

  “I Wasn’t Being Non-Nonviolent”

  Every what the Mississippi white man pose with, he got to be met with. I said, “Meet him with ever what he pose with. If he pose with a smile, meet him with a smile, and if he pose with a gun, meet him with a gun.”

  —Hartman Turnbow, Mississippi farmer

  Now you can pray with them or pray for ’em, but if they kill you in the meantime you are not going to be an effective organizer.

  —Worth Long, SNCC field secretary

  As the 1960s opened, white-supremacist terrorists, galvanized by mounting challenges to the South’s racist status quo, increased their attacks on civil rights workers and leaders and on the ordinary black men and women who made up their constituency. Local and state governments supported this violence, and it was largely ignored by the federal government. And as the attacks and assassinations went on unabated, the question of how best to deal with such dangers also grew.

  Most southern organizations formed to struggle for civil rights did not adopt the tactics of armed self-defense as visibly as did Robert Williams and the NAACP branch in Monroe and Union County, North Carolina. However, many local NAACP leaders routinely traveled armed because they were in constant danger of murderous attack, especially following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. At the same time—and quite unexpectedly—the use of nonviolent forms of direct action was also growing, especially among younger participants in the movement. Perhaps the most renowned campaign of nonviolent protest was the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s, but student sit-in protests—which erupted in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and spread rapidly—made nonviolence, as both tactic and philosophy, an even larger part of black political conversation. However, as the Freedom Movement began to emphasize work in rural communities, it became clear that nonviolence—both the practice and the idea—had its limits. Activists and organizers associated with nonviolent organizations such as SNCC, CORE, and SCLC increasingly found themselves working with local supporters who were strongly inclined to shoot back at night riders and other terrorists.

  Most of these activists and organizers were young and inexperienced, fresh off college campuses or high schools. For many of them, grassroots community organizing was a new approach to the civil rights struggle, and it posed new, unexpected challenges. Their key supporters in local communities—men and women who were often their parents’ age or older—had survived white-supremacist terrorism earlier in the century and were able to openly aid these organizers in part because they were willing to use their guns. This presented the young activists with an unanticipated dilemma. How should they respond? Should they resist the possession and use of guns by the local people they were involved with in rural communities? Or should they accept it, knowing that the very weapons that seemed so out of place as part of a nonviolent protest movement might also save their lives? Few had any training in nonviolence beyond a few workshops to prepare them to sit in or walk picket lines. Even fewer had any grounding in nonviolence as a philosophy or way of life. So, to put it simply, what would these young men and women do when confronted with guns—and, indeed, what could they do? The answer to these questions would be found not in the cla
ssroom or church but, rather, in the day-today work of community organizing.

  The story of Joe McDonald reclaiming his shotgun in Ruleville, Mississippi, in the summer of 1962, told in the prologue, offers a window onto the ways young organizers could influence the attitudes and behavior of the men and women at the grassroots level. Yet it also reveals the ways the organizers had to change in order to win their trust and support. For although organizers might have come to these communities with at least a vague notion of nonviolence as a tool for change, the reality was that black men and women in the Deep South had developed their own ways of coping with the threat of white violence, and in engaging with these local community organizers found themselves being transformed at the same time that they were effecting transformation.

  Ruleville mayor Charles Dorrough confiscated Joe McDonald’s gun following nighttime attacks in the black community by night riders. The mayor accused SNCC organizers—myself among them—of planning and executing the attack. Mr. Joe needed the gun not only for self-defense but also for the simple but primary purpose of putting food on the table, so he took a copy of the U.S. Constitution to Ruleville’s city hall, pointed to the Second Amendment, and demanded his gun back. It was an act of profound bravery, but it and Mayor Dorrough’s response both speak to the complex range of challenges, risks, and small victories found in civil rights struggle at the grassroots level. Clearly, neither segregation nor white-supremacist power was defeated by the mayor’s returning Joe McDonald’s shotgun. But victories in the South were almost always small. To be able to organize in rural communities like Ruleville, organizers had to win the support of people like Mr. Joe, people willing to work with them despite the danger. The problem was large and movement efforts only addressed part of it, so organizers had to be realistic about how much change they could effect and had to be careful to temper the expectations of the people they worked with. “One of the things I felt in Mississippi was that you always had to understate everything,” explained SNCC’s Bob Moses years later. “What you had to show people was that you were actually biting off a small piece of the problem… . [You] were always afraid that you were going to get people thinking that something was going to happen that wasn’t going to happen.” This concern affected priorities and even the language organizers used in these communities. The problems facing black people in the Deep South were hundreds of years old, and intimately familiar to local people. There was not much about the local dimension of the problem that they did not already know, so they would see through any exaggerations about change organizers might make. Approaching them required a hardheaded honesty that was consistent with their lived experience, the facts of their lives, which organizers had to learn as they worked.

  In attempting to build meaningful relationships with black people in these rural communities, organizers quickly came to appreciate the fact that, in their lives, danger was always nearby. Understanding and organizing local black communities in the Deep South was not the same as mobilizing for a protest march or a sit-in. “It isn’t [done] by getting people who are going to respond to the big speech,” says Bob Moses, thinking back to those dangerous days. It was slow, mostly quiet work, because any public challenge to the existing order of white supremacy could get organizers or their local supporters killed. Danger was not abstract; it was immediate and intensely personal, affecting the entire community—family, neighbors, and friends. This was quite different from putting ourselves at risk. And we organizers knew, as surely as we knew the sun would rise, that it was our presence that triggered white violence. One of the most painful movement memories is of the funeral of NAACP leader Herbert Lee, when the murdered man’s anguished wife walked up to Bob Moses and SNCC chairman Charles “Chuck” McDew and devastatingly charged, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!”

  Yet risk was already a fact of life for many black people in the South, and although they could not eliminate it, southern black communities had learned how to minimize risk long before the existence of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and even the NAACP. They knew when they were in danger and when they were not, and they did the best they could to protect themselves. It made perfect sense, therefore, that local blacks responded cautiously to the arrival of our small group of organizers in Ruleville, while measuring the value and consequences of the new risks that accompanied our presence.

  The presence of civil rights workers stoked a deep-rooted fear among local Afro-Americans. Often confused with apathy, this fear was complex. One obvious reason for it was the terrorism that local blacks knew could be brought to bear against them at the slightest hint of a challenge to the prevailing white-supremacist order—terrorism that ranged from Ku Klux Klan violence to Citizens’ Council reprisals, from individual attacks to collective punishment. Another component of what could look like apathy was the fact that local people generally did not have the option of leaving; they were held by family, work, even loyalty to place, or sometimes simply debt. Movement organizers—almost all of whom came from outside the community where they were working—always had the option of leaving. And finally, through the use of force and violence, fear had been cultivated in black communities for centuries.

  There was widespread concern in Ruleville’s black community that the very presence of organizers was dangerous. “They were afraid of us because the white folks didn’t like us,” remembered Mac McLaurin. There was also concern for the young workers themselves. Whether or not local Afro-Americans were willing to work with them, no one in the black community wanted to see the organizers killed. McLaurin recalled that when Mayor Dorrough picked him, Landy McNair, and me up at gunpoint as we walked along the side of the road in Ruleville’s Jerusalem Quarters, “People were peeping out of the windows, scared. And after we got back they told me, ‘we never expected to see you all again.’ Why? I asked. What did you think was going to happen? ‘We thought you all was gonna be in the river.’” The fact that we were not murdered was a small victory and became part of the local conversation about the presence of “the nonviolents” in town, advancing our work in Ruleville and Sunflower County.

  As organizers we needed to convince the black populace that we would remain present and committed when—as it inevitably did—the going got terrifyingly rough. That sort of trust could not be built overnight. People would judge our commitment much as they judged the weather or crops or the danger they faced from the Klan, the county sheriff, and his deputies. And they would judge at their own pace, using skills that the necessities of survival had forced black communities to develop over centuries in America. “The basic first step was earning the right to involve the people you were working with,” remembered Bob Moses of those early organizing days when life-threatening danger hung over every potential action. Organizers needed to fit into the local culture while at the same time challenging oppressive and restrictive parts of it. And since they were, after all, asking people to put their lives at risk, they had to earn the right to organize. That could not be accomplished by pretending to be more capable of defending themselves or the people who cooperated with them than they actually were. As Moses noted,

  It’s all dangerous. You are carrying danger with you [and the local people] have to figure out whether or not you’re for real. You have to earn that. You don’t earn that [by engaging in] some kind of charade about being violent—they know better—or by being boastful about what you’re going to do to whoever messes with you. They’ve already been through too much to think that that kind of talk means anything. Their very lives have depended on the ability to read people as distinct from reading books. And that ability is what allows you to earn their respect.

  Organizing this way literally and figuratively required putting one foot in front of the other; going from door to door and field to field, knowing that even those men and women most open to joining them would be cautious.

  Although Moses’s observations reflect his experiences in rural Mississippi, organizers confronted similar challenges everywhere th
ey went in the South, in cities as well as in the back country. In a 1961 field report describing his first days in Albany, Georgia (a small city, not a rural town), SNCC’s southwest Georgia project director Charles Sherrod explained what was involved in taking the first steps toward earning the right to organize:

  The first obstacle to remove … was the mental block in the minds of those who wanted to move but were unable for fear that we were not who we said we were. But when people began to hear us in churches, social meetings, on the streets, in the pool halls, lunchrooms, nightclubs, and other places where people gather, they began to open up a bit. We would tell them of how it feels to be in prison, what it means to be behind bars, in jail for the cause. We explained to them that we had stopped school because we felt compelled to do so since so many of us were in chains. We explained further that there were worse chains than jail and prison… . We mocked the system that teaches men to be good Negroes instead of good men.

  These first steps of contact and conversation were what ushered in serious publicly visible challenge to white power. Most people in these communities were accustomed to keeping their dissatisfaction well hidden. In 1896, a time of great antiblack violence across the South, Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote poetically,