This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  We wear the mask that grins and lies

  …

  We sing, but oh the clay is vile

  Beneath our feet, and long the mile.

  Humor, double entendre, and misdirection in tone and language were all traditionally used to conceal dissatisfaction behind a variety of masks. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage provides a useful descriptive label: “Resistance assumed the guise of what may be called discursive insubordination.” This “language of dissent,” as Brundage calls it, can be seen in the spirituals that were born in the bondage of slavery and are still admired for their beauty but are rarely appreciated as songs of resistance. Although many black people projected a sense of deference and subordination to whites, that did not mean they accepted the injustices done them; rather, it meant they had learned the practicalities of survival in a world where the odds were heavily stacked against them. Movement organizing in the 1960s was an attempt to change those odds—an attempt connected, it must be emphasized, to similar efforts much older than SNCC, CORE, SCLC, or even the NAACP.

  That Joe McDonald slipped his mask by asserting his gun rights cannot be disconnected from the links of trust forged by the conversations Charles Sherrod describes or the earned respect that Bob Moses considers so crucial. The relationship with the community was everything. And slowly the community began to reveal its real face. The first impressions organizers made counted for a lot. For instance, McLaurin and his SNCC colleagues—myself among them—were brought to Ruleville by local NAACP leader Amzie Moore. Significantly, he did not introduce us to the black community by placing us at the head of a protest march into the town square; rather, he brought us to a Sunday service at Mount Galilee Missionary Baptist Church, where we were introduced to the congregation. After the service, Amzie handed us over to the McDonalds and left.

  We got to know the local people and the community in conversations driven as much by curiosity as by political purpose. We learned from Joe McDonald and others what it was like to live and work in Ruleville and Sunflower County. At the same time, he, his neighbors, and others wanted to know about the family history and personal backgrounds of the three young SNCC workers now living among them. They were asking the “Who are your people?” questions that form—or at least once formed—so important a part of relationships in southern culture. We moved with careful, deliberate steps, because even within the confines of the black community it was impossible to avoid danger, as demonstrated by Mayor Dorrough’s sudden pistol-toting appearance as we walked down one of the dirt roads in Jerusalem Quarters.

  It was this kind of presence that earned cooperation and support. People made small commitments that were visible in the choices they made, often at great risk, and those choices had a profoundly persuasive wider effect. It helped put eighteen people on the bus that left Ruleville for the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola; it informed Fannie Lou Hamer’s decision to stand up to the owner of the plantation where she worked; and it helped Joe McDonald go down to city hall and demand his shotgun. Individual choices like these were the starting points for a much broader, organized, and collective effort to challenge white supremacy. “To battle institutions we must change ourselves first,” SNCC’s Lawrence Guyot once observed, and it was not difficult to see those sorts of personal changes everywhere in the Deep South in the early 1960s.

  Mississippi in 1962 was a totally repressive state, the most repressive in the country. It was a “closed society,” choking in the tight grip of white supremacy. And what helped keep white supremacy so powerfully in place was not simply violence but also old habits of thought. Black people had been taught to believe in their own inferiority and to accept that white power determined all their rights and could not be dislodged or challenged. Organizers going from door to door trying to encourage voter-registration attempts often heard in response to their efforts, “That’s white folks business” and “Ain’t foolin’ around with that mess.”

  In this context, Joe McDonald’s decision to use a book to assert his gun rights was a critical breakthrough. Mr. Joe could neither read nor write, noted Charles McLaurin, and he had also never stood up to white authority in the way he did that day. “Joe McDonald had never looked a white man in his face and demanded anything in all of his life,” said McLaurin years later,

  and now here he was, this seventy-six-year-old black guy who can’t read or write inspired enough by these young Negroes to go down to city hall and challenge the mayor with this book. Think about it! The mayor was known to carry a pistol; he’d pull a gun on any black person who challenged him. He pulled a gun on us! But Joe McDonald went down there. We gave Mr. Joe the ammunition he needed to face the [white] man. And I think the mayor gave Mr. Joe his gun back to try and keep down “trouble”—folks in Ruleville responding to us. He probably said to himself, “Let me give Joe his gun back ’cause I don’t want no more trouble from these boys.” We empowered Mr. Joe and that helped [our work] in the community.

  McLaurin’s recollection of McDonald’s victory that day speaks not only to the intimate relationship between organizing and grassroots struggle but also to the boldness required of individual men and women who, having been raised in a system that often brutally crushed challenges to white authority, responded to encouragement from young organizers to take control of their own lives.

  McDonald’s assertion of his gun rights and Mrs. Hamer’s attempt to register to vote were bold examples of direct action by people who had never before raised their voices to speak for themselves. Together, men and women like these formed the heart of the fledgling movement in Ruleville and Sunflower County. They were sharecroppers, day laborers, domestic workers, housewives, and grandmothers—people like three older women who, a week before Mrs. Hamer’s group tried to register, were brought to the Sunflower County courthouse by McLaurin. They were the first from Ruleville to attempt to register since the early 1950s; McLaurin called them “my little old ladies” and insisted, “They made me a man.”

  Examples like these certainly did not represent mass movement, but they were an indication that some new current was flowing through black Mississippi. They represented, as Bob Moses put it in a 1961 letter smuggled from the jail cell he shared with student protesters in McComb, Mississippi, “a tremor in the middle of the iceberg.”

  These tiny tremors were felt in both the black and white communities in Ruleville and elsewhere across the South. They helped erode the paralyzing fear that had defined black people’s relationship with white people for the entire twentieth century. They were also part of the potential “trouble” that McLaurin thought had alarmed Dorrough. McDonald’s demand for the return of his shotgun suggested a loss of the white power controlling the lives of black people, a power that had been secured by fear, force, and violence. Even with voting rights still denied, even without attempts to desegregate public schools and without lunch-counter sit-ins in Ruleville and Sunflower County, a demand by one elderly man was enough to trigger alarm.

  In the 1960s whites began to learn that black people were not as docile as they had thought. That bred fear in them, and their range of options for quashing black resistance was shrinking. “Spectacle lynching” was common in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers sometimes gave advance notice of hangings and burnings as public events for whites, and even children were brought to watch. Now, though such events were not impossible, it was far more difficult to participate in one without facing penalties. After World War II, antiblack violence began to take on a more covert character: assassination, kidnapping, bombings.

  Although new federal laws were forcing white violence underground, so too were black-owned rifles and shotguns. “Nighttime marauders had learned to keep a more respectful distance from their targets because the targets were increasingly prone to shoot back,” notes Charles Payne. Night riders could not be certain that they would not get killed by the blacks they assaulted. Since the end of World War II, black veterans had been consistently proving thems
elves willing to repel violent attack with gunfire, which helps explain why night riders turned to drive-by shootings—not lingering on the scene—or to bombs planted beneath churches and homes in the dead of night. Also, many blacks—not just veterans—were gun owners. Mrs. Hamer’s mother would go to the cotton fields with a pistol in her possession. And Mrs. Hamer, like her mother, also kept weapons nearby in case she needed them: “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”

  As organizers embedded themselves in local life and culture in the Deep South, they discovered that people had different relationships to guns and self-defense. The specifics varied from community to community. Rural Holmes County, Mississippi, for example, was radically different from Sunflower County; 70 percent of the land in Holmes County was owned by black farmers, the legacy of a New Deal Farm Security Administration program, and that in turn had encouraged a strong tradition of black independence and mutual cooperation, including armed self-defense. There was considerable and sometimes violent white opposition to independent black farming communities like the ones in Holmes County, but black farmers, proud of their landownership, were used to cooperating with each other—there was a cooperatively owned cotton gin in Holmes County, for example—and they were determined to protect themselves and their land from attack.

  This tradition of organized armed self-defense was already well entrenched in other parts of the South when movement workers arrived. One noteworthy example of a Holmes County community that employed sophisticated defensive tactics was the community of Mileston, where Hollis Watkins began working as a SNCC field secretary in 1963. A native Mississippian raised in the tiny southwest Mississippi hamlet of Chisholm Mission (named for an AME church), Hollis was brought up in a family with its own share of “crazy Negroes.” (As a boy his father had to leave home because he fired a shotgun at a white man who was cursing his mother.) Recalls Watkins of the approach to Mileston:

  You had to turn off the highway, cross the tracks and make a loop on a narrow dirt road to get back to the highway. You’re gonna be passing houses, and a few had telephones. Mr. Dave had one at the beginning of the road, Miss Epps at the other end. Mr. Howard’s daddy and his brother lived in between; they had phones. If after a certain hour, you know after dark, a vehicle didn’t give the proper signals, then telephone messages would be relayed. Usually Miss Epps would call Mr. Howard’s daddy or his brother; they would call Mr. Dave and ultimately that vehicle would be approached from the front and the rear and checked to see who it was. In most cases it would be met head-on with bright headlights … with two people in a car. And from behind by four people in a pickup truck … two of the people would generally be in the cab. And two would generally be in the back with the guns raised over the cab.

  Terrorists approaching Mileston could not be absolutely sure they would get home alive.

  Yet most black people were not organizing paramilitary units or much self-defense beyond that which protected their own homes and immediate community, which helps explain why the mayor of Ruleville returned McDonald’s shotgun to him. Dorrough obviously thought it unlikely that Joe McDonald would use his gun in any type of aggressive or retaliatory violence. Like denim overalls, shotguns and pistols were an ordinary part of everyday southern life. Indeed, Mississippi’s gun culture proved so powerful that in 1954, when state legislator Edwin White expressed alarm that too many blacks were buying firearms and introduced a bill requiring gun registration “[to protect] us from those likely to cause us trouble,” the bill never even made it out of committee.

  Like many in the generally impoverished rural South—impoverished for many white as well as black people—Joe McDonald mainly used his gun to put food on the table. Mayor Dorrough surely knew that. Guns were undeniably possessed for self-defense too, but to a lesser extent, and blacks exercised caution when it came to this, and the mayor certainly knew that as well. Moreover, Joe McDonald was seventy-six years of age and known to be a man of great dignity and probity; his having a gun posed no danger of aggressive violence to anyone in the black or white community. He was not going to climb into his pickup truck and drive through town shooting into the homes of his neighbors or lead a posse of black vigilantes into the white community; Dorrough, his racial prejudices notwithstanding, had to have known this too.

  This is not to say that whites did not worry about black retaliation. Hodding Carter III, who was editor of Greenville, Mississippi’s Delta Democratic Times in the 1960s, explained,

  You don’t even have to put it in terms of race. If you have run a society in which basic to its sense of itself was the use of violence, its use of murder, its use of weapons to hold control firmly in its hands … it’s almost inevitable that being who you were you would think that those to whom you had been doing this would consider it worth their while to use the same tactics.

  Whites, in other words, feared and perhaps expected that the same sort of terrorism they had used against the South’s black communities would someday be turned against them. This fear could take bizarre turns. In November 1965, the Ku Klux Klan contacted Deputy Sheriff Earl Fisher in Washington County, Mississippi. The Klan told Fisher that Louisiana’s Deacons for Defense and Justice, notorious at the time for providing armed protection to nonviolent CORE organizers in that state, and the Nation of Islam, which had been made prominent by Malcolm X and his Black Nationalist rhetoric, had joined forces to organize a black uprising against whites. Arms and ammunition, the Klan said, were being smuggled into the county seat—Greenville—via the Mississippi River and were being hidden in coffins at a black cemetery on the edge of town. The Klan urged state police to place armed guards at every black cemetery in Mississippi and actually persuaded Fisher to exhume the grave of one elderly black man. No guns were found. Fisher called a press conference to assuage the fears of the white community, which was panicking about the rumors of a pending black uprising. Fisher also announced that the sheriff’s office was launching an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Although the likelihood of armed insurrection by blacks was practically nil, trumpeting the threat of such an uprising—as the Klan did in Washington County—was demagogically useful to some whites and played to fears held by others. “Almost all of the planter-farmer types believed that their blacks, their ‘niggers,’ their whatever, felt themselves better treated than others’ and were not likely to be insurrectionists,” says Carter, “but [they] felt they couldn’t be sure that their neighbors’ [black] ‘bad guy’ wouldn’t show up, and kill them.”

  Yet remarkably, even in the midst of panics like these, whites did not attempt to disarm blacks. The precedent for disarming blacks went as far back as the antebellum and colonial eras, when laws across the South were written to keep weapons out of black hands. But another aspect of southern culture appears to have trumped these precedents. Even within the framework of white supremacy, if there was no overt or apparent political challenge to the social order, a peculiar intimacy could exist in rural communities like Ruleville, and even in cities. Sometimes—and the word sometimes must be stressed here—whites’ collective delusion that blacks were satisfied with the way things were loosened long-standing segregationist practices and eased more generalized and abstract fears of black insurgency. After all, blacks across the South performed intimate domestic services for whites, from nursing and caring for white babies to cleaning and caring for white peoples’ houses and lawns and cooking their food, often spending as much time in white homes as in their own. Even in the 1960s, as white anger increased over black protest and political assertion, one could still hear some whites declare how close they were to their “mammies” or tell of a black “uncle” or kindly Old Black Joe teaching them to hunt and fish. In some respects, day-to-day life was less segregated in the South than in the North.

  But none of these everyday relations challenged white supremacy, which was always unders
tood to be fundamental to black–white interactions. The codes coordinating racial contact and behavior were more finely calibrated than suggested by the raw violence and crude language of the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk. Hodding Carter described this relationship succinctly, noting, “There was a great deal of contact between black and white in Mississippi and in the Deep South. The contact was that of master and slave, of subordinate to superior, of serf to master. It was a contact in which the illusion of familiarity on the white part bred [their] contempt… . It was togetherness under very rigid rules. It was a joke.”

  There was certainly no sympathy among most whites for the notion of freedom rights that drove black struggle. When a black boycott of white businesses began in Port Gibson, Mississippi, a small town where everybody knew everybody, whites were hostile to even such modest black demands as asking that adults be addressed by the courtesy titles of “Mr.” and “Mrs.” In one telling illustration of this hypocrisy and resistance, a supermarket owner said that she didn’t “feel like it was a good idea” to hire a black cashier because blacks could not be trusted—they would lie and steal—but she nevertheless also explained that when she had young children she was able to work at the store because “you could get [black] help pretty reasonable and they were pretty dependable.”

  Most white reaction to black political action for change across the South was characterized by hypocrisy and paranoia, frequently taking the form of both a claim and an accusation: “Our niggers” are happy and satisfied with their lives because we whites are good to them, and all this violence and “trouble” is “instigated” by “outside agitators” for their own destructive political, probably communist, purposes. One variation of this claim held that charges of white violence made by civil rights workers and organizations were fabrications designed to embarrass the South as part of the process of destroying “our way of life.” Another variation justified arresting nonviolent sit-in students and Freedom Riders for disorderly conduct or breach of the peace instead of members of the violent white mobs swirling angrily around them and sometimes assaulting them. Whites in the South recognized that their way of life was under serious attack and had to be defended—with arms when necessary.