This intransigence could only be challenged effectively by local people. It meant little if McLaurin, McNair, or I said that black people in Ruleville were dissatisfied; we could be ignored or dismissed. But it meant a lot if Mrs. Hamer or Joe McDonald said they were dissatisfied, and it forced attention on black life in a white-supremacist culture. Our explanation to Mr. Joe that he had a right to his gun had nothing to do with any interest we might have had in his—or our—self-defense at that moment, and everything to do with a basic principle that defined grassroots organizing in Ruleville, Sunflower County, and across the South: if there was going to be meaningful change, ordinary people needed to find their voices and begin speaking for themselves. SNCC and CORE field secretaries took advantage of every opportunity to help people understand that they had rights and to help them see exactly what those rights were. It was an obvious and necessary part of the process of building a local consensus around the idea of challenging a powerful white-supremacist system like that which existed in the state of Mississippi. Telling McDonald that he had a right to his gun was an opportunity to do just that.
Mr. Joe’s decision to retrieve his gun, although unexpected and certainly not organized by the SNCC workers in Ruleville, was as important an assertion of his rights as going to the county courthouse to try to register to vote. And it is indicative of the budding strength of the Freedom Movement in this hostile territory that Mayor Dorrough returned the gun to Mr. McDonald.
Although black people across the South recognized that without federal protection they would sometimes need to take up arms in defense of their persons and property, they had to be cautious. Black community leaders had long ago concluded that retaliatory violence was off-limits and that, in addition their constituents always needed to weigh their right to self-defense by any means, including the use of guns, against the negative reaction that would result from their use of guns. Armed aggressive assault against state or local government or attacks against police would almost certainly alienate potential allies and might bring an overwhelming armed retaliatory response.
Carrying weapons for self-defense was viewed quite differently. NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers customarily traveled around Mississippi armed, with a rifle in the trunk of his car and a pistol beside him on the front seat. His national headquarters in New York did not challenge him; it was a commonsensical and acceptable approach to increasing his chances of staying alive. But using guns for one’s own defense and for punitive retaliation were two different things. In 1959, in Monroe, the county seat of Union County, North Carolina, a white man escaped conviction for assaulting an eight-months-pregnant black woman; Robert Williams, president of the county’s NAACP branch, angrily responded, “We must be willing to kill if necessary. We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court… . In the future we are going to have to try and convict these people on the spot.” The NAACP removed him from his position. Williams was not the first to speak in this manner, and many in Monroe, the county, and other black communities agreed with his sentiments. The NAACP’s national leadership, however, felt he had crossed a line that made the organization vulnerable to political attack from both local and federal governments.
Unlike the NAACP, which was silent on nonviolence in its stated policy, the newer organizations—SNCC, CORE, and SCLC—all had policies of nonviolence. But as their work in rural communities progressed in the 1960s, the necessities of survival blurred the line separating their organizational commitment to nonviolence from armed self-defense. In Mississippi as in Monroe, this blurring of the line—even crossing of the line—did not begin with young political radicals. Rather, it had started well before the 1960s among impatient, determined, and sometimes embittered southern black men of an older generation, who were seeking the traditional rights that were supposedly the birthright of all Americans but that they had long been denied. The surge of white supremacist violence that forced him to leave also reveals its limits.
Theodore Roosevelt Mason “T. R. M.” Howard, chief surgeon at the Taborian Hospital of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor in the all-black Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou, was one of the most prominent of these older men. His story, in 1950s Mississippi, illustrates the practical use of armed self-defense and demonstrates what would be true in the 1960s as well: that armed self-defense was connected to the broader stream of community organization.
In 1951, the successful and sometimes flamboyant doctor founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), in some ways a forerunner of the movement that would emerge a decade later as the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). That organization, founded in 1961, was the umbrella organization under which all civil rights organizations in Mississippi worked. Creation of the RCNL coincided with increased activity by the NAACP in the state, and though the RCNL was sometimes at odds with NAACP leadership in New York, for all practical purposes local NAACP leaders and RCNL leaders were interchangeable.
Although the RCNL had only a small dues-paying membership, it had an outsized influence. Interestingly, most of its leadership came from Mississippi’s tiny class of black doctors, entrepreneurs, landowners, and craftsmen. Not only did these men (the RCNL leadership was entirely male) have something to lose, but they had won their property and status against great odds, and they were inclined to protect them. Unlike many laborers, for instance, they had trucks and automobiles, a fact that helped shape their activism: the RCNL mounted a boycott of Delta gas stations that refused to have restrooms for black people, distributing bumper stickers that read “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.” The RCNL also persuaded the NAACP to organize a national campaign urging black associations and businesses to deposit money in the black-owned Tri-State bank in Memphis, Tennessee, and to make this money available for loans to black businesses suffering from economic reprisal in Mississippi—not an effort likely to be launched by sharecroppers. This was not a group that placed integration or desegregation high on its agenda; instead, it sought political influence with white power. The RCNL’s members saw themselves as leaders of the vast majority of Mississippi’s black population, a population that was impoverished and generally had little formal education but that desired an end to white supremacy all the same.
Dr. Howard was a charismatic, affable leader and an eloquent speaker whose pointed wit delighted black audiences. And he had no shortage of audiences; thousands attended the RCNL’s annual Freedom Day rallies held in Mound Bayou where they were addressed by prominent black leaders of national stature. Chicago congressman William Dawson spoke at the first of these in 1952; he was the first black congressman to speak in Mississippi since the nineteenth century. Gospel great Mahalia Jackson sang there the same day. Addressing a 1955 Freedom Day rally, Howard joked that the virulently racist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, who had died in 1947, was living in hell and had “recently sent a direct message to the capital at Jackson asking [whites] to stop treating the Negroes so badly in Mississippi and to give them a break, because they have a Negro fireman down there that keeps the fire mighty hot.”
Because of his highly visible militancy and his organizing skill, Howard was constantly in danger of being attacked by white-supremacist groups, and so guns were as important to him as his medical instruments. Mississippi law permitted the open display of firearms, and Howard often wore a pistol on his hip; a rifle was also always visible in the back window of his air-conditioned Cadillac. And although a license was required to carry a concealed weapon, reportedly there was also a secret compartment in the Cadillac housing a pistol and a similar compartment in his leather-upholstered Ford Skyliner convertible. The Pittsburg Courier reported that Howard would sometimes “take the gun from its secret hiding place and put it in his lap … always cocked!” Howard was not unique in this regard; all the RCNL leadership traveled armed, especially after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which triggered a rapid expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi and escalating antiblack violence.
The RCNL maintained strict security. Strangers visiting Howard’s home were required to pass through a checkpoint, and armed guards were on duty around the clock. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, stayed at Howard’s home while attending the trial of her son’s murderers. A heavily armed RCNL caravan escorted her daily to the Tallahatchie County courthouse thirty-four miles away in the little town of Sumner. Jet magazine’s Simeon Booker, who stayed in a two-bedroom guest cottage across from what he described as Howard’s “mansion,” had never been to Mississippi before the Till murder trial. He was a Baltimore native and acknowledged being “scared as hell most of the time; but the object was to get the story.” Booker recalled that his photographer, David Jackson, “was even more frightened than I was, and he carried a pistol.” At the trial, Tallahatchie County sheriff H. C. Strider wanted to keep Booker—along with the few other black reporters in town to cover the event—out of the courthouse, but he was overruled by the judge. “Demonstrating that he bore no resentment at being overruled by the judge,” Booker recalled later, “[Sheriff Strider] greeted us every morning at our press table with a cheery, ‘Good morning, niggers.’”
Howard’s home was safe haven for the black reporters covering the Till trial. Ebony magazine’s Cloyte Murdock, having difficulty opening the front door wide enough to bring her luggage inside, found that a stack of weapons was blocking the door. Another visitor saw a magnum pistol and a .45-caliber pistol at the head of Howard’s bed; a submachine gun rested at its foot. He also saw “a long gun, a shotgun or a rifle in every corner of every room.”
The defensive measures of the RCNL were more informal than those of the well-trained units formed by black military veterans that would later emerge in Monroe, North Carolina; Jonesboro, Louisiana; and Tuscaloosa, Alabama; but the armed RCNL leaders shared with these later groups a sense of political activism. Gun ownership by RCNL members represented a great deal more than simple possession of firearms, long routine in individual black households. The organization could speedily mobilize substantial and deadly firepower. For instance, when a rumor spread that Howard’s wife, Helen Nela Boyd, had been assaulted by whites, fifteen carloads of armed men quickly appeared at the Howard home prepared to provide assistance and protection anywhere it was required.
In the early 1960s, robust and organized defensive measures were an absolute necessity for any prominent black civil rights advocate who valued his or her life. These were especially strong men and women. The terror of the preceding decade had selected leaders who were willing to stand up to white terrorism, with force if necessary. A combination of economic pressure, violence, and murder had savaged the ranks of black leadership after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Those leaders who survived and who chose to remain and continue to risk their lives in the pursuit of civil rights tended to be dogged, militant, and willing to engage in armed self-defense.
The decimation of the black leadership in the 1950s had been abetted by new, more sophisticated tactics that emerged from the white-supremacist establishment in Mississippi in response to postwar civil rights activism. Many in Mississippi’s white political and business leadership had come to recognize that mob violence undermined the support they sought from the rest of the nation. Similarly, some political and economic leaders considered “Bilboism”—a neologism that referred to the unabashedly racist rhetoric of Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo—ineffective. So by the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like “states’ rights” and concepts such as the need to protect “constitutional liberties” from communist subversion and federal interference were becoming stand-ins for raw racist rhetoric.
The Citizens’ Council—a new tool for white supremacy—was born in Indianola, Mississippi, on July 11, 1954, called together by former para-trooper and plantation manager Robert “Tut” Patterson just two months after the Brown decision. The council began “pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary,” urging “concerned and patriotic citizens to stand together forever firm against communism and mongrelization.” The fourteen men who gathered for the first Citizens’ Council meeting reflected all the councils that would quickly spread first across the Delta and then across the state and the South. They were middle-class businessmen and managers. By November 1954, Citizens’ Councils had been organized in scores of Mississippi towns and cities; by 1956 the council claimed 25,000 dues-paying members in the state. Their agenda was to force anyone, white or black, who dissented from white supremacy and racial segregation back into line or out of the state.
What happened in Yazoo City, Mississippi, following the formation of the Citizens’ Council is typical of what began to happen everywhere across the South. Fifty-three people in Yazoo City had signed a petition in favor of school desegregation. The Citizens’ Council arranged for the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all fifty-three to be published in the local newspaper as a full-page advertisement. The last line of the ad read, “Published as a public service by the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City.” All the people whose names were listed in the advertisement lost their jobs or had their credit cut off. In Clarksdale, the names of those petitioning for school desegregation in that town were published in the Clarksdale Press Register along with the editorial comment, “These people are the agitators and troublemakers.”
The Citizens’ Council officially eschewed violence but legitimized it with their campaigns on behalf of white supremacy. Reprisals for the Clarksdale petition case “came swiftly,” recalled local pharmacist Aaron Henry, who would eventually preside over Mississippi’s NAACP. “Whites looked at the petition list and if your name was on it, you just caught hell.” In this period, even being accused of civil rights activity could get one killed. Columbus dentist Emmett J. Stringer, who was president of the Mississippi NAACP in 1953 and 1954, dramatically increased the organization’s membership during his presidency, but his efforts earned him continual threats against his life. He and his wife began sleeping in the middle bedroom of their home, thinking they might be safe from bombings there. Knowing his life was at risk, Stringer took steps to protect himself as best he could. “I had weapons in my house, and not only in my house, I had weapons on me when I went to my office, because I knew people were out to get me. I would take my revolver with me and put it in the drawer, right where I worked.
All around the state, the pace of deadly violence steadily increased as the councils grew. In Belzoni, the county seat of Humphreys County, Reverend George Lee and Gus Courts, a grocer, organized an NAACP branch in 1954. Its membership grew rapidly. The following year, just a few days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, Lee was driving home from an RCNL meeting. A car pulled up beside him and someone inside shot him to death. Sheriff Ike Shelton suggested that Lee had somehow lost control of his car and that the lead pellets found in what was left of his jaw might be teeth fillings. As the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi’s main daily newspaper, headlined Lee’s murder: “Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.” Six months later, Courts barely escaped death when a car pulled in front of his grocery store and the occupants opened fire. Bullets hit Courts in the left arm and stomach. Shortly thereafter, he left the state for Chicago.
With all the levers of power in white hands, and with stepped-up antiblack terrorism being encouraged by the state governments and largely ignored by the federal government, civil rights advancement had essentially come to a halt in the Deep South. Black voter registration, which had been showing modest increases in the first half of the decade, declined sharply in the second half as white intimidation intensified. In 1955, before Courts was driven out of Belzoni, a Citizens’ Council member showed him a list of ninety-five black registered voters and told him that everyone on the list who failed to remove his or her name from the voter lists would be fired. Within a year, the only black registered voter in Belzon
i was a T. V. Johnson, an undertaker, wrote Aaron Henry in his autobiography. And Johnson, according to Henry, “was afraid to go to the polls.”
Courts was by no means the only black leader to flee Mississippi. Testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on February 16, 1957, Courts pled for help and protection:
My wife and I and thousands of Mississippians have had to run away… . We had to flee in the night. We are the American refugees from the terror in the South, all because we want to vote. Not only are they killing colored people who want to vote and be citizens, but they are squeezing them out of business, foreclosing their mortgages, refusing them credit from the banks to operate their farms.
Rumor had it that there was a $1,000 price on T. R. M. Howard’s head, so three months after the September 25, 1955, acquittal of the murderers of Emmett Till, and shortly after his wife had had a stroke, he moved to Chicago. “I feel I can do more alive in the battle for Negro rights in the North than dead in a weed-grown grave in Dixie,” he was quoted as saying.
Not everyone fled, however. Among those who stayed was Amzie Moore, a leader in the RCNL and the Bolivar County NAACP president. Another who refused to leave the state was Aaron Henry, the Clarksdale pharmacist. Like Moore, he had been active with the RCNL, and he was also a leader of young Turks who in the mid-1950s began challenging Mississippi’s older, more cautious and conservative NAACP leadership. Though not recorded, Amzie Moore was almost certainly aligned with Henry. In 1960 Henry became NAACP state president, and two years later he was named president of COFO. Medgar Evers stayed in Mississippi, too. He was regional representative for T. R. M. Howard’s Magnolia Insurance Company and had become deeply involved with the RCNL as its program director. Despite mounting antiblack violence, Evers also devoted himself to full-time work for the NAACP.
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