These men—all three World War II veterans—reflected changing times not only in Mississippi and the United States but also in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where armed anticolonial resistance and political protest were receiving a great deal of coverage in the postwar black American press. Evers, Henry, and Moore were sharply aware of the changing world around them. Evers, for example, was watching with great interest the Mau Mau insurgency against British colonial rule in Kenya that was also known as the “Land and Freedom Movement.” For a time in the early 1950s, the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta, who some thought was covertly leading the insurgency, “dominated” Evers’s thinking, says his wife Myrlie. “Kenyatta, Medgar felt instinctively,” she recalled, “was a man driven to violence by the brutal oppression of his people.” Evers even considered trying something similar in Mississippi. Even if guerrilla activity could not win in Mississippi, he thought, it might attract much-needed attention to the plight of black people in the state. Charles Evers reflected decades later, “Why not really cross the line? We wondered. Why not create a Mau Mau in Mississippi? Each time whites killed a Negro, why not drive to another town, find a bad sheriff or cop, and kill him in a secret hit-and-run raid?”
The Evers brothers did not take the idea of an insurgency—or of retributive violence against whites—any further than speculation. “We bought some bullets [and] made some idle Mau Mau plans,” says Charles Evers. “But Medgar never had his heart in it.” Myrlie Evers elaborates, “Part of him realized that nothing could be solved by violence but more violence.” Evers had been heavily influenced by his mother, Jessie, who was devoutly religious, which partly explains his reluctance to organize and engage in guerrilla warfare. As Medgar Evers himself told Ebony magazine interviewer Francis Mitchell, “It didn’t take much reading of the bible, though, to convince me that two wrongs would not make the situation any different, and that I couldn’t hate the white man and at the same time hope to convert him.”
Nonetheless, when Medgar and Myrlie’s first son was born in 1953, the couple named him Darrell Kenyatta Evers. The couple was then living in Mound Bayou, and because Kenyatta was their young son’s middle name, residents would sometimes ask, “How’s the little Mau Mau?” Recalled Myrlie Evers, “They knew the name [from black newspaper reporting] and for them it was a symbol of strength and pride.”
Even though the movement struggles of the 1960s have come to be defined in terms of nonviolent tactics and strategies, they can only be fully understood in relation to the deep wells of strength that could be found all across the terrain of black life: the black militias active in self-defense after the Civil War; proud and successful leaders like Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, who could have walked away from struggle but chose to stay and fight as long as he could; of men and women like Lou Ella Townsend, Reverend George Lee, Medgar Evers, his father James, and all the “crazy Negroes” who stood their ground time and time again in defense of their families, their property, or themselves. Labels—“nonviolent” or “militant” or “violent”—do not easily describe these men and women. Hartman Turnbow, a black farmer active with the movement in Holmes County, noted as much after driving away night riders by returning their gunfire and, if rumor is true, killing one of them. He explained his action to movement organizers the next morning, declaring, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent; I was just protecting my family.”
Significantly, actions such as Turnbow’s counterattack did have the effect of reducing violence. But night riders attacked Turnbow’s home a second time about a year later. When FBI investigators spoke to Turnbow after that shooting, Turnbow recalled, “They come tellin’ me, first words they said to me was, ‘Don’t kill nobody. Don’t kill nobody.’” But Turnbow told the agents that he would not tolerate any more attacks on his home and family and that he wanted the FBI to make sure it was the last time there was one. If not, “it’s gonna be some trouble, ’cause I’m gonna git my gun and get busy and see who I can shoot.” After that, according to Turnbow, violence “cooled off.”
With one or two exceptions, guns were not much of an issue for the organizers and activists from nonviolent organizations who began working in rural communities. It is the way they accommodated themselves to guns that provides insight into the complexities of the Freedom Movement and, in fact, humanizes it, stripping away the image of noble nonviolent icons prepared for martyrdom to which movement activists have been reduced. Occasionally there was discussion and debate about the possibility of carrying and using weapons, but even that was neither lengthy nor anguished. And in SNCC’s somewhat laissez-faire tradition of fieldwork, the question of what to do in regards to guns was pretty much left to those in the field.
No one flashed weapons or carried them openly, but some activists and organizers did possess guns—sometimes they owned them, and sometimes they were given them when people in the communities where they worked thought they needed weapons. When the weapons were accepted—and that was not always the case—a good part of the reason was upbringing. Most movement organizers were not northerners who came “down South” as liberators; rather, they were southerners fighting for change in their own land, and guns—small shotguns, rifles—had been a routine part of their lives, especially if they came from rural communities. “My daddy made sure we knew how to handle a gun,” remembers Hollis Watkins. “I could take a .22 rifle and strike a match with it,” he boasts. In any case, there was never any discussion of assaulting local bastions of white supremacy with weapons; common sense said that was foolhardy and counterproductive. And although guns did sometimes provide a measure of protection, for the most part it was not organized by movement workers. Many black households already had guns, and they used them when they felt it necessary—a decision SNCC and CORE organizers would not be making and in fact were not qualified to make.
Civil rights workers had virtually no chance of successfully challenging local traditions of keeping guns for protection. Indeed, the issue did not even come up for most organizers, because the work itself—primarily organizing within the black community in rural areas—made the question of nonviolence moot. The ordinary day-to-day interactions of community organizing consisted mainly of attempting to persuade people to try to register to vote, and the question of nonviolence almost never came up. SNCC and CORE organizers were frequently labeled “the nonviolents,” but that was because of protests that seemed remote from these rural communities. Occasionally in planning a voter-registration attempt someone might say, “I ain’t going down to that courthouse without my pistol.” The organizer’s response was not a lecture about nonviolence but a conversation about the practicalities of gunplay in that situation. For example, the organizer might ask, Even if you shoot a white man bothering you down there, what’s that going to mean for the group? Sometimes guns would then be left behind (Medgar Evers and the group attempting to vote in Decatur in 1946 left their guns in the car), and sometimes a potential registrant would choose not to make the attempt to register.
But such situations were rare. Someone involved enough with “a nonviolent” to seriously consider making a voter-registration attempt was not likely to bring up the subject of guns.
Although organizing for voter registration could put an organizer’s life or the lives of others at risk, it usually required no explicit commitment to nonviolence. Sit-ins at lunch counters, Freedom Rides, walking picket lines—these were all direct actions at and inside white-owned facilities, and for tactical and strategic regions, they required an acceptance of nonviolent discipline. Knocking on doors and sitting on porches, attending church, talking over beer at a juke joint, and even walking into cotton fields on white-owned plantations—these all went on entirely within the black community. Movement organizers did not face the necessity of choosing nonviolence because they rarely had direct contact with whites. For the most part, the issue of nonviolence simply did not come up; there was no reason for it to come up. Furthermore, in many ways the young organizers of SNCC and CORE
were treated as the community’s children, and though for obvious reasons most in the community were not likely to directly challenge white power, movement workers always felt relatively protected in and by the black community. In the final analysis, organizers fit into the patterns of the communities they worked in, and the fact that guns were part of that life simply was not of great concern.
There were times, however, when organizers were faced with choosing whether or not to use a gun. The issue could almost be described as a question of responsibility, or at least of good manners. After all, they had an obligation to the local people who, at great risk, supported the movement. Occasionally a sense of indebtedness led an organizer to participate in armed self-defense in ways that he or she might not normally have done. While working in Holmes County, recalled Hollis Watkins,
I was living with Dave Howard and his wife. They farmed. I realized after a few days that they had a shift set up to protect me and the house; his wife took a shift and he took a shift. One shift was from dark until midnight; the other from midnight to daybreak. Now here I was living in their house, eating their food and I’m sleeping all night and this man and his wife, farmers, are up all night protecting me. At daybreak he’s in the field all day until it starts getting dark. When I realized that, I told him I would take a shift. He asked me if I knew how to use a gun. I said, Yes sir, I do. We don’t use them in the movement but I know how. But will you use guns? he asked. I said, If necessary I’ll use ’em. So he says, Take a look at these and see which one you like the best. I think he was testing me. He shows me a shotgun, a .30-06, and a .30-30 Winchester rifle. As I was checking them out he said I could have them all. Later I told Jim Forman [SNCC’s executive director] about this and he said, You can’t do that. I said, I’m already doing it.
Although impossible to quantify because such accommodations were not written about in field reports or even much discussed, other organizers had similar encounters with guns—if not picking them up and using them, then at least encouraging their hosts of the need to defend their rights and do so themselves, as in the case of Joe McDonald and his shotgun.
Whether or not they owned guns or had access to guns, activists and organizers knew that nonviolence was generally a much more commonsensical and sustainable tactic—one more likely to succeed—than offensive armed action. But armed self-defense was one thing; armed offense quite another. Recalled Bob Moses:
Black people had organized enclaves which they were prepared to defend. Their self-defense was pretty much around a house or church, a meeting place. “Self-defense” in the white community is surrounding the courthouse. They were going to defend the courthouse in different ways. I think of us going to the courthouse [with potential registrants] as a nonviolent offensive maneuver. It allowed us to take the offensive and actually attack. You couldn’t go to the courthouse with guns and attack.
There were tense encounters with the white community of course—bringing people to county courthouses to attempt voter registration is plainly one example—but in the South of those days most of the danger came suddenly (as with Mayor Dorrough’s roadside confrontation with myself, Landy, and McLaurin in Ruleville) or from ambush or from being overwhelmed by mob violence—situations in which being armed was often of little use. CORE’s James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were killed in 1964 after Neshoba County, Mississippi, deputy sheriff Cecil Price handed them over to a Ku Klux Klan mob. Price had stopped Chaney, who was black, and arrested him for allegedly driving over the speed limit. Schwerner and Goodman, both of them white, were with Chaney in the car, and Price held them in jail along with Chaney “for investigation.” Medgar Evers was ambushed and killed in his driveway by a gunman hiding behind bushes across the street; he had no chance of reaching the weapons he always kept in his car and in his house.
And when it came to terrorist attacks on private residences, the decision of whether or not to respond with defensive gunfire—a decision that had to be made quickly—was not in the hands of SNCC or CORE organizers. Men like Hartman Turnbow did not ask movement workers if it was okay to shoot back. Robert Cooper, another movement supporter and one of Hartman Turnbow’s neighbors, shot it out with Klansmen when they attacked his home in 1965, and he summed up his and Turnbow’s thinking with absolute clarity: “I felt that you’re in your house, ain’t botherin’ nobody; the only thang you hunting is equal justice. An’ they gonna sneak by at night, burn your house, or shoot in there. An’ you gonna sit there and take all of it? You got to be a very li’l man with no guts at all.”
To be sure, communities reacted differently to the efforts of civil rights workers. One factor influencing how a community reacted was whether it was rural or urban. In the city of Greenwood, Mississippi, not too far from Holmes County, the kind of cooperation between organizers and locals that occurred in Holmes County never really developed, even at the peak of movement activity. During a boycott of the downtown area, for example, a boycott leader noted that participation from city dwellers was spotty, whereas there was almost 100 percent cooperation from people “out in the rural,” as they say in the South.
And out in the rural, when Mrs. Laura McGhee—who if she thought it necessary, sat on the porch with her Winchester rifle—permitted movement workers to use her farm outside Greenwood for a rally, the sheriff came to warn her against holding it. She told him that he was on her property, that he was trespassing and hadn’t ever offered her any protection from the terrorists who kept threatening to shoot up her farm, and that he therefore had nothing to offer her now and had better leave, get off her land. And the sheriff left.
Yet where individuals or communities fell on a rural–urban scale did not always predict how they would respond to terrorist attack. McComb, Mississippi, for instance, is a small city that had just 12,000 residents in 1961, about a third of them black, yet its dynamic was somewhat different from Greenwood’s. This was surely due, at least in part, to the fact that McComb was not part of the plantation tradition. Established as a hub and repair center for the Illinois Central Railroad, McComb had a gritty, rough-and-tumble culture that helped foster Klan recruitment and terrorism but also generated a tough, we-won’t-take-it-forever attitude in the black community, even if that attitude was rarely expressed openly. A branch of the NAACP had been established in McComb in 1946, which was relatively early for this part of the South, and some of the city’s black workers were unionized, although the unions were racially segregated.
During the summer of 1964, more than a dozen bombings occurred in McComb, earning the city the nickname “bombing capital of the world.” In late August, nine unexploded sticks of dynamite wrapped in red tape were found near the front door of Willie and Matti Dillon. Mrs. Dillon was one of the local leaders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and she had registered to vote. A few seconds earlier, an explosion from another dynamite package had rocked their home. Dillon and his wife were uninjured in the attack, but local white authorities found other ways to punish them. The police chief, the sheriff, and the head of the FBI task force in McComb conspired to jail Dillon on charges of operating a garage without a license even though the garage where he occasionally fixed cars was not his. He was finally jailed for stealing electricity. He had attached a wire not registered by the meter to install a floodlight, which he felt he needed to protect his home from sudden attacks by night riders. Dillon was held incommunicado, tried, and convicted without a lawyer.
The Dillons were not the only members of McComb’s black community who were targeted by white terrorists. In April 1964, night riders threw dynamite at the home of NAACP president Curtis Conway “C. C.” Bryant, the man who had gotten Amzie Moore to send Bob Moses to McComb in 1961. Fortunately, the dynamite fell short. Quickly recovering from the explosion, Bryant grabbed his rifle and fired at the attackers. They fled. In July, Bryant’s brother Charlie and his wife, Ora, were awakened by the sound of a car pulling into their driveway. Ora grabbed her shotgun and fir
ed at the attackers just as they tossed sticks of dynamite toward the house. Again the explosives fell short, and again the night riders did not stick around to throw any more dynamite, for C. C. Bryant—who lived across the street—had taken up his rifle and joined his sister-in-law in shooting at the attackers. Others in the neighborhood joined in as well.
By September 1964, McComb’s black community had begun to take on some of the characteristics of a military camp, with armed patrols protecting homes, businesses, and churches—although even these patrols could not always stop the violence. The home of Alyene Quin, proprietor of a small café that fed movement workers, was bombed on September 20. Although she and her children survived, the pent-up anger and frustration of McComb’s black community erupted in the kind of violence that is born of rage rather than self-defense. In scenes that mirrored the rioting that had occurred in Harlem and Philadelphia that summer, blacks poured into the streets of McComb, some armed with rifles, others with bottles and gasoline—the makings of Molotov cocktails. Teenagers picked up bricks and threw them at police, backing them down and forcing the town to call in state troopers. And C. C. Bryant soon replaced his .22-caliber rifle with a new, high-powered model.
This intense period in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 proves a point that was true elsewhere in the South, as well: a clear, sharp line cannot be meaningfully drawn between nonviolence and armed self-defense. Within the framework of black community life and civil rights effort in the South, and in the minds of most who joined the Freedom Movement, the pistol, the rifle, and the shotgun were integrated with the spirit of struggle that has always been a basic feature of black life in America and a critical component of the black experience and of black memory. Nonviolence was an important part of this struggle, too, but it was not the entirety of it; nor was the use of guns the be-all and end-all of black struggle.
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