The rural black culture that SNCC field secretaries encountered in the Deep South had long accepted armed self-defense as legitimate. Although local black people could be uncertain about when and how to best employ it, the idea itself was not subject to debate. Guns were common in southern households, used not only for hunting but also for protection from white violence. The idea of removing guns from the equation was, for the vast majority of rural southern blacks, simply a nonissue.
The young SNCC and CORE activists now becoming grassroots organizers learned almost immediately that guns were in the political mix in a way they had never been before, on picket lines and at sit-ins. In rural Lee County, Georgia, for example, seventy-year-old Annie “Mama Dolly” Raines was a key movement supporter. Her small farm “was like a stop on the Underground Railroad because so many of us in the Albany Movement came there,” recalled Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, a student who became involved with the Albany project in the summer of 1962. Mama Dolly was one of Charles Sherrod’s earliest and closest confidants in Southwest Georgia, but not because she shared his philosophical commitment to nonviolence; far from it, in fact. Sherrod remembered,
[Mama Dolly] had this big shotgun. I tried to talk her out of guarding me but she said, “Baby, I brought a lot of these white folks into this world, and I’ll take ’em out of this world if I have to.” Sometimes, no matter what I said, she would sit in my bedroom window, leg propped up with that big ol’ gun. She knew how to handle it way better than I did. In fact, I didn’t know nothin’ about no shotgun.
Preacely would remember the experience of sleeping at Mama Dolly’s farmhouse in more general terms. “When we slept at night,” she said, “we felt somewhat protected. It was ironic and ambiguous all at the same time.”
Developments such as these were indeed ambiguous. The ideal of nonviolent struggle had driven Sherrod and most of that first small group of students to leave school to work full-time with SNCC. With one or two exceptions—John Lewis was one, James Bevel another—these students were products of the urban South. They had varying degrees of personal experience in the rural South, but guns, even for hunting, had never been an important part of their lives. Their earliest movement activity centered on protests against segregated public facilities, and the great majority of those protests occurred in urban areas, where guns were rarely a factor in any violence the activists might have experienced—white mobs seemed to prefer fists or clubs. This would all change as they entered the rural Deep South.
It was the work of SNCC field secretary Bob Moses that first began to make plain the issue of self-defense for the organization—ironically, because Moses has always been identified with nonviolence and as a college student had worked on Quaker projects overseas. At twenty-six, Moses was slightly older than most SNCC workers, and he already held a master’s degree from Harvard. In the summer of 1961, after finishing a teaching contract in New York City, he joined SNCC’s staff and wound up in the small city of McComb in Pike County, Mississippi, where he began SNCC’s first voter-registration project. About a month after he arrived, he was joined by Reginald Robinson, a SNCC activist from Baltimore, and John Hardy, a Freedom Rider from Fisk University in Nashville.
Freedom Riders were interracial groups of young men and women who challenged the segregation of interstate transportation by riding together on buses traveling between southern states. They began coursing into Mississippi early in the summer of 1961, and hundreds were arrested. Before he came to McComb, Hardy himself had been imprisoned in the notorious Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) in the Mississippi Delta. By penetrating the rural South on buses, Freedom Riders served as highly visible symbols of resistance to white supremacy for the black people in small towns and hamlets across the region, places that had no Woolworth lunch counters or, indeed, much beyond a gas-station restroom where segregation could be directly challenged. Some of the riders remained in Mississippi after being released from jail. Thus it was that Hardy had joined Moses’s work in McComb—just an hour and a half south of Mississippi’s capital city and the last major stop on the bus route to New Orleans.
Freedom Riders were not the only ones interested in Moses’s work. Shortly after his arrival in McComb, a cadre of young black people emerged to help him. They were mostly too young to vote, and they were impatient. These young people had been admiring the Freedom Riders and sit-in activists from a distance. Now, as some of the riders and SNCC activists began arriving in McComb, the young people of the town welcomed their help in forming a local nonviolent organization. And so, in this small Southwest Mississippi city, we see for the first time the convergence of nonviolent direct-action protest with community organizing focused on voter registration. It was here that SNCC’s most militant proponents of nonviolent direct action—who were also the ones most suspicious of voter-registration campaigns—began to get their first close-up view of organizing at the grassroots and began to understand its implications.
It did not take long for word of Moses’s work to spread beyond McComb, and a group of residents from neighboring Amite and Walthall Counties sought help in launching similar voter-registration efforts. Curtis Conway “C. C.” Bryant, head of the Pike County NAACP branch, brought Moses to Amite County and introduced him to his NAACP counterpart there, Eldridge Willie “E. W.” Steptoe. And Steptoe offered to let Moses use the church on his small farm outside of the town of Liberty as a voter-registration school. “I’ve been expecting you,” the farmer told Moses after being introduced to him.
Steptoe was a small, wiry man of renowned toughness, intelligence, and determination. As founder and president of the Amite County NAACP in 1953, he was always in the crosshairs of local white supremacists. In 1954 Amite County sheriff Ira Jenkins and fifteen or twenty other deputies and Klansmen raided an NAACP meeting on Steptoe’s farm, confiscating the membership list and other records. Not surprisingly, NAACP membership dropped sharply. But Steptoe kept the branch alive by buying enough memberships himself to meet the quota that the NAACP national headquarters required for a chartered branch.
White supremacists constantly threatened and harassed Steptoe, but they had to be careful. Night riding was not likely to be successful in confronting a man like Steptoe—and in fact, it could be deadly, for it was well known that his farmhouse contained a small arsenal and that he would not hesitate to shoot back. If you stayed overnight with Steptoe, recalled Chuck McDew, “as you went to bed he would open up the night table and there would be a large .45 automatic sitting next to you… . [There were] guns all over the house, under pillows, under chairs.” Steptoe also traveled as heavily armed as possible. His wife, Sing, was uncomfortable with the idea of her husband carrying weapons on his person, so sometimes before he left to go into town she would pat him down, confiscating any guns she found. Still, he was rarely unarmed. He often carried a derringer in his sock, a firearm that somehow Sing never found, despite the fact that almost everyone in Amite County seemed to know it was there.
Steptoe’s grit mirrored the landscape that had produced him. Southwest Mississippi is a hilly, hardscrabble place; most of its residents, black or white, were poor. They had never managed to come together to fight the causes of their poverty, however, for race trumped everything. As tough and racist as McComb was, Amite and Walthall Counties made it seem a haven of moderate, understanding whites. In these counties whites displayed none of the pretense of paternalistic affection that some white planters in the cotton country of the Delta seemed to reserve for blacks. Southwest Mississippi was the most Klan-ridden region in the state, and the Amite County chapter of the Klan was headed by the sheriff’s son. Only one black person in Amite County—a majority-black county—was known to be registered to vote, and he had never tried to exercise that right.
Surprisingly, in spite of the ferocious white-supremacist opposition to civil rights in Southwest Mississippi, the NAACP was in some ways stronger in this region than anywhere else in the state. Steptoe’s determined pro
tection of his NAACP branch is one example. Although no black person was registered to vote in Walthall County, it had an NAACP chapter, and its residents were the first in Mississippi to file a school-desegregation suit. In McComb, Medgar Evers organized an NAACP youth chapter specifically concerned with police brutality. Pike County members of the NAACP went to Washington, D.C., to testify in support of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
But overall, Amite, Walthall, and Pike Counties were the stuff of black nightmares. Wrote journalist Jack Newfield, “In the mythology of the Movement Amite County is synonymous with the Ninth Circle of Hell.” Some in McComb urged Moses to stay away from Amite and Walthall Counties, fearing that he would never get out alive. However, Moses had been asked for help by the residents of these counties, and he felt that to refuse would defeat the purpose of what he and others from SNCC had begun. “Farmers came over and were very anxious to try and register,” Moses explained, “and you couldn’t very well turn them down… . You can’t be in the position of turning down the tough areas because the people, then, I think, would lose confidence in you.” By late August Moses was holding regular classes on Steptoe’s farm.
As other SNCC organizers joined Moses in Amite, Walthall, and Pike Counties, it quickly became apparent just how dangerous those places were. After Moses brought two people to register in the tiny town of Liberty, the county seat of Amite County, the cousin of Amite County’s sheriff accosted him in the street and beat him with the butt end of a knife. Steptoe’s neighbor Herbert Lee, an NAACP leader and a key supporter of SNCC’s voter-registration efforts in Amite County, was shot and killed in broad daylight at the town’s cotton gin. Three weeks later, a crowd of enraged white men beat SNCC organizer Travis Britt into semiconsciousness at the Amite County courthouse. Britt later reported to SNCC that one of his attackers had yelled out, “Brothers! Should we kill him here?” In another incident, John Hardy brought two potential registrants to the courthouse in Tylertown, the county seat of Walthall County. The clerk told Hardy he was not registering voters that day, and when Hardy leaned forward to ask why, the clerk pulled a pistol from beneath the counter and smashed the gun into the side of his head. Hardy staggered from the courthouse out into the street, where he was placed under arrest for disturbing the peace.
Violence often works in the short term, and it initially stopped the work of Bob Moses and his SNCC colleagues in Southwest Mississippi. “Can we really keep doing this?” Moses would later recall asking himself after the murder of Herbert Lee, knowing that the price could get higher. He temporarily retreated from the region and returned to McComb, where high school students’ protests against segregation were heating up. But angry black adults in McComb opposed the protests, for which they blamed him and SNCC. The NAACP leaders, who had initially invited Moses to McComb, were furious about the sit-ins, protest marches, and, especially, the consequent jailing of high school students. They held Moses and SNCC responsible for this unexpected development and felt they had been double-crossed; sit-ins were not why they had invited them to McComb. C. C. Bryant even asked the state NAACP executive committee to condemn the SNCC project in McComb. Although Steptoe, Amzie Moore, and several other local civil rights leaders defended Moses, by December he and SNCC had left McComb, not to return until 1964.
Moses may have felt defeated in the short term, but the experience in Southwest Mississippi contained important lessons. He and others from SNCC had learned that it was possible to dig in and organize, especially for voter registration. They now understood that they were capable of attracting a critical mass of local supporters, young people especially. They found support from existing (if sometimes invisible) local leadership and discovered new leaders who arose as the local movement emerged. As Moses later put it, he and his fellow SNCC organizers “had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet.”
These first, uncertain steps in Southwest Mississippi were invaluable, pioneering not only SNCC’s future work in Mississippi but also its efforts across the rest of the South. Although organizers like Moses were outsiders to the rural communities they worked in, local blacks embraced them—as family, not just as allies. Indeed, the organizing efforts in Southwest Mississippi confirmed what Ella Baker and Amzie Moore had already stressed in their conversations with Moses and SNCC: that there were people in rural communities, like Steptoe, who had been waiting for—even expecting—them. The nature of the relationship, however, was “totally unexpected,” Moses recalled:
I had become part of something else besides a civil rights organization in Mississippi. Everywhere we went I and other civil rights workers were adopted and nurtured, even protected as though we were family. We were the community’s children, and that closeness rendered moot the label of “outside agitator.” … Importantly, as is always true in close families, our young generation was dynamically linked to a rooted older generation who passed on wisdom, encouragement, and concrete aid when possible. This was empowering, enabling SNCC and CORE field secretaries to move from county to county across a network that provided different levels of support. A network made up of people offering whatever they could within their means.
The experiences of Moses and SNCC in Southwest Mississippi drove home what Ella Baker knew they would learn: that organizing for voter registration was direct action. And even if sit-ins seemed counterproductive without the support of local leadership in small towns like McComb and all but impossible in rural areas like Amite County, organizing for voter registration was proving itself as direct a challenge to white supremacy as any sit-in or Freedom Ride. SNCC’s Reggie Robinson succinctly described how these first efforts in Mississippi drove home this lesson: “If you went into Mississippi and talked about voter registration they’re going to hit you on the side of the head and that’s as direct as you can get.”
The voter-registration campaign in the Delta had merely been postponed when Moore sent Moses to McComb. Moses (now living in Jackson) realized that a unified effort was needed in order to tackle voter registration or to make any sort of meaningful stab at community organizing in the state. David Dennis, CORE’s Mississippi project director, had reached the same conclusion, and it had long been the view of Aaron Henry, now state president of the NAACP. In January 1962, Henry convened in Clarksdale a meeting of representatives from SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP. This meeting gave new life to a statewide organization that had originally been formed to support Freedom Riders: the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). The attendees decided that a revitalized COFO would launch a voter-registration campaign, to be staffed largely by SNCC and CORE field secretaries. Moses was named COFO’s state project director, and Dennis was named assistant director. Partly because of his relationship with Amzie Moore, and partly because of the numbers—Delta counties were roughly two-thirds black—Moses and SNCC targeted the Delta. And now a cadre of young Mississippians had emerged from McComb and Jackson who were prepared to work in the Delta with Moses and SNCC. Dennis began a project staffed by CORE in the center of the state between Canton and Meridian, in what was then Mississippi’s Fourth Congressional District.
As voter-registration work expanded, however, attacks by white supremacists intensified, and the federal government refused to provide protection for either the organizers or the communities they worked in. Discussions about self-defense accelerated. One issue was whether or not civil rights workers in the Delta and elsewhere in the Deep South should carry weapons for their own protection. They and their cars were known to hostile whites. Many of the adult leaders they worked with traveled armed and sometimes offered them weapons. “My position,” says Moses considering it years later, “was that the SNCC field secretaries themselves should not carry guns. Local people might be carrying guns—that was up to them—but we would all be in danger if the idea went out that SNCC field secretaries were arming themselves.”
Although the young Mississippians now working with Moses and SNCC were local people just like the older leaders in their communities, they did not p
ut up much of an argument over Moses’s antigun stance, which mirrored SNCC policy. Just as for their parents and grandparents, the practicalities of the day were the determining factor in their attitudes toward armed self-defense. Police commonly stopped, questioned, and searched blacks, so gun possession could indeed put a person at risk by giving police an excuse to gun him or her down. At the very least, it could give weight to whites’ claim that blacks were plotting armed insurrections.
Most of the organizers now working with SNCC and CORE realized that carrying a gun would not necessarily save their lives. They were most likely to be accosted by white supremacists on back roads and highways, where they would have little use for guns unless they were trapped. And even then, firing back might only save them if their attackers were civilians, cowards, or both. Shooting back at racist police officers only made matters worse. Activists knew that it was better to try to outrun pursuing vehicles than to engage their occupants. And a tragic fact of the Deep South was that black victims could not always anticipate the attacks that killed them. Herbert Lee, for instance, kept a gun in his truck but was shot down and killed by a white man—a boyhood playmate—who he thought was calling him over for conversation. It admittedly would have been an argumentative conversation, but Lee was expecting to talk to the man, not shoot at him.
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