This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  The violence only heightened the uncertainty over how much or how little protection weapons provided. In many cases, such as Herbert Lee’s, it was clear that the targets never had the chance to use a firearm even if they were carrying one. In 1963 SNCC worker Jimmy Travis was machine-gunned while he was driving from Greenwood to Greenville, Mississippi. He was unarmed, but a pistol would have been of little use in this sudden attack. Medgar Evers, who always traveled armed, was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson home later the same year, bleeding to death without ever managing to reach the pistol and rifle that were in his car. CORE organizers James Chaney, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were killed in 1964 after a Neshoba County deputy sheriff handed them over to a Ku Klux Klan mob.

  These and other incidents in the early 1960s were a far cry from the Wild West shoot-outs romanticized by Hollywood cowboy movies. The good guys and the bad guys did not stand at opposite ends of dusty southern streets facing one another mano a mano. And the lawmen were not always—or even usually—a force for good. Indeed, state power was almost always willing to step in and ruthlessly reinforce local white violence in the name of law and order.

  There is some comfort in carrying a weapon in dangerous situations. And more than a few local movement supporters carried them, though for the most part they did not flash their guns or display their rifles on gun racks in their trucks, as whites were able to do. But local supporters who did carry guns exerted pressure—whether consciously or unconsciously—on organizers and activists to do the same. “Steptoe and other people [in Amite County] chided me a lot for not being willing to carry a gun,” recalled Moses, “telling me when they had their guns, ‘But you’re nonviolent and you’re not going to help with the protection, are you?’ So on that score you were the odd man out.”

  Moses resisted the culture of gun ownership and armed self-defense as much as he could. Steptoe’s son, E. W. Steptoe Jr., remembered one disagreement over weapons that took place as his father and Moses were preparing to visit Lee’s widow. “Daddy wanted to put a gun in the car,” E. W. Jr. related later. “[Bob] said ‘No, I’m not going with you if you’re going to carry a gun.’ [Daddy] said, ‘You don’t know these people around here.’” Eventually, Steptoe reluctantly left the gun at home—although he may well have kept the derringer that he habitually carried in his sock.

  The threats that drove local people to carry guns were certainly real, and few organizers were prepared to go as far as Moses did in objecting even to traveling with an armed protector. Indeed, when it came down to a question of survival, most activists’ practice of “nonviolence” proved quite flexible.

  Although it was not usual for “nonviolent” activists to possess or use guns, they did carry weapons from time to time. Willie (now “Wazir”) Peacock illustrated the fluidity of attitude about weapons at a June 10, 1964, SNCC staff meeting in Atlanta. Peacock, a young activist from Tallahatchie County, was organizing in Greenwood, and at the meeting he passionately described some of the complexities that could be involved in balancing the need for self-defense with SNCC’s official commitment to nonviolence:

  I asked a local man to fire on anyone who broke into our Freedom House, so that neither I nor any other SNCC staff person would be compromised by using arms. But he would not agree. So, instead, I placed guns [in the house] so that we could at least guard the Freedom House at night. We have done this since February… . Violence is not being preached about, but the local people all say that the white man thinks it’s war and he is preparing to defend his home … [and] whites in Greenwood are more convinced than ever that they can kill a Negro and get away with it.

  It became clear that Peacock was not alone in challenging the philosophical principles espoused by his organization. All that year, violence against activists and their supporters had been increasing, and the topic of self-defense continued to be the subject of much debate at the meeting. This was SNCC’s most intense organizational discussion of the issue to date, and there were myriad questions swirling around it. Should SNCC workers carry guns? Would SNCC defend a field secretary arrested for helping a household that used arms to defend itself from terrorists? Did SNCC even want local people to defend its organizers with arms? Should they seek such protection?

  Both sides argued their positions passionately. “Willie said he was concerned about the people around the office who might die,” said Prathia Hall, a fellow organizer who was also at the meeting. She was totally committed to nonviolence and opposed to the use of violence, whatever its context. “But at the same time,” she argued, “you might shoot a person breaking in to plant a bomb, you might shoot someone who broke in because of hunger.” Sam Block, a native of Cleveland, Mississippi, was of the opposite mind-set. He had begun the Greenwood project, and he spent his first days in the city ducking white terrorists determined to kill him, even sleeping in a junkyard in the backseat of a car until he found a family brave enough to put him up. He told the meeting, “Amzie Moore has reported that vigilantes will kill Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Aaron Henry, Dave Dennis and me… . I’m not going to carry a gun but if someone else is going to protect himself, then let him protect me as well!” Block also succinctly summed up an important sentiment held by many of the activists who were skeptical about the effectiveness of nonviolence: “I would back nonviolence if the whites coming down [as volunteers] for the summer would go into the white community and preach nonviolence.”

  Just three months earlier, Peacock informed the meeting, someone had shot at him in front of the SNCC office in Greenwood. He then suggested that it would be worthwhile for SNCC to consider organizing defense for its field secretaries and their local supporters. “I think an organization to stop whites should be set up,” he told the group. Peacock’s fellow activist Lawrence Guyot, however, was having none of it. He insisted that carrying guns put the organizers at greater risk, exclaiming at one point, “Don’t you see? They’ll shoot us quicker if we’re armed!” And so it went, back and forth.

  The group finally reached a consensus: SNCC field staff would not carry weapons, and summer volunteers who carried weapons would be sent home. No enforcement mechanism or penalty for staff was discussed, however. In effect, the question of guns and self-defense remained open. Still, at least some of the organizers took this new SNCC policy seriously. When he returned to Greenwood after the meeting, Stokely Carmichael removed weapons from the office.

  The meeting in Atlanta reflected a crucial reality about nonviolence and armed self-defense: the choice of which tactic to use in a given situation was, ultimately, up to the organizers in the field. Movement culture granted organizers a great deal of latitude in decision making in the field, which effectively made the 1964 Atlanta consensus moot.

  Virtually all the SNCC projects across the Deep South were wrestling with the tension between nonviolence and self-defense, trying to find the balance that would best suit the communities where they were working. Don Harris, who directed a SNCC project in and around Americus, Georgia, told the Atlanta meeting that there had been six shootings in eighteen months in his area and that locals were resistant to the idea of not firing back at terrorists. “At a mass meeting two nights after the last shooting we talked about nonviolence,” Harris told the meeting, “but the people walked out angry and frustrated.” Later, in discussion among themselves, staff members in Americus questioned “what right they had to stop the local people from whatever they wanted to do.” Sherrod would later attest that his Southwest Georgia project had “many discussions” about weapons. His project was headquartered in Albany, the major city in the region, and any volunteer or staff person planning to work with SNCC arrived there first and was oriented.

  My instructions were that nobody was to have guns, or buy guns, or take guns into the community, but also to withhold our judgment on the local people who did have guns because everybody in Albany had guns. The counties were just as bad. You couldn’t look into a room without seeing a gun eit
her on the mantelpiece, above the mantelpiece, or in a corner somewhere. We didn’t come to change their local culture.

  Nonviolence was an abstract and sometimes impractical idea to many, perhaps most, people in the rural South, where antiblack terrorism was often protected by local law enforcement and treated as customary by many whites. The alternative to self-defense could be a brutal death. In 1965, Hosie Miller, the father of Charles Sherrod’s wife Shirley Miller Sherrod, was murdered by a white man in Baker County, Georgia (“bad Baker,” as the county was nicknamed), gunned down on his own land following a dispute over some cows. Not long after her father’s killing, Shirley, then seventeen years old, and a handful of other young people desegregated the local high school; the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the Millers’ farmhouse yard in retaliation. More than a dozen Klansmen were there, and the cross burned brightly enough to reveal the faces of several of the night riders. Shirley’s mother stood on the porch with a pistol and shouted out, “I know who you are!” as Shirley and her sisters telephoned neighbors. Armed black farmers quickly showed up and surrounded the Klansmen. The night riders were allowed to flee, but only after they had pleaded for the life of one of their number, who was in the rifle sights of an angry young black man. Some of the Millers’ defenders might have considered their actions nonviolent, because no shots were fired in response to the Klan raiders.

  Although Charles Sherrod retained his commitment to nonviolence even as he immersed himself in Southwest Georgia, most who emerged from nonviolent protests and began working as community organizers did not press the idea in southern black communities. Many organizers saw nonviolence as a tactic and did not think it necessary to raise the issue unless it was tactically necessary—for example, in bringing people to courthouses to register to vote or for a protest march. Many movement activists agree that there was a racial element threaded into attitudes toward nonviolence: white volunteers seemed to be in favor of it; black activists seemed to be skeptical of it. This of course is not absolute; there were strong black proponents of nonviolence—Charles Sherrod, for example—and there were also whites who considered self-defense valid and necessary.

  Living and working in southern black communities had a profound effect on organizers. Respect for community life was at the heart of their project and affected their attitudes toward armed self-defense. Organizers who were taken into a community felt an obligation to abide by local values, especially if those values were contributing to the protection of the organizers. Sam Block’s sister Margaret understood this when she was organizing in Tallahatchie County in January 1964. She stayed with eighty-six-year-old Janie Brewer, the matriarch of a large black family who lived with some of her children and grandchildren on the family farm about four or five miles outside the tiny village of Glendora. “Mrs. Brewer asked me what did SNCC mean,” Block would later recall, “and I told her the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And she stopped me. [She said] ‘You said nonviolent. If somebody come at you, you ain’t gonna do nothing.’ … She pulled up a big ole rifle… . She kept a big rifle behind the chair… . [Mrs. Brewer said,] ‘Shit, we ain’t nonviolent.’” Ideas like this shaped Block’s own feelings about nonviolence. “Since I was living with [the Brewers],” she later explained, “I had to be what the family was.”

  The experience of fieldwork changed organizers’ actions as well as their attitudes. One night in August 1964, after four of Mrs. Brewer’s sons and another local resident tried to register to vote at the county courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, whites in cars began circling the family’s farmhouse. This was not the first time such harassment had occurred; when SNCC staff took local people to attempt to register to vote, whites often followed the groups back home. On this night Janie Brewer had already been warned by her local sources of a possible attack, and she instructed her children, grandchildren, and SNCC guests to arm themselves and hide in the cotton fields. Meanwhile she and Margaret Block began making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen, “spilling gas everywhere,” Block remembered. “And I’m like ‘Damn if we get burned up in here, everyone was going to swear the Klan did it [and] it’s going to be Mrs. Brewer blowing us up.” As the sheriff and a “truckload” of Klansmen approached the farmhouse, Brewer family members and some of the SNCC workers were still in the fields with rifles and shotguns. Before the raiders reached the house, someone shone a floodlight on them. Others fired into the air. Brewer stood on the front porch ready to hurl a Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled. Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm.

  SNCC and CORE field secretaries almost never had to ask for protection, and when protection was needed, their defenders often received signals that the field secretaries did not even know were being transmitted. Bernard Lafayette was one of those in SNCC most committed to nonviolence. In Selma in 1963 he was saved from possible assassination by a neighbor and Korean War veteran whose name he remembers as “Red.” Red fired a rifle and drove away two white men who had been assaulting Lafayette in front of his home with their fists and a pistol. Lafayette was understandably relieved, but even in the moment he attempted to reconcile his commitment to nonviolence with the gunfire that saved him. “When I saw Red had a rifle I shouted out, ‘Red, don’t shoot him!’” he recalled. “Then I placed my body between Red and the big burly white man who had been beating me.” Lafayette’s attackers were not killed, or even wounded, and they fled. “I stopped Red, that’s the point. My position was practical and moral. I didn’t want to be involved or participate in somebody getting killed.” Afterward, “Red kind of assigned himself as my bodyguard because there were four units in the house. Red lived in one of them and if somebody threw a bomb he was gonna get killed too.”

  Organizers recognized that armed protection was an intrinsic part of life in black communities and accepted it as natural and necessary. One of the places where guns were thoroughly integrated into movement life was Lowndes County, Alabama, a place so notoriously violent that it was known as “Bloody Lowndes.” When SNCC organizers led by Stokely Carmichael began working there in 1965, just one black person was registered to vote—this despite the fact that the population of Lowndes was 80 percent black.

  The organizers arrived shortly after the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and almost immediately terrorists began targeting the black community. In August students decided to picket stores at the county seat, an action unusual in such a rural area. Accompanying them was a young white Episcopal minister from New Hampshire, Jonathan Daniels, who had first come to Alabama for the Selma-to-Montgomery march and had stayed as a volunteer in Lowndes County. The group was arrested, and released a few days later. Then Daniels and others of the group entered a white-owned store frequented by blacks to buy some soft drinks. A deputy sheriff holding a shotgun ordered them out. Then, suddenly, he opened fire, killing Daniels and wounding a catholic priest, Father Richard Morrisroe. According to Ruby Sales, a Tuskegee student, “Things happened so fast… . There was a shotgun blast and then another shotgun blast, and I heard Father Morrisroe moaning for water. And I thought to myself, This is what dead is. I’m dead.”

  As the violence grew, black people fortified their homes and began to organize protection. Bessie McMeans of Fort Deposit in Lowndes County placed a mattress in her living room and stacked a dozen or so guns on it. People kept shotguns behind their bedroom doors; they oiled their old pistols and placed them on nightstands. Local people carried weapons while canvassing for potential voter registrants. They also organized armed caravans to and from mass meetings. Gun shops stopped selling bullets to black people, but family members and friends who were part of a “Lowndes diaspora” in Detroit and other places outside the state helped smuggle guns and ammunition into the county. The daughter of one local leader who taught school in Georgia began purchasing large quantities of ammunition and some weapons, which she brought home whenever she visited.

  The important lesson here is that SNCC staff did not have to organize self-defense in L
owndes. Nor did they automatically reject the idea of grabbing a weapon if necessary to help protect a household under fire from terrorists. R. L. Strickland, a farmer, told Stokely Carmichael, “Wal, in this county, if you turn the other cheek … these here peckerwoods’ll hand you back half of what you sitting on.” Men like Strickland sat on their porches with guns, “and Stokely wasn’t inside the house being protected by them,” says Ivanhoe Donaldson. “He was right there with them.”

  Organizers elsewhere in the South also kept open the option of armed self-defense. In Natchez, Mississippi, during the period that became known as the 1964 Freedom Summer, organizers stored guns in a shack near the “freedom house” they rented as their organizing headquarters and living space. Organizers could get away with breaking official SNCC doctrine like this because of their relative autonomy and distance from the core of the organization. In an era before smartphones and social media, movement fieldwork was largely invisible to SNCC headquarters until an organizer wrote a field report and snail-mailed it to the organization’s main offices—Atlanta, in the case of SNCC and SCLC, and New York, in the case of CORE. Organizers who carried guns did not put that fact in their field reports.

  In the summer of 1964 Chuck McDew, who by then was no longer SNCC’s chairman, entered Natchez with two other SNCC workers: Dorie Ladner and George Green, both native Mississippians. But before going to that notoriously Klan-infested river city, says McDew, “I got three guns from Mr. Steptoe down in Amite County—a .32 pistol, a Japanese luger, and a .45 pistol. The .32 was for Dorie.” After they settled in the house where they had made arrangements to stay overnight, McDew showed Dorie how to aim and shoot the pistol. “We’d already been stopped by the cops coming into town. They knew where we were staying, which meant the Klan knew we were in town and where we were staying.” Dorie was in a bedroom on the third floor. George and Chuck were downstairs in a first floor bedroom, and McDew’s instructions to Dorie were explicit. “I explained that if Klansmen tried to get into the house she would probably hear some noise—shooting and stuff,” McDew remembered. He told her, “If anybody comes up the stairs, unless it is me or George don’t open your door, just shoot. I repeated, Nobody can get in your room without coming through your door. If anybody you don’t know tries, just shoot ’em; hit them anywhere. Just shoot!”