McDew’s fears were justified. Earlier that summer, three CORE workers—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had disappeared while attempting to register black voters in central Mississippi; they would later be found shot to death. At the time, says McDew, “there really wasn’t any lengthy discussion” about whether or not SNCC workers could participate in armed self-defense if they were attacked, as their three fellow workers presumably had been. McDew noted,
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were missing and we assumed they were dead. We also thought that there was a statewide plan to get rid of us all, or at least to kill as many of us as they could get away with killing. Now, I was not an advocate of going out and killing white people, but I did know how to use a gun, and when it came down to thee or me, you were going to die before me. I didn’t think about the effect on the organization [SNCC]—a “nonviolent” organization. It was my feeling that some dumbass cracker is not going to catch me and shoot me down here in Natchez, Mississippi, without me taking him and his friends along on that trip to the other side.
Although no formal survey of movement veterans has been done, it is virtually certain that most field workers shared Chuck McDew’s attitude toward guns. Most did not carry weapons on their person in their day-today work, but there were moments when organizers felt it could be handy to have a gun.
Besides the disappearances of the three CORE workers, a host of other violent events occurred that summer and fall that reinforced organizers’ desire for protection. In September, Natchez mayor John Nosser—a native of Lebanon who had immigrated to the United States as a nineteen-year-old—proposed opening discussions with the NAACP; the Klan bombed his home in retaliation. A few weeks earlier a bomb blast had demolished a black-owned tavern almost next door to the house that movement workers in Natchez had rented. “The fire chief said the bomb was meant for us,” Dorie Ladner said later, “and the police chief said he was surprised that we hadn’t been killed already.”
Dorie Ladner was well acquainted with the dangers of being black in Mississippi. As high school students she and her sister Joyce had been mentored by both Medgar Evers and their hometown NAACP leader, Vernon Dahmer, who would be murdered in 1966 when Klansmen firebombed his home. However, said Dorie, “I didn’t think about white people and violence when growing up because I wasn’t around them that much. Then I jumped into the movement full time and saw how they really were.” Nonetheless, she said, “It was strange to have a gun. I guess it was sort of like being given a plank to use for walking across the water if necessary.” There had been guns in her house when she was growing up; her father kept a shotgun above the front door. But like many grown-up things in a young girl’s household, especially things mostly associated with adult males, the shotgun had been unimportant to her. She did not know how to use it and had never tried to learn.
Dorie Ladner never had occasion to use the pistol Chuck McDew gave her, but she might have been willing to do so. “I am not a violent person, but I knew I was going into a very violent territory,” she said later. “I didn’t anticipate violence because if you did that all of the time, day to day, you couldn’t live that way; you might go crazy with fear. But when Chuck gave me the gun, in my own head I thought if somebody I didn’t know came up those stairs I was going to shoot them. I didn’t think about the ramifications or anything like that; it was save yourself, survive.”
6
Standing Our Ground
If you are not afraid, you can make a good leader. If you are scared of white folks you don’t make a good leader. That white man will beat your brains out.
—Clarence Chinn Jr. to author
We decided since we didn’t have protection from the law, by the law, we should organize a group to protect our peoples in the neighborhood… . And we took up the job of self-defense… . We never attacked anyone, but we would defend ourself against anybody at any time, anywhere, regardless of the price.
—Charles Sims, president of Deacons for Defense
and Justice, to Howell Raines, Bogalusa, Louisiana
Tough men and women and the weapons they sometimes used were essential to the southern Freedom Movement. And it seems remarkable that some of the most defiant survived in parts of the South where even in the mid-twentieth century, some whites thought they had a God-given right to kill any black person showing discontent. One such unlikely survivor was C. O. Chinn. In his early forties and tall, dark, and muscular, Chinn was already a legend in Madison County, Mississippi, because of his unwillingness to bend to white power. David Dennis, then CORE’s Mississippi project director, recalls being in the courtroom of the county courthouse in Canton, Mississippi, one morning in 1963, attending a bond hearing for a volunteer who had been arrested on a traffic violation, when C. O. Chinn walked in. Chinn was wearing a holstered pistol on his hip, which probably would not have raised an eyebrow if he had been white.
“Now C. O.,” drawled the judge, “You know you can’t come in here wearing that gun.” Madison County sheriff Billy Noble was also in the courtroom; Chinn looked over at him and responded, “As long as that SOB over there is wearing his, I’m gonna keep mine.”
The enmity between Chinn and the sheriff was well-known throughout the county, and half expecting a shootout, Dennis thought to himself, “We’re all dead.” But the judge spoke coaxingly to both men: “Boys, boys, no. Why don’t you put your guns on the table over here in front of the bench. Let’s be good boys.” Both men walked to the table and—eyeing one another “very carefully,” Dennis remembers—set their pistols down.
Chinn stands out among the men and women who were willing to provide armed protection to Freedom Movement workers in Mississippi. As Sheriff Noble himself once said, “There are only two bad sons of bitches in this county; me and that nigger C. O. Chinn.” Many whites in notoriously racist Madison County feared Chinn. CORE field secretary Mateo “Flukie” Suarez, who worked in Canton at the time, said of Chinn, “Every white man in that town knew you didn’t fuck with C. O. Chinn. He’d kick your natural ass.”
Chinn had earned his reputation early in life. He had grown up in a family of small, independent farmers, and although they did not have much money, he did not work for white people. One day a white farmer approached his mother and told her that Chinn needed to find work with a white person or leave the county. When she told her son about it, he went to the farmer, armed with a .38-caliber pistol, and told him to stay out of Chinn family affairs, thereby establishing his reputation as a “crazy Negro,” a “dangerous Negro.”
Chinn was one of the movement’s most unusual stalwarts. He was an entrepreneur, and his business concerns included a 152-acre farm, Canton’s Club Desire (one of Mississippi’s major rhythm-and-blues nightclubs), a bootlegging operation, and other enterprises that skirted and occasionally crossed the line of legality. Chinn, his daughter-in-law Mamie Chinn explains, “was always fearless.” She remembers her mother-in-law, Minnie Lou Chinn, telling her years later, “My husband never been no nonviolent man. He’d fit [fight] the devil out of Hell if he had to.” Chinn’s son Clarence elaborates, “He was raised to believe that you were supposed to work hard, treat everyone right, respect everybody but take no mess off nobody, regardless of color.”
When Dennis first met Chinn (just a few months before the incident in the courthouse), it was also the first time he encountered the reality that guns were inescapably going to be part of his and CORE’s grassroots organizing projects. Although Dennis was never committed to nonviolence as a way of life, he had organized nonviolent CORE chapters and protests in his home state of Louisiana. As CORE’s project director for Mississippi, he had sent organizers to Canton. On his first visit to Canton, George Raymond, the project director Dennis had sent there, told him that he had a problem with Chinn bringing his guns around movement activities.
Nonviolence was more deeply embedded in CORE than in SNCC. CORE had roots in Christian pacifist activism that went back to World War I thr
ough the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and CORE’s local chapters were bound more tightly to their national headquarters than were SNCC field secretaries and the community organizations they developed. Commitment to nonviolence was mandatory in CORE chapters. SNCC did not even develop chapters; there was no SNCC membership card and, unlike the NAACP, SNCC required no dues. SNCC had staff who were “field secretaries,” not members. As historian Emily Stoper notes, “Nowhere was there a pamphlet stating authoritatively ‘this is what you must believe to be a SNCC member.’”
Most of the organizers in Madison County, including Raymond himself, had come over from the very strong CORE chapter in New Orleans at Dave Dennis’s request, and they were heavily invested in the idea of nonviolence. As with many other members of southern CORE chapters, key leaders of New Orleans CORE were trying to embrace nonviolence as a way of life. Some members fasted in preparation for nonviolent protest and followed CORE’s rules for action, pledging to “meet the anger of any individual or group in the spirit of good will.” They also pledged that they would “submit to assault and not retaliate in kind by act or word.” Except for the Nashville, Tennessee, group, this commitment was much stricter than anything found in the campus protest groups associated with SNCC.
Although, as Chinn’s wife had noted, he “never been no nonviolent man,” he admired the young civil rights organizers who had come to Madison County. As CORE field secretary Suarez remembers,
[Chinn] believed we were doing the right thing and felt he should be supporting us and providing us with a certain amount of protection. Everything he had was just put at our disposal. There was never a time you needed to go someplace that he didn’t assign somebody to go with you. He was his own man in his own mold. I don’t think there were many parts [of him] that came from somewhere else.
George Raymond, who was committed to nonviolence as a way of life, was uncomfortable with Chinn’s guns. So, as a meeting at a local church got underway during Dave Dennis’s first visit to Canton, Raymond asked him to step outside and talk to Chinn. “Whenever we have a meeting,” Dennis later remembered Raymond telling him, “C. O. Chinn sits outside with his guns. He won’t leave. He says he’s here to protect his people. Can you talk to him?” So, Dennis recalled,
I went outside to talk to him. He’s sitting in the back of his truck with a shotgun across his lap and a pistol by his side. I introduced myself; told him about CORE’s nonviolent philosophy. He listened. Then, very calmly he told me: “This is my town and these are my people. I’m here to protect my people and even if you don’t like this I’m not going anywhere. So maybe you better leave.” I could tell he wasn’t a guy for any bull and I could tell he was there to do what he said he was going to do. I didn’t argue. I said, “Yes, sir,” and shook his hand then walked back into the church thinking, he’s got his job to do and I’ve got mine.
To Dennis, who had not wholly committed himself to the philosophy of nonviolence, Chinn’s insistence on his right to defend himself and his community was reasonable enough. But as more organizers like Raymond encountered local men and women like Chinn, their perspectives on armed self-defense slowly began to change.
Everywhere they worked in the rural South, CORE organizers were finding that black people were not going to abandon the practice of armed self-defense, and thus the same transformations were occurring among CORE members as in SNCC. Unlike the people they met when they were students and leading sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the older people in rural counties and parishes (as they are called in Louisiana) made it clear that they were not going to commit to the nonviolent way of life advocated in the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi. Most of the local people attracted to the movement were—like Chinn in Madison County, E. W. Steptoe in Amite County, or Janie Brewer in Tallahatchie County—seeking change and justice, which they often summed up in a single word: “freedom.” They were willing and even eager to participate in the movement, but they were unwilling to give up their right to make their own decisions about how best to protect themselves and their communities, although they were always willing to consider concerns of “the nonviolents” now living with them.
Consequently, by 1964 CORE—at least its field staff—found itself reconsidering just how applicable nonviolence was to its work in the rural South. And as CORE expanded its work in Louisiana where it was making its biggest effort, the organization’s relationship with weapons and self-defense quite unexpectedly took a significant turn.
Most of the CORE organizers in Louisiana had been born in the state. Most had quit school and, like SNCC’s organizers, had taken on the challenge of voter registration in rural areas. But in Louisiana they had also begun organizing nonviolent direct actions to test compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal to deny access to public accommodations. Unlike in Mississippi, some of these actions took place in rural Louisiana. These areas were not the Louisiana of Mardi Gras or sophisticated Creole cuisine, nor were they neighborhoods like the New Orleans Garden District. In fact, most of rural Louisiana was a far cry from the relatively comfortable urban campuses that many of the CORE organizers had recently left. As Jack Newfield once wrote of Amite County, Mississippi, rural Louisiana was, in many ways, far removed from the twentieth century itself.
CORE’s efforts in these areas were immediately met with coordinated police and Klan violence. In Plaquemine, Louisiana, the seat of Iberville Parish near Baton Rouge, nonviolent protesters found themselves attacked by mounted state policemen, who hurled tear-gas canisters and then charged their horses into the ranks of demonstrators approaching the parish courthouse. In this parish the Ku Klux Klan literally hunted CORE national director James Farmer, who had to be smuggled out of the area in a hearse. Farmer’s terrifying experience in Plaquemine seems to have caused him to question his own beliefs and to begin seriously, if privately, reconsidering the place of nonviolence and self-defense in the southern movement. The driver of the hearse and his companion were both armed and had been given explicit orders by community leaders: “Don’t stop for anything and, if forced to stop, shoot.”
Officially, Farmer and CORE remained firmly committed to nonviolence. Increasingly, however, many local blacks involved with the organization were arming themselves in response to violent onslaughts by white supremacists. In a January 1964 field report, one CORE organizer—who was still committed to nonviolence—wrote, “[Education] was needed to cement the relation between CORE and the people of West Feliciana Parish. The idea of nonviolence is a new one, and will require much discussion and training, especially for the older people.” CORE began nonviolence-training workshops in the area, but they had no more success in persuading older residents to that seismic change in attitude than Dave Dennis had with Chinn in Canton or that Bob Moses had with Steptoe in Amite County. For instance, Reverend Joseph Carter made several attempts to register to vote in West Feliciana Parish. When he finally succeeded, he kept a shotgun nearby at night to protect himself and his neighbors. “I value my life even more since I became a registered voter,” Carter explained. “If they want a fight, we’ll fight.”
In Louisiana gun use was more thoroughly integrated into the civil rights struggle than in most places in the South. This was due in part to the influence of a highly organized armed self-defense group: the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Nowadays, the Deacons barely appear in study and discussion of the southern Freedom Movement, but they were heavily armed and defiantly outspoken about their willingness to shoot back when fired upon. They were committed to protecting the nonviolent movement, but their involvement caused some contention in the movement. Some in the movement felt there was a practical rationale for opposing such groups: namely, that they invited swift, brutal, and overwhelming retaliation by all levels of government. Yet CORE’s Louisiana experience seems to refute that assumption, as well as the argument that organized armed self-defense was incompatible with nonviolence; in fact, CORE organizers helped create the Deacons.
The emergence of a group like the Deacons was also due in part to Louisiana’s uniqueness among the southern states. So-called racial purity, and the segregation and white supremacy intended to preserve it, was more distorted by the state’s history than was the case elsewhere. Latin and Catholic influences made the southernmost part of the state unlike any other area in the South. Most of those enslaved in Louisiana came directly from Africa, and strong African retentions helped cultivate a Creole culture of unique racial intermixture and interaction. Even the racist and demagogic Huey Long, who served as governor from 1928 to 1932, once cracked with more truth than untruth that it would take only “a nickel’s worth of red beans and a dime’s worth of rice” to feed all of the “pure whites” in Louisiana. Discovery of oil, and with it the establishment of oil refineries and petrochemical plants, contributed to the state’s difference by making Louisiana more urban than any other southern state. That led to unions and union agitation. In some places, music, ranging from jazz and New Orleans rhythm and blues to zydeco, and the New Orleans Carnival tradition of masquerading, parading, and street culture made it less difficult or dangerous to cross racial lines than in other parts of the South. There is certainly no shortage of antiblack violence in the state’s history, and large areas of the state were exactly like neighboring Mississippi in attitude: the Florida Parishes east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mississippi state line, the Red River Valley where Colfax is located, and especially North Louisiana, the “top of the boot” where virtually all of the early-twentieth-century lynching in the state took place. But there is also no shortage of examples of black resistance to the vicious and violent white supremacy that continued to prevail in Louisiana as CORE organizers began their work.
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