This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  The TCAC campaign intensified over the next two months, launching a voter-registration drive and a boycott of downtown Tuscaloosa. Activists also established so-called Citizenship Schools to help potential voter registrants cope with Alabama’s difficult and unfairly applied literacy requirements. Both King and his closest SCLC colleague, Ralph Abernathy, visited Tuscaloosa to meet with activists there, strengthening the connection between Tuscaloosa’s protest movement and SCLC’s nonviolent approach to struggle.

  White resistance to the movement was growing, but among Tuscaloosa’s black residents, there was growing unwillingness to back down in the face of intimidation. There were, of course, consequences. As the leader of the movement in Tuscaloosa, Rogers became the main target of white harassment, but he remained committed to nonviolence. His wife, LaPelzia Rogers, stood in sharp contrast to her soft-spoken husband. She gave as good as she and her husband got. “To tell you the truth,” she said later, “I wasn’t too nonviolent. I had a temper and I had a big mouth.” Sometimes, when racist whites telephoned the Rogers household to berate or threaten her husband, LaPelzia would silence them with a harangue of her own. Her husband admitted later, “I felt sorrier for the people who called than I did for her. If she got a chance to talk to them, she talked to them worse than they talked to her. It stemmed some of the tide,” he acknowledged, “because they finally reached the point, I guess, when they said, ‘Well that lady’s crazy, anyway, so there’s no point in calling so much.’”

  LaPelzia Rogers did not participate in demonstrations because her husband demanded strict adherence to nonviolence, to which she just could not agree. Thus, she was not present on June 9, 1964, when hundreds of demonstrators, the bulk of them students, gathered at First African, intending to march to the courthouse in defiance of Police Chief William Marable’s prohibition on marches. Rogers began to lead the long column of marchers away from the church and toward the courthouse; Marable and a large number of policemen wearing blue helmets almost immediately stopped them. “Do you intend to continue marching?” the chief asked. “Yes,” replied Rogers. The policemen promptly arrested him and the other TCAC leaders in the march.

  Much worse soon followed. Police now blocked the marchers’ way to the courthouse. A fire truck with high-pressure hoses sat nearby, awaiting orders, but was not used. The policemen suddenly assaulted the demonstrators with cattle prods, nightsticks, and their fists, pushing them back into the church. A group of teenagers allegedly threw some rocks; one of Marable’s men fired a tear-gas canister into the church. Protesters broke church windows to let in air, so the police fired more tear gas into the building. Finally, the students poured out of the church; police arrested some of them and beat others in the street.

  Tuscaloosa’s black community was outraged. Although local blacks had not shown much support for the protests or even for the civil rights movement in general, they felt the police had crossed a line, desecrating their most prominent church and unfairly, brutally, and unnecessarily attacking their best and brightest young people. The response of many local blacks was telling: expecting more violence, they brought out their guns in order to protect themselves and their homes. Many of them were expecting the Ku Klux Klan to conduct drive-by shootings and did not intend to be caught unprepared. Moreover, the fact that most of the TCAC leadership was in jail did little to convince locals that nonviolent protest was sensible. In a revealing comment, one man—a factory worker who had brought his shotgun to First African after the police assault—explained later, “At that time, I wasn’t a civil rights man … cause if anybody hit me I [was] gonna hit him back.”

  One particularly outraged Tuscaloosan was Joseph Mallisham, a native of the city and a Korean War veteran who was also a union organizer at Tuscaloosa’s Ziegler meatpacking plant. Mallisham had been one of the men who rushed to the defense of Autherine Lucy at Howard and Linton’s Barbershop. Later he helped establish the SCLC chapter in Tuscaloosa. Now, in this explosive atmosphere, Mallisham resolved to do something to focus and organize the community’s anger.

  He called together a small group of men—almost all of them World War II or Korean War veterans—to discuss armed self-defense, telling them, “If we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it right.” He emphasized that the community needed organization and planning, not inchoate anger. The group discussed the possibility of retaliating against the police, but backed away from the idea in favor of a more constructive plan. Mallisham felt that if the police failed to perform their duties, someone else would have to do them; that if the police were going to let the Klan run rampant, someone else would have to stand up to it; that if men, women, and children were being beaten, someone else would have to stop it. The group all felt that these things required an organized group of black defenders.

  The following night, another meeting was held. This one was much larger and involved a wider range of participants: factory workers, teachers, businessmen, and even young gang leaders. These diverse attendees resolved to create a new organization to safeguard Tuscaloosa’s black residents. As far as is known, they chose no name for the group. It was not a mass movement; rather, it was limited to about a hundred members and was roughly structured like a military combat unit: a commander chaired a small executive board that determined strategy, lieutenants, and troops. Mallisham was elected chairman, and one of the requirements for membership in the group was active combat experience in World War II or the Korean War.

  If aspiring members of Tuscaloosa’s new defensive group passed a background check and were accepted into the organization, they had to pledge to protect the black community, even at the cost of their own lives. Members were required to be married; they were drawn from a wide range of occupations and had varied educational backgrounds, social standing, and economic class. Personal responsibility counted more than any other factor; a heavy drinker whom the others in the group thought of as “a talker” was excluded, according to University of Alabama historian Harold A. Nelson. “The organization functions in a semi-secret manner… . It operates on the principle that those who need to know of its existence do know or will be informed of it. It sees no value in general publicity, and consciously avoids it.”

  Rogers was now receiving constant death threats, so his safety became one of the group’s first priorities. Almost immediately, members set up a round-the-clock guard at Rogers’s home. Armed guards demanded identification from anyone approaching the house. On more than one occasion guards fired at white drivers who did not stop when ordered to do so. But the group also extended their support to other at-risk individuals.

  Shortly after the group was formed, it began protecting TCAC president Willie Herzfeld and T. W. Linton, the barbershop owner who had provided refuge for Autherine Lucy nearly a decade earlier. It also protected some whites who had assisted movement efforts, and the group’s efforts in this regard were even more covert, because there were limits on how easily and how safely a black man, especially one carrying arms, could move around a white person. Nonetheless, Mallisham’s group surreptitiously guarded Alberta Murray, a white attorney, teacher, and founder of the Council for Human Relations, as she moved throughout the county encouraging voter registration. She did not even know about their protection until much later.

  Mallisham and his men were not quite a secret organization, but very few of the area’s white residents could have known how sophisticated their group was. When the group conducted inquiries, it did so as secretively as possible. “As soon as [Mallisham] is informed of an incident with which the Defenders might become involved, he dispatches investigators to interview witnesses and to gather any other pertinent information,” notes Nelson. “Seldom do investigators make public their duties. Rather, interviewing and data gathering are carried on without revealing that an investigation is under way or that the organization is in any way involved in the situation.” Tuscaloosa’s newspapers never reported on them, and except for the Klansmen who came up against them, most whites wer
e probably unaware of the group’s existence. Furthermore, although police were surely alert to the fact that some sort of organized black armed protection was at play in Tuscaloosa, they found themselves unable to stop such determined black protection.

  To be sure, the group often operated in full view of the white community—as it did on July 8, 1964. A group of black teenagers went to the Druid movie theater in downtown Tuscaloosa to test its compliance with the recently passed Civil Rights Act. A mob of about two hundred whites greeted them by throwing stones and bottles. The teens telephoned Mallisham. He sent two cars filled with armed men who picked up the teenagers and sped back to the black community. When they arrived they found Klansmen lying in wait. The hidden terrorists opened fire, but Mallisham’s group fired back, and the astonished Klansmen fled. Klan violence in Tuscaloosa’s black community ended when Klansmen discovered that attack would be met by an organized armed response. Police violence also slowed.

  The fact that Mallisham’s group existed at all is remarkable. That they achieved a balance between secrecy and easy accessibility to the black community is even more remarkable. Before their founding, it had been the practice of Tuscaloosa’s Ku Klux Klan leader to show up where TCAC meetings were being held, sometimes “patrolling” the area by car and sometimes simply planting himself and others in front of the meeting place. One night members of Mallisham’s group showed up too; when the Klansmen watching the meeting place saw that these new arrivals were prepared to fire on them, they raced away. Klansmen never again appeared at TCAC meetings.

  The effectiveness of Mallisham’s group cannot be underestimated. Although their existence did not in and of itself lead to new civil rights legislation, they played an essential role in liberating the black community from fear, which certainly helped support other black Tuscaloosans’ struggle for new laws. The greater significance of Mallisham’s group lies in its integration into the nonviolent civil rights movement. Although for a variety of reasons Mallisham’s group was not as visible as the Deacons, in Tuscaloosa the two strands of activism, armed and nonviolent, were even more entwined than in Louisiana.

  Despite Rogers’s deep commitment to nonviolence, he welcomed the protection of Mallisham’s group; his wife certainly did, as well. And despite the obvious differences between Rogers’s philosophies and Mallisham’s, the two men’s efforts and organizations were tightly linked. Some members of Mallisham’s group were on the TCAC executive board. And Mallisham insisted that his group be made aware of movement plans so they could decide how best to protect activists, so Mallisham and Rogers met regularly. The effect was to embed Mallisham’s group deeply into the activities of the nonviolent movement.

  It is unclear whether or not SCLC’s leadership in Atlanta knew that an armed group was protecting Tuscaloosa’s black community—and specifically protecting the SCLC affiliate there. And if the larger organization did know of the group, their attitude toward it does not seem to have been recorded. Nonetheless, at least some of SCLC’s field staff in Tuscaloosa seemed well aware of gun-packing protectors. “I’m here to see that the struggle remains nonviolent,” said one SCLC field worker, adding that it was going to be “quite a task.”

  Rogers had been mentored by Martin Luther King Jr., and SCLC leaders like James Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, and King himself visited Tuscaloosa more than once. Biographers of King, autobiographies by SCLC leaders such as Abernathy or Andrew Young, and studies of SCLC make no mention of the group, despite the fact that Tuscaloosa’s decision to desegregate was a significant victory by an SCLC affiliate. By late January 1965 most downtown restaurants had desegregated; in September there were black students enrolled in formerly all-white high schools. The people in King’s shop may not have known how important Mallisham’s group was to this success, or they may have chosen not to speak publically about it in deference to Mallisham’s desire for relative anonymity—or perhaps even out of embarrassment that their nonviolent affiliate in Tuscaloosa was enduring with the assistance of armed defenders. One important mission of SCLC’s ministers had always been to protect King’s public image; if any associates were involved in armed defensive action, the SCLC leadership would not have wanted to broadcast that fact to the world.

  In any case, it would not be long before King had to confront the reality that groups like Mallisham’s existed and were becoming increasingly prominent—and were increasingly entangled with the nonviolent movement he was trying to create. And he would be forced to acknowledge that the movement had reached a watershed moment.

  On June 6, 1966, James Meredith, the first African American to be enrolled at the University of Mississippi, was shot by a sniper on a Mississippi highway while engaged in a solitary 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith’s wound was not fatal, but the shooting would reverberate throughout the civil rights movement and help shake apart the fragile consensus built around nonviolent actions, a consensus designed to win popular support and federal backing for the civil rights movement.

  Meredith’s march, which had initially generated little interest from the major civil rights organizations, now commanded their attention. Leaders from the organizations gathered in Memphis to plan for its continuation. SNCC had already concluded that protest marches were not particularly useful, but it decided that the attack on Meredith required some response, even if that response ended up being a protest march. The group had made a similar compromise the year before. SNCC’s executive committee had voted against participating in the Selma-to-Montgomery protest. But during the march, SNCC chairman John Lewis, who had made a personal decision to participate, and scores of other marchers were beaten and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers and a sheriff’s posse on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. SNCC sent a full complement of organizers to Selma. As Stokely Carmichael phrased it, that decision—and SNCC’s resolution to participate in a resumption of the Meredith march in 1966—reflected a “violence-cannot-be-allowed-to-stop-the-movement reflex.”

  But even as SNCC joined other national civil rights organizations to respond to this latest act of violence, the old days of relatively easy agreement and common cause despite political and tactical tensions had clearly ended. This relative harmony had begun disintegrating in 1964, and the fragmentation accelerated with passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Most of the reasons can be traced to disagreements between the young people radicalized by their southern experience and the more conservative members of civil rights organizations; these differences ranged from positions for or against the growing war in Vietnam, alienation from or accommodation with the Democratic Party, and even stances on the Palestinian cause.

  When the national civil rights leadership gathered in Memphis in response to the Meredith shooting, these divisions were on full display. Among the assembled leaders were the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins; Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC; Floyd McKissick, who had become national director of CORE, replacing James Farmer in January; and Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s new chairman, who had defeated John Lewis in an election only a month earlier. It did not take long for them to fall out with one another. SNCC program secretary Cleveland Sellers participated in the meeting and later remembered how difficult it was for the attendees to reach any sort of consensus about resuming Meredith’s march: “It was obvious to me from the beginning that the possibilities of unity were almost nil.”

  One issue in particular divided the leaders: guns. If Meredith’s march was resumed, Carmichael said he wanted to invite the Deacons for Defense to protect the marchers. McKissick favored the idea, but Wilkins and Young were adamantly opposed. King seems not to have contributed much to this particular discussion, although at one point he did note that there was a difference between carrying guns in self-defense and bringing them to a protest; the latter carried a risk of police retaliation that the former did not. But King does not seem to have put up very much resistance to Stokely’s proposal of using the Deacons, and
that—in the eyes of some of the meeting’s attendees, at least—amounted to assent.

  King’s tacit assent to Carmichael’s proposal about the Deacons was more or less the result of an unstated deal between the two men. Stokely had also argued for the exclusion of whites from any resumed march. King could not possibly agree to such a demand, and Stokely knew it, but he also knew that backing away from that position—a position he himself did not strongly hold—would help persuade King to support him on other issues. And when King did not fight Stokely over the presence of the Deacons, Wilkins and Young angrily stormed out of the meeting—which Carmichael had wanted in the first place. “We did not want the march to lose its militancy,” he said years later.

  This dispute over the Deacons concerned a larger political issue than simply a debate over whether and how best to resume James Meredith’s march. The Deacons had become a growing presence in the South, expanding not only in Louisiana but in Mississippi and Alabama as well. Bogalusa’s chapter had commanded much press attention, and its leader, Charles Sims, claimed that there were fifty-five Deacons chapters across the South. The Deacons’ secretiveness about their organization’s strength makes it almost impossible to verify Sims’s claim, and he was known to exaggerate. But his claim could not be disproven, and the Deacons’ spread across the South, even if more limited than they claimed, had made them a force to be reckoned with both within the civil rights movement and outside it.