This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  In the end, the Deacons did accompany the Meredith march when it resumed later in June 1966. Although there were multiple confrontations between them, the marchers they were protecting, and Mississippi police, all the confrontations stopped far short of shoot-outs. The Deacons had always been pragmatic in deciding when to use their weapons, and they may also have discovered a difference between the potential for armed self-defense in Louisiana and in Mississippi. Mississippi police were far worse perpetrators of white-supremacist violence than were Louisiana police, and the Deacons had to be restrained in their use of defensive force lest they find themselves in an unwinnable fight against the white authorities. As SNCC’s Hollis Watkins later explained, “Tactically and strategically the Deacons knew they couldn’t maintain their usual posture. The Deacons usual posture wasn’t toward law enforcement.”

  The Deacons’ tactics were not the only things that changed on this march. Whether because of their presence or because of the clear ruptures within the civil rights establishment that were so evident during the march, it had become apparent that none of the old formulas that white power used to stifle black aspirations or to predict black activism were likely to work anymore. This was an issue not of guns or of armed self-defense but, rather, of consciousness. Black consciousness had become “blacker” by the mid-1960s, and Afro-Americans had learned to dig deeper into their shared black experience for political purpose. This change would have enormous consequences, both in the days, weeks, and months following the Meredith march and also in the decades to come. And by linking militant black political expression with violence, it would have the unfortunate side effects of letting white hysteria distort what guns had meant in the earlier phases of blacks’ struggle for freedom and of twisting into unrecognizability the vital and laudable legacy of armed self-defense in black history.

  EPILOGUE

  “The King of Love Is Dead”

  I don’t grieve for James Chaney. He lived a fuller life than most of us. He’s got his freedom, and we’re still fighting for ours. I’m sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men. I’ve got vengeance in my heart tonight, and I ask you to feel angry with me.

  —David Dennis at James Chaney’s funeral service, August 7, 1964

  When Stokely Carmichael called for “Black Power” during the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear through Mississippi, he did not so much launch a new, more militant era of civil rights and freedom struggle as reflect an evolution of the movement—an evolution that was inevitable and that had begun long before his statement. Many of history’s most influential interpreters have treated Stokely’s words poorly, associating them with violence and an incoherent, antiwhite black nationalist rage. Even within the Freedom Movement, several prominent figures denounced Carmichael: at the NAACP’s annual convention a month after Stokely’s declaration, Roy Wilkins charged that black power “can mean in the end only black death.” Martin Luther King Jr. called the slogan “unfortunate.” And years later James Lawson told an interviewer that he thought Stokely’s cry had “betrayed the movement.” Many observers and much Freedom Movement historiography identify his Black Power speech as the moment when the “good” nonviolent civil rights movement of love ended and was replaced by the “bad” violent Black Power movement of hate.

  In retrospect, the political hysteria that greeted Carmichael’s call was predictable, although its intensity could not have been completely anticipated by Carmichael or anyone else who applauded and echoed his stance at the time. The tones of Stokely’s words were certainly different, in that we do not hear in them the poignant, almost comforting sound of “We Shall Overcome.” His was not an appeal to the heart, and it presumed a black self-interest that involved more than ending segregation and gaining voting rights. So it is not difficult to understand the puzzlement and fright that many onlookers—especially whites—felt at the sharper notes coming from Carmichael and SNCC on that Mississippi march. For despite the passage of new Civil Rights Acts, fear and resentment still governed the way powerful and influential whites reacted to assertive blacks; the “uppity” Negro was still considered way out of line and dangerous.

  Some of the fear and resentment that Carmichael’s call for Black Power elicited from whites across the country amounted to a backhanded recognition of their own hypocrisy and racism. For to be sure, northern whites bore their share of responsibility for racism’s entrenchment in U.S. culture. There had been violent white reaction outside the South to even modest attempts at desegregating schools and housing, as in Los Angeles at Fremont High School, or as on Detroit’s Belle Isle during World War II, where residents rioted when the new Sojourner Truth federal housing project built in their all-white community was opened to blacks. In November 1963, CORE’s James Farmer and Floyd McKissick were not allowed to speak at the University of Southern California because the school considered them “too controversial.” And just a few months after the Meredith March, Martin Luther King and SCLC discovered just how violently segregationist Cicero, Illinois, was when they protested housing discrimination and other inequities. For the first half of the twentieth century, urban rioting was typically white antiblack rioting, and it mostly occurred in the North. As the Saturday Evening Post warned in an editorial reacting to the Black Power idea: “We are all, let us face it, Mississippians.” The “we” was definitely not meant to express common cause with black sharecroppers in Mississippi, or any other black person in the state or nation.

  Fear seemed to underlie much of the media reaction to Carmichael’s words. His call, many commentators asserted, reflected his violent intentions. Reporters constantly insisted that Carmichael explain what he meant by Black Power, and no explanation was deemed satisfactory. Many mid-twentieth-century whites, seeing signs of black dissatisfaction, echoed the question Thomas Jefferson had asked in the country’s earliest years: “Are our [Negroes] to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” From this apprehensive perspective, the signs—and Stokely’s words were but one sign in 1966—did not seem encouraging. Inexplicably to many whites, blacks continued to express dissatisfaction.

  The debate about self-defense that took place during the Meredith March lent an additional and ominous dimension to white perceptions of what Carmichael might have meant by Black Power. Some participants in the march—especially northerners—considered the presence of the Deacons for Defense and Justice inappropriate. “The movement’s no place for guns,” said Reverend Theodore Seamons, a white minister from the North, when he saw a .45-caliber pistol in a car being driven by one of the Deacons. Most organizers, however, felt differently. The police protection the marchers were originally promised had been cut back, and whites harassed them as they marched toward Jackson. Civil rights workers who had spent time in the South knew that these were signs of danger, and many of them appreciated the presence of armed protectors along the march route.

  Argument among the march leaders mirrored larger disagreements within the civil rights movement and in the nation’s black community. Ironically, many in the black political establishment—those leaders who by now had gained access to the corridors of power and exercised some influence on the nation’s politics, however limited—now had to deal with the dissatisfaction of many of their black constituents. Even before the Meredith March, during a May 1966 White House conference on civil rights titled “To Fulfill These Rights,” protesting picketers carried signs that read, “Save Us from Our Negro Leaders.”

  SNCC did not participate in the White House conference. “Regardless of the proposals which stem from this conference,” SNCC said in a statement, “we know that the Executive Department and the President are not serious about insuring constitutional rights to black Americans.” In a press conference elaborating on SNCC’s misgivings about the conference, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the organization’s new executive director, publicly used the phrase “Black Power” for the first time: “We been head-lifted and upstarted in white societies all
our lives and we’re tired of that. And what we need is black power.” Unlike Carmichael’s June debut of the phrase, however, Robinson’s remarks attracted little attention.

  The first half of the 1960s had seen dramatic changes in the civil rights movement, changes that challenged many of the old guard—and old ideas—that had propelled the movement in its earlier phases. Especially significant changes occurred in 1964: Blacks locally organized armed self-defense and protection much more publicly than at any point in the history of black struggle except the aftermath of the Civil War, and both SNCC and CORE reached a historic turning point as organizations, beginning to move away from any further commitment to nonviolence.

  SNCC and CORE both felt they had been betrayed by longtime political allies in the Democratic Party. Despite the power that Dixiecrats wielded within the party, SNCC, CORE, and the rest of the civil rights establishment had more or less considered the Democratic Party an ally because of the considerable northern liberal forces concentrated in it. For SNCC, CORE, and many young people, this alliance effectively dissolved at the party’s national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in late August 1964.

  The break with the Democratic Party was triggered by the Democrats’ rejection of a black Mississippi delegation to the national convention. Although discrimination was widespread in southern states, Mississippi was the most blatant in resisting political participation by black people. The state’s whole political apparatus was dedicated to this denial, and that apparatus belonged to the Democratic Party. So one result of Freedom Movement work in the state (a development greatly aided by SNCC and CORE staff working as staff for the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO) was the emergence in April 1964 of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This new party began planning to challenge the legitimacy of Mississippi’s all-white “regular” delegation at the national convention and to claim the right to be seated as the legitimate delegation from the state. Success seemed almost a sure thing; virtually no one denied Mississippi’s blatant and brutal discrimination against black people.

  At the heart of the MFDP’s challenge to the “regular” Mississippi delegation was the charge that the state’s official Democratic Party had not even followed its own rules when selecting delegates to the national convention, essentially choosing delegates through what might be called a good ol’ boy network that deliberately excluded blacks and most whites in Mississippi. The first step in the MFDP challenge, therefore, was to attempt to participate in the delegate selection process of the established “regular” party.

  On paper, the rules for delegate selection required much transparency in order to assure maximum participation. For example, precinct meetings were the first step in delegate selection, and the dates and times of those meetings were supposed to be advertised in media accessible to the general public. The rules were usually not followed, however. Even most white people did not know when the meetings were to be held. Even if black people knew when the meetings were to be held, attempting to enter and participate in one of the gatherings could be dangerous for them; in regions like southwest Mississippi, it could be akin to attempting a sit-in at a Ku Klux Klan hangout.

  It did not take much for the MFDP to validate their charge of discrimination and exclusion; all their members had to do was show up at an official Democratic Party precinct meeting, if they could find out where one was being held. White men with guns might be in the doorway of a meeting place, the meeting may have been moved, or the door might be locked. When Aaron Henry showed up at a precinct meeting in Clarksdale, he met no violence, and the twenty people he brought outnumbered the five whites participating in the meeting. The white chairman, however, immediately adjourned the session until he could round up enough additional participants to create a white majority.

  Ultimately, the MFDP failed to gain access to the regular process of delegate selection, leading them to create—following party rules—their own delegation to attend the convention. The delegation was not all-black; it also included four white members. Still, at the convention, the MFDP’s efforts to be seated as the official Mississippi delegation were immediately met with ruthless resistance from the Lyndon Johnson White House and its allies. Liberal Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, aspiring to the vice-presidential candidacy, was Johnson’s primary hatchet man. He and others threatened some convention delegates sympathetic to the MFDP that they might lose their potential federal appointments. Black leaders seeking favors from the White House were also used to pressure MFDP delegates. United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther even threatened Martin Luther King Jr., promising to cut off union contributions if he did not use his prestige and influence with the MFDP to convince them to back off. To King’s credit, he did not do so.

  Suddenly, a “compromise” was announced on television by then Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale. There had been no discussion with the MFDP about it. As Mondale outlined the compromise, the MFDP was to be given two at-large seats to be occupied by two men already chosen by the White House: state NAACP head Aaron Henry and Tougaloo College chaplain Edwin King, both members of the MFDP delegation.

  An assortment of black leaders put intense pressure on the MFDP, urging them to accept the offer, but the MFDP turned it down. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats since all of us is tired,” said the MFDP vice chair, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, in a now-legendary retort. And the angry but more philosophical Bob Moses commented, “We were trying in part to bring morality into politics, not politics into our morality.”

  The MFDP delegation returned to Mississippi, angry and disappointed. The young COFO organizers who had invested so much time and energy in the birthing of the MFDP and who had assisted the new party in taking its first uncertain steps were perhaps even more bitter.

  The all-white Mississippi delegation who Johnson and his allies had decided were the legitimate representatives of the Democratic Party in the state were not even good Democrats. The white delegates came to the convention supporting Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, refused to pledge loyalty to their own party’s nominee at the convention, and left still committed to Goldwater. (In the November election, Goldwater received over 87 percent of the Mississippi vote.)

  Despite the ignominy of being rejected and the contempt reflected in the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation, the MFDP decided to campaign for the Johnson–Humphrey ticket. This would prove to be more than some in the civil rights community could stomach. “The national Democratic Party’s rejection of the MFDP at the 1964 convention was to the civil rights movement what the Civil War was to American history; afterward things could never be the same again,” wrote Cleveland Sellers, who soon would become SNCC’s program secretary. “Never again were we lulled into believing that our task was exposing injustices so that the ‘good’ people of America could eliminate them. After Atlantic City our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation.”

  In complete disagreement with the MFDP’s decision to support the Democratic Party despite their rejection in Atlantic City, but unwilling to fight that decision, Stokely Carmichael and a small group of SNCC organizers traveled to Lowndes County, Alabama, intending to encourage the development of an independent black political party there. This party—and the ideals it espoused and political movement it engendered—would completely refashion SNCC’s understanding of where Black Power and armed self-defense fit in its work. On this SNCC project, in one of the most violent regions of Alabama, guns were as routine as leaflets announcing a mass meeting.

  The new party that resulted from the work of Carmichael and the SNCC organizers working with him was called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). Because of the high rate of illiteracy in the state, Alabama law required political parties to have a visual symbol. The LCFO selected a black panther and became known as the Black Panther Party. Reflecting on the party’s choice of a symbol, LCFO chair John Hulett recalled years later,

  The black
panther … said that we would fight back if we had to. When we chose that symbol many of the peoples in our county started saying we were a violent group who is going to start killing white folks. But it wasn’t that, it was a political symbol that we was here to stay and we were going to do whatever needed to be done to survive… . White peoples carried guns in this county and the law didn’t do anything to them, so we started carrying our guns too … but we wasn’t violent. We wasn’t violent people. But we were just some people who was going to protect ourselves in case we were attacked.

  By the time of the November 1966 elections in Lowndes County, black registered voters outnumbered white registered voters. The LCFO ran a slate of seven candidates seeking the offices of sheriff, coroner, and tax assessor and several seats on the Board of Education. All the candidates lost. Ironically, they lost not because blacks were prevented from voting but, rather, because black sharecroppers and other blacks who were vulnerable to white power were pressured to vote for white candidates. Fear—as well as chicanery, such as selecting polling places that were inconvenient for blacks—kept about 20 percent of black registered voters at home.

  The new party also faced great hostility from much of Alabama’s middle-class black political establishment, which was now positioning itself to broker the black vote, which had been greatly increased because of the new Voting Rights Act. An independent political party of any kind was the last thing the black political elite wanted. In a diatribe surprising for its contempt, Hosea Williams, the project director for SCLC in Alabama, attacked SNCC while declaring black people politically incompetent: “There ain’t no Negro in Alabama including ourselves that knows one iota about politics. Politics is a science… . This is why I think SNCC is taking advantage of the Negroes.”

  Although the LCFO had revealed—and perhaps widened—long-hidden divisions within the civil rights movement and the black community, it had an outsized effect on black self-determination in the areas where it was active. Despite accusations of “reverse racism,” SNCC workers did not urge blacks to support “moderate” whites seeking election to office. In Lowndes County, “We just told folks to pull the lever for the Black Panther and then go home,” recalls Courtland Cox. “What you have in this country is that Negroes are always told to vote for someone who is less of a racist instead of more for Negroes,” said Stokely Carmichael. Although no LCFO candidate won in the 1966 elections, Lowndes County witnessed an increase in black voters from just one at the start of 1965 to almost 2,000 a year later. This alone was a remarkable success story, and so too is the fact that the county’s original lone black voter—John Hulett—was elected sheriff of Lowndes County in 1970. Other blacks would soon be elected to a range of county offices.