4“to teach the Negroes to be defenseless”: Malcolm X, in “A Summing Up: Louis Lomax Interviews Malcolm X” (1963), TeachingAmericanHistory.org, www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-summing-up-louis-lomax-interviews-malcolm-x/.
4“[It] gave our generation”: Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 166.
4“Our struggle was not just against something”: Dr. Vincent G. Harding, conversation with the author, July 20, 2013.
6“Self-defense is so deeply ingrained”: Moses, quoted in King, Freedom Song, 318.
6“I’m alive today”: John R. Salter Jr., “Guns Kept the Klan Enemies at Bay in Deep South,” Grand Forks Herald, October 9, 1994, www.saf.org/pub/rkba/general/GunsVersusKKK.htm.
7“This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good”: Turnbow, quoted in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster Touchstone Edition, 1988), 781; see also Emilye J. Crosby, “You Got a Right to Defend Yourself: Self-Defense and the Claiborne County, Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” International Journal of Africana Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 133.
7“Bill, wait, wait!”: John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 230; see also David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow Quill Edition, 1999), 72–73.
7“an arsenal”: Smiley, quoted in Adam Winkler, “MLK and His Guns,” HuffPost Politics, November 22, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/mlk-and-hisguns_b_810132.html; see also Clayborne Carson, “The Unexpected Emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” King Papers Project, Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, Campus Report, 17 January 1996, www.mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/additional_resources/articles/unexpected_emergence.htm.
8to protect the Bates home and the surrounding neighborhood: David B. Kopel, “Civil Rights and Gun Sights,” Reason.com, February 22, 2005, www.reason.com/archives/2005/02/22/civil-rights-and-gun-sights/2.
8“watched over us like babies”: Mateo Suarez, interviewed by Harriet Tanzman, March 26 and 30, 2000, for the Civil Rights Documentation Project of the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), USM and the Tougaloo College Archives.
8“The first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence”: Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967),57.
10“I had a wife”: Turnbow, quoted in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 266.
10“Violence is as American as cherry pie”: H. “Rap” Brown, in a press conference at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of SNCC, quoted in the Evening Star, Washington, D.C., July 27, 1967, 1.
14“the Great Tradition of black protest”: Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), xx; see also Eric Foner, “The Long Black Movement toward Justice,” New York Times, November 1, 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/11/01/books/the-long-black-movement-toward-justice.html.
16continuation of white violence: On February 8, 1968, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, highway patrolmen raided the campus of South Carolina State College and attacked students protesting segregation at a nearby bowling alley, killing three of them. On May 15, 1970, police in Jackson, Mississippi, opened fire on a dormitory housing students who had been protesting segregation (as well as the Vietnam War), killing two of them.
Chapter One: “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air”
19The title quotation is from Bernice Johnson Reagon’s spontaneous updating of the traditional black spiritual “Over My Head I See Trouble in the Air” while singing at a mass meeting following a protest in Albany, Georgia. It is now a traditional Freedom Movement song. Charles E. Cobb Jr., On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008), 184.
28a fact that undermines our understanding of both subjects: And that sometimes devolves into what can only be called stupidity, as reflected in radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s January 18, 2013 question: “If John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the [Selma] bridge?” Limbaugh would still be berating Lewis as a terrorist if, with a gun, he had opened fire on the policemen who were beating him. Lewis himself would undoubtedly be dead.
29designed to prevent the possession of weapons by black people: Clayton E. Cramer, “The Racist Roots of Gun Control,” Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, Winter 1995, www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm.
29indentured servitude for the rest of his life: A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race, and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 28. Interestingly, in 2012 Ancestery.com issued a press release claiming its genealogists had discovered that President Barack Obama is the eleventh great-grandson of John Punch. And this connection is through his mother! Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests,” New York Times, July 30, 2012.
29import duties on slaves brought into the colony: March 1659/60-ACT XVI. An Act for the Dutch and all other Strangers for Tradeing to this Place.
30bonded together regardless of race: Bacon himself was a wealthy landowner and a member of the Colony Council, a cousin to the governor by marriage, in fact. But he thought that Native Americans should be exterminated, as did many of the Virginia Colony’s freemen and small farmers; the colony’s rulers wanted to continue trading with Indians. Indentured servants, black or white, wanted freedom from servitude, which Bacon promised.
30driving the colonial governor from the colony: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 267–268; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 2012), 205–212.
30nonracial unity that had powered the revolt: “That was the great danger, for in the words of Governor Berkeley himself, ‘The very being of the Collony doth consist in the Care and faithfulness as well as in the number of our servants.’” Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 212.
31“common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together”: Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 327.
32“And it is hereby further enacted”: Richard Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago, Slavery and Emancipation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 15.
32“Freedom,” the governor said, “wears a cap”: Spotswood, quoted in Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 245.
32“any gun, powder, shot, or any club”: Allen, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, 250.
32“We have already at least 10,000”: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 35.
33That Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory: Roger Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 4.
33“Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?”: Jefferson to Adams, January 22, 1821, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” Jefferson Monticello website, www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.
34“It would give to persons of the negro race”: A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 65.
34“To be a Negro in this country”: “The Negro in American Culture,” WBAI radio panel, 1961, moderated by Nat Hentoff, held on the occasion of the Civil War centennial and published in the summer 1961 issue of Cross-Currents magazine. In addition to James Baldwin, participants were Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Emile Capouya, and Alfred Kazin.
34“endangering the peace and safety of the state”: Chief Justice Taney also declared in his ruling that blacks “had no r
ights which the white man was bound to respect.”
34“If I was as drunk with enthusiasm as Swedenborg and Wesley”: Adams, quoted in Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 128.
35“this assemblage of horrors”: Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow, 48.
36“I have nothing more to offer”: Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 208; see also a more detailed discussion of the rebellion and trial in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 219–226.
36“[My] child will be a black child born in Mississippi”: Lynn Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001), 212.
37an all-black military company called the Bucks of America: Leonid Kondratiuk, “The Bucks of America: Massachusetts’ First African American Unit,” February 17, 2010, Massachusetts National Guard website, www.states.ng.mil/sites/MA/News/Pages/The%20Bucks%20of%20America.aspx.
37between 1619 and 1865 more than 250 rebellions: Herbert Aptheker, Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy: A Reader, ed. Eric Foner and Manning Marable (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), xi.
38One escaped slave attempted to marry: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 140–141.
38Historian Corey D. B. Walker notes: Corey D. B. Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 89; also interview with author, May 1, 2013.
39“I can die”: Sam Livingston, “An African Life of Resistance: Moses Dickson, the Knights of Liberty, and Militant Abolitionism, 1824–1857,” paper, August 12, 2008, www.academia.edu/1600054/_Moses_Dickson_Militant_Abolitionist_1824-1865, 15; also see Jasper Wilcox, “Secret Societies and Social Justice: Knights of Tabor,” www.partofthesolutionvanguard.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/secret-societies-social-justice-knights-of-tabor/.
40“In the Darkest hours”: Reverend Moses Dickson, A Manual of the Knights of Tabor and Daughters of the Tabernacle Containing General Laws, Regulations, Ceremonies, Drill, and a Taborian Lexicon (St. Louis: A. R. Fleming, 1891), 14. Although early in the manual Dickson describes some of the Knights of Liberty’s activities, he is cautious, making it clear after a brief and oblique reference to “the failure of Nat. Turner and others” that he does not intend to reveal much: “The Underground Railroad was in good running order and the Knights of Liberty sent many passengers over the road to freedom. We feel we have said enough on this subject. If the War of the Rebellion had not occurred just at the time it did the Knights of Liberty would have made public history. Let the past sleep; enough has been said.” Ibid., 16–17. Dickson would go on to become one of the founders of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Livingston, An African Life of Resistance, 17–20.
40“Gentlemen, the question is settled”: James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Vintage, 2003).
41“The slave pleaded”: Du Bois, quoted in Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 369, www.muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_civil_war_era/summary/v002/2.3.emberton.html.
41By the end of the Civil War: William Loren Katz, “Lincoln, the Movie,” Indian Voices, n.d., www.indianvoices.net/latest-editorials/249-lincoln-the-movie-by-william-loren-katz.
41shot and bayoneted the garrison’s soldiers: Eric Foner and Manning Marable, eds., Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy: A Reader (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 160; “The Fort Pillow Massacre: Report of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. All Previous Reports Fully Confirmed. The Horrors and Cruelties of the Scene Intensified. “Report of the Sub-Committee,” New York Times, May 6, 1864, www.nytimes.com/1864/05/06/news/fort-pillow-massacre-report-committee-conduct-warall-previous-reports-fully.html.
41for the express purpose of teaching the soldiers to read and write: James G. Hollandsworth, Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 211.
41“Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave”: Douglass, quoted in Wilma King, Stolen Childhood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 187.
43“You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics”: Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, Francis Parkman Prize ed. (New York: History Book Club, 1988), 283.
44even military titles for the commanding “officers”: Ibid., 283–285.
45“No freedman, free Negro or mulatto”: “The Mississippi Black Code, (1865),” in Longman American History Demo site, www.wps.ablongman.com/long_longman_lahdemo_1/0,8259,1546454-,00.html. Reading Mississippi’s black codes gives one the strong sense that for all practical purposes, they reinstalled slavery.
46“virtually re-enacted slavery”: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013), 405.
46One delegate, Reverend Jotham W. Horton: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 218; see also Donald E. Reynolds, “The New Orleans Riot of 1866, Reconsidered,” Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 12–13.
47“Nothing short of the disenfranchisement of the negro race”: Roberts, quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 341.
47“the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box”: Frederick Douglass, The Complete Autobiographies of Fredrick Douglass (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008), 291.
47“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor”: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (Surry Hills, Australia: Accessible Publishing Systems, 2008), 33.
47In Lowndes County, Alabama: Hasan Kwame Jefferies, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 14.
47a group of black men threatened to burn down the city: Edmund L. Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 90.
47an armed guard of 150 men: Ibid., 90.
47there would be “burning”: Harrison, quoted in ibid., 90.
48“Let no man or set of men think”: Simms, quoted in ibid., 90.
49“The bullets of the assassin”: “Powell Clayton: A Litany of Horrors” (Arkansas), Old State House Museum website, www.oldstatehouse.com/exhibits/virtual/governors/civil_war_and_reconstruction/clayton2.aspx.
50Hidden Hill plantation just outside of Colfax: Nicholas Lehmann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006), 4.
50extreme violence aimed at intimidating blacks: Leeanna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59.
51“Damn the court,” Ward said: Ibid., 72–75.
52“the Mecca of bad and desperate negroes”: Ibid., 78.
52“was not altogether certain”: Ibid., 82.
52Both appointed a set of local officials for Grant Parish: This dispute and power struggle resulted in Pinckney Benton Stewart “P. B. S.” Pinchback, an African American, becoming governor for thirty-five days, from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873. He was the first African American to become a governor of a state.
53“We want that courthouse”: Keith, The Colfax Massacre, 97.
53estimates of the number of blacks killed: James K. Hogue, “The 1873 Battle of Colfax—Paramilitarism and Counterrevolution in Louisiana” (paper June 7,
2006), 13–19. Hogue’s paper is based on a lecture presented at the Southern Historical Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, November 6, 1997. Historian Eric Foner has called the Colfax massacre “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.” Foner, Reconstruction, 437. See also Keith, The Colfax Massacre, 109. A partial list of names and some eyewitness accounts can be found on the Colfax Massacre 1873 page of the Black Holocaust Society website, www.blackwallstreet.freeservers.com/colfax%201873.htm.
54“Practically, so-called Reconstruction”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 482.
54“an essential component in the counterrevolution”: Hogue, “The 1873 Battle of Colfax,”
54“The slave went free”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 30.
Chapter Two: “The Day of Camouflage Is Past”
55The title quotation is from W. E. B. Du Bois, “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. Lewis, 732–33.
57became so drunk he passed out and had to be carried away: John Calhoun Fleming later told the FBI that he had breathed too many ether fumes. Gail William O’Brien, The Color of Law: Race Violence and Justice in the Post World War II South (Chapel Hill:
57for help paying the fine: Blair and Morton sometimes helped rescue arrested blacks from bail “fee grabbers” if they considered mistreatment a factor in an arrest, but they did not assist “thieves, bootleggers, and whiskey drinkers.” Ibid., 74.
57“Probably one hundred-fifty negroes”: Quoted in O’Brien, The Color of Law, 12.
58about forty-five miles north of town: Unless otherwise noted, all the events on the evening of February 25 are described in O’Brien, The Color of Law, 12–13.
59Raymond Lockridge, told writer Juan Williams: Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 134–135.
59“Whites whose obituaries stated [they] died”: Afro-American, quoted in ibid. This idea that white deaths were covered up was not uncommon in black conversations about self-defense. Although whites’ wanting to cover up deadly black armed responses is understandable, it is difficult to see how it would be possible to keep such deaths secret in small towns and rural communities.
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