101“I shall make no appeals based on prejudice or passion”: Stennis, quoted in Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 107.
103be opened to voters of all races: Until the mid-1940s, political parties established all the rules governing participation in their elections and could therefore exclude members of any group they chose, including blacks. In 1944, however, the Supreme Court declared such rules unconstitutional.
104“DO YOU WANT Negroes beside you”: William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 38.
104The “essence of the liberal position in Georgia in 1946”: Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003), 53.
105“far outstripped”: Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2000).
10561 percent of black soldiers: Jennifer E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans: Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 17.
106“We didn’t push anything in that time”: Neil R. McMillen, Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 106.
106“Since I lost a portion of my body”: Brooks, Defining the Peace, 19.
109“That was one of the first incidents”: Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), xviii.
110“We ended up with a chapter that was unique”: Ibid., 14.
111“We shot it out with the Klan”: Ibid., 19.
111“a great and successful leader of our race”: Robert Williams, Liberation, September 1959, quoted in Clayborne Carson, senior ed., The Papers of Martin Luther King, vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17.
112“mislead Negroes into the belief”: Martin Luther King Jr., Liberation, October 1959.
112“When the Negro uses force”: King, quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 215.
113“the Lancelot of Monroe”: Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 152.
Chapter Four: “I Wasn’t Being Non-Nonviolent”
114The title quotation is from Hartman Turnbow, quoted in Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 75.
116“One of the things I felt in Mississippi”: Bob Moses, “This Transformation of People,” interview with Charles Payne, in Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968, ed. Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield), 175–176.
116This concern affected priorities: Because movement organizers were identified as “Freedom Riders” and “nonviolents,” there was frequently pressure from young people to launch sit-ins and other direct actions.
117“It isn’t [done] by getting people”: Ibid., 176.
117“You killed my husband!”: Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 124.
118“They were afraid of us”: Charles McLaurin, interview with author, March 23, 2012.
118“We thought you all was gonna be in the river”: Ibid.
118“The basic first step was earning the right”: Bob Moses, interview with author, April 25, 2013.
119“It’s all dangerous”: Ibid.
119“The first obstacle to remove”: Sherrod, quoted in James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 249.
120“We wear the mask that grins and lies”: Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, ed. James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross (New York: Free Press, 1968), 41.
120“Resistance assumed the guise”: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Black Resistance and White Violence in the American South, 1880–1940,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 274.
121relationships in southern culture: I may have felt this more than Mac and Landy because I was the only one of us in Ruleville without a Mississippi accent.
121“To battle institutions”: Lawrence Guyot, comment to author in Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963.
121“closed society”: From the title of James W. Silver’s important 1964 book Mississippi: The Closed Society.
122“Joe McDonald had never looked a white man in his face”: McLaurin, interview with author, March 23, 2012.
123“my little old ladies”: Charles McLaurin, comment to author, August 1962.
123“they made me a man”: Charles McLaurin, comment to author (after formal interview), March 23, 2012.
123a tremor in the middle of the iceberg: The letter is well-known in the Freedom Movement. It can be found in its entirety in Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 233.
123“Spectacle lynching”: I first heard this term used by Emory University professor Carol Anderson in reference to the large mobs of men, women, and children who gathered to watch and participate in lynchings. Pending lynchings were often advertised in advance, and body parts were often sold or given away as souvenirs afterward.
123“Nighttime marauders had learned”: Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 204.
124“I keep a shotgun”: Mrs. Hamer, quoted in Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 48.
124“You had to turn off the highway”: Hollis Watkins, interview with author, May 31, 2012.
125“[to protect] us”: David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Blacks, Gun Cultures, and Gun Control: T. R. M. Howard, Armed Self-Defense, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi,” www.saf.org/journal/17/blacks.pdf.
126“You don’t even have to put it in terms of race”: Hodding Carter III, interview with author, August 26, 2012.
126In November 1965, the Ku Klux Klan contacted Deputy Sheriff Earl Fisher: Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 244–245.
126“Almost all of the planter-farmer types”: Hodding Carter III, interview with author, August 26, 2012.
127“There was a great deal of contact”: Ibid.
128illustration of this hypocrisy and resistance: Quoted in Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 114.
129“We must be willing to kill”: Williams, quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 149.
131“Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom”: It is worth noting that this was not a demand for desegregation, but a demand to have restrooms for blacks at white-owned gas stations. It would be interesting to know to what degree putting on the RCNL bumper sticker endangered drivers and how many actually traveled with it on their vehicle. But I have found no report on this.
131“recently sent a direct message”: Howard, quoted in David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 107.
132“take the gun from its secret hiding place”: Pittsburg Courier, quoted in ibid., 103.
132“scared as hell most of the time”: Simeon Booker, interview with author, July 1, 2013.
132“Demonstrating that he bore no resentment”: Simeon Booker, Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, with Carol McCabe Booke
r (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 66. The judge had ordered black reporters to sit at a card table, separate from the white reporters.
132“a long gun, a shotgun or a rifle”: Beito and Beito, Black Maverick, 120.
134“pursuing the agenda of the Klan”: Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 34.
134“concerned and patriotic citizens to stand together”: Susan M. Weill, “Mississippi’s History of Segregation and White Power,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 22.
13425,000 dues-paying members in the state: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 45–46.
134“Published as a public service by the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City”: Myrlie Evers-Williams, For Us the Living, print-on-demand ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 164.
134“These people are the agitators and troublemakers”: Clarksdale Press Register, quoted in Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, with Constance Curry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 92.
134“Whites looked at the petition list”: Ibid., 93.
135“I had weapons in my house”: Stringer, quoted in Dittmer, Local People, 47.
135“Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident”: Jackson Clarion-Ledger, quoted in ibid., 54.
135“was afraid to go to the polls”: Aaron Henry, 97.
136“My wife and I and thousands of Mississippians”: Courts, quoted in Aaron Henry, 97.
136“I feel I can do more alive”: Howard, quoted in Booker, Shocking the Conscience, 94.
137“Kenyatta, Medgar felt instinctively”: Myrlie Evers-Williams, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
137“Why not really cross the line?”: Quoted in Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 32.
137“We bought some bullets”: Evers, quoted in ibid.
137“Part of him realized that nothing could be solved by violence but more violence”: Myrlie Evers-Williams, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
137“It didn’t take much reading of the bible”: Medgar Evers, “Why I Live in Mississippi,” interview by Francis Mitchell, Ebony, November 1958, 65.
137“How’s the little Mau Mau?”: Myrlie Evers-Williams, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
138“I wasn’t being non-nonviolent”: Turnbow, quoted in Umoja, We Will Shoot Back, 75.
138“They come tellin’ me”: Turnbow, quoted in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 265.
139“My daddy made sure we knew how to handle a gun”: Hollis Watkins, interview with author, May 31, 2012.
140“I was living with Dave Howard and his wife”: Ibid.
141“Black people had organized enclaves”: Bob Moses, interview with author, April 25, 2013.
142“I felt that you’re in your house”: Cooper, quoted in Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010), 107.
142And out in the rural, when Mrs. Laura McGhee: Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 209.
145“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”: Frederick Douglass, “An Address on West India Emancipation (August 3, 1857), quoted in Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 175.
147“I ripped into him”: Brenda Travis spent six and a half months in the Oakley reform school. Her mother was fired from her job at McComb. Brenda Travis, interview with author, March 21, 2013.
147“Mrs. Cooper wouldn’t have turned around”: King, quoted in Josh Gottheimer, ed., Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 263.
148“Most people do not see themselves”: Worth Long, interview with author, March 24, 2012.
Chapter Five: Which Cheek You Gonna Turn?
149“Pilgrimage of Friendship”: Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 65.
150“It may be through Negroes”: Gandhi, quoted in ibid., 12.
150Thurman was an important influence on him: Dixie and Eisenstadt write in Visions of a Better World, “King was quoting Thurman in his sermons even before the latter arrived in Boston” (192). Thurman’s slim 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, an early rendering of Liberation Theology, had enormous influence on King and many black ministers of his generation. However, there are few references to Thurman in King’s writing.
150“a cadre of black and white pacifists”: Nishani Frazier, “How CORE Began,” (chapter one), from the manuscript of an untitled book to be published by the University of Arkansas Press.
150Charles Hamilton Houston, then dean of Howard University’s law school, took a ferry: Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009), 213.
150Howard University student Kenneth Clark: Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds., African American Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 170.
150sitting in the whites-only section of a bus: Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, eds., Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography: K–Z, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 416–417; Cheryl Mullenbach, Double Victory: How African American Women Broke Race and Gender Barriers to Help Win World War II (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 55.
151“his courage and his commitment to freedom”: Parks, quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 307.
152“We cannot rely on the law”: Williams, quoted in James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 176; also Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 149.
153“That’s what I said and that’s what I am going to tell them”: Phone call between Williams and Wilkins, in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 150–151.
153“Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout black communities”: Williams, quoted in Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire, Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 64. In a revealingly angry passage from an unpublished and undated manuscript cited by Strain here, while exiled Williams wrote, “There is an air that approximates latent racism and white chauvinism about these nonviolent moralists who cannot stand the thought of oppressed Afro-Americans defending themselves … [while they] are being raped, maimed, legally framed, murdered, starved, and driven into exile. What is more brutal? What is more violent?” 65.
155the historically black women’s college just a few blocks away from A&T: Bennett College president Willa Player is one of the great examples of the changing times. At the peak of the Greensboro protests, as many as 40 percent of Bennett students—known as the “Bennett belles”—were under arrest. Ms. Player backed them fully; she visited with them every day and arranged for professors to hold classes for them. “Willa Player, 94, Pioneer Black Educator Dies,” New York Times, August 20, 2008.
155“Who do you think you are?” one of the whites yelled: William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), 85.
155“McNeil said, ‘Well, we ought to have something like a boycott’”: Ezell Blair, transcript of a taped conversation among Ezell Blair, Stokely Carmichael, Jean Wheeler, and Lucy Thornton, with Robert Penn Warren, at Howard University, March 4, 1964, 1–2, in Robert Penn Warren’s website Who Speaks for the Negro, www.whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interview/ezell-blair-stokely-carmichael-lucy-thornton-and-jean-wheeler.
156“police came from everywhere”: Rodney L. Hurst Sr., inte
rview with author, November 18, 2013; also Hurst, It Was Never About a Hot Dog and a Coke! (Livermore, CA: WingSpan Press, 2008), 77.
157“the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence”: SNCC founding document, in The 1960s: A Documentary Reader, ed. Brian Ward (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 69–70.
157“We knew we wanted to be students”: Lonnie C. King, interview with author, February 11, 2013.
157“there really wasn’t that much debate about it”: Charles McDew, interview with author, January 31, 2013
158“In Atlanta we accepted [nonviolence] as a tactic”: Lonnie King, interview with author, February 11, 2013.
158Acceptance of nonviolence as a way of life”: Charles “Chuck” McDew, interview with author, March 23, 2012.
158“When they arrested us they published our addresses”: Lonnie King, interview with author, February 11, 2013.
158“Charles Johnson, a Korean War veteran, told me this later”: Ibid.
159“I’d only heard about it because I read about [Martin Luther King] in newspapers”: Charles Sherrod, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
160“The only thing that ever caused me to question my nonviolence”: Ibid.
160were influenced more by the example of their fellow students: Reverend King must be given a great deal of credit for students’ interest in nonviolent direct action. It was the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and his articulation of it that put nonviolence in the national media and thus into student consciousness.
160“And Lonnie said to me, ‘Why don’t we do this here?’”: Julian Bond, interview with author, October 12, 2012.
161Only seven other students were enrolled: Julian Bond provided me with an official class list.
161“I took the gun home”: Annie Pearl Avery, “There Are No Cowards in My Family,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, ed. Faith S. Holsaert et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 455, 457.
162“The civil rights movement was about civil rights”: Ivanhoe Donaldson, interview with author, April 23, 2013.
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