continued...
Theodore Roosevelt Mason "T.R.M." Howard was another black Southerner who found guns a highly effective means to gain rights. Cobb uses Howard's story in 1950s Mississippi to illustrate "the practical use of armed self-defense" for an oppressed minority. Howard, who was the chief surgeon at a hospital for blacks in the Mississippi Delta, founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), an umbrella organization of civil rights groups in the state. The RCNL led a campaign against segregated gas stations, organized rallies featuring national civil rights leaders, and encouraged black businesses, churches, and voluntary associations to move their bank accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank, which loaned money to civil rights activists denied credit by white banks.
Knowing that he was always at risk of being attacked by white supremacists, Howard took full advantage of Mississippi's loose gun laws. He wore a pistol on his hip, displayed a rifle in the back window of his Cadillac, and lived in a compound secured by round-the-clock armed guards. Black reporters covering the civil rights movement in Mississippi often stayed in Howard's home, which contained stacks of weapons, at least one submachine gun, and, according to one visiting journalist, "a long gun, a shotgun or a rifle in every corner of every room."
According to many accounts, southwest Mississippi was the most dangerous and Klan-ridden region of the South-"the stuff of black nightmares," according to Cobb-but it was also home to several of the strongest branches of the NAACP. Activists from the area were the first in Mississippi to file a school desegregation suit, a youth chapter campaigned against police brutality, and local NAACP members traveled to D.C. to testify for the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The presidents of two NAACP branches-C.C. Bryant of Pike County and E.W. Steptoe of Amite County-offered their fortified houses as resting stops for SNCC and CORE organizers. One SNCC volunteer recalled that if you stayed with Steptoe, "as you went to bed he would open up the night table and there would be a large .45 automatic sitting next to you.…[There were] guns all over the house, under pillows, under chairs." It was for that reason that SNCC operated one of its "Freedom Schools" on Steptoe's farm.
Anti-racist proponents of gun control should note an irony in this story: One aspect of Southern culture allowed for the dismantling of another. "Although many whites were uncomfortable with the idea of blacks owning guns-especially in the 1960s," Cobb writes, "the South's powerful gun culture and weak gun control laws enabled black people to acquire and keep weapons and ammunition with relative ease." One example of this came in 1954, when the Mississippi state legislator Edwin White responded to an increase in black gun ownership with a bill requiring gun registration as protection "from those likely to cause us trouble," but the bill died in committee.
Guns weren't the only physical weapons used to advance civil rights. Five days after the famous 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, another sit-in was attempted but the protesters were blocked from entering the store by crowds of young whites carrying Confederate flags and threatening violence. So football players from the historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College formed a flying wedge and rammed through the mob. In Jacksonville, Florida, a gang of black youth known as the Boomerangs used their fists to beat back a group of whites who were attacking sit-in protestors with ax handles.
Two of the best-known civil rights organizations practicing armed self-defense were the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was formally incorporated in Louisiana in 1965 with the explicit purpose of providing armed protection for civil rights activists, and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) of Alabama, a SNCC affiliate that renounced the national organization's nonviolent philosophy and helped inspire the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in northern cities.
The Deacons appeared at protests toting rifles and gained special notoriety when they aimed their guns at firemen who were preparing to unleash hoses on a group of black high school students in Jonesboro, Louisiana, as they picketed for black control of black schools. The LCFO-headed by Stokely Carmichael, who coined the slogan "Black Power"-was staffed by well-armed organizers who increased the number of black voters in Lowndes County from one, when the group was established in 1965, to almost 2,000 a year later.
Though national civil rights leaders publicly renounced the use of violence, many of them privately relied on it. Even the great American apostle of nonviolence himself tacitly acknowledged the value of guns. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956, King applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He was denied the license but filled his home with firearms and allowed armed neighbors to stand guard over his family and property. More than one visitor to King's house in Montgomery described it as "an arsenal."
King wasn't the only civil rights leader who relied on "crazy Negroes." Indeed, according to Cobb, even though most of the major civil rights organizations of the period were formally committed to nonviolence, "there were few black leaders who did not seek and receive armed protection from within the black community." Many also maintained their own means of protection. Fannie Lou Hamer, whose fearlessness as an organizer in the most violent regions of Mississippi is legendary, held no qualms about owning or using firearms. "I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom," she said, "and the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again."
Cobb concludes from these and many other examples of black armed self-defense that the current tendency among liberals to think of gun rights as a cause championed by racists is wrong-headed. Though "largely associated with the conservative white Right…there was a time when people on both sides of America's racial divide embraced their right to self- protection, and when rights were won because of it."
But This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed isn't just about rights. It's also about freedom-freedom as a means and an end. This is the kind of freedom our children's textbooks won't mention, but I can guarantee at least one seventh-grader will learn.
