Negroes and the Gun Read online

  Published 2014 by Prometheus Books

  Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Johnson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Johnson, Nicholas, 1959-

  Negroes and the gun : the Black tradition of arms / by Nicholas Johnson.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61614-839-3 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-61614-840-9 (ebook)

  1. African Americans—Civil rights—United States—History. 2. Firearms ownership—United States—History. 3. Firearms—United States—Use in crime prevention—History. 4. Self-defense—United States—History. I. Title.

  E185.61.J695 2014

  323.1196’073—dc23

  2013033057

  Printed in the United States of America

  To

  Jane, Nicky and Ellen

  Mom and Dad

  Than and Nita

  Cleo and Buddy

  The Crump Brothers

  and the Church Folk

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1. Boundary-Land

  2. Foundation

  3. Promise and Breach

  4. Nadir

  5. Crisis

  6. Leonidas

  7. Freedom Fight

  8. Pivot

  9. The Black Tradition of Arms and the Modern Orthodoxy

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  This book started with an essay I was asked to write for the Harvard Law and Policy Review. That work produced a manuscript so long that it was unsuitable for the format. It expanded from there, and I finally whittled it down into an article published as the centerpiece of the Connecticut Law Review’s 2013 Commentary Edition. Along the way I realized that the essay turned article was really a book.

  I have benefited from the insights and comments of people who read versions of this work. Thanks to Bob Kaczorowski, Shelia Foster, Marc Arkin, Russ Pearce, Howie Erickson, Dan Richmond, Kimani Paul-Emile, Jack Krill, Nelson Lund, Jenny Brown, Laura Bair, Dick Lohkamp, Bob Levy, Steve Halbrook, Alice Marie Beard, Joyce Malcolm, Robin Lenhardt, Tanya Hernandez, and to the participants in the 2010 Fordham Law School Faculty Scholarship Retreat where I presented a version of this work. Thanks also to my coauthors on Firearms Law and the Second Amendment, Dave Kopel, George Mocsary, and Mike O’Shea, for their insights along the way. I owe a particular debt to Robert Cottrol and Don B. Kates for their friendship and pioneering scholarship.

  Thanks to the research assistants who worked on different versions of this project. Tammem Zainulbhai and John Hunt helped at the beginning, before I thought that this was a book. John Paul Sardi, Giancarlo Stanton, Jacob Laksin, and Ellen Johnson saw it through to the end. Thanks to my wife, Jane, who, in typical fashion, was adept at something I was not good at and tracked down many of the images that appear in the book. Thanks to Katherine Epanchin-Butuc, Juan Fernandez, and Larry Abraham at the Fordham Law Library for retrieving a variety of obscure texts. Thanks to Fordham University for the sabbatical grant that gave me the time to distill a mountain of information into 150,000 words. And thanks generally to family and friends for tolerating in good cheer the countless hours that this project drained from other equally worthwhile things.

  This book raised two notable stylistic challenges. The first was whether to capitalize black in the frequent references to Black people. Many consider capitalization the new norm. And some have argued that the failure to capitalize Black is a slight that sensitive writers will avoid. But people are plainly divided. My daughter observes that her Black professors uniformly capitalize Black and her white professors generally use the traditional lowercase form. In many contexts, including my textbook and in the law-review article that is the foundation for this book, I have capitalized references to Black people and Black concerns. The publisher of this book, on the other hand, follows the traditional usage of referencing black people in the lowercase. After extensive conversations, we chose to use the lowercase form here primarily as a matter of aesthetics. This book makes frequent reference to black and white people within the same sentence or paragraph. Capitalizing Black but not white seemed visually distracting. Capitalizing both Black and White seemed equally distracting.

  The second challenge was in sourcing. This book uses the sourcing style familiar to readers of law reviews and other legal texts. Notes at the end of paragraphs or a sequence of paragraphs will identify the sources for the quotations and the factual claims that appear above them. My goal was to provide sources for every significant factual claim and quotation in the book. That goal was in tension with the practical constraints of book publishing. Sourcing in the precise style of law reviews would have produced well over one hundred pages of endnotes. (The forty-thousand-word law-review article on which this book is based came in at more than six hundred source notes). The endnotes here run roughly thirty-five pages. In some instances, for the sake of efficiency, I have collapsed references for several paragraphs into a single endnote. This may require readers to proceed through several paragraphs to reach the endnote that provides the source. The text of an endnote may contain references to several sets of pages from a single source, and it might also list more than one source. The cited sources here will generally proceed in sequence. So, for example, an endnote following a sequence of three paragraphs indicating pages “3-4, 12, and 23-24” will designate the sources for those paragraphs in sequence.

  Gun! Just the word raises the temperature. Add Negroes and the mixture is incendiary, evoking images of hopeless young gangsters terrorizing blighted neighborhoods.

  This book tells a dramatically different story. It chronicles a tradition of church folk, merchants, and strivers, the very best people in the community, armed and committed to the principle of individual self-defense. This black tradition of arms takes root early and ranges fully into the modern era. It is demonstrated in Frederick Douglass’s advice of a good revolver as the best response to slave catchers. It is evident in mature form in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow of Mississippi fought off a Klan attack with rifle fire. Turnbow considered this fully consistent with the principles of the freedom movement, explaining, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent, I was just protectin’ my family.”

  The black tradition of arms has been submerged because i
t seems hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence in the modern civil-rights movement. But that superficial tension is resolved by the long-standing distinction that was vividly evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer’s approach to segregationists who dominated Mississippi politics was, “Baby you just got to love ’em. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But, asked how she survived the threats from midnight terrorists, Hamer responded, “I’ll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”1

  Like Hartman Turnbow, Fannie Lou Hamer embraced private self-defense and political nonviolence without any sense of contradiction. In this she channeled a more-than-century-old practice and philosophy that evolved through every generation, sharpened by icons like Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, pressed by the burgeoning NAACP, and crystalized by Martin Luther King Jr., who articulated it this way:

  Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi. . . . When the Negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects. . . . But violence as a tool of advancement, involving organization as in warfare . . . poses incalculable perils.2

  In practice and in policy, from the leadership to the grass roots, this view dominated into the 1960s—right up to the point where the civil-rights movement boiled over into violent protests and black radicals openly defied the traditional boundary against political violence. That violent and radical turn was the catalyst for a dramatic transition, as the movement ushered in a new black political class. Rising within a progressive political coalition that included the newly minted national gun-control movement, the bourgeoning black political class embraced gun bans and lesser supply controls as one answer to violent crime in their new domains. By the mid-1970s, these influences had supplanted the generations-old black tradition of arms with a modern orthodoxy of stringent gun control.

  The first seven chapters of this book chronicle the rise, evolution, and decline of the black tradition of arms. Chapter 8 details the pivot from that tradition into the modern orthodoxy.

  The secondary theme of this book, distilled in the last chapter, addresses an intriguing tension. On one side is the tragic plague of violent young black men with guns and the toll that this violence takes on many black communities. On the other is the fact that recent momentous affirmations of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms were led by black plaintiffs, Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald, who complained that stringent gun laws in Washington, DC, and Chicago left them disarmed against the criminals who plagued their neighborhoods. The modern orthodoxy would cast Parker and McDonald as dupes or fools. But the black tradition of arms places them in a more complex light and raises critical unexamined questions about the modern orthodoxy. Chapter 9 engages those questions, highlights the diversity of interests and views about the gun question, and assesses the current implications of the black tradition of arms.

  In the several years that I have been working on this project, people have asked what motivated it. What did I hope to achieve? To the first question, this book, like much of my work, is motivated by a rural sensibility, a familiarity with and affection for people and places that are underacknowledged in both in popular culture and in policy making.

  To the second question, my goal here is to answer a longing that I have observed in a variety of contexts. It is evident when people, especially young people of color, probing the narrative of the civil-rights movement, wonder plaintively whether anyone ever fought back. There is a palpable yearning for something more than the images of Negroes in church clothes flattened by baton charges, attacked by dogs, and sometimes hanged from tree limbs. Many of these people were heroes. But they were also victims, and that leaves us unfulfilled, grateful for their sacrifice but still not fully proud. The question lingers, where is our Leonidas? Where is our classic champion who meets force with force even in the face of long odds? Some may find an answer within the black tradition of arms.

  Of course, many episodes here end badly for Negroes with guns. And any worry about overglorifying violence is further leavened by accounts of prosaic black-on-black violence and desperate, failed efforts that are more pathetic than heroic. But other episodes, like Hartman Turnbow’s defiant stand, leave us wondering how different is this, really, from the tale of gallant young cavalrymen charging artillery placements with sabers?

  Black folk still await their Tennyson. But his raw material is in these pages.

  Robert Williams returned home from the army in the spring of 1946 to the same bitter irony that had confronted countless black veterans before him. They shed blood to protect democracy abroad, and bled again under racial apartheid at home.

  Monroe, North Carolina, remained much the same as when Williams was a boy and witnessed a scene of petty brutality that confirmed what it meant to be on the wrong side of the color line. Turning the corner toward the courthouse, he stepped into the scene of a burly white cop arresting a woman in a fashion that captured the status of Negroes across the South. The man with a badge was “Big Jesse” Helms Sr., father of the future United States senator. For the rest of his life, Williams carried the image of Big Jesse flattening that woman with a sock to the jaw, and then dragging her off to jail with her dress up over her head and screaming as the concrete singed her back and thighs. As an old man, Williams the revolutionary—leaning on a cane, sporting a big, grey afro—would talk like it was yesterday about the laughter of the white bystanders and how the cluster of black courthouse loiterers hung their heads and scurried away.

  The courthouse loiterers represented a particular stripe of man. Some would say that Robert Williams was a different kind of man. Maybe so. But more important is that Robert Williams was not alone. He is an exemplar, but he was not unusual. He was part of a long tradition of black men and women who thought it just and natural to answer aggression with corresponding force. They kept and carried guns and believed in self-defense as a fundamental right. Their story is obscured by the popular narrative of the nonviolent civil-rights movement. But alongside that narrative, deep in the culture, is a rich vein of grit and steel. Robert Williams was heir to that tradition. His bloodline was thick with it.

  Williams’s early experiences confirmed the privilege of white skin, but that did not cow him. Even though his people were no match for the power of the state and the culture of Jim Crow, when pushed to the wall, they bucked up and fought back. There is a hint of this in the Williams clan back as far as grandfather Sikes. Over the course of his life, Sikes Williams was a slave, a farmer, a reconstruction newspaper editor, a perpetual optimist, and finally, always, a realist. In the middle of a hostile environment, with powerful reasons to despair, Sikes Williams worked hard and hoped for the best for himself and his family. He also understood his responsibility in that moment where his next breath or the safety of those he loved was threatened by imminent violence. One of Robert’s prized possessions was a rifle that, according to family lore, had been used by Sikes Williams in matters of life or death.

  Grandpa Sikes was a hero of Robert’s imagination. But the firsthand confirmation of the Williams family backbone came in another childhood episode, when word spread that a mob was forming to lynch a Negro who had fought with police. Rumor circulated that in addition to dragging the man from his cell for a hanging or burning, the mob also was planning to run some black folk out of town. The old people, and some young ones, who had witnessed the terror of the lynch mob, hid or prepared to flee.

  Williams’s father, “Daddy John” heard the rumors too. But when it was time to head out for work on the graveyard shift at the mill, he picked up his lunch pail and left the house as usual. The only difference this time was, before s
tepping out the door, he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his overalls. Fortunately, neither the lynching nor the chasing came that night. But Robert never forgot his father’s steel in that environment of fear and carried with him the image of that pistol, slipped quietly into the overalls pocket of a man who was not looking for trouble.

  Later, when Robert Williams became an inflammatory figure, white people would say he should be more like his father, someone they considered a good Negro who kept his place. Robert knew the only difference between them was that Daddy John had the luck never to face a threat that would have turned him into a bad Negro with a gun. While the casual observer might take his kindness for weakness, even as an old man, Daddy John thanked his luck and still prepared for the worst. “Always the shotgun was there,” Robert remembered, “it was always loaded and it was always at the door. And that was the tradition.”1

  Robert Williams was honorably discharged from the service, but only barely so. He served at least one stint in the brig for insubordination, or, in his words, “refusing to be a nigger.” Back home, he faced a similar problem. Monroe in 1946 was Klan territory. And it was not long before the insubordinate soldier was in conflict with the Invisible Empire.

  Bennie Montgomery was Williams’s childhood friend. Bennie was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and discharged with a metal plate in his head. He was never really the same after that. Out of the service, Bennie cycled quickly back to his ordained place in the Jim Crow South—into the fields, chopping and shoveling. Home only a few months, he got into a scrap with his white employer. With the pleasures of Saturday night on his mind, Bennie approached the boss around noon and asked for his wages. Workers were always paid at the end of the day, and Bennie knew it. The boss rewarded his impudence with a slap and a kick. They tussled. By the end of it, Bennie had pulled a knife and killed the man. Later, police found Bennie, still in bloody clothes, drinking beer at a local dive, just sitting there like nothing had happened.2