Negroes and the Gun Read online

  The Klan threatened to lynch Bennie. So the authorities moved him from Monroe. He was quickly convicted of murder and executed. But the execution of Bennie Montgomery did not satisfy the Klan. When the state shipped his body back home for burial, the Klan proclaimed that the remains belonged to them. They planned to drag Bennie’s body through the streets.

  Before that could happen, the black men of the community met at a barbershop and worked up a plan. By the time the Klan motorcade reached the Harris Funeral Home to seize Bennie’s body, forty black men with rifles and shotguns were already in place, hidden where the cover allowed. The motorcade stopped. The black men showed themselves and leveled their guns. Unprepared for a real fight, the Klansmen drove away and Bennie got a civilized burial.3

  Robert Williams was one of the men who drew down on the Klan that night. That same year across the South, black veterans marched and protested and armed themselves against reprisals in Birmingham, Alabama; Decatur, Mississippi; and Durham, North Carolina. Among these men was a young Medgar Evers, home from the army and pressed to the edge of an armed confrontation at the Decatur courthouse, where a mob rose against his attempt to register to vote. Robert Williams was not alone.

  Monroe had a slippery hold on Williams. After marrying Mabel and seeing his first son born, he ranged north to Detroit for work on the assembly lines. But almost as soon as he was gone, he talked of returning home. By 1950, he had moved the family back south and enrolled under the GI Bill in the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. He wanted to be a writer. A year before finishing, with his government money spent, Williams moved north again for work. He and Mabel sublet a little apartment on Eighty-Eighth Street, in New York City. The building was not generally available to blacks, but the Williamses got in through some radical unionist friends Robert had met at work. The white neighbors were less enlightened than Williams’s progressive coworkers. Retreating from the hostility, Mabel stayed in the apartment most of the time. She kept a 9-millimeter pistol close by. It was not a place to make a home, and the Williamses soon left, with Robert chasing work wherever there was promise or rumor of it.

  In 1954, induced by promises of training in radio and journalism, Williams enlisted in the Marine Corps. Posted at Camp Pendleton, California, he was promptly installed as a supply sergeant. The promise of training in journalism evaporated with the explanation that blacks did not work in the Information Services. Angry and defiant, Williams fired off missives to Congress complaining about the bait and switch. Then he sent a nasty letter and a telegram to President Eisenhower, threatening to renounce his US citizenship in protest of his mistreatment. This ultimately was enough to earn him a dishonorable discharge from the Marines and a train ticket back to Monroe.

  Despite Williams’s immediate circumstances, the outlook actually was brightening for blacks in 1954. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. But it would take far more than a Supreme Court opinion to kill off Jim Crow. White opposition to Brown was deep and often vicious. North Carolina governor Luther Hodges, immediately went nuclear, fulminating about black and white amalgamation. State government bureaucrats schemed to maintain de facto segregation. In Monroe, the white reaction against those who aimed to live the message of Brown ran from veiled warnings to economic reprisals, to threats and acts of violence.

  In 1956, the Klan held a huge rally, led by Reverend James “Catfish” Cole, a tent evangelist and carnival barker from South Carolina. Cole stirred up support through a series of rallies, some drawing more than fifteen thousand people. In the space of a few months, two murders, a cross burning, and dynamite attacks were attributed to the Klan. The combination of economic pressure and violence dampened local enthusiasm for the NAACP’s efforts to press enforcement of Brown.

  When Robert Williams joined the Monroe NAACP, membership was down to six, and the chapter was ready to disband. Fearing economic sanctions as well as Klan violence, the comparatively middle-class folk who had run the branch handed Williams the presidency and soon abandoned the organization. Set adrift by the cautious strivers, Williams recruited new members from people who had been ignored by the clique of black bourgeoisie. He went to the pool halls, the street corners, and the tenant farms, and to the black veterans, some of them comrades in the 1947 defense of Bennie Montgomery’s remains. Within two years, Williams would grow the Monroe branch from basically just him, to more than three hundred members.

  One of Williams’s first controversial acts as chapter president came after a young black boy drowned at a local swimming hole. Monroe had a pool for whites. It was built with public money but excluded blacks, who were relegated to ponds, lakes, or old quarries. Every summer black children drowned in these makeshift swimming holes. The Monroe Parks Commission briefly considered granting black kids one or two days a week to swim. But that was deemed too expensive because of the need to change the pool water after Negroes used it. When Williams and his allies continued to press the issue, including one encounter where he brandished a pistol to escape a threatening crowd of counter-protesters, whites circulated a petition asking that “local Negro integrationists especially Williams and NAACP Vice President, Dr. Albert Perry, be forced to leave Monroe.”4

  The petition was at least nominally democratic compared to the work of Klan potentate Catfish Cole. Cole whipped up sympathetic crowds screeching that “a Nigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath. He is looking for a funeral.” Cole held five rallies over as many weeks. At the end of each one, the Klan drove through Monroe’s black section, blaring horns, throwing debris, and shooting into the air. At the head of these drives was Monroe Police chief, A. A. Mauney, who described them as “motorcades” that he led simply to keep order. On at least one occasion, members of the motorcade fired shots into Dr. Albert Perry’s home. Williams complained and requested intervention from the mayor and the governor and with notable persistence sent another letter to President Eisenhower. The only evident response was from local politicians who explained that the Ku Klux Klan had a right to meet and organize, same as the NAACP.5

  Around the same time, the death threats started. The main targets were Williams and Dr. Perry. Williams began wearing a Colt .45 caliber automatic pistol wherever he went. The gun was familiar, identical to the US Army Model 1911 sidearm. Surplus Colts were widely available in the civilian market and sometimes sold through the US government’s Civilian Marksmanship Program, administered by the National Rifle Association, which Williams promptly joined. Williams carried the big gun in a hip holster, “cocked and locked,” the hammer clicked back (some would say menacingly), so with a quick swipe of thumb safety, the gun would fire eight fat 230 grain slugs as fast as he could press the trigger.

  Williams carried the .45 out of legitimate fear of attack, but it was still an inflammatory act. Up to that point, the Monroe NAACP had enjoyed a smattering of support from progressive whites. That support had faded when Williams pushed the swimming-pool issue. It ended entirely when he began wearing the Colt.6

  Although Williams was president of the Monroe chapter, many whites felt that the vice president, Dr. Albert Perry, was the greater threat. He was comparatively affluent, and many suspected he was the group’s primary financial backer. Unlike many middle-class black folk, Perry was relatively immune from white economic pressure.

  One night, Perry’s wife interrupted a chapter meeting with a panicked call. They had received another death threat. She knew about the earlier threats, of course. But this was the first time she had answered the phone herself and heard a voice dripping with venom say we are going to kill you.

  Dr. Perry rushed home. The rest of the men disbanded the meeting, retrieved their guns, and went to guard Perry’s house. They camped that night in his garage, some sitting up in folding chairs with shotguns and rifles across their laps, others standing watch and napping on cots, with rifles and shotguns stacked nearby. They soon d
etermined that the threat was too serious for such ad hoc measures and developed an organized system of rotating guards. Off and on, more than sixty of them guarded the Perrys in shifts.7

  In October 1957, Catfish Cole held another big Klan rally in Monroe, followed by the traditional motorcade. The destination was Dr. Albert Perry’s house. As they approached, some of the hooded revelers fired shots at Perry’s neat brick split-level. They were surprised at the response. Anticipating the threat, Williams and the black men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions. One account puts it this way:

  It was just another good time Klan night, the high point of which would come when they dragged Dr. Perry over the state line if they did not hang him or burn him first. But near Dr. Perry’s home their revelry was suddenly shattered by the sustained fire of scores of men who had been instructed not to kill anyone if it were not necessary. The firing was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some abandoned their automobiles and had to continue on foot.8

  Maybe exaggerated in memory, another defender recalled, “When we started firing, they run. We run them out and they started crying and going on. . . . The Klans was low-down people that would do dirty things. But they found out that you would do dirty things too, then they’d let you alone. [They] didn’t have the stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community.” In the aftermath, the local press was actually critical of the Klan, attributing the incident significantly to the provocative motorcade. The city council agreed. In an emergency meeting, it passed an ordinance banning KKK motorcades. Outside Monroe, however, the defiance of Williams and his neighbors prompted sympathetic responses like the $260 contribution from a congregation in Harlem to purchase rifles and requests from other communities for help in setting up black rifle clubs.9

  This was a time of tremendous stress for Williams. His financial situation was precarious. White employers or lenders often tightened the screws on blacks who pressed the civil-rights agenda. At least partly due to his activism, Williams had difficulty finding and keeping work. His frustration is evident in an article he wrote for the newsletter, the Crusader. He disdained “Big cars, fine clothes, big houses and college degrees.” Manhood, Williams claimed, was more elemental. It meant standing up and taking care of people who depended on you.

  But what precisely did that mean? What about the chance that standing up got you knocked down or carried off? Then what good were you to your family and community? Williams’s thinking on these questions would soon be sharpened. The lesson came from an unlikely confrontation between the nearby Lumbee Indian tribe and the Klan.

  The Lumbee incident was instigated by the now-familiar Catfish Cole, this time exercised by reports of race mixing between whites and Lumbees. Cole laid this sin at the feet of the Lumbee women, disparaging their morals and their “half-breed” children. He announced publicly, “we are going to have a cross burning and scare them up.” After several small cross burnings and public fulminations about mongrelization, Cole’s Klan planned a widely advertised rally, near Maxton. Before the rally, Cole was warned by the sheriff against further provoking the Lumbees. He had gotten perfunctory warnings like this before. Undeterred, he continued plans for the big event.10

  On the appointed day, in a roadside field, the Klansmen gathered in the darkness. They set up a portable generator, a PA system, and a kerosene-soaked cross. As the speechmaking started, a Lumbee man swooped in on Catfish Cole. Out of the surrounding darkness, more Lumbees, some would later say several hundred of them, gave a war cry and fired guns into the air. Many of the Klansmen were armed but were unprepared for a gun battle with unknown adversaries hidden in the darkness. Klansmen ran for their cars, abandoning their generator, their little buttons and pamphlets, and their cross. Catfish Cole fled into the swamp, leaving his wife, Carolyn, behind. Four people were injured, reportedly by falling bullets.

  The Lumbees’ celebration was carried by the national news. After pushing Carolyn Cole’s Cadillac out of the ditch and bidding her good-bye, the Indians lit the Klan cross and burned an effigy of her husband. The next day, some of them strutted in Klan robes and hats abandoned by members of the Invisible Empire. Life magazine featured a playful photograph, taken several days later, of a beaming Simeon Oxendine, a Lumbee leader, wrapped in a confiscated Ku Klux Klan banner. Even a few local papers seemed to celebrate the Lumbee rout of Cole and his minions, quoting Simeon Oxendine, that “if the Negroes had done something like this a long time ago, we wouldn’t be bothered with the KKK.”11

  Oxendine’s assessment is intriguing because it raises questions that would plague Robert Williams. Williams was committed to standing like a man and fighting back. But the tougher questions were how much fighting, what type, and within what boundaries? The Lumbees were a tiny slice of the population and insignificant at the ballot box. Their rout of Catfish Cole, the carnival barker, was a sideshow that did not threaten the balance of political power. Responding to Cole’s threats to return to Lumbee territory with thousands of armed Klansmen, Governor Hodges pressed the state to indict Cole on charges of inciting a riot. Cole was convicted and served more than a year in prison.

  Ultimately, Williams’s admiration for the Lumbees was cautious. He was under no illusions that the conviction of Catfish Cole was an endorsement of any broader claims for justice, certainly not black claims. Whites could jokingly salute the Lumbee triumph over the Klan because Cole was a clown and the Indians, long conquered and their population decimated, posed no political threat. Blacks, on the other hand, were far more numerous, an actual majority in many places. This evoked the old demons of Reconstruction and Negro rule. Groups of Negroes with guns, threating political violence either tacitly or overtly, would be provocative on a different order from the almost-quaint Lumbee rout of Catfish Cole.

  Negroes with guns had defended Bennie Montgomery’s body from desecration and had backed down Klansmen intent on savaging Dr. Albert Perry. But those episodes could still be cast as simple self-defense against Klan provocation. Certainly, Williams saw them that way. They did not clearly cross the line into organized political violence.

  This had been a crucial distinction for generations. In different ways over time, blacks recognized the folly of political violence. Ultimately outnumbered and out-gunned, Negroes would win nothing as a people through violence. The only plausible tools for group advancement were moral suasion rooted perhaps in religion or American ideals and generally dependent on coalitions with white progressives or enlightened pragmatists. Like generations before him, Williams was acutely conscious of the essential boundary between self-defense and political violence. And, at least in his own mind, he was cautious not to step over it.

  Of course, even legitimate private self-defense could be perilous for blacks. Even those who took up arms and protected themselves against imminent threats might still be at the mercy of some sheriff or prosecutor or all-white jury, who would say their violence was not justified. But many times, things did not get that far. Many blacks benefited from the phenomenon, now confirmed by modern researchers, that in most episodes of armed self-defense, no shots are fired and in the remaining fraction, mostly no one is hit. So even in an era where the justice system was overtly biased against blacks, it was plausible to gamble on armed self-defense. And many people would.12

  Even where shots were fired and someone was injured or killed, the aftermath could vary greatly. In black-on-black confrontations, white authorities might easily dismiss the incident as just a black thing, not worth pursuing. This fueled responses like the 1940s initiative of the Mississippi Delta Committee for Better Citizenship to “ensure greater punishment for Black criminals who committed offenses against Blacks.” As circumstances changed, white intervention could also complicate things further, as reflected in one activist’s lament that “a Negro who is
the favorite of an influential white man can kill another Negro with impunity.”13

  Black-on-white self-defense was another thing altogether. The most cynical assessment is that self-defense simply delayed the violence; that blacks who survived an initial threat would quickly be consumed by the violence of the state or the mob. So it is some proof of the visceral draw of self-defense that this logic did not dissuade Williams or countless others. Sure, it was safer to avoid the threat altogether if you could—better to dissemble, to step back with eyes averted after a slap across the face, or just to flee. But when stripped of those choices and forced to decide about being brutalized today or to gamble on self-defense, countless black people, guns in hand, chose to fight back.

  Black protest against injustice was growing across the South. The evolving political strategy—pressed by national civil-rights organizations (some of them capitalizing on interracial coalitions and formally disavowing violence), their local affiliates, and independent grass-roots groups—was mainly passive resistance using the tools of sit-ins, marches, and boycotts. The white reaction was sometimes vicious, and self-defense by blacks under those circumstances risked a spillover into political violence. This was the atmosphere in which Robert Williams sparked an incident that captures the strategic burden, continuous tactical assessment, and boundary drawing that frame the black tradition of arms.

  In May 1960, at the Union County Courthouse, Lewis Medlin stood charged with rape. Medlin was white. His accuser, Mary Ruth Reed, was black. At the time of the alleged attack, she also was pregnant. According to the charge, Medlin came to her cabin while her husband was in the fields and tried to rape her as her five children stood by. Mary Ruth broke away and fled into the yard, where Medlin caught her and beat her. A white neighbor intervened and then called the police.