NEGROES AND THE GUN

THE BLACK TRADITION OF ARMS

Prometheus Books

Contents

BOUNDARY-LAND

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

Monroe, North Carolina, remained much the same as when Williams was a boyand witnessed a scene of petty brutality that confirmed what it meant to be on thewrong side of the color line. Turning the corner toward the courthouse, he steppedinto the scene of a burly white cop arresting a woman in a fashion that captured thestatus 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 carriedthe image of Big Jesse flattening that woman with a sock to the jaw, and then draggingher off to jail with her dress up over her head and screaming as the concretesinged her back and thighs. As an old man, Williams the revolutionary—leaning ona cane, sporting a big, grey afro—would talk like it was yesterday about the laughterof the white bystanders and how the cluster of black courthouse loiterers hung theirheads and scurried away.

The courthouse loiterers represented a particular stripe of man. Some would saythat Robert Williams was a different kind of man. Maybe so. But more importantis 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 andnatural to answer aggression with corresponding force. They kept and carried gunsand believed in self-defense as a fundamental right. Their story is obscured by thepopular 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 heirto that tradition. His bloodline was thick with it.

Williams's early experiences confirmed the privilege of white skin, but that didnot cow him. Even though his people were no match for the power of the state andthe 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 thecourse of his life, Sikes Williams was a slave, a farmer, a reconstruction newspapereditor, a perpetual optimist, and finally, always, a realist. In the middle of a hostileenvironment, with powerful reasons to despair, Sikes Williams worked hard andhoped for the best for himself and his family. He also understood his responsibilityin that moment where his next breath or the safety of those he loved was threatenedby imminent violence. One of Robert's prized possessions was a rifle that, accordingto 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 confirmationof the Williams family backbone came in another childhood episode, whenword 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 hangingor burning, the mob also was planning to run some black folk out of town. The oldpeople, and some young ones, who had witnessed the terror of the lynch mob, hidor prepared to flee.

Williams's father, "Daddy John" heard the rumors too. But when it was timeto head out for work on the graveyard shift at the mill, he picked up his lunch pailand left the house as usual. The only difference this time was, before stepping outthe door, he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his overalls. Fortunately, neither thelynching nor the chasing came that night. But Robert never forgot his father's steelin that environment of fear and carried with him the image of that pistol, slippedquietly into the overalls pocket of a man who was not looking for trouble.

Later, when Robert Williams became an inflammatory figure, white peoplewould say he should be more like his father, someone they considered a good Negrowho kept his place. Robert knew the only difference between them was that DaddyJohn had the luck never to face a threat that would have turned him into a badNegro 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 itwas always at the door. And that was the tradition."

Robert Williams was honorably discharged from the service, but only barelyso. 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 1946was Klan territory. And it was not long before the insubordinate soldier was in conflictwith the Invisible Empire.

Bennie Montgomery was Williams's childhood friend. Bennie was woundedin the Battle of the Bulge and discharged with a metal plate in his head. He wasnever really the same after that. Out of the service, Bennie cycled quickly back tohis 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 thepleasures of Saturday night on his mind, Bennie approached the boss around noonand asked for his wages. Workers were always paid at the end of the day, and Bennieknew it. The boss rewarded his impudence with a slap and a kick. They tussled. Bythe end of it, Bennie had pulled a knife and killed the man. Later, police foundBennie, still in bloody clothes, drinking beer at a local dive, just sitting there likenothing had happened.

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

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

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 armedthemselves against reprisals in Birmingham, Alabama; Decatur, Mississippi; andDurham, North Carolina. Among these men was a young Medgar Evers, home fromthe 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 Williamswas not alone.

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

In 1954, induced by promises of training in radio and journalism, Williamsenlisted in the Marine Corps. Posted at Camp Pendleton, California, he waspromptly installed as a supply sergeant. The promise of training in journalism evaporatedwith the explanation that blacks did not work in the Information Services.Angry and defiant, Williams fired off missives to Congress complaining about thebait 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 ultimatelywas enough to earn him a dishonorable discharge from the Marines and atrain ticket back to Monroe.

Despite Williams's immediate circumstances, the outlook actually was brighteningfor blacks in 1954. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in Brownv. Board of Education that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional. But it wouldtake far more than a Supreme Court opinion to kill off Jim Crow. White oppositionto Brown was deep and often vicious. North Carolina governor Luther Hodges,immediately went nuclear, fulminating about black and white amalgamation. Stategovernment bureaucrats schemed to maintain de facto segregation. In Monroe,the white reaction against those who aimed to live the message of Brown ran fromveiled warnings to economic reprisals, to threats and acts of violence.

In 1956, the Klan held a huge rally, led by Reverend James "Catfish" Cole, atent evangelist and carnival barker from South Carolina. Cole stirred up supportthrough a series of rallies, some drawing more than fifteen thousand people. In thespace of a few months, two murders, a cross burning, and dynamite attacks wereattributed to the Klan. The combination of economic pressure and violence dampenedlocal enthusiasm for the NAACP's efforts to press enforcement of Brown.

When Robert Williams joined the Monroe NAACP, membership was downto six, and the chapter was ready to disband. Fearing economic sanctions as well asKlan violence, the comparatively middle-class folk who had run the branch handedWilliams the presidency and soon abandoned the organization. Set adrift by the cautiousstrivers, Williams recruited new members from people who had been ignoredby the clique of black bourgeoisie. He went to the pool halls, the street corners, andthe tenant farms, and to the black veterans, some of them comrades in the 1947defense of Bennie Montgomery's remains. Within two years, Williams would growthe 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 youngblack boy drowned at a local swimming hole. Monroe had a pool for whites. It wasbuilt with public money but excluded blacks, who were relegated to ponds, lakes, orold quarries. Every summer black children drowned in these makeshift swimmingholes. The Monroe Parks Commission briefly considered granting black kids one ortwo days a week to swim. But that was deemed too expensive because of the needto change the pool water after Negroes used it. When Williams and his allies continuedto press the issue, including one encounter where he brandished a pistol toescape a threatening crowd of counter-protesters, whites circulated a petition askingthat "local Negro integrationists especially Williams and NAACP Vice President,Dr. Albert Perry, be forced to leave Monroe."

The petition was at least nominally democratic compared to the work of Klanpotentate Catfish Cole. Cole whipped up sympathetic crowds screeching that "aNigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath. He islooking for a funeral." Cole held five rallies over as many weeks. At the end of eachone, 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. Onat least one occasion, members of the motorcade fired shots into Dr. Albert Perry'shome. Williams complained and requested intervention from the mayor and thegovernor and with notable persistence sent another letter to President Eisenhower.The only evident response was from local politicians who explained that the KuKlux Klan had a right to meet and organize, same as the NAACP.

Around the same time, the death threats started. The main targets wereWilliams and Dr. Perry. Williams began wearing a Colt .45 caliber automatic pistolwherever he went. The gun was familiar, identical to the US Army Model 1911sidearm. Surplus Colts were widely available in the civilian market and sometimessold through the US government's Civilian Marksmanship Program, administeredby the National Rifle Association, which Williams promptly joined. Williamscarried 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 wouldfire 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 aninflammatory act. Up to that point, the Monroe NAACP had enjoyed a smatteringof support from progressive whites. That support had faded when Williams pushedthe swimming-pool issue. It ended entirely when he began wearing the Colt.

Although Williams was president of the Monroe chapter, many whites felt thatthe vice president, Dr. Albert Perry, was the greater threat. He was comparativelyaffluent, and many suspected he was the group's primary financial backer. Unlikemany middle-class black folk, Perry was relatively immune from white economicpressure.

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

Dr. Perry rushed home. The rest of the men disbanded the meeting, retrievedtheir 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, othersstanding watch and napping on cots, with rifles and shotguns stacked nearby. Theysoon determined that the threat was too serious for such ad hoc measures and developedan organized system of rotating guards. Off and on, more than sixty of themguarded the Perrys in shifts.

In October 1957, Catfish Cole held another big Klan rally in Monroe, followedby the traditional motorcade. The destination was Dr. Albert Perry's house. As theyapproached, 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 theblack men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions. Oneaccount puts it this way:

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

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

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