Negroes and the Gun (46 page)

The walk home was an odd scene. “No one followed us,” Charles recalled. “We walked home along the railroad tracks, Medgar on one side of daddy and me on the other. We put our arms around daddy's waist, he put his hands on our heads. We were so happy.” He might easily have been describing the night after a Little League game.

Still, no one in the Evers household was naive about the trajectory of these sorts of incidents. The possibility that the humiliated shopkeeper and a gang of sympathizers would descend on the Everses' homestead under the cover of darkness left Jim Evers sitting up nights, resting, without really sleeping, cradling a rifle in his lap.

For the Evers boys, it was a profound lesson. “Some thought daddy was crazy risking his neck, but that's the stock we came from,” Charles recalled. “That was part
of what it meant to be an Evers.” And that grit was rooted deeper than Jim Evers. Family lore had it that Medgar's great-grandfather had fought two white men to the death and then ran off from his childhood home ahead of a lynch mob.
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The Everses' fighting lineage struck Charles somewhat differently than Medgar. According to Charles, his younger brother was the “saint” of the Evers kids. Charles tilted the other way. But in the winter of 1935, none of that made a difference, as both the boys sat shivering with their father and two other men, all of them cradling rifles. Jim Evers had broken the Jim Crow rules again.

It was late December and the custom was “No niggers allowed in Decatur around Christmas.” But Jim Evers heard his boys talking about the excitement in town and determined to take them to see it. Preparing for the risk, he “put a metal tip on the end of a broom handle and hefted it like a baseball bat.”

As they walked down Main Street, a mischievous white boy ran up to throw a firecracker at them. Jim Evers told him drop it or get walloped. The kid ran and told his father, who stormed up, spitting epithets. Jim Evers threatened to give the father the same medicine. He escaped intact only after a sympathetic merchant intervened, admonishing a gathering crowd, “You leave Jim alone. Get on away from here and let Jim alone.”
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By now, Charles and Medgar knew the drill, and said out loud what their father was thinking, “We better sit up tonight.” In a more involved replay of the incident in 1931, Jim Evers recruited two neighbors from across the road. Anticipating retaliation for Jim's affront, the three armed adults, and Charles and Medgar with their .22 rifles, “set up a crisscross” and waited. No one can say how real the mob threat was, only that it did not appear. But for Charles Evers it was another affirmation of his father's grit and the viability of standing up defiant, gun in hand.

By 1946, the Evers brothers had gone to war, spilled blood, and fallen in love with women they could never take back to Decatur, Mississippi. While other men would sit around kitchen tables, telling romantic stories about journeys home with their war brides, Charles and Medgar came home from fighting in Europe and the Philippines still barred from voting. They actually talked about “finding our girls and living in peace in some Central American country where no one cared about race.” But fate had a different future in store for the Evers brothers, and for one of them a fight more deadly than the war just endured.
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The first battle was over the ballot. In the fall of 1946, Medgar and Charles determined that after their sacrifices in uniform, the United States of America, the state of Mississippi, and the town of Decatur owed them at least the opportunity to go through the motions of democracy. It turns out this was asking too much. And some of the strongest opposition came from the halls of Congress.

It was closing in on a century since the federal government abandoned the brief experiment in Southern Reconstruction and nodded in acquiescence as the Confederate states stripped the franchise from freedmen. One could travel the South through a sea of black souls and find only a handful of them allowed to vote. In Mississippi, the man nominally assigned to represent the interests of Charles and Medgar Evers in the United States Senate, the little homunculus, Theodore Bilbo, advised, “The best way to stop niggers from voting is to visit them the night before the election.”

When Charles and Medgar announced that they planned to register and to vote in the next election, word spread fast and the warnings came quickly. Jim Evers was told to talk some sense into his boys. The registration clerk, who had been a friend to the Evers family, pulled them into his office and begged them to wait. Charles Evers appreciated the caution from this essentially decent man, whose meager outreach was enough to earn him the dangerous brand “nigger lover.” Charles and Medgar thanked him for the warning but insisted on registering, and the worried clerk did the paperwork.
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But registering was different from voting. And on Election Day, Charles and Medgar stepped right to the edge of the precipice before conceding that Negroes did not vote in Decatur. They planned to arrive early, sneak in and out, and be back home before anyone knew the difference. But before the polls were even open, two hundred armed white men were already gathered at the courthouse.

Medgar and Charles had planned for trouble and brought four other men with them. Charles carried a .38 caliber revolver in his pocket. Following a tactical plan that puts modern complaints about voting inconvenience in perspective, the six of them split up, aiming to exploit the three separate entrances to the courthouse.

Through speed and guile, they actually managed to enter the building and get their hands on two ballots. But the ballot box itself had been locked away in a back office that was guarded by armed men stacked three deep. With one hand on his ballot and the other on his revolver, Charles Evers faced down the armed phalanx. Some of the men he had known for years and a few of them he called friends, within the racial constraints of the day.

Charles Evers was launched into some other place when one of those men, “a nice man from the drugstore” whom he had known for years, hissed, “Listen, nigger, ain't nothing happened to you yet.” Charles tightened the grip on his gun and spit back, “Ain't nothing going to happen to me!” Writing about it later, Evers said that he was ready to die that day and was pulled back from the edge by his cooler-headed brother. Medgar talked him down with a soft, “Come on, Charlie, let's go. We'll get them next time.”

As they backed out of the courthouse, hecklers closed in, hurling epithets and threats. The black men held their guns low and navigated a tense retreat. More anxious nights followed, with the Evers brothers sitting up armed through the night,
Medgar perched in the barn, Charles spotting from the garage. Again they survived the specter of the mob, and by the next year, weathering a campaign of threats and intimidation, they actually voted in the 1947 county elections.
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As Medgar and Charles began working on civil rights under the tutelage of T. R. M. Howard, Medgar traveled around the region as a salesman for Howard's insurance business. He started to layer civil-rights talk into his insurance pitch. In 1948, the brothers began canvassing for the NAACP. By 1952, they were labeled race agitators, and the resulting threats against them started Charles Evers sleeping with a gun under his pillow.
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As the Evers brothers digested the threats and calculated the toll of the sporadic episodes where Negroes turned up dead on the side of the road, they flirted with the radical idea that had tempted Roy Wilkins a generation earlier. As a young man still working as a journalist in Kansas City, Wilkins seethed over a series of local lynchings and imagined retaliating with raiding parties that would skulk into lynch venues and rain random violence on those who hosted the mob.
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Charles and Medgar indulged a similar notion that “each time whites killed a Negro” they would “drive to another town, find a bad Sheriff or cop, and kill him in a secret hit and run raid.” For both Wilkins and the Evers, this militant fantasy subsided, and they channeled rage into work. Between Medgar and Charles, their different dispositions were evident as the idea ran its course. “Medgar never had his heart in it,” Charles recalled, “and over time we dropped it. Medgar was a sweeter man than me.”
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Change was in the wind. And one continuing influence on the Evers brothers as their activism escalated during the 1950s was the percolating goodwill of “a lot of white folk [who] wanted to do right but the atmosphere was so sick,” according to Charles, “that they were scared to speak up.” What counts as goodwill here must be considered in the context of the times. Evers was speaking of people who “disliked lynchings but lacked the guts to stop them. So instead they'd warn us. . . . At the first sign of race trouble, white folks warned the niggers they liked. . . . Even the Klan had a few who said leave that poor nigger alone.”

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the infamous venue of the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders, Charles Evers records that Mayor Clayton Lewis tipped him off to multiple threats and “saved my ass a few times, maybe saved my life.” Other men like Howard Cole, owner of WHOC Radio, exhibited goodwill in more ordinary ways. Responding to complaints that the Evers family funeral home was getting shortchanged in its advertising buys because white announcers brought insufficient style to the copy, Cole told Evers to do the ads himself, and then gave him a radio show to boot.

But in many ways these acts of goodwill were reminders of the dangerous current the Evers brothers were bucking. In 1956, Medgar was the NAACP's
Mississippi field director and Charles headed voter-registration efforts. A white friend called to warn Charles, “There is a Negro coming to your house. He'll ask you to drive your cab down to the county line. Don't go. Some Klansmen are waiting there to kill you.”

Later that night, just as the caller warned, the fellow showed up following the script that Evers already knew. With his .38 revolver in his pocket, Evers invited the man in and offered him an alternative driver. When the fellow insisted on Evers, Charles sprung the trap. He might have killed the assassins' helper but for the intervention of his wife, Nan.

Things accelerated from there. Howard Cole at the radio station was pressured to cancel Charles Evers's show and a landlord refused to renew the lease on his restaurant. Then a local woman was sent by the Citizens' Council to stage an accident with one of Evers's taxicabs. Economic pressure was a better tool against Charles Evers than physical threats. He set off for Chicago in 1956.
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Some said it was better that he was gone because it was not clear Charles had the temperament for the challenges to come. Even in the short space of a visit back to Mississippi, he boiled over into violence after a white cabdriver assaulted Medgar. Charles drove to the taxi stand, brandished a shotgun, and threatened to kill the man who had sucker punched his little brother.

Charles Evers was in Chicago when the news came that Medgar had been shot by a sniper in his driveway and bled to death as his wife and children poured out their grief. Two neighbors, Thomas Young and Houston Wells, heard the shot and ran out to investigate. Wells fired his gun into the air, hoping to scare off anyone who remained lurking. But it was soon clear that this armed response was useless against the damage already done to their friend and neighbor.

Charles Evers returned to Mississippi, buffeted by anger, guilt, and fear. He slept with a pistol within reach, and after the September 15, 1963, bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four little black girls, Charles Evers indulged his old suicidal fantasies of Mau Mau–style retribution. Then, as his rage subsided, he picked up the mantle of his dead brother.

Now walking the path that had gotten Medgar killed, Charles Evers was guarded by an informal team of armed men who were active in the Jackson NAACP. During particularly tense periods, and on occasions when NAACP leaders and prominent figures like Gloster Current, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and Lena Horne were visiting, the defense group deployed in teams, some sitting with guns in cars outside, others on the porch of Evers's Jackson home.

The Jackson defense group extended its protective reach to local NAACP activist Reverend R. L. T. Smith after his business was targeted by terrorists. Smith surely appreciated the protection but also took his own measures. Charles
Evers recounts, that Reverend Smith “carried a gun and wouldn't have minded using it.”
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In June 1964, student activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner went missing in Neshoba County. Over the coming months, four bombings targeted local black activists. It was a time, Evers recalled, where “I kept a gun in every corner of every room of my house. . . . I felt whites would probably get me, but not like they had Medgar—not in the back, with no return fire.”
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Charles Evers was not dissuaded by the fact that being armed was no guarantee of safety. The gun plainly had not saved Medgar, who followed T. R. M. Howard's practice of arms. Ruby Hurley, NAACP Youth Program director, recalls, “many times when Medgar and I would be driving together, Medgar would tell us about carrying his gun. . . . He used to sit on it under his [driver's seat] pillow.”
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Medgar's wife, Myrlie, acknowledged that the family “had guns in every room of our house. I slept with a rifle next to . . . the nightstand. He slept with a rifle next to him. We had one in the hall, . . . one in the front room.”
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Just a week before he was murdered, Medgar was startled awake by a crash in the night, jumped from his bed, and grabbed a rifle to investigate.
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Charles Evers depicts Medgar's concurrent commitment to political nonviolence and private self-defense with no sense of contradiction. “
Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room
.”
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