Negroes and the Gun (23 page)

Fortune was an articulate but volatile affiant of the black tradition of arms. Although he proposed to respect the line between political violence and self-defense, his passion fueled a rhetorical style that sometimes treaded close to the boundary. Describing the agenda and strategy of his proposed national civil-rights organization, the Afro-American League, Fortune exhorted, “we propose to accomplish our purposes by the peaceful methods and agitation through the ballot and the courts. But if others use the weapons of violence to combat our peaceful arguments, it is not for us to run away from violence. . . . Attucks, the black patriot—he was no coward! . . . Nat Turner—he was no coward! . . . If we have work to do, let us do it. And if there comes violence, let those who oppose our just cause ‘throw the first stone.'”
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Looking out desperately toward the new century, Fortune declared, “to be murdered by mobs is not to be endured without protest, and if violence must be met with violence, let it be met. If the white scamps lynch and shoot you, you have the right to do the same.”
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Some criticized him for agitating from the relative comfort and safety of New York City, but Fortune had endured his share of racism and did not shy from a fight. In fact, he seems consciously to have picked one in 1890 when he entered the bar at the Trainor Hotel on Thirty-Third Street and demanded a glass of beer. He was refused service, as he apparently expected. In the record from a subsequent trial, the bar owner claimed that Fortune threatened to “mop up the floor with anyone who laid hands on him.”

Fortune gave a different account of the conflict. He sued the bar owner for assault, solicited donations for a litigation fund, and ultimately won a thousand-dollar jury verdict. The black press celebrated Fortune's victory. He was the model of the New Negro, said the
Indianapolis Freeman
, adding that in the past “the Negro's greatest fault was being a magnificent sufferer.”
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The allegation that Fortune had threatened to mop up the floor with anyone who laid hands on him is consistent with his editorial stance. Denouncing a Georgia court decision allowing railroad conductors to send black first-class passengers back to the smoking car, Fortune advised Negroes to “knock down any fellow who attempts to enforce such a robbery.”

Cognizant that he was advising Negroes to strike the first blow, Fortune equivocated, “we do not counsel violence; we counsel manly retaliation.” Then, capturing the dilemma that state failure and malevolence posed for blacks, he reasoned, “in the absence of law . . . we maintain that the individual has every right in law and equity to use every means in his power to protect himself.”

Fortune's militant stance extended explicitly to the use of firearms. Commenting on an interracial gunfight in Virginia, Fortune wrote, “if white men are determined upon shooting whenever they have a difference with a colored man, let the colored man be prepared to shoot also. . . . If it is necessary for colored men to arm themselves and become outlaws to assert their manhood and their citizenship, let them do it.”
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This editorial drew a harsh response from the white press. One paper argued that Fortune's advice would provoke a race war that blacks could not win. Fortune responded with an essay titled “The Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.” On the last passionate turn, Fortune argued that a man who would not defend himself was properly deemed “a coward worthy only of the contempt of brave men.”

Fortune's prescription here teases back and forth into the boundary-land
between political violence and individual self-defense. The editor of the
Cincinnati Afro-American
saw Fortune's approach as utter folly and welcomed inclusion on “the list of cowards,” arguing that it was indeed “better for the colored man to stand and be shot than to shoot and stand.” This dissent provokes the question whether Fortune was on the edge of community sentiment or in the middle of it.

One signal of how Fortune's views resonated in the community is the long-standing but largely secretive connection between him and the conservative Booker T. Washington. In a decades-long relationship, Fortune was sometimes a daily correspondent with Washington and often served as ghostwriter for Washington's books, speeches, and editorials. Washington secretly financed Fortune's journalistic efforts, and when the
New York Age
was incorporated, Washington took a block of stock in exchange for his past and future support of the paper.

Fortune was a passionate race man and sometimes, especially in extemporaneous speeches, he projected a militant tone that the Wizard of Tuskegee surely deemed unwise. This was certainly the case in 1898 when an irate Fortune unleashed a tirade against President William McKinley's tour of reconciliation through the South. Incensed that McKinley was honoring Confederate dead while blacks were being lynched in the name of white supremacy, Fortune ranted, “I want the man whom I fought for to fight for me, and if he don't I feel like stabbing him.”
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Later Fortune said that he had not advocated “physical assassination” but rather meant to stab McKinley at the ballot box. Still, his comments were widely criticized, and Booker T. Washington surely was not happy with the attack on the Republican president, who still held more promise for blacks than the Democrat alternative.
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We are left just to wonder about the conversations Washington and Fortune had on questions of defensive violence. When Washington died, his people scurried to retrieve their correspondence. But we know for sure that Washington was a gun owner. In 1915, the Tuskegee faculty presented the aging headmaster with a shotgun as a token of their affection
.
One of his biographers says that the gift reflected the faculty's desire that the aging and overworked Washington get some rest and recreation. But it also suggests Washington was familiar with firearms and reflects the prosaic nature of gun ownership in the culture of Tuskegee.
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Booker T. Washington's support of T. Thomas Fortune overlapped with a variety of controversial statements. At a speech at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Washington, DC, Fortune boiled over at reports from a recent conference, where prominent white university professors, ex-governors, and presidential cabinet members opined on the state of the Negro postemancipation. Several of them had seriously proposed repealing the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed black male suffrage. Here Fortune saw no need to dance around the edges of political violence. He threatened that the same amount of blood that had secured
the Fifteenth Amendment would be required to revoke it. He advised black folk, “if the law can afford no protection, then we should protect ourselves, and if need be, die in defense of our rights as citizens. The Negro can't win through cowardice.”

The white press criticized that Fortune's prescription was folly “verge[ing] on crime.” But Fortune put the question in terms of essential manhood and whether some versions of life are worse than death.

The black man's right of self-defense is identically the same as the white man's right of self-defense. Tell me that I shall be exterminated, as you do, if I exercise that right and I will tell you to go ahead and exterminate—if you can. That is a game that two can always play at. And suppose you do exterminate me, what of it? Am I not nobler and happier exterminated while contending for my honest rights than living a low cur that any poor white sneak would feel free to kick?
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Fortune's passion spilled over again at a Philadelphia meeting of the Afro-American Press Association. Motivated by a new spate of lynchings, Fortune raged, “we have cringed and crawled long enough. I don't want anymore ‘good niggers.' I want ‘bad niggers.' It's the bad ‘nigger' with the Winchester who can defend his home and children and wife.” Fortune was followed by W. A. Pledger, editor of the
Atlanta Age
, who invoked the Winchester as the optimal tool against the mob.
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Fortune's response to turn-of-the-century rioting in Atlanta that destroyed neighborhoods and killed scores of blacks was unsurprising. “The trouble will go on in Atlanta,” he said, “until the Negro retaliates—until driven to bay, the Negro slays his assailant.” In correspondence with Emmett Scott, chief aid to Booker T. Washington, Fortune seethed, “What an awful condition we have in Atlanta. It makes my blood boil. I would like to be there with a good force of our men to help make Rome howl.” Fortune dismissed “nonresistance,” arguing to Scott that incidents like the Atlanta riot invited “contempt and massacre of the race.”
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Fortune offered a series of episodes as models for black self-defense, including, prominently, an 1888 incident in Mississippi. It started with a black man's refusal to step aside for white people on the sidewalk and escalated into a nasty scrap. When the talk turned to lynching, the black men of the community grabbed their guns, laid an ambush, and, on Fortune's telling, fired on the “lynching party of white rascals, killing a few of them.” Fortune excoriated the northern white press for casting the blame on the black men.

Fortune saw this incident as a model of black resistance, arguing that if whites “resort to the gun and the torch . . . let the colored men do the same, and if blood must flow like water and bonfires be made of valuable property, so be it all around, for what is fair for the white man to do to teach the Negro his place is fair for the Negro to do to teach the white man his place.”
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There is some instinct to dismiss Fortune's rhetoric as a fringe voice in a sea of more levelheaded, nonviolent folk. But that dissolves under the assessment of Kelly Miller, dean of Howard University, who wrote in the
Amsterdam News
that Fortune “represented the best developed journalist that the Negro race has produced in the Western world. His editorials were accepted throughout the journalistic world as the voice of the Negro. Between the decline of Frederick Douglass and the rise of Booker T. Washington, Fortune was the most influential Negro in the country.”
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There are many confirmations that Fortune was channeling community attitudes about armed self-defense. It is evident in the black reaction to the 1898 coup that extinguished Negro influence in Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington had a black voting majority and numerous black officeholders supported by a fusion ticket of populists and Republicans. Republicans controlled the board of aldermen, where three black members served. Blacks served prominently in the local judiciary, and black postmasters numbered more than twenty. All of this rested on a thriving black middle class of hoteliers, merchants, druggists, bakers, and grocers.

This success bred tensions, and things boiled over when Alex Manly, editor of the black newspaper the
Daily Record
, launched his own attack against the rape justification for lynching, arguing, “every Negro lynched is called a big burly black brute, when in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with, as is very well known to all.” Manly was doubly offensive as the embodiment of his own critique. He was the acknowledged mulatto son of former North Carolina governor Charles Manly.

These accumulated affronts drove Democrats over the edge. Backed by Klan-type organizations dubbed “Red Shirts” and “Rough Riders,” Democrats summoned thirty-two of the city's prominent blacks and laid out their demands: All black officeholders in Wilmington must resign and Alex Manly must leave Wilmington.

Then, while the black elite were formulating a response, the Democrats launched a wave of violence that steamrolled the scattered Negro opposition. The Republican-Populist administration was ousted and replaced with Democrats. More than 1,400 blacks abandoned their property and fled the city. One commentator called it “the nation's first full-fledged coup d'état.”
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Across the country, black reaction to the coup was visceral. A protest rally at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, DC, is emblematic. To a chorus of sympathetic cheers and angry tears, Colonel Perry Carson raged against the coup in Wilmington and lamented the lack of preparedness. Wilmington, he said, was an object lesson that blacks must, “prepare to protect yourselves; the virtues of your women and your property. Get your powder and your shot and your pistol.” The
Washington Post
was apoplectic, not so much about the Wilmington coup, but that a previously sensible colored man like Carson was urging Negroes to arms.
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