Negroes and the Gun (24 page)

Fig. 4.1. Newspaper coverage of the Wilmington race riots. (
New York Herald
, Friday, November 10, 1898.)

Lesser incidents provoked similar responses in the black press and even among the clergy, who extolled the self-defense impulse even where there was little hope of prevailing. In the
Cleveland Gazette
, Reverend C. O. Benjamin celebrated the heroism of a black man in Mississippi who resisted his white assailants, urging that “Negroes should stand like men.”
47
Speaking before the Afro-American Press Association in 1901, W. A. Pledger of the
Atlanta Age
similarly advised that terrorists “are afraid to lynch us where they know the black man is standing behind the door with a Winchester.”
48

Pressing against the boundary of political violence, Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church urged development of a national black organization with an explicit focus on community self-defense. In a March 10, 1898, letter in the
New York Age
, Walters exhorted, “after the late outrages perpetrated against postmasters Loften of Hogansville, Georgia, and Lake of Lake City, South Carolina, for no other reason than their race and color . . . it becomes absolutely necessary that we organize for self-protection.”
49

After the torture and burning at the stake of Sam Hose in 1899, with its incomprehensible carnival atmosphere, Walters was moved beyond restraint and openly advocated political violence. In an address to the New Jersey Methodist Conference,
Walters juxtaposed the recent American bloodshed to “free” Cubans and Filipinos from Spanish domination, with the barbarism of the southern lynch mob. “The greatest problem of America today,” said Walters, “is not the currency question nor the colonial processions, but how to avoid the racial war at home. You cannot forever keep the Negro out of his rights. Slavery made a coward of him for 250 years, he was taught to fear the white man. He is rapidly emerging from such slavish fear and ere long will contend for his rights as bravely as any other man. In the name of the Almighty God, what are we to do but fight and die?”

When Bishop Walters's first concrete action after the Sam Hose lynching was to call for a day of prayer and fasting, W. Calvin Chase saw it as a retreat and criticized that it would have no impact on “cutthroats, lynchers and murderers.” Chase said that blacks were “praying when they needed to strike.” Julius F. Taylor, editor of the
Salt Lake Broad Axe
, affirmed this sentiment, urging that “the Negro must not expect to have his wrongs righted by praying, fasting and singing, but he must rely on his own strong arm to accomplish that objective.”
50

Although he may have been short on follow-through, Bishop Walters's statements are significant as a suggestion of how self-defense resonated within the community. And it speaks to the power of the self-defense impulse that, even within the black clergy, he was not alone. In 1897, following the lynching of two men in Louisiana, AME bishop Henry McNeal Turner wrote in the
Voice of the Missions
newspaper that Negroes should defend themselves with guns against the lynch mob. He urged blacks to acquire guns and “keep them loaded and ready for immediate use.” Turner admitted that his views might be considered an unseemly departure for a man of God and that he had held his tongue for many years, out of concern for the religious organization he represented. But after the latest lynchings, he was now urging, “Get guns Negroes, get guns, and may God give you good aim when you shoot.”
51

This sentiment was shared by emerging black intellectual John Edward Bruce, lecturer, editor, self-taught historian, and founder of the Negro Society for Historical Research. Bruce reserved nothing in his condemnation of lynch violence. His October 5, 1889, speech in Washington, DC, urging violence in kind against the mob, is representative. “The man who will not fight for the protection of his wife and children,” said Bruce, “is a coward and deserves to be so treated. The man who takes his life in his hand and stands up for what he knows to be right will always command the respect of his enemy.” Bruce seemed unconcerned about treading over into advocacy of political violence:

Let the Negro require at the hands of every white murder in the South or elsewhere a life for a life. If they burn your houses, burn theirs. If they kill your wives and children, kill theirs. Pursue them relentlessly. Meet force with force, everywhere it is offered. If they demand blood, exchange with them until they are satiated. By vigorous adherence to this course, the shedding of human blood by white men will soon become a thing of the past. Wherever and whenever the Negro shows himself to be a man he can always command the respect even of a cutthroat. Organized resistance to organized resistance is the best remedy for the
solution of the vexed problem of the century which to me seems practical and feasible.
52

Fig. 4.2. Negro leaders of the late nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass
(center)
, T. Thomas Fortune
(upper left)
, Booker T. Washington
(upper right)
, Garland Penn
(lower left)
, and Ida B. Wells
(lower right)
, circa 1900. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division.)

Publisher and philanthropist Mrs. C. C. Steward urged that black folk take a lesson from their white neighbors, “The white man knows how to shoot and keeps his Winchesters. He teaches his wife and his baby boy to shoot.” This was a lesson, said Steward, that “the Negro needs to learn. . . . A good double barrel rifle and plenty of ammunition will go a great deal further in protecting our families from being mobbed and lynched than all the prayers which can be sent up to heaven.”

Considered against the sentiments of his peers, T. Thomas Fortune's views about armed self-defense were not at all unusual. And he did not build one of the highest-circulating Negro papers in the country by being out of step with the mood of black folk. On the theme of self-defense, Fortune's exhortations were not some tough medicine he was pushing onto the masses. He was channeling the sentiment of the community.

This sentiment was fueled in part by the failure of government at all levels to protect and serve black folk, a failure that drove calls for an array of black self-help strategies and spurred the development of national civil-rights organizations that Fortune and Ida B. Wells would help start. Fortune despaired at the lack of grassroots financial support for the Afro-American League, the organization he conceived in 1886. It would never really thrive, but the pulse of the league fueled development of the Afro American Council, the Committee of Twelve, the Niagara Movement, and ultimately the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
53

With federal abandonment of Reconstruction, rising lynch violence, and disenfranchisement of black voters, the outlook for blacks in the late nineteenth century seemed so dim that many Negroes thought the best thing to do was to leave. The grand schemes to settle in Liberia or the Caribbean are familiar. But there were also small-scale movements within regions.

In some cases, Negroes fled to urban centers, spurred by violence in the countryside. But there was also an impulse in the other direction. Following race riots in the urban North, Henry Highland Garnet advised flight to the countryside, complaining that “prejudice is so strong in cities, and custom is so set and determined, that it is impossible for us to emerge from the most laborious and the least profitable occupations. . . . For instance in the city of New York, a colored citizen cannot obtain a license to drive a cart! Many such inconveniences beset them on every hand.”

Garnet surely idealized the countryside. But he was driven by an impulse
familiar to many Negroes that there must be someplace better than where they were. And that impulse drove many black folk to strike out for the American West.
54

The story of Negroes in the West is obscured by the dominant narrative of the white cowboy. Some research traces this tilt to the class and racial bias of Owen Wister, whose classic novel
The Virginian
in many ways frames the canon that feeds the popular narrative and drives much of the American mythology of the gun. But the reality was far richer than the myth. The real American West was not the lily-white scene portrayed in film but a far more racially mixed affair that contributes abundantly to the black tradition of arms.
55

By 1870, roughly 284,000 blacks accounted for 12 percent of the population of sixteen Western states and territories. But Negroes actually show up as early as 1790, in a Spanish census, where roughly 20 percent of the populations of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, and Monterey acknowledged African ancestry. Until the United States' conquest of the Mexican territory, about 15 percent of Californians continued to acknowledge African heritage. But with the coming of US rule, the incentive to deny Negro blood resulted in the large-scale “disappearance” of that population. These largely mixed-race people were still there, of course. But now they had stronger reasons to disclaim their African roots.
56

The most obvious prewar path west for blacks was slavery. One underacknowledged aspect of this movement is the population that went west as slaves of Indians who were displaced from the southeast under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Among the Five Civilized Tribes forced from the East, only the Seminoles of Florida abjured slavery and actually developed alliances and friendships with blacks in two separate waves of interaction.

As early as the 1690s, Spain tempted slaves from the English colonies into Florida with the promise of freedom under Spanish rule. In 1739, an African named Francisco Menendez actually commanded the stronghold at Fort Mose, with the assignment of protecting St. Augustine from attack. In 1740, his forces helped repel an English attack led by Georgia governor James Oglethorpe.

By the 1780s, Florida was home to Spanish-speaking Africans, fugitive slaves from the colonies, and indigenous and migrated Indian tribes, including the Seminoles. Fugitive slaves established maroon settlements in Spanish Florida with names like “Disturb Me If You Dare” and “Try Me If You Be Men.” By 1819, when the United States purchased Florida from Spain, General Andrew Jackson commented that the transaction had finally closed “this perpetual harbor for our slaves.”

Equally instructive is the 1837 assessment of the Second Seminole War by Major General Thomas Sidney Jessup: “This you may be assured, is a Negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.” Modern research echoes
this view, concluding that the Second Seminole War is better described “as a Negro insurrection with Indian support.”
57

Fig. 4.3. Escape into the Swamps. (Drawing by B. West Clinedinst, from Harriet Beecher Stowe,
The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe
[Houghton, Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1896].)