Negroes and the Gun (29 page)

Fig. 4.10. Buddie Shang.

We can fight about what lesson, if any, to draw from the story of Buddie Shang. He seems, by comparison to Black Mary Fields, a less threatening, more compliant character. The obvious critique here is that the Negro who knew his place, the kindly uncle, might get a measure of justice—although acquittal of the murder of a white man is extraordinary even within that framework.

Perhaps Buddie Shang is more useful for thinking about the bigger, continuing question of whether guns are worth the trouble. A man died and Shang stood trial for murder because he was “just foolin'” with a shotgun. Wouldn't Buddie Shang have been better off without the gun?

If the answer is yes, then what? Should we jump from there to say that everyone would be better off without the damn things, and enforce that resolve with legal rules? But if Buddie Shang is the proof case for that approach, how do we square that lesson with all that came before him, with what was all around him, and with what was to come?

“I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot. If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.”
1

Guts sprayed over the grass? Who would think such a thing, let alone say it? When we learn that it was the stiff-collared, Harvard PhD W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps still the preeminent intellectual of the race, the black tradition of arms gains new resonance.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born into the relatively benign environment of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. His people had lived free there since the eighteenth century. An acknowledged prodigy, Du Bois demonstrated his gifts early in competitions with white classmates and eased gently into the cauldron of American racism when a little white girl nastily refused his offering in the school's visiting-card exchange.

Du Bois would become the leading voice for the higher aspirations of black folk, famously warring with Booker T. Washington's strategy of uplift through industrial education. His energy and vision were a crucial force in the early development of the NAACP. Through the association's flagship magazine,
The Crisis
, Du Bois spoke to and for the American Negro like no one else on the scene. A Pulitzer Prize–winning treatment of his life is aptly subtitled
Biography of a Race
.
2

By 1906 Du Bois was ensconced as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, one of the top Negro schools in the country. His shotgun threat was a response to the carnage of the 1906 Atlanta race riot. The riot was a piece with the times. The immediate catalyst was the claim of assaults by black men on white women. The local press fanned the flames with special editions carrying at least two specious reports of such attacks. These allegations caught hold in the context of widespread white angst about the real and imagined debaucheries of Atlanta's “Decatur Street Dives” and the black criminality that their patrons represented.
3

This was a period in America where Negroes were regularly lynched. The Fulton County, Georgia sheriff's spitting public assessment reflected the times:
“Gentlemen we will suppress these great indignities upon our fair wives and daughters if we have to kill every Negro in a thousand miles of this place.”
4

By arming himself in Atlanta, Du Bois was something of an aberration, but only in the sense that he was late to the game. Many in his circle owned and carried guns, but he never had. As a freshman at Fisk University in 1886, Du Bois recorded that his classmates commonly carried guns whenever they ventured into Nashville.
5
He was lucky that he was able to find a shotgun for sale and had the money to buy it when the Atlanta rioting broke out.
6

While no one of note appreciated it at the time, the Atlanta riot also was a formative experience for a young man who would become Du Bois's comrade in arms, young Walter White, later the famous spokesman for the NAACP. With a mob advancing, thirteen-year-old Walter waited with his father, gun in hand, at the front windows of their Huston Street home. Shooting from a nearby building repelled the mob before he was forced to fire. But the episode seared in White's memory and cemented his Negro identity.
7

Walter White's time would come. But Du Bois was already in the thick of the dilemma that burdened blacks trying to navigate the political disenfranchisement and the private violence of early twentieth-century America. With the lessons of Confederate redemption still vivid, the folly of political violence was evident. But the draw of self-defense against personal threats remained powerful.

The circumstances that sent Du Bois running for a gun held lessons about the danger of armed self-defense spiraling into political violence. Reaction to the riot from outside Atlanta made the boundary against political violence seem quite tenuous. Although Booker T. Washington, ever cautious in his public statements, vaguely urged “the best people” white and black to come together to prevent such episodes of disorder, many folk embraced the more militant thinking that fueled Du Bois's armed stand.
8
Among the rising national organizations, the Afro American Council, the Niagara Movement, and the Constitution League, the reaction was openly militant. At a meeting of the Afro American Council in New York, Dr. William Hunter raised the roof with a speech urging blacks to prepare for self-defense on a national scale, “not with brickbats and fire sticks but with hot lead.” To the issue of Negroes chafing under the malevolent authority of officials like the Fulton County sheriff, he advised, “Die outside of jail and do not go by yourself.”

Reverend George Lee of the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, DC, cast off the restraints of his guild, declaring that the attacks in Atlanta dissolved any obligation of turning the other cheek. “I preached peace after the Atlanta riots,” said Lee, “But don't misunderstand me, it was prudence, not my religion. If I had the power to stop that kind of thing, even by force, I'd use it. The trouble is all one-sided now, [but] trouble never stays one-sided for long. There's going to be trouble
on the other side soon.” The
New York Times
caricatured this militant chorus, but still captured the general sentiment with the headline “Talk of War on Whites at Negro Conference.”
9

Fig. 5.1. The front cover of
Le Petit Journal
, covering the 1906 Atlanta riot. (
Le Petit Journal
, October 7, 1906, “The Lynchings in the United States: The Massacre of Negroes in Atlanta.”)

The ostensible militancy of the emerging leadership class was rooted in candid acknowledgement of daily threats and hazards. Most would reject political violence as strategically foolish. But it was hard to deny that arms for self-defense were a crucial private resource for blacks.

Du Bois projected this dichotomy in various ways. In his classic work,
The
Souls of Black Folk
, Du Bois argued that organized violence was folly, noting that “the death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defense.” At the same time, in the chapter titled “Of the Coming of John,” a tale of violence and private honor, Du Bois championed self-defense as a core private interest.
10

Responding to real-world threats, Du Bois was adamant about the legitimacy and perhaps the duty of self-defense, even where there was danger of spillover into political violence. Consider his 1916 editorial in the
Crisis
excoriating Negroes in Florida who submitted without resistance to the depredations of a lynch mob.

No colored man can read an account of the recent lynching at Gainesville, Fla., without being ashamed of his people. . . . Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder their women, shoot down innocent men entirely unconnected with the alleged crime, and finally to cap the climax, they caught and surrendered the wretched man whose attempted arrest caused the difficulty.

No people who behave with the absolute cowardice shown by these colored people can hope to have the sympathy or help of civilized folk. . . . In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop in the South when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.
11

In another
Crisis
editorial, following the 1919 Chicago race riot, Du Bois sharpened the point, pushing the boundaries of legitimate self-defense but still warning against violence as a political strategy.

Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self-Defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns. But we must tread here with solemn caution. We must never let justifiable self-defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence.
12

Du Bois nurtured the
Crisis
from its inaugural issue into the conscience, ambition, and voice of black America. It circulated far beyond its subscription base, passed from hand to hand and left in barbershops, in beauty salons, and on church pews. The
Crisis
offered a deeply textured critique of Negro life, carrying news ignored by the white press. It was superior to most of the black dailies partly because it was a periodical, which allowed more time to perfect the product. But the bigger difference was Du Bois.

The
Crisis
recorded the common news, culture, and hazards that fueled Du Bois's stance on armed self-defense. There were many contributions by talented guests, but it is doubtful that anything appeared in the
Crisis
that Du Bois did not scrutinize. There were uplifting segments titled
Industry
,
Education
, and
Social Progress
. Other more somber sections like
Crime
,
The Ghetto
, and
Lynching
chronicled the indignities and threats that drove countless decisions by black folk to keep and carry firearms and the many episodes where Negroes fired guns in self-defense. Many of these probably were written by Du Bois, and a sampling of them helps us understand his stance on personal and political violence and the line between them.

• In 1911 at a hotel in Indian Springs, Georgia, a tussle between a white clerk and a black bellboy led to a shootout between blacks and whites where two
  white men were killed. Four black men were snatched up by a mob but retrieved by authorities and sent to the relative safety of Atlanta. Assaults in retribution continued throughout the countryside around Indian Springs.
  13
  
• In the summer of 1912, white neighbors attempted to block Negroes from moving into the Cook Avenue section of St. Louis. A house purchased by Negroes was pelted with stones and its windows were broken out. Police were called and managed only to arrest a Negro man, Robert Watson, who was patrolling the street in front of the house. He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon.
  14
  
• On June 18, 1912, in Mangham, Louisiana, George Clayton was lynched for the murder of his employer, Ben Brooks. Before dying, Clayton gamely fought off the mob with a hail of gunfire that wounded six men in the mob.
  15
  
• In Pineville, Louisiana, a private conflict boiled over into public violence after a Negro shot a white man in an argument. This sparked a wave of retribution along with warnings that blacks should leave Pineville. When blacks resisted, rioting ensued. Six blacks were shot. Two died.
  16
  
• In Durant and Caddo, Oklahoma, lynch talk was precipitated by the shooting of a white man by a black man. The shooting victim's companions claimed that they were simply passing by a house in the Negro section and were randomly fired upon. The blacks claimed that the white men were trying to blow up their house and they fired in self-defense.
  
• In Rocky Comfort, Arkansas, a “plantation Negro” shot a white man in self-defense. Incensed by the Negro having sassed him, the white man was in chase, screaming threats to kill, when the Negro ran to the cabin of a friend, retrieved a gun, and shot his pursuer dead. He was almost immediately laid upon by a mob and lynched. The next night, the mob returned to lynch the owner of the cabin where the black killer had borrowed the gun.
  17
  
• The
  Crisis
  applauded Hugh M. Burkett, a successful real-estate broker credited with placing black families on some of the better streets in Baltimore. Burkett was celebrated for furnishing bail to a colored man who fired in self-defense against a mob and had been released with the aid of lawyers hired by the NAACP.
  18
  
• The praise for Hugh Burkett refers to the case of George Howe, “A colored resident of 95 Hartford Ave., Baltimore [who] in an attempt to protect his home, fired into the mob attacking the house and injured four men.” He was arrested as the mob threatened to lynch him. “When tried, he was given a sentence of two months each for the first three offenses, but through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People these decisions were appealed and he is now under $500 bail awaiting a jury trial for the fourth case. None of his white assailants in the mob were arrested.”
  19
  
• Mrs. Lily Hill of Washington County, Tennessee, was pardoned by the governor after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. “The pardon record says it appears from the statement of the Attorney General that this colored woman is a respectable and well behaved married woman and had been previously molested by the prosecuting witness in the case, and that she was assaulted . . . in a public street because she resented his attentions a second time and when she was pressed by him, drew a pistol from her handbag and shot him in the arm.”
  20
  
• In 1912 in Hamilton, Georgia, three men were lynched after being arrested on suspicion of murder. They were taken from the custody of the local sheriff, who was the uncle of the murder victim. The dead white man, a planter named Hadley, apparently expressed affection for a black woman named Bertha Hathaway. He was killed by gunshot inside Bertha's home, allegedly by Henry Anderson, who counted Bertha as his future bride. Anderson and two Negroes accused of aiding him were lynched.
  21
  
• In Hickman, Kentucky, competition for work prompted two white laborers to assault a black man. He defended himself with a gun, killing both of them. In retaliation, a group of white men then shot two Negro boys. No arrests were made.
  22
  
• Ordinary negligence precipitated the lynching of a black farmer named Ralston in Wichita, Kansas, in 1913. Ralston fired his shotgun to scare away a group of white boys who were raiding his watermelon patch. His warning shot killed one of the boys, and a lynch mob soon formed. Ralston initially eluded the mob and turned himself in to authorities who “lost custody” of him to the mob and watched him die.
  23
  
• Three incidents from November 1917 show the daily risks of interracial encounters. Rueben Mason, a Negro truck driver in Atlanta, was shot and killed by J. B. McElroy because he was slow in moving his vehicle out of the way. In Moultrie, Georgia, Will McRae, a Negro farmhand, was shot and killed by a white overseer because of insolence. In England, Arkansas, that same week, Sam Cates was shot and killed by a group of white men for “annoying white girls.”
  24
  
• A colored woman in Augusta, Georgia, “shot and killed Earl Harmon, a white private, for robbery.”
  25