Negroes and the Gun (35 page)

“Son, don't shoot until the first man puts a foot on the lawn and then—don't you miss.”

That was the somber instruction from Walter White's father in 1906 as race rioting rocked Atlanta. Walter was only thirteen and entirely unknown to W. E. B. Du Bois, who, not too far away, paced with a shotgun, ready to defend his own family against the mob.

Years later, when they both were pulling heavy oars for the bourgeoning NAACP, Du Bois signaled the growing personal rift between them. Criticizing the ease with which White moved between two worlds, Du Bois complained, “He has more white companions and friends than colored. He goes where he will. . . . And naturally meets no color line, for the simple and sufficient reason he isn't colored.”
1

Du Bois was right that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Walter White lacked the physical characteristics of the typical colored man. But the ability to pass for white was no shield for Walter and his family in Atlanta in 1906. While Du Bois was patrolling with his shotgun, Walter White crouched with a rifle, behind lace curtains in the parlor of his family's neat bungalow.

Walter White came closer to shooting a man that night than most people ever will. The mob approached near enough for him to hear the venomous threat, “That's where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let's burn it down! It's too nice for a nigger to live in!” The only thing that prevented White from shooting that night was that his neighbors fired first. Like Walter and his father, they were armed and barricaded in. They also were quicker on the trigger, with some reports saying that their gunfire drove the mob away and others saying that it just drew them in a different direction
.

This early incident with a gun had a profound effect on Walter White and might be the best explanation for why he did not take the smoother path through America as a white man. The Atlanta riot was a hinge point where White was “gripped by the knowledge of [his] identity.”
2

Decades later, a biographer would doubt the veracity of White's story about the gun. White was there, of course, so he should know. But it is still useful to consider
that White might have made up the story. That sort of fabrication would suggest that he considered the account compelling, if not heroic, and expected it would resonate with his audience. Since he was writing at least in part to black folk, this would have been a fair surmise, especially considering that across town, Du Bois was doing basically the same thing. And it turns out that White and Du Bois were not the only future NAACP vanguards wielding guns in Atlanta that night.
3

Walter White rose to power and influence within the NAACP and ultimately butted heads with Du Bois, who resigned his post at the
Crisis
in 1934, having lost the battle of egos and vision. A year after Du Bois's departure, the NAACP elected Dr. Louis T. Wright as chairman of the board. Wright was the first Negro ever to serve in the post. He was a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a Georgia native. Just like Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Wright survived the 1906 Atlanta riot. And just like White and Du Bois, his reaction demonstrated the core self-defense concern that fueled the black tradition of arms. Roy Wilkins, future steward of the NAACP, who observed Walter White, Louis Wright, and W. E. B. Du Bois during the association's early development, reveals, “Louis came from Atlanta. Like Walter he had been through the Atlanta race riot of 1906, and like Walter he had watched through the darkened windows of his home, gun in hand.”
4
Louis Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White were among the cream of the Talented Tenth. They reflected a culture where the best people in the community unapologetically owned and carried firearms. They were part of a broader tradition in which the importance of armed self-defense seemed plain.

Like James Weldon Johnson, who recruited him to the NAACP, Walter White was abundantly gifted. He sacrificed greater financial success to pursue the work of a race man. Still, his prodigious talents spilled over into efforts that gained him a measure of fame as a literary figure. His popular novel
The Fire in the Flint
depicted of a black doctor and war veteran who returned to Georgia, aiming to do good work. In the novel's closing scene, the hero succumbs in a fashion that captures the theme of the New Negro, fighting desperately against long odds, outnumbered, plainly destined to die but committed to die fighting.”
5

Walter White's more remarkable achievement in print was the book
Rope and Faggot
, which distilled his firsthand accounts of more than forty lynchings. Passing for white, he witnessed the murderous rage, carnival atmosphere, and unfathomable barbarism of the mob. With few discernible Negro characteristics, Walter White stood in the crowds and reported back on the very worst mob violence of the early twentieth century. Some of the details are so gruesome, they read like slasher fiction, doubly horrifying against the new prosperity of the Industrial Revolution and happy images of flappers dancing the Charleston.

But
Rope and Faggot
is not just a chronicle of the macabre. White offers cutting social, psychological, and political critiques of lynching. He also demonstrates the visceral draw of the self-defense impulse. From Nodena, Arkansas, White reported the case of Henry Lowery, who worked under a contract that made him a virtual slave. Lowery's landlord treated him accordingly. On Christmas Day, 1920, Lowery boldly demand his overdue wages. His landlord responded with curses and kicking. As the two men scuffled, the landlord's son drew a gun and shot Lowery. Wounded, Lowery pulled his own gun. In the exchange of shots, Lowery killed the landlord and the man's daughter (hit by a stray bullet). Lowery ran as far as Texas, where he was captured. On his return, he was seized by a mob, chained to a log, doused with gasoline, and roasted alive.

White's account of the Lowman family in Aiken, South Carolina, demonstrates the typical self-defense scenario where folk were desperate and had no clearly better choices. It was 1925 and Prohibition was in full swing. Sam's whiskey making drew the sheriff and four deputies out to his rural cabin. Sam was gone when they arrived, which left them to concentrate on his wife, Bertha. Bertha must have sassed them because the sheriff punched her square in the mouth. Bertha's mother ran to intervene, and one of the deputies shot her through the heart. Hearing the gunshots, Bertha's brother and cousin came running from the field. They evidently had guns on them or laid nearby, because the next thing was a gunfight that left the sheriff dead and the two black men wounded.

Like all of the episodes in
Rope and Faggot
, this one ended in Negroes killed by a mob. This time it was a crowd of two thousand, and they made a game of it. Jailers helped the mob remove the Lowmans to a tourist camp on the outskirts of Aiken. They set them free and told them to run. Then they shot them down like feral dogs. Prominent in the crowd were local lawyers, businessmen, and several members of the South Carolina legislature.
6

James Weldon Johnson said that the federal government bore part responsibility for the mobbing in Aiken. The Senate's refusal to act on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, he argued, “was equivalent to serving notice on the lynchers that they could pursue their pastime virtually unmolested.”
7
Johnson's mentor, Charles W. Anderson, leveled a similar criticism at Woodrow Wilson's policy of segregating the federal workforce, arguing that Wilson's policy had “the reflex influence of giving anti-Negro elements across the country the feeling that they would not be punished by federal authorities.”
8

Walter White reported another episode in
Rope and Faggot
that prompts us to think again about people who pick up a guns in defense of others. White did not witness this incident, but he drew the details from a report by Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey. The case demonstrates a category of violence where black men tried
to protect wives, daughters, and girlfriends from carousing white men. It ended in a fashion that White claimed was typical.

Two drunk white men were roaming the Negro section, trolling for sport. An elderly Negro grabbed his gun and ran to the defense of black womanhood. Before it was over, one of the white men lay dead in the street. The Negro was arrested, broken out of jail, and lynched before he got a decent meal. It is an open question whether this fellow was a selfless hero or just a meddler who transformed a sex prowl into a cycle of death.
9
And we might even ask why violence in defense of others fits under self-defense at all.

The questions that plague violent defense of others are even more poignant where people deploy guns in defense of an idea. One is tempted to say that this kind of violence is inherently political, exactly the kind of thing that the black tradition of arms disdained. Walter White's account of Robert Moton complicates that assessment. Moton succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute and was an unlikely advocate of the gun. Tuskegee was a conservative, some said accommodationist, force in the freedom movement. Robert Moton exhibited that approach. But even an innately conservative and gentle man like Moton could retreat only so far. We learn from Walter White about Moton's preparations in 1923 when the local Klan threatened to destroy Tuskegee.

The conflict sparked over Veterans Administration plans to build a Negro hospital on the grounds of Tuskegee. The NAACP had protested construction of any new segregated hospitals. But Moton welcomed the project because he would have influence over the jobs it brought. Local whites also wanted control over the hospital jobs and deployed the Klan to help them take it. In a show of force designed to quell Negro opposition, the Klan paraded and assembled on the grounds of Tuskegee. Walter White's brother, George, was in Alabama at the time. Passing for white, he gained entry to the Klan assembly, where men talked of torching Tuskegee and killing Moton if necessary.

With the plot brewing, Walter White rushed to Washington to seek intervention by the Veterans Administration, and then to Alabama to strategize with Moton. There he found a changed man. “I sat with him in his home in Tuskegee during the height of the trouble,” White recalled. “He pointed to a rifle and a shotgun well-oiled and grimly businesslike, that stood in the corner of the room. Although his words in cold print sound overheroic, they did not sound so to me as he said quietly, ‘I've got only one time to die. If I must die now to save Tuskegee Institute, I'm ready. I've been running long enough.'”

The conflict at Tuskegee was defused without gunfire by an army general who commandeered the hospital staffing decisions. But we are left to ponder Robert
Moton's movement to the gun. He had plenty of warning that danger was lurking. He could have guaranteed his personal safety by running away. But Moton took up the gun and stood his ground in defense of place and principle. And it is illuminating to imagine the fallout if he had fired his guns and killed someone under the umbrella of self-defense. A narrow conception of self-defense might say that Moton's failure to retreat on fair warning should block any subsequent self-defense claims; that by laying in wait with guns, Moton was courting violence that was easily avoided. The alternative instinct would affirm Moton's resolve to run no more and leads to a broader conception of legitimate self-defense. These competing impulses illuminate disparate philosophies and the divergent American rules about retreat and the boundaries of self-defense.
10

The black tradition of arms evolved through a long period where, at least for interracial conflicts, the law was overwhelmingly hostile to Negro self-defense claims. But on this score the odds for black self-defenders actually improved during the lynch era. The Mississippi Supreme Court's intervention in 1919 to save Anthony Williams from the gallows demonstrates the trend. Williams is a proof case because he was not some harmless uncle or a community favorite. Anthony Williams was a common Negro who shot and killed a Mississippi deputy sheriff.