Negroes and the Gun (42 page)

Howard built his professional life in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in the town of Mound Bayou. Mound Bayou, recall, hosted the attempt at enlightened American slavery by Joseph Davis, brother of the Confederate president. By the first half of the twentieth century, Mound Bayou was a haven for black self-determination and an exemplar of black self-help. Booker T. Washington praised it as a model for black economic development. It drew talented folk who had other options, including Benjamin Green, an early black graduate of Harvard Law School who served as mayor from 1919 to 1961.
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From his base in Mound Bayou, T. R. M. Howard built a thriving medical practice and a series of lucrative businesses, including a thousand-acre farm, a restaurant, a construction company, and an insurance brokerage
.
Among Howard's many employees were Medgar and Myrlie Evers, who worked at his insurance agency and would take their lead from Howard into the civil-rights movement.

Later in the movement, Medgar's brother, Charles, said, “People call Martin Luther King Jr. the Negro orator of the century. T. R. M. Howard was as good or better and I heard both of them in their prime.” As much as Howard was exalted by blacks, he was reviled by whites. When his civil-rights activism accelerated, Howard responded to mounting threats by preparing to defend himself in the fashion of generations of Negroes before him.

As a young man in the 1930s, Howard treaded gingerly against the backdrop of episodes like the lynching of Tom Robinson that were still a worry in America. Robinson eked out a living working other people's land in the countryside around Emelle, Alabama. His downfall was a contested transaction over a car battery. He had the misfortune of trading with the son of a wealthy white planter. The dispute escalated to a feud and then to a gun battle that left the scion, Clarence Boyd, facedown dead. It was the familiar circumstance where a black combatant won a battle but not the war. A gang of armed men attacked the Robinson clan, killing two of Tom Robinson's sons. Although some in the Robinson family escaped, a mob killed two other blacks in the process of tracking them. Two mutilated bodies were left hanging as a lesson for other defiant Negroes. T. R. M. Howard was traveling through Emelle after this incident and never shook the image of two corpses dangling from tree limbs.
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This is the America where Howard came of age and accumulated more guns than he could easily count. When racist administration of Mississippi firearms laws denied Howard a permit to carry a concealed weapon, he had a secret compartment built into his car to hide a pistol. Then he put a gun rack in his car window to exploit the allowance for openly carrying a long gun. A gun rack in a pickup truck is the familiar image. Howard fitted one in his Cadillac.

In 1947, Howard was stopped for speeding. There were five other men in the car. As patrolmen approached, the five passengers drew their pistols and laid them on the floor, hoping to avoid a concealed weapons charge on the argument that the guns were in the open. That tactic failed, and each was fined $100 for carrying a concealed firearm without a permit. Howard was not charged. The story goes that his handgun remained hidden in its secret compartment.
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A car full of blacks speeding down the highway illegally carrying concealed handguns conjures modern nightmares. But for men like T. R. M. Howard it was a reasoned, rational calculation. We really can only speculate how widespread the practice was. But we know that Howard and his traveling companions were not unique.

The community attitude about carrying a gun without approval from authorities is suggested in a 1939 report from the
Crisis
that the head of the Greenville, South Carolina, branch of the NAACP was facing charges of illegal concealed carry. The report expressed no surprise that he was carrying a gun and seemed to recognize it as a well-considered tactic and a legitimate act of civil disobedience. According to the
Crisis
, “J. A. Briar, 69, President of Greenville South Carolina branch is the latest victim of the terror the Klan and other groups are using against Negroes in Greenville and vicinity. Mr. Briar was arrested December 1 charged with carrying a concealed weapon.”

Briar had been leading a voter-registration fight since early summer. This precipitated a wave of intimidation and threats. According to the
Crisis
, “The first movement to frighten the NAACP was the arrest of William Anderson, president of the Youth Council on the trumped up charge of telephoning a white girl. . . . The arrest of Mr. Briar was the next step. The situation reached a crucial stage early in December when it was reported that all the hardware stores in Greenville were sold out of guns and ammunition and that Negroes were determined to protect themselves in the event any assault was made upon them by the Klan.”
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J. A. Briar faded into obscurity, and who knows how many other such men were never noted at all. T. R. M. Howard is emblematic of such men. We are fortunate that he left a richer record.

In a long career of activism, Howard is most celebrated for his efforts surrounding the Emmett Till murder trial. Howard helped search for witnesses,
developed evidence, and opened his home as a safe haven for journalists, witnesses, and visitors. A variety of observers confirm that guns were everywhere. One reporter records “a long gun, a shotgun or rifle, in every corner of every room.” Howard typically carried a pistol openly in a belt holster. Every day of the trial, Howard and a caravan of armed men escorted Maime Bradley (Till's mother) and others, including Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, to the courthouse.

Journalist Cloyte Murdock, writing for the black monthly magazine
Ebony
, described arriving at Howard's home and having trouble getting her luggage through the front door. She finally wedged in and found the problem. A cache of guns stacked behind the door had fallen over and blocked her entry. Another visitor identified a .357 Magnum revolver and a .45 automatic in holsters looped over the headboard in Howard's bedroom. A Thompson submachine gun rested at the foot of the bed.

If accurate, the report of the submachine gun raises the question of whether Howard had fully complied with the 1934 National Firearms Act, which requires owners of fully automatic firearms to jump through a series of regulatory hoops that would have invited interference by the same local authorities who denied him a permit to carry a concealed handgun. We are left to wonder whether the machine-gun report is just a familiar case of someone ignorant about the technology, misreporting what they saw or another example of Howard defying gun laws.

Some contend that the acquittal of the men charged with Emmett Till's murder marked the beginning of the civil-rights movement in Mississippi. It certainly propelled Howard onto a bigger stage. From that platform, in speeches and in commentary, Howard presented armed self-defense as an essential private resource for blacks. On several occasions, Howard recounted the story of his friend George L. Jefferson, head of the Vicksburg, Mississippi, NAACP. The Klan had burned a cross in front of Jefferson's funeral home. According to Howard, Jefferson called to alert the sheriff that the logistics of Jim Crow required tending:

They have burned a cross in front of my funeral home. I'm sure that you and everybody in Vicksburg knows where my wife and my family lives. I understand that they are going out there to burn a cross. And, Mr. Sheriff, I just want to tell you that Mississippi law requires separate ambulances for transportation of colored and white persons and inasmuch as the white hearse can't carry a colored man or a colored hearse can't carry a white man, I'm telling you that when that group comes out to my home to burn a cross, I have already got my colored ambulance standing by. I want you to send a white hearse along because somebody's going to be hauled away.

The punch line, rendered to thunderous applause by black audiences, was that no cross was burned at Jefferson's home. The white establishment was less enthused. The
Jackson Daily News
reprinted the full text of Howard's speech and in three separate editorials condemned his “incendiary” language and his “poison tongue.”
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Throughout his activism, Howard confronted the reality of state failure and overt malice. It fueled his natural stance and political philosophy of self-sufficiency and self-help. The folly of relying on the state for protection was especially evident in an episode where FBI agents were sitting in his office just as a fresh threat came in. The agents were there investigating whether Howard had been the target of extortion. The interview was interrupted by a telephone caller who threatened to kill Howard if he continued to press for integration. Although they had just observed a threat to his life, the agents rebuffed Howard's request for protection and suggested that he contact local authorities. The governor of Mississippi already had refused the NAACP's plea to investigate the roadside shotgun murder of Reverend Henry Lee, with the retort that he did not answer letters from the NAACP. That alone might explain why Howard kept “a small arsenal” in his home.
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T. R. M. Howard's practice of arms was not unusual. Witness for example the response when news spread that Howard had received a particularly credible death threat. Howard's nearby neighbor was quickly on the scene with the assurance, “Don't worry about a thing, Doc. Me and a gang of fellows will surround your house tonight and we all have guns.” Later, just on the rumor that Howard's wife had been accosted by bigots, fifteen cars full of armed black men sped to Howard's home.
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Following the Emmett Till trial, Gus Courts, a black grocer and president of the Belzoni branch of the NAACP, was wounded in a drive-by shooting. Courts had been warned to remove his name from the voting rolls on the pain of economic reprisals and then threats of violence. Howard prodded investigation of the case with the threat of a mass march on Washington. He traveled to Baltimore, New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, agitating for a “freedom March to Washington.”
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Howard's first stop on this tour was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The event was hosted by the newly installed pastor, twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. Also in the room were two other freedom fighters, Rosa Parks, still just an obscure member of the Montgomery NAACP, and Autherine Lucy, who walked the gauntlet to integrate the University of Alabama.

Each of the three storied figures in the room with Howard that night offers a layer to the evolving black tradition of arms. We already know something about King and will see much more. But Rosa Parks and Autherine Lucy open the chapter of the women whose words and deeds illuminate the tradition of arms in the modern freedom movement.

Fig. 7.1. Representative Charles Diggs
(second from right)
, T. R. M. Howard
(third from right)
, and Mamie Bradley
(fourth from right, and held by Howard)
at the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.)

Justly famous for the act of defiance that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks confirms the black tradition of arms in the context of her earliest memories:

By the time I was six, I was old enough to realize that we were actually not free. The Ku Klux Klan was riding through the black community, burning churches, beating up people, killing people. At the time I didn't realize why there was so much activity, but later I learned that it was because African-American soldiers were returning from World War I and acting as if they deserved equal rights because they served our country. . . .

At one point the violence was so bad that my grandfather kept his gun—a double barreled shotgun—close by at all times. And I remember we talked about how just in case the Klansmen broke into our house, we should go to bed with our clothes on so we would be ready to run if we had to. I can remember my grandfather saying, “I don't know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, but I'm getting the first one who comes through the door.” . . . My grandfather wasn't going outside looking for any trouble, but he was going to defend his home. I remember thinking that whatever happened, I wanted to see it. I wanted to see him shoot that gun. I wasn't going to be caught asleep. I remember that at night he would sit by the fire in his rocking chair and I would sit on the floor right by his chair, and he would have his gun right by just in case.
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The tradition of arms is further evident in Parks's recollection of the first stages
of her activism. When Parks's husband, Ray, started attending late-night meetings of budding activists, the men came with guns and there was always an armed lookout. Initially Ray sheltered Rosa from these meetings. But eventually the couple started hosting groups in their home on Huffman Street. The culture of arms was plainly in evidence. Parks describes it this way. “It was the first meeting we ever had at our house, and it was in the front room. There was a little table about the size of the card table that they were sitting around. . . . The table was covered with guns. I didn't even think to offer them anything—refreshments or something to drink. But with the table so covered with guns, I don't know where I would've put any refreshments. No one was thinking of food anyway.”
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