Negroes and the Gun (32 page)

They argued over some trifle. Then Browder turned his back to James Cunningham and walked away. This affront, a clear violation of racial etiquette, provoked Cunningham to violence. Cunningham cursed Browder for his insolence and slashed him with a whip.

Browder's immediate response is unrecorded. But he probably struck back, because Cunningham went from the whip to a pistol and shot Browder in the chest. Wounded, but ambulatory, Browder pulled his own pistol and killed Cunningham. Browder was arrested for murder and moved to a jail in Louisville, Kentucky.

Browder escaped lynching, but four of his lodge brothers did not. Browder was a member of one of the many fraternal organizations that blacks developed as surrogates for absent social-services networks. These groups administered burial funds, pooled emergency assets, and were sometimes the organizational base for vigilance and self-defense groups. Rumor spread among whites that Rufus Browder's lodge brothers were plotting a preemptive attack on whites who had threatened to mob Browder.

Four lodge brothers were meeting in a private home when police entered and arrested them for disturbing the peace. While they were sitting in the jail in Russellville, Kentucky, a mob of nearly one hundred men descended and demanded that the jailer give them up. He handed over the keys, and the four men were summarily hanged. The mob pinned the message on one of the corpses,
“Let this be a warning to you niggers to let white people alone or you will go the same way.”
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Negro men were the primary victims of lynch law. But black women were also targets of mobs and sometimes beneficiaries of the armed community. Marie Thompson was both. Around 1904, in Lebanon Junction, Kentucky, Marie Thompson was arrested for murder of a white farmer. The humanized picture of Marie is lost. White press reports caricature her as a “Negro Amazon,” an evident attempt to explain how she had managed to kill a stout white farmer who chastised her son over some missing tools. Thompson claimed that she had acted in self-defense.

Anticipating the mob, black men from the community assembled with guns to guard the jail. They repulsed a late-evening attack, and apparently concluded that the danger had abated. But deep into the night, Marie Thompson was snatched from her cell by men who seem to have gotten access without resistance from the jailer.

Bolstering the Amazon legend, Thompson was dangling from a rope, seemingly dead, when one of the mob ventured too close. Thompson sprang to life, grabbed the man by his shirt, snatched a knife from his hand and cut herself free. Now wielding the blade, she waded into the mob. Unwilling to engage her hand-to-hand, the mobbers killed Marie Thompson with a volley of gunshots.
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The self-defense impulse played out badly for Marie Thompson. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that everyone would have been better off if she had just stayed out of the conflict between the white man and her son, which might have ended with just harsh words and her boy submitting to a light beating. But the difficulty of translating that insight into general policy is illustrated by the murder of Kentucky farmer Jim Hill.

Jim Hill got into a scrape with a white man named L. J. Swift that left Hill missing three front teeth. Hill sought redress through the legal system, asking the county prosecutor to issue a warrant for Swift. County bureaucrats went through the motions. But Hill's complaint ultimately was dismissed on Swift's testimony that Hill had talked back and made threats.

Unsatisfied with the victory in court, Swift lead a group of men to Hill's farm about a week later. With guns drawn, they forced a sack over Hill's head and dragged him from his home. They did not announce their intentions. Perhaps they planned a beating, perhaps a whipping. Perhaps they only intended to frighten Jim Hill enough that he would never again invoke the law against a white man.

Jim Hill's wife had only seconds to make a decision. And if she had drawn a lesson from Marie Thompson, she might have decided just to let them drag her husband off into the night. She hesitated, and then, fighting off a kind of fear that is difficult for us to imagine today, she pursued the mob with a rifle in one hand
and a lantern in the other. She was willing, but the results leave one wishing she had been more effective. The lantern turned out to be a tactical mistake that made her a target. Ducking under gunfire, she lost her lantern and her gun. With Jim Hill's only defender subdued, the mob dragged him into a field and beat him to a gel.
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Individual calculations about the wisdom of owning or carrying guns surely varied. Even today gun ownership rates and the data about how many people carry concealed firearms are only estimates from surrogate information. The early twentieth century offers its own sinister surrogate for estimating the frequency with which Negroes carried guns. A study of the southern convict labor system shows that it was quite common for black men of the era to travel armed. It is contestable whether the convict labor system was more about crime control or more about dragooning cheap labor. There is a strong argument for the latter, given the frequency with which black men were roped into the system on charges like “idleness,” “using obscene language,” “selling cotton after dark,” and “violating contract” with white employers in places where true crime was almost trivial.

Men arrested on these specious charges were jailed and fined. If they could not pay, and many couldn't, their term was extended and their fines and fees compounded. Now even further in debt, they were essentially sold to anyone who paid their fines and were required to work off the debt. The case of Green Cottenham is emblematic. He was arrested for vagrancy in March 1908, spent three days in jail awaiting trial, then was found guilty and sentenced to a fine or thirty days hard labor. Green Cottenham had no money, so he did the thirty days. But this meant he racked up an array of fees for his keep. Soon his debt equaled one year of hard labor, and the obligation was purchased by a railroad subsidiary of the northern industrial giant US Steel
.

Perhaps as many as two hundred thousand black men were snared into the convict labor system on a variety of pretexts. One of the most common charges was carrying a concealed firearm. This was era when many southern men carried side arms. But the crime of carrying a concealed weapon was enforced mainly against Negroes. By the turn of the century it had become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration. The indications that arrests for carrying a concealed gun were more frequent than arrests for things like idleness and using obscene language suggests a robust culture of keeping and bearing firearms that thrived despite the risk that it was a pathway into the convict labor system.
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Labor supply was the seed of racial violence in East St. Louis, Illinois. And the aftermath brings another appearance from the storied advocate of the Winchester rifle, Ida B. Wells, now married to Chicago striver Ferdinand Barnett. Negroes had been migrating to East St. Louis for at least a decade. This rising population was
either a threat or an opportunity, depending on whom you asked. Democrats saw the influx of likely Republican voters as a threat. Woodrow Wilson worried aloud that the rising black population of East St. Louis was a Republican plot.
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On the other hand, Negro labor was an important strategic asset for industrialists in contests with the bourgeoning local labor movement. The country had just entered World War I when white unionists struck local meatpacking and metal-refining companies. Management responded by hiring black replacements who crossed picket lines.

In the spring of 1917, more than three thousand union men marched to City Hall to protest the unfair labor competition. Riled by angry speeches and fearing permanent displacement by cut-rate black labor, the crowd raged through the streets, destroying property and assaulting any Negroes they could lay their hands on. The governor sent troops to quell the rioting, at least for the moment.

But the underlying source of the conflict, Negroes who would work cheaper than whites, remained. And the black folk of East St. Louis knew to prepare for more violence. Black defense preparations also raised the perennial dilemma about whether arming in anticipation of conflict actually elevates the risk. Is it better to avoid such preparations on the worry that they escalate the risk and spur cycle of violence? Or do violent aggressors prey on weakness?

The rioting in East St. Louis ultimately prompted a congressional investigation. The conclusions were contested, but the formal findings laid much of the blame on black defense preparations. The precise focus was community leader Leroy Bundy, a relatively affluent black dentist. After the initial attacks in May, Bundy urged Negroes to keep their guns in good order and to acquire more where they could. According to the congressional report, this set East St. Louis on edge and sparked the conflagration.
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Fig. 5.3. Reporting on the East St. Louis riot. (
Springfield Republican
, Springfield, Massachusetts, July 3, 1917.)

The community was armed and primed for conflict when a car full of men drove through, shooting at shop windows and bystanders. When the car returned a short time later, Negroes with guns were prepared and fired preemptively, killing two men inside. But there was a mistake. This was not the same car. This was a car full of plainclothes policemen. And now Negroes had shot and killed two of them.
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Whites responded in a rampage that killed at least forty Negroes and destroyed multiple blocks of East St. Louis's black enclave. The NAACP pleaded with President Wilson to condemn the mobbing. Wilson said nothing. Investigators called the black defense preparations a conspiracy to riot instigated by Leroy Bundy. Bundy was charged with the murder of the two slain officers.
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Through the intervention of Ida B. Wells and her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, Leroy Bundy ultimately was cleared of the murder charges. In the aftermath, Ferdinand Barnett's advice reflected a common assessment of whether preparing for armed self-defense was a worse option than disarming and hoping for protection from the government. At a mass meeting of Negroes following the riot, Ferdinand Barnett advised his roaringly sympathetic audience, “Get guns and put them in your homes. Protect yourselves. Let no black man permit a policeman to come in and get those guns.” Perfectly in sync with her husband's advice, Ida Wells urged that “Negroes everywhere stand their ground and sell their lives as dearly as possible when attacked.”
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Fig. 5.4. A family portrait of Ferdinand Barnett and Ida B. Wells Barnett. (Photograph from 1917.)

Looking back, we know that things would improve for blacks over the twentieth century. But one wonders how W. E. B. Du Bois thought about the prospects for American Negroes in private moments of candor. Did he question the wisdom of staking his future here? Unlike many black folk, he had options and made a conscious bet on the United States of America.

Du Bois had lived and studied abroad. He had fallen for a German girl, or
at least she had fallen for him. He could have stayed in Europe. But he returned, resolved to fight both politically and, if we credit his rhetoric, physically. His writing in the
Crisis
demonstrates that resolve.