Negroes and the Gun (51 page)

Williams's instructions illustrate the long difficulty of navigating the boundary that defined the black tradition of arms. As conflicts moved from the extremes into the middle of the spectrum, the distinction between self-defense and political violence became muddied. The conservative counsel said to give the political violence boundary wide berth and avoid this perilous middle ground. But in every age, there had been aggressive men who pressed hard on the boundary and some who launched full over into it.

Robert Williams was fully into the danger zone. He would continue to characterize his preparations as defensive. And defensive they were, in the sense of fixed emplacements set in anticipation of aggression. But as the organized work of a group engaged in political struggle, his preparations were manifestly plans for political violence. And but for the navigation error of a hapless white couple, the story of
Monroe might have figured far more dramatically in our collective memory of the civil-rights movement.

As dusk settled on Monroe, Bruce and Mabel Stegall, a white couple from nearby Marshville, drove unwittingly into the midst of Robert Williams's defensive gauntlet. Mabel said later, “we were just surrounded by these niggers, and we couldn't move. There were hundreds of niggers there, and they were armed. They were ready for war. I think they must've been expecting a bunch of white folks to come over through there and they was going to wipe them out.” According to one of the black eyewitnesses, Bruce Stegall was drunk and did not help his predicament by questioning, “What's the matter with you niggers? Whatcha pointing those guns at me for? I likes niggers.”

With the crowd closing in, Robert Williams fought through and pulled the Stegalls into his house. Mabel said later, “He acted like he wanted to be nice to us . . . Like he wanted to let us go.” And that was Williams's claim as well. But the Stegalls wanted Williams to escort them out to safety. Williams had his own problems and responded frankly, “Look lady I didn't bring you in here and I'm not going to take you out. You're free to leave any time you get ready.” This statement, along with the decision to move the Stegalls' car out of the street to Williams's driveway, would fuel charges of a “hostage situation” and send Robert Williams fleeing into exile. Mabel Stegall said later, “I was not even thinking about being kidnapped, the papers of publicity and all that stuff is what brought in that kidnapping mess.” But at the time, with rumors swirling that the police chief had promised to hang him in the courthouse square, Williams weighed the risk of fighting and decided to flee.

With his family in tow and four guns and five hundred rounds of ammunition between them, Robert Williams skulked out of Monroe through the closing circle of police, a fugitive on the run. They traveled to New York, then into Canada. From there they settled in Cuba, as personal guests of Fidel Castro, who quickly exploited the opportunity. Within a few weeks of his arrival on the Crocodile Island, Williams taunted his Yankee pursuers over the airwaves as host of a show called “Radio Free Dixie,” beamed from Cuba across the southern United States. It was not the result he planned, but given the risks he courted, things could have turned out far worse.
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Considering that he is the embodiment of the nonviolent civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King is a surprisingly strong affiant of the black tradition of arms. One might be tempted to explain his seeming support of armed self-defense in the storied exchange with Robert Williams as just a reluctant accommodation of the practical and political fact that others in the movement did not have a pristine commitment to nonviolence. More telling are King's personal decisions about
armed self-defense. And on that score, at least in the early stages, King embraced defensive arms with the earnest practicality of generations of black folk before him.

King rose to prominence out of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which was sparked by Rosa Parks's December 1955 defiance of segregated seating rules. The boycott was the brainchild of E. D. Nixon, who served intermittently as president of the Montgomery NAACP and as an organizer for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rosa Parks worked for Nixon. It was Nixon who retained white lawyer Clifford Durr to get her out of jail. On the evening of her release, Nixon sat at her kitchen table and prevailed on her to fight.

With Parks on board, Nixon then estimated the revenue generated by Negroes using the bus lines and imagined wielding it as a sword. His wife thought it was a silly plan. It was December. Black folk would not walk to work and shopping in the cold. But E. D. Nixon persisted. His first impulse was to organize a boycott through the NAACP. But he was at that stage a past president of the organization, and the acting head of the Montgomery branch was reticent to undertake the protest without going through channels at the national office.

Roy Wilkins offers a reliable account of what happened next. “Nixon decided on an alternative course of action: he turned to the city's black churches for help. He got on the phone and started calling every minister in town. Reverend King was the third name on his list.” King listened politely to Nixon's plan and said, “Brother Nixon, let me think about it for a while.”

Nixon called a dozen more ministers before ringing King back. This time the twenty-six-year-old King, newly installed at Dexter Avenue and still preoccupied with finishing his doctoral dissertation, told Nixon that he was interested in the boycott. “I'm glad to hear you say so,” Nixon said, “because I've talked to eighteen other people and told them to meet in
your
church tonight. It would've been kind of bad to be getting together there without you.”
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Nixon later explained that the choice of Dexter Avenue had less to do with King than the location of the church. “If we'da met in the suburbs, insurance mens and doctors and things who were working downtown wouldn't leave the office to go way out. But with it right downtown in the heart there wasn't no question they would walk right around the corner to it, and that's why the meeting was set up there.”
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As plans for the boycott coalesced, the ministers of Montgomery met at the Holt Street Baptist Church to arrange logistics and elect officers. Black churchmen had long been a relatively conservative force in the community, and this was evident in the Holt Street meeting. As the pastors dithered and schemed how to initiate a boycott so “nobody will know how it happened,” E. D. Nixon leapt to his feet so mad, he forgot he was in church. “What the hell you people talkin' bout? . . . How the hell you gonna have a mass meeting, gonna boycott a city bus line without the
white folks knowing it? You guys have went around here and lived off these poor washer women all your lives and ain't never done nothing for 'em. And now you got a chance to do something for 'em you talkin' bout you don't want the white folks to know it.” Nixon then made it a question of manhood, chiding, “either admit you are a grown man or concede to the fact that you are a bunch of scared boys.” This was too much for King, who jumped up and shouted that he wasn't a coward. “That was the moment,” said Nixon, “that he got nominated.”
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Soon after King assumed leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the formal organization that would press the boycott, black folk in Montgomery started to worry about his safety and organized a staff of drivers and bodyguards for him. They brought the guns they had, and fortunately never had to rely on Reverend Richman Smiley's diminutive .25 caliber Beretta, which modern trainers would dismiss as inferior to a bludgeon.
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On January 30, 1956, nearly a year into the boycott, King's house was bombed. King had been speaking at a protest meeting and rushed home to Coretta and their two-month-old daughter. He found them unharmed and the parsonage guarded by a loose assembly of armed black men that soon grew into the hundreds. As police pushed through the crowd, one black man brimming with anger was set off by their rough entry to the scene. He challenged the cops, “now you got your .38 and I got mine. So let's shoot it out.” King diffused things, telling the crowd, “My wife and baby are all right. I want you to go home and put down your weapons.” The armed black men dispersed. But the situation edged toward chaos, and one of the cops later told a reporter, “I'll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life to that nigger preacher.”
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King dispersed the men with the message, “I want you to love our enemies.” But he was at this stage still quite practical about the surrounding threats. Reverend Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery First Baptist Church recalls asking King “if he had any means of protection for himself and his family.” King said that all he had was a butcher knife and they decided that “we should go downtown together and buy some weapons for our protection.”
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King even sought a permit to carry a concealed gun in his car. But local authorities determined that he had not shown “good cause” for needing a permit to carry a firearm. A generation later, protests against the caprice and cronyism that pervaded these types of discretionary permit systems would spark a movement toward nondiscretionary, “shall issue” concealed-carry permits that would become the American norm.
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Inflamed by the bombing of the parsonage and another bombing at E. D. Nixon's house, members of King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church redoubled efforts to protect him. The churchmen came with guns and sat up in shifts guarding his house.
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Arriving at King's home to assist in the struggle, pacifist Bayard Rustin recalled that the parsonage was “a virtual garrison” with pistols, rifles, and shotguns
in every corner of the living room. When Rustin's friend, journalist William Worthy, sat down on a pistol wedged into a chair, King assured them that the weapons were only defensive precautions.
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Reverend Glenn Smiley, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, visited Dr. King's home in 1956 and reported back to his employer:

[King] had Gandhi in mind when this thing started, was aware of the dangers to him inwardly, wants to do it right, but is too young and some of his close help is violent. King accepts as an example, a body guard and asked for permits for them to carry guns. This was denied by the police,
but nevertheless, the place is an arsenal
. King sees the inconsistency, but not enough. He believes and yet he doesn't believe.
The whole movement is armed in a sense
, and this is what I must convince him to see as the greatest evil.
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According to Bayard Rustin, a potentially tragic close call shocked King into a more cautious mind-set about the armed guards. The story goes that a delivery boy had ducked behind the hedges near King's home to pee, and was mistaken by one of King's guards as a threat. The armed man almost killed the boy. According to Rustin, the incident pushed King to ban guns from the house.
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King is such an iconic figure that we lose the sense of his daily struggle, of how much day-to-day courage his work demanded, and how much pressure he labored under moment to moment. We talk now about King falling to an assassin's bullet, numb to the trauma and outrage of the time. But it sharpens our sense of the angst surrounding King's daily decision making to consider a lesser-known attack that he survived in 1958 in Harlem. He was signing copies of his book
Stride toward Freedom
, when a deranged black woman rushed from the crowd and stabbed him. The attack left a thin, razor-sharp blade lodged in his chest. At Harlem Hospital, a team of doctors removed the blade from flush against King's aorta. They mended the wound, which healed into the shape of a cross over his heart.

We will never know exactly the toll that such things took on King's psyche and resilience. With dangers all around, he leaned heavily on his faith, though we can never really know the extent of his doubts. But ten years later, close to the day he was murdered, the wear and tear was evident in his brief exchange with Roy Wilkins in the Cleveland airport. Wilkins was alone. But King “had three very large men at his side.” He called to Wilkins and asked him if he was traveling alone. Wilkins said yes, and King's response reflected his own calculations, “I don't think you should do that. It's too dangerous. You should always have someone with you.”
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The various influences buffeting King on questions of personal security and self-defense are illuminated by the decision making following the shooting of James
Meredith at the inception of his Mississippi March against Fear. The swirling debate demonstrates the powerful self-defense impulse that King would navigate as he attempted to steer the freedom movement through multiple hazards with just the loose controls of rhetoric.

A veteran of the freedom struggle, James Meredith broke boundaries at the University of Mississippi in 1962, on a platform of nonviolence.
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On the first day of his 1966 Mississippi March against Fear, Meredith was ambushed by a white gunman. Interviewed from his hospital bed, after doctors had picked a mound of shotgun pellets from his flesh, Meredith made national headlines, railing, “He shot me like I was a goddam rabbit. If I had a gun I could have got that guy. I'm not going to get caught in that situation again.” Asked how this statement squared with the philosophy of nonviolence, Meredith snapped, “Who the hell ever said I was nonviolent? I spent eight years in the military and the rest of my life in Mississippi.”
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