a century of acts for civil rights
leading to a civil rights actIn 1962, Laura McGhee invited civil rights organizers to stay at her Mississippi farm. A widow with three sons, McGhee also repeatedly used the title on her farm as security for bail bonds to get civil rights workers out of jail. As a southern black woman challenging white men in positions of power, she soon found herself under fire; nightriders attacked her farmhouse, and police officers beat her and her sons with nightsticks whenever they had the chance.
But McGhee fought back, decisively and with apparent fearlessness. After a police officer once raised his club to strike her, Charles Payne reports, other civil rights protesters "had to pull her off him." As the attacks on her home intensified, she took to sleeping during the day so she could spend nights on her front porch "with her Winchester." When her sons shot at a carload of attackers one night, the local sheriff showed up with a group of FBI agents the next day "to warn her against letting her boys shoot back. She said that was okay; she'd do all the rest of the shooting herself. They were not bothered by nightriders for a while after that."
This set of events -- the violent attacks on a black woman who supported civil rights organizations, the involvement of the local sheriff and the FBI on the side of the white supremacists, and McGhee's own aggressive and persistent self-defense -- reflect the very most fundamental themes of the history of black Americans in the century after emancipation; it was another black woman, the anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells, who wrote eighty years before that "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home."
In the last twenty years, the century-long exchange of violence between white supremacists and ordinary black men and women has been covered in breadth and depth by historians. Timothy Tyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Jacqueline Jones, and many others have shown us in great detail the kinds of daily resistance to white supremacy that took place at the center of ordinary people's lives.
Tyson has paid particular attention to Robert F. Williams, a black WWII veteran who led the small local NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, with an aggressive distaste for the concept of non-violence. Williams discussed his campaign against segregation in a memoir, Negroes with Guns, describing an incident in which white men tried to pull him and several other activists out of a car and kill them while the local police stood quietly by and watched. The police got involved, natch, only when Williams and his friends got out of the car with guns of their own. Daisy Bates, the local NAACP president who led the effort to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, tells a similar story in her book about those days. She fought to integrate the local high school; white men tried to kill her; she stuck a gun in their faces, and they ran.
And so, to go back to my earlier post about MLK and LBJ: Take a look at this section of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, with emphasis added:
I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community...The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible 'devil.'And yeah, that's a threat. Martin Luther King played a tactical posture of non-violence against a threat of violence; he said, to Lyndon Johnson and to the rest of white America, we can do this the peaceful way, or we can fucking kill some of you. He was able to make that threat, and make it plausibly, because of a century of black men and women who were willing to shoot back.
I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the 'do nothingism' of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as 'rabble rousers' and 'outside agitators' those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.
So the liberal triumphalist narrative in which King used heartfelt reasoning to convince Johnson of the justice of the black cause, leading the benevolent white liberal president to grant black freedom and equality by waving the state's wand of justice, doesn't work. The facts aren't there. There was a hundred years' war in the United States, and the bad guys lost.
posted by Chris Bray @ 5:00 PM
5 Comments:
Actually, I don't think the connection you're making is valid at all. King was making a much more explicit threat tied to revolutionary potential, rather than to explicit acts of violence. Self-defense wasn't the issue, the willingness of individuals to stand up to threats. It was the potential for the movement to become mass violence directed outward, violence that could not be directed against individuals but would be turned against communities.
King is using fear, to be sure, but it's fear of a mass people's movement -- remember that this is the height of the Cold War -- turning radical.
King, and the entire civil rights movement, had been involved in a long and intense debate about the place of violent self-defense; Robert Williams and Martin Luther King had a published exchange over the question. I think King intends to present a choice for whites, here, between dealing with non-violent, middle class, churched and respectable black America and dealing with a carefully drawn picture of an angry black menace. He's not holding the cudgel -- he's hinting broadly that, cough, cough, I should would hate to see my enraged friend come over here with his cudgel.
Robin D.G. Kelley writes about the other black group at the edges of nonviolent movement protests -- a younger, poorer, angrier group that wasn't interested in movement politics, and just wanted to hit back. There's a moment he describes -- not going to look it up, but I can -- in which a crowd of young black men and women are throwing bottles at white Birmingham police, and a cop chases a group of them up an alley. A few seconds later, the cop stumbles back out of the alley, bleeding, stabbed multiple times. Whites were surely aware of those moments of responsive violence.
I don't think MLK intends a lofty reference to radical mass politics, here.
I'd be interested in hearing Ralph Luker's thoughts.
Timothy Tyson:
"In a widely-published response to Williams, King conceded that white violence had brought the movement to 'a stage of profound crisis' and that 'all societies...accept [self-defense] as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.' Then, sensing his constituency, King added, 'When the Negro uses force in self-defense he does not forfeit support -- he may even win it, by the courage and self respect it reflects.' Here, Dr. King clearly accepted Williams' position.
"However, King distorted Williams' philosophy when he described it as 'the advocacy of violence as a tool of advancement, organized as in warfare, deliberately and consciously.' This was not what Williams believed."
Julie Buckner Armstrong, from her book Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement, with emphasis added:
"The Louisiana Deacons for Defense and Justice provide an important example of well-organized, collective black self-defense. Founded in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, when local lawmen provided a Klan escort and failed to protect movement workers, the Deacons spread to other communities where they worked closely with movement activists, including those whose national organizations were pledged to nonviolence...
The best-known Deacons chapter was organized in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a factory town on the Mississippi border dominated by an active, 800-member Klan. Facing Klan terrorism and inadequate law enforcement, the Deacons protected movement workers and the black community, carrying guns and returning fire when attacked...
George Lipsitz writes that by 1965, Bogalusa was 'the most violent city in the South' with 'sharply polarized' and 'heavily armed' 'combatants.' According to Adam Fairclough, it was an 'armed camp' and the clash between the Klan and civil rights forces in Bogalusa had created a 'crisis of such magnitude' that both the state and local government were forced to respond.' In fact, the Deacons' willingness to fight back encouraged relatively aggressive state and federal intervention that ultimately helped disarm the Klan and enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
That puts the agency where it belongs, I think: Escalating violence forced the state to respond. Armed black responses to white supremacist violence, rather than white liberal paternalist benevolence, led to changes in the law and in the enforcement of the law. LBJ reacted; it didn't "take a president to make it happen." It only "took a president" to follow the current downstream.
Terrific email from Ralph Luker:
"For me, at least, the news twenty years ago in David Garrow's *Bearing the Cross* that a) King and Ralph Abernathy both tried to take out gun permits during the bus boycott, even while they were leading one of the most successful non-violent civil protests in the 20th century; b) the deacons at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church organized a round-the-clock armed vigil at the parsonage after it was bombed; and personal reports to me that Floyd McKissick had armed guards on vigil on the upper floors of buildingsoverlooking the school his children desegregated in Durham, NC, is all very telling. To read King's *Letter* as a warning about the risk of revolutionary violence, I think, read it back through the lens of urban riots in the later 1960s. I don't think that King foresaw them or anything similar to them in 1963. But both his public testimony to non-violence and his personal exemplifying of it (there are excellent examples both inMontgomery & Selma) was done in the face of his own knowledge that the non-violent demonstrations always risked the outbreak of violence (which happened in Montgomery, Albany, Selma, Memphis, and elsewhere), in which African-Americans *would* defend themselves."
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