Men
outside of the office of black Chicago businessman Jesse Binga, summer
of 1919. “During Chicago’s riot,” writes David Krugler,
“African-Americans gathered on street corners in the riot zone to share
news and to form self-defense forces.”
Photo by Jun Fujita. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum (ICHi-65481).
In Longview, Texas, in July 1919, S.L. Jones, who was a teacher and a local distributor of the blacknewspaper the Chicago Defender,
investigated the suspicious death of Lemuel Walters. Walters was a
black man who was accused of raping a white woman, jailed, and
ultimately found dead under “mysterious” circumstances. When the Defender
published a story about Walters’ death, asserting that the alleged rape
had been a love affair and Walters’ death the result of a lynching,
Jones came under attack, beaten by the woman’s brothers.
Hearing a rumor that Jones was in trouble, Dr. C.P. Davis, a black
physician and friend of the teacher, tried to get law enforcement to
protect him from further violence. When it became clear that this help
was not forthcoming, Davis organized two-dozen black volunteers to guard
Jones’ house. That same night, a mob surrounded the dwelling. Four
armed white men knocked on the door, then tried to ram it down. The
black defenders, who were arranged around Jones’ property, opened fire. A
half-hour gun battle ensued, in which several attackers were wounded;
the posse retreated.
Hearing the town’s fire bell ringing to summon reinforcements, Jones
and Davis went into hiding, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to defend
themselves against a larger mob. Davis borrowed a soldier’s uniform,
put it on, and took the first of several trains out of the area. At one
point, he asked a group of black soldiers he found in a train car to
conceal him in their ranks, which they did, contributing to his disguise by giving him an overseas cap
and a gas mask. Later that day, Jones also managed to escape. But their
successful resistance and flight were bittersweet victories: Before the
episode was over, Davis’ and Jones’ homes were burned, along with
Davis’ medical practice and the meeting place of the town’s Negro
Business Men’s League. Davis’ father-in-law was killed in the violence.
In his new book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back,
David F. Krugler, professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin–Platteville, looks at the actions of people like Jones and
Davis, who resisted white incursions against the black community through
the press, the courts, and armed defensive action. The year 1919 was a
notable one for racial violence, with major episodes of unrest in Chicago;Washington; and Elaine, Arkansas, and many smaller clashes in both the North and the South. (James Weldon Johnson, then the field secretary of the NAACP, called this time of violence
the “Red Summer.”) White mobs killed 77 black Americans, including 11
demobilized servicemen (according to the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis).
The property damage to black businesses and homes—attacks on which
betrayed white anxiety over new levels of black prosperity and social
power—was immense.
The history of black responses to the violence of 1919—which ranged
from the use of a single weapon against a home invader, to the
organization of defensive posses like Davis’ that were meant to protect
potential victims of lynching, to the deployment of groups of men who
patrolled city streets during unrest—makes it clear that armed
self-defense, far from being an invention of Malcolm X and the Black
Power movement, is a strategy with deep roots. As we celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the civil rights movement, the story of nonviolence—a
beautiful strategy with uncontestable moral force—has taken center
stage. However the story of active self-defense against violence—a
tradition that developed before, and then alongside, nonviolent
resistance—is too often dismissed or simply ignored. Even before slavery
had been outlawed, black Americans took up arms when their lives and
livelihoods were threatened. Their experiences make the familiar history
of marches and peaceful protest more complex. But the story of the
civil rights struggle is incomplete without them.
Why was there a spike in violence in 1919? Krugler argues that black
service members’ experience in World War I was one of the catalysts. In
many places, demobilized black veterans, having fought for their
country, had a diminished tolerance for racial discrimination—and their
families, having sacrificed on the homefront, felt the same way.
Meanwhile, white civilians resented what they perceived as an excess of
pride (what an Army captain, registering his concern with the Military
Intelligence Division, called “social aspirations”) in those who had
served. Servicemen were allowed to wear their uniforms for three months
after being “demobbed.” Georgian Wilbur Little was lynched in April
1919, reportedly for the sin of wearing his after the cutoff date—a
crime that suggests how much the vision of black men in uniform
threatened the racial regime.
The black community’s defensive actions in response to racial
violence were also shaped by the war. Veterans took the initiative in
armed self-defense, using their combat experience and knowledge of
tactics and organization. But communities around them—many of whom had
worked for the war effort in civilian capacities—were also energized by
their wartime experiences and by the presence of the returned service
members. (C.P. Davis and S.L. Jones were not veterans, but they were
affected by the prevailing climate nonetheless. Davis’ escape took
advantage of the cover provided by his borrowed uniform and relied on
solidarity from black soldiers who were willing to vouch for him.)
Meanwhile, writers and journalists in the black press—some of whom
had served—turned out prose that was increasingly bold, calling for
armament and self-defense, and shaping the image of what came to be
called the New Negro. That year, poet Claude McKay published his sonnet “If We Must Die” in the socialist magazine the Liberator:
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Activists followed these calls for resistance with attempts to work
within the legal system to defend those who fought back. After each
episode of violence, the NAACP took new legal initiative in prosecuting
white rioters and representing black people who had acted to defend
themselves. Sometimes, as in the aftermath of the violence in Longview,
Texas, NAACP lawyers were able to get prisoners who had been found with
weapons released by arguing that their actions were taken in
self-defense. These legal victories—though somewhat diminished by the
difficulty lawyers had in landing convictions of white rioters—were
nonetheless significant.
While there is a notable cluster of examples of black communities
fighting back in the racial conflicts of 1919, the history of armed
self-defense goes back even further. Law professor Nicholas Johnson points to fugitive slaves
who armed themselves against slave-catchers as some of the earliest
examples of the practice. In another dark period of racial violence at
the end of the 19th century, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a
journalist and investigator of lynching, advocated “boycott, emigration,
and the press” as weapons against white aggression, outlining the
rationale in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.
When those peaceful strategies failed, Wells-Barnett thought a more
active strategy was the answer, observing: “The only times an
Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and
used it in self-defense.” For this reason, she wrote, “[A] Winchester
rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be
used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
Some citizens caught up in racial violence at the turn of the 20th century shared Wells-Barnett’s philosophy. Krugler cites instances of self-defense in turn-of-the-century racial strife in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898; Evansville, Indiana, in 1903; Atlanta in 1906; and Springfield, Illinois, in 1908.
In Evansville, Krugler writes, “[A]pproximately thirty black men
assembled to drive away white vigilantes attempting to break into the
county jail to lynch a black prisoner.” In Springfield, “[B]lack snipers
fired on white rioters from a saloon window, and twelve armed black men
formed a patrol and fired on members of a mob leaving the site of one
attack.”
Members of a white mob run with bricks in hand during the Chicago race riot of July and August 1919.
Photo by Jun Fujita. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum (ICHi-65495).
In his research on the unrest of 1919, Krugler found evidence of
self-defense that was both highly coordinated and ad hoc. “In Chicago,”
he told me, “we have examples of individual stockyard workers who go to
work, are attacked, and turn and fight. That’s not premeditated; that’s a
human response to a life-threatening danger and risk—but it still
counts as self-defense.” Also during the unrest in Chicago, “The
veterans of the 8th Regiment
put on their uniforms, found weapons, and took to the streets to try to
stop the mob violence”—a preplanned action that took advantage of their
military training and status in the community.
One of the problems with writing a history of armed self-defense
during episodes of racial violence lies in establishing what actually
happened. The events are obscured by the motivations of the authors of
many of the historical sources, as well as the simple fog of war—these
conflicts were complex events unfolding, in some cases, over many city
blocks. Krugler triangulates between sources, looking at black and white
newspapers, records of the tribunals held after some of the riots, and
the reports of investigators from the Military Intelligence Division and
the Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was called in its first two decades of operation).
Comparing-and-contrasting these sources, as Krugler does in a section
on the Chicago unrest called “The Fictional Riot,” shows how
self-defense could look very different depending on the point of view of
the witness. The soldiers from the 8th Regiment, who, black
onlookers reported, instilled a sense of calm in the community merely by
their presence, showed up very differently in the Chicago Daily News’
coverage. One detachment of veterans was described as “a group of
twelve discharged negro soldiers, all armed,” who had “terrorized small
groups of whites in various parts of the south side all afternoon.” The Herald-Examiner reported that several thousand
decommissioned members of the 8th Regiment had stormed the regiment’s
armory, wounding more than 50 people as they seized weapons. “Black
Chicagoans, menaced by gangs and mistreated by the police, now
[confronted] a white-written narrative about the riot that cast them as
the wrongdoers,” Krugler writes. This was one of the drawbacks of
self-defense, which, in a racist society, put those who resisted in
perilous positions, vulnerable to further violence and legal
prosecution.
Americans have wholeheartedly adopted the history of nonviolent
protest as part of our national mythology. But we’re hesitant to
commemorate the history of black self-defense. As historian Peniel E.
Joseph writes,
radical strains of resistance during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—the
activism of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement—are often remembered
as “politically naïve, largely ineffectual, and ultimately stillborn.”
Yet, Joseph (and a host of other historians
who have looked anew at Black Power and related activism in the past
decade or so) argues that the activists who believed in Black Power
precepts of armed self-defense and radical self-determination were
always a part of the civil rights movement, acting alongside people who
believed in nonviolence. Joseph and other scholars of Black Power look
at civil rights and Black Power as “part of the same historical family
tree.”
Perhaps our eagerness to dismiss self-defense stems from the fact
that it makes us confront uncomfortable questions about our present-day
realities. The history of armed black self-defense is a story of
individual resistance in the face of unfairness and of successful
community organization in places where the dominant culture refused
protection. Like the history of nonviolence, it’s a stirring story,
reminding us of the real dangers black people faced and of their refusal
to submit, despite the prospect of reprisal and the possibility of
legal consequences. But given the fact that black Americans still face
life-threatening violence at a disproportionate rate, and that some of
this violence—now, as in years past—comes from officials sworn to protect and serve, the history of armed self-defense is less readily adaptable for anodyne commemorative purposes.
Still, this other aspect of civil rights history can be found even in
the more traditional narratives, once you start to look. I asked
Krugler to comment on the relationship between the history of
self-defense and the dominant story of civil rights. He pointed to a recent article in the Washington Post
about the unveiling of the Rosa Parks papers collection at the Library
of Congress. The author, Michael E. Ruane, began the piece by referring
to one of Parks’ childhood memories. Parks remembered staying up late
with her grandfather as a young girl in rural Alabama, as he sat with a
shotgun and guarded against possible attacks from the members of the Ku
Klux Klan. “Even someone who’s a mainstay of the nonviolent part of the
civil rights movement grew up understanding the importance of armed
self-defense against racial terrorism,” Krugler pointed out. Rosa Parks
was 6 years old in 1919.
Rebecca Onion
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