Negroes and the Gun Read Free

succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute and was an unlikely advocate of the gun. Tuskegee was a conservative, some said accommodationist, force in the freedom movement. Robert Moton exhibited that approach. But even an innately conservative and gentle man like Moton could retreat only so far. We learn from Walter White about Moton’s preparations in 1923 when the local Klan threatened to destroy Tuskegee.
    The conflict sparked over Veterans Administration plans to build a Negro hospital on the grounds of Tuskegee. The NAACP had protested construction of any new segregated hospitals. But Moton welcomed the project because he would have influence over the jobs it brought. Local whites also wanted control over the hospital jobs and deployed the Klan to help them take it. In a show of force designed to quell Negro opposition, the Klan paraded and assembled on the grounds of Tuskegee. Walter White’s brother, George, was in Alabama at the time. Passing for white, he gained entry to the Klan assembly, where men talked of torching Tuskegee and killing Moton if necessary.
    With the plot brewing, Walter White rushed to Washington to seek intervention by the Veterans Administration, and then to Alabama to strategize with Moton. There he found a changed man. “I sat with him in his home in Tuskegee during the height of the trouble,” White recalled. “He pointed to a rifle and a shotgun well-oiled and grimly businesslike, that stood in the corner of the room. Although his words in cold print sound overheroic, they did not sound so to me as he said quietly, ‘I’ve got only one time to die. If I must die now to save Tuskegee Institute, I’m ready. I’ve been running long enough.’”
    The conflict at Tuskegee was defused without gunfire by an army general who commandeered the hospital staffing decisions. But we are left to ponder RobertMoton’s movement to the gun. He had plenty of warning that danger was lurking. He could have guaranteed his personal safety by running away. But Moton took up the gun and stood his ground in defense of place and principle. And it is illuminating to imagine the fallout if he had fired his guns and killed someone under the umbrella of self-defense. A narrow conception of self-defense might say that Moton’s failure to retreat on fair warning should block any subsequent self-defense claims; that by laying in wait with guns, Moton was courting violence that was easily avoided. The alternative instinct would affirm Moton’s resolve to run no more and leads to a broader conception of legitimate self-defense. These competing impulses illuminate disparate philosophies and the divergent American rules about retreat and the boundaries of self-defense. 10

    The black tradition of arms evolved through a long period where, at least for interracial conflicts, the law was overwhelmingly hostile to Negro self-defense claims. But on this score the odds for black self-defenders actually improved during the lynch era. The Mississippi Supreme Court’s intervention in 1919 to save Anthony Williams from the gallows demonstrates the trend. Williams is a proof case because he was not some harmless uncle or a community favorite. Anthony Williams was a common Negro who shot and killed a Mississippi deputy sheriff.
    It started with dice. There was a big gathering in the town of Arcola, with attendant drinking and gambling. Williams was shooting dice behind a boarding house when someone was called a cheat, and someone pulled a knife. Then one of the men ran to the sheriff, claiming that Anthony Williams drew a pistol on him.
    In the habit of the times, the arrest of Anthony Williams was just the beginning. Intent on confiscating the pistol, sheriff’s deputies decided to beat Williams until he coughed up the gun. They dragooned several men to hold him down. They kicked him with heavy boots. Then they stripped him and beat him with the buckle end