Negroes and the Gun Read Free Page A

of a belt until the brass lock broke off.
    The beating worked, in a fashion. Williams pleaded for them to stop and promised to show where he hid the gun. They went back to the scene of the gambling and searched all around but did not find the pistol. Now frustrated by the impudent Negro and his elusive gun, the deputies decided to stake him out and give him a full and proper whipping.
    As they were dragging him off to be hided, Williams jerked out of the way of a passing horse, prompting one of the deputies to take a shot at him. Williams then ran for his gun, which was hidden all along on his horse, saddled nearby. In the prosecution that followed, the court, quoting his trial testimony, projected Williams’sdilemma. “I said Lordy if I don’t get it I am killed, and if I do get it I am killed. One mind said get your gun and that time I eased up to my horse and got my gun from under the pommel of the saddle.”
    The deputies had better guns and more shooters. But Anthony Williams was more efficient, or at least more resilient. He was shot twice but managed to fire back, killing a deputy. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. After two trips to the Mississippi Supreme Court, Williams’s conviction was overturned on the grounds that he shot the deputy in self-defense against an unlawful beating and whipping. 11
    The case is remarkable first because Williams was not simply lynched. The prosecutor’s cynical praise of the nascent lynch mob for their restraint shows that this was a real possibility. Of greater long-term importance was the court’s finding that the post-arrest brutality was illegal and sufficient to justify Williams’s violent response. This sort of official affirmation is the essential final component of any fully successful act of self-defense and something that Negroes had seldom been able to count on. 12
    Before the decade ended, the Mississippi Supreme Court issued another decision that similarly defies the intuitions fueled by the horrors chronicled in Rope and Faggot . In Byrd v. State , the court reversed the conviction and dismissed the prosecution of Jack Byrd, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the Christmas Eve murder of Bilbo Cox in the town of D’Lo.
    The first notable thing is that the prosecution miscalculated the influence of white privilege. Race still played significantly in the court’s assessment. But here it tilted in favor of the accused Negro who was vouched for by numerous prominent white men. These same sponsors also commented on the low reputation of the dead man and his surviving companion, Burkett Neely.
    The credible testimony depicted Cox and Neely as carousing drunks who descended on the “Negro Quarters” around midnight in search of whiskey and sport. They started a row in a colored café, assaulting Wes Byrd, while claiming that they were “the law.” The café operator fled to seek intervention from his white landlord, who demurred. Then someone ran to tell Jack Byrd that his brother was in trouble.
    Jack Byrd grabbed his shotgun and headed to the café, where Cox and Neely turned to him as new and more interesting entertainment. In a stream of profanity and racial invective, they threatened to kill Byrd if he did not surrender his gun. When Byrd refused, they opened fire with revolvers, wounding but not disabling him. Byrd shot back, killing Cox.
    Finding that the two white men “were aggressors from start to finish,” the Mississippi Supreme Court acknowledged and criticized the impact that race playedat the trial, and articulated the racial baseline against which adjudications of black self-defense were evolving. “We cannot escape the conclusion that if this had been a case where the white man had killed a white man, or a Negro had killed a Negro, or a white man had killed a Negro, there would never have been a conviction. We therefore reverse the verdict and