Civil Rights and Gun Sights

Black self defense in America

David B. Kopel | February 22, 2005

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Other times, resistance produced heavy bloodshed on both sides. In July 1919, a black who had floated into “white” water near a Lake Michigan beach in Chicago was killed. Whites rioted, blacks fought back with rifles, and the police stood aside. Twenty-three blacks and 15 whites were killed in a week of rioting.

Michigan’s law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.

Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks’ right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.

Darrow summed up for the jury: “eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards.”

In Tulsa during and after World War I, the police worked closely with the “Knights of Liberty,” a group which wore masks and attacked blacks and union organizers. In the 1921 Tulsa riots, armed blacks protected an alleged black rapist from a lynch mob. A small white army, led by the American Legion and with the approval of the police and city government burned a one-mile square black district to the ground. As many as 200 blacks died, but about 50 whites also lost their lives in the riot.

The eminent historian John Hope Franklin wrote: “The self-confidence of Tulsa’s Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites...After 1921, an altercation between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident...It was just an incident.”

After the Tulsa Riots, Herbert H. Harrison, the president of the Liberal League of Negro America, told a New York audience that more white riots were possible soon:

I advise you to be ready to defend yourselves. I notice the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms, and one form of life insurance for your wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements.

In 1936 in Gordonsville, Virginia, an elderly black man and his sister, William and Cora Wales shot a sheriff who had come to arrest the Mr. Wales on false charges of threatening a white woman. The arrest was a pretext to force the Waleses to sell their property to the town, for a cemetery expansion. An enraged crowd of 5,000 grew outside the Wales’s home. Roy Wilkins, a future head of the NAACP, reported what happened next:

There was a slight flaw in the set-up, however. The man and woman had arms and they were not afraid to shoot…The leaders of the five thousand…had numbers. They had machine guns. They had sulphur bombs. They had tear gas bombs. But the two in the house had rifles, shotguns, and perhaps a pistol or two. Not so good. Not half as good as one lone Negro with nothing but his bare hands…

The mob sent a request that the United States Marine Corps send some men from Quantico to take care of the Waleses. The Marines refused.

After night fell, the crowd threw a torch on the house, and shot the Wales as they were silhouetted against the fire. After the fire had cooled, souvenir hunters hacked the Waleses’ bodies into tiny pieces. Wilkins defended the Waleses for standing up to the system after a lifetime of humiliating oppression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new civil rights movement began in the South. White supremacist tactics were just as violent as they had been during Reconstruction. Over 100 civil rights workers were murdered during that era, and the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the Klan or to protect adequately civil rights workers. Help from the local police was out of the question; Klan dues were sometimes collected at the local station.

Blacks and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas NAACP and publisher of the Arkansas State Press during the Little Rock High School desegregation case, recalls that three crosses were burned on her lawn and gunshots fired into her home. Her husband, L. C. Bates, stayed up to guard their house with a .45 semi-automatic pistol. Some of their friends organized a volunteer patrol.

After the Bates’s front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied that there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. “Of course that wasn't going to protect us,” Mrs. Bates remembered.