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  But when I told them I was on my way to a civil rights workshop in Texas, Lawrence Guyot, a student at Tougaloo College, rose from his seat and gave me a stern look. He was about to head up into the Delta and become part of SNCC’s beginning efforts there. In 1964, he would become chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). “Civil rights workshop in Texas!” he scoffed. “What’s the point of doing that when you’re standing right here in Mississippi?” Guyot (as we most often called him) was a big, intense guy, and his tone was disdainful, almost bullying, conveying without further words what was at once a challenge and a demand: So you’re down here just to chatter about civil rights, are you? That’s pretty useless. If you’re serious, stay and work with us. Jessie Harris, another of the young Mississippi activists, chimed in: “You’re in the war zone here.”

  I got the message. The Greyhound left without me; I never completed my journey to Texas and instead became a part of SNCC’s effort in the state. When summer ended, I remained in Mississippi as a SNCC field secretary instead of returning to school. I was nineteen years old.

  Although it had happened almost a year before I arrived in Mississippi, I was aware of the September 25, 1961, murder of Herbert Lee, a small farmer and NAACP leader in Amite County. Lee had given strong support to SNCC’s efforts in Southwest Mississippi, and his killing—which occurred in broad daylight—was a frightening reminder that death could find you anywhere in the state. It was a lesson I remembered at tense moments, like the one at the Sunflower County courthouse in late August of 1962.

  That day, I could feel the tension in the air outside the courthouse. Everywhere in the state, politicians and newspapers were whipping whites into a frenzy over the possibility that in a few weeks James Meredith could become the first black person to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Like school desegregation, voting rights was an explosive issue—the armed white men on the steps of the courthouse were a living testament to that fact.

  On the way to Indianola, the fear on the bus had been palpable, but Fannie Lou Hamer had gone a long way toward easing it. She lived a quiet, simple life as a sharecropper and timekeeper on a Sunflower County cotton plantation, and we had neither noticed nor anticipated her strength until she raised her powerful voice in songs of faith and freedom on that bus. Soon her strength and boldness would make her a legendary figure in Mississippi’s Freedom Movement.

  What happened to Mrs. Hamer after this attempt at voter registration is fairly well known. She returned to the plantation where she and her husband, Perry “Pap” Hamer, had lived and worked for eighteen years. Word of her attempt to register had gotten back to the plantation before she did, and William David “W. D.” Marlow, the plantation’s angry owner, was waiting for her. He demanded that she withdraw her application and promise never to make such an attempt again; otherwise, she was to get off his land immediately. Mrs. Hamer’s reply has entered Freedom Movement lore: “I didn’t go down there to register for you,” she informed Marlow. “I went down there to register for myself.”

  Mrs. Hamer’s story has become familiar, but the retaliatory violence that soon descended on Ruleville’s black community is not so well-known. On September 10 night riders drove through town shooting into the homes of people associated with the voter-registration effort, including the home where Mrs. Hamer had found refuge after her expulsion from Marlow’s plantation. In another Ruleville home, that of Herman and Hattie Sisson, located in a black section of town called the Sanctified Quarters, two young girls were wounded: The Sissons’ granddaughter Vivian Hillet and her friend Marylene Burks, who were visiting before heading off to college. Hillet’s arms and legs were grazed by rifle shots, and Burks was more seriously injured by shots to her head and neck.

  Another of the homes attacked by the night riders was that of an elderly couple, Joe and Rebecca McDonald, neighbors of the Sissons. I was staying with the McDonalds along with two other SNCC workers, Charles “Mac” McLaurin and Landy McNair, but as it happened, none of us was in the McDonalds’ house when the shooting occurred. I was in town, however, and in a tiny place like Ruleville (population 1,100 then), gunshots fired anywhere could be heard everywhere, especially in the still of a Mississippi Delta night.

  I immediately raced back to the Quarters and was told that two girls had been wounded, so I rushed to the North Sunflower County Hospital where they were being treated. I began to ask about their condition and sought to find out, from the Sissons and others, exactly what had happened. Ruleville’s mayor, Charles Dorrough, was also at the hospital, and he ordered me arrested for interfering with the investigation by “asking a lot of silly questions.” Ruleville’s town constable, S. D. Milam (the brother of one of the men who had murdered Emmett Till), put me next to a police dog in the backseat of his car and hauled me off to Ruleville’s jail.

  Mac, Landy, and I had first encountered Mayor Dorrough a few weeks earlier. We had just come to town and were walking down a dirt road in Ruleville’s Jerusalem Quarters—named for a church—when a car suddenly stopped beside us. A white man jumped out and, waving a pistol, announced angrily, “I know you all ain’t from here, and you’re here to cause trouble! I’m here to tell you to get out of town!” He was Mayor Dorrough, who sometimes engaged in police patrols. In addition to owning the town’s hardware store and broadcasting agricultural news on the local radio station, he was president of the local Citizens’ Council.

  Holding us at gunpoint, Dorrough barked, “You niggers get into this car!” Mac asked why, and the mayor responded, “’Cause this pistol says so!” We got in his car, and he drove us to Ruleville’s city hall, where he acted not only as mayor but also as justice of the peace. He accused us of being New York City communists and “troublemakers,” shouting that we should get out of Ruleville and go back to New York. In the Mississippi of those days, the Civil War and the Cold War were often conflated, and except for those in Russia, China, and Cuba, New York City communists were considered the worst kind of communists in the world. Mac and Landy were native Mississippians; when Mac explained that “we” were all from the state, I was relieved at being included and kept my Washington, D.C., mouth shut.

  Mayor Dorrough seemed to be from another planet, and he certainly ran Ruleville as his own fiefdom. On one occasion SNCC workers were picked up for violating the town’s curfew, enforced only on blacks if enforced at all. One of the SNCC workers told the mayor that the Supreme Court had ruled curfews for adults unconstitutional. His response sums up what Mississippi was like at the time: “That law ain’t got here yet.”

  Now, in the wake of the shootings in the Quarters, and on the basis of what could be called Ruleville law, Dorrough came up with another reason for arresting me at the hospital. He claimed that the shooting that had wounded Hillet and Burks was a “prefabricated incident” designed by Bob Moses (SNCC’s Mississippi project director), McLaurin, Landy, and myself to generate publicity for a failing political effort in the state. “We think they did it themselves,” he told a local reporter, claiming that a “reliable source” had informed him that a civil rights worker had purchased shotgun shells a few days earlier. This accusation and my arrest were so ridiculous that even Dorrough could not hold me for long, and I was released the next morning.

  Back at the McDonald home after my release from jail, I found that Dorrough had confiscated Joe McDonald’s shotgun, using my arrest as an excuse. Mr. Joe, as we called him, worried aloud about what he would do without it. Like most of the black people in Ruleville and Sunflower County, he was poor, and he depended on a garden in the backyard and his gun to put food on his table, especially now that three young guys were part of his household.

  We told Mr. Joe that he had a right to his gun, that the U.S. Constitution gave him that right. He asked us if we were certain. Yes, we told him, and we had a history book with a copy of the Constitution in it. I went and got the book and then read the Second Amendment out loud. “You see,” Mac told Mr. Joe for emphasis, “that�
��s where it says so right in the United States Constitution.”

  Mr. Joe told me to fold over the page I had just read and then took the book from me. A little while later, we noticed that Mr. Joe was not around and we asked his wife, Rebecca, where he was. “He went to get his gun,” she told us. “You said it was all right.”

  We were stunned and fearful. One of our constant concerns in the violent Deep South of those days was that local people would get hurt or even killed for behavior we had encouraged. Herbert Lee’s murder leaped into my mind; Mr. Joe going to get his gun raised the terrible possibility that he would be killed too.

  We were about to run after Mr. Joe when we heard the familiar rattle of his old truck pulling up. He was back from city hall. We rushed outside. “What happened?” we asked. Mr. Joe said he had leaned into the doorway of city hall and simply told Dorrough, “I come to get my gun.” The mayor replied that he didn’t have a right to his gun, but Mr. Joe held up the history book he had taken from us, opened it to the page he had asked me to fold over, and told the mayor, “This book says I do!”

  It was exactly the sort of action that could get a black man hurt, jailed, or killed in the Delta or anywhere in Mississippi; certainly Emmett Till had been murdered for less. And Dorrough was such an inveterate racist that none of us could have imagined that he would easily return the shotgun. But we had misjudged the mayor, Joe McDonald, and the entire culture of guns in the Deep South. For now, as Mr. Joe stepped out of his truck, he was triumphantly raising the shotgun above his head.

  1

  “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air”

  Slaveholders have no rights more than any other thief or pirate. They have forfeited even the right to live, and if the slave should put every one of them to the sword tomorrow, who dare pronounce the penalty disproportionate to the crime?

  —Frederick Douglass, February 9, 1849

  Guns and violence are uniquely romanticized in the United States, and they play a leading role in our national creation myth. The American West looms especially large in our historical memory and showcases our obsession and associations with guns: frontiersmen and quick-drawing pistol-toting lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok; the U.S. Cavalry charging to save a wagon train at the last minute; farmers and ranchers fending off angry, dispossessed Native Americans. In their wildly popular family movies, good guys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry rarely rode without their pistols; the Lone Ranger was never without his six-shooter. Even bad guys—Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and Al Capone, all of them killers—have achieved a sort of antihero status and are part of the great American romance with guns and violence. The cowboy movie has been pretty much replaced by digital games today, especially among young people, and this new medium offers players the opportunity to enter into a virtual reality where they can engage in violent fantasies at a level and intensity unimagined a generation ago.

  Django, Shaft, and a few other black action figures notwithstanding, most glamorized gunmen are white. For most Americans, the notion of black people carrying guns conjures fear rather than admiration or nostalgia. Rarely is anything romantic associated with the image of a black gun user, despite the heroic black rebellions against slavery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The historical connection between black gun use and the freedom struggle has nearly been lost entirely—a fact that undermines our understanding of both subjects.

  Time and again, guns have proven pivotal to the African American quest for freedom. It took not just slave rebellions but the Civil War—uniformed and sustained armed conflict—to force open the door to freedom, and it took guns in black hands to begin securing even the limited freedoms gained by that war. Over the following century guns were still being used to help win a promised freedom that was betrayed and had never completely materialized.

  Any discussion of guns and black self-defense therefore must begin with the country’s origins. Race—a concept far more complex than skin color—is integral to this discussion, and slavery is at the root of any discussion of race in the United States.

  Slavery was fundamental to America’s beginnings and to life in the United States for most of the nation’s history. The lens through which slavery is viewed is typically bifurcated racially, and thus the memory of slavery tends to lead to different observations and conclusions about its effects. To bring into proper focus America’s “peculiar institution”—to use a nineteenth-century euphemism for slavery—we have to understand its place in the country’s beginnings. And in many ways the country began in the Virginia Colony. Although France and Spain established colonies and slavery in the Americas, the deepest roots of the United States are found in England’s North American colonies, and of them, Virginia had the greatest political impact on the founding of the country. Its leaders, especially George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, arguably had the most influence on shaping the design of the emerging United States. Although in 1641 Massachusetts became the first of England’s colonies to legalize slavery, Virginia, with a far greater number of enslaved Africans, led the way in regulating slavery throughout the southern colonies. Thus, colonial life in Virginia is the most useful starting point for understanding the beginnings of black rebellion and the accompanying fear of weapons in black hands—a fear that led to America’s first gun control laws, which were designed to prevent the possession of weapons by black people.

  In the decades immediately following Virginia’s founding in 1607 indentured servitude was far more prevalent in the fledgling colony than slavery, although slavery certainly existed. Slave law emerged gradually. But in a racially significant decision on July 9, 1640, in their sentencing of three indentured servants who had run away and been recaptured in Maryland, the Virginia Council and General Court ended the fiction that black indentured servitude was anything less than slavery. One of the servants, James Gregory, was “a Scotchman”; another, Victor, with no last name given, was identified in court minutes as “a dutchman”; and the third, John Punch, was “a negro.” Gregory and Victor were sentenced to thirty lashes with a whip and their servitude was extended by four years. Punch, however, was sentenced to indentured servitude for the rest of his life.

  Punch’s race almost certainly determined the court’s decision. Although this early application of the racial double standard took away Punch’s prospects of ever living as a free person, there is no mention of slavery in the court’s decision—only the fact that John Punch was “a negro.” And court minutes give no reason for the disparity in the three escapees’ sentences. In other cases before and after Punch’s, Virginia courts frequently used the words “negro” and “non-Christian” when specifically prescribing punishment for blacks, but the term “slave” is not used. The discriminatory language of these decisions assumes black inferiority, but the general status of blacks in colonial Virginia appears to be largely undefined by law during the first half of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, it is only logical to infer that it was an emerging racist culture in the “New World” more than explicit legal code that initially described black–white relations.

  The discrimination expressed in the judgment against Punch began hardening into actual slave law in 1659 with the passage of a statute reducing import duties on slaves brought into the colony. This was the first overt reference to slavery in Virginia law. The following year a statute was enacted lengthening the servitude of English indentured servants who ran away with enslaved blacks.

  By the end of the century indentured servitude had almost disappeared, supplanted by African slavery. There were economic reasons for this, particularly a shortage of available servants from England. But an important political factor accelerating the use of slave labor in the United States—and establishment of the idea of “race”—was the near success of the 1676 rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon and his followers. Bacon’s Rebellion was first stirred by his disagreement with the colony’s po
licy toward Native Americans and by onerous new tobacco taxes. Land hungry freemen and smallholders joined him, even though Bacon’s argument reflected a quarrel within the colony’s wealthy elite, and it quickly became an effort to overthrow the royalist government and replace it with one that would cater to a new class of farmers and entrepreneurs who felt little allegiance to the imperialist obligations of the colony’s royalist leadership governing for England’s King Charles. Bacon’s expanding army of the discontented also included indentured servants—black and white seeking freedom from indenture—who had bonded together regardless of race. They succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground and driving the colonial governor from the colony. The rebellion collapsed when Bacon suddenly died of dysentery, but Virginia’s tiny ruling class of wealthy merchants and large landowners feared the sort of rebellious nonracial unity that had powered the revolt.

  Thus, in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, the notion of race as we now know it began to take shape. Formalizing the idea that blacks were inferior just because they were black was easy to do; they looked different. But to have blacks it was necessary to have whites. So not only did laws establish slavery based on the premise of Africans being an inferior race, but “white people” were invented as a collective description of disparate European colonists who had traditionally been defined by their national identities—for instance, Punch’s codefendants Victor (“a dutchman”) and Gregory (“a Scotchman”). For the purpose of social control, the Virginia Colony’s rulers—“Englishmen”—began emphasizing a new, “white” racial identity that encompassed more than those of Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. Even “wild” Irish Catholics were included. Colonial leaders enforced the social and cultural separation of blacks and whites with increasing rigor.