We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

Introduction

1 Introduction My father was born in 1915 to a sharecropping family in the Bolivar County village of Alligator in the Mississippi Delta. Dad told me stories about Mississippi when I was growing up in Compton, California. These stories were full of examples of White terrorism and intimidation. One story I heard invoked mixed feelings of fear and pride. My father remembered seeing a Black man hanging from a Delta water tower, apparently after being lynched by White supremacists. Angered by this visible assault on Black humanity, my grandfather grabbed a rifle and intended to shoot the first White man he saw. My father, his siblings, and his stepmother tackled my grandfather and disarmed him. After hearing this story, I was proud that my grandfather wanted to fight back against the terrorists who lynched one of our people. On the other hand, I understood the fear in the hearts and minds of my father, uncles, and grandmother as they visualized the retaliation that would have been inflicted on the family if my grandfather had carried out his plans. Fear and intimidation were essential elements of the system of subordination of Black people and the maintenance of White power in Mississippi and the South during the times of racial slavery and segregation. White supremacist violence was the primary cause of fear and intimidation. The primary social function of this violence was to maintain White political and economic power and the color line during segregation. My grandfather would have most likely been a lone warrior on the day he was disarmed by his loved ones. His anger overcame his fear and motivated him to fight back to confront the perpetrators of this lynching. This book is about Black people in Mississippi who picked up guns or other weapons and decided to use force to fight back against those who would deny their human rights and dignity. Ultimately, the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi and the South was a fight to overcome fear. Blacks overcame fear and asserted their humanity through a variety of tactics. This story documents the role that 2 Introduction armed resistance played in overcoming fear and intimidation and engendering Black political, economic, and social liberation. The central argument in We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Struggle is that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation by White supremacists was intended to bring fear to the Black population and its allies and sympathizers in the White community. To overcome the legal system of apartheid, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense had been a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the effort made by the sons and daughters of enslaved Africans to overturn fear and intimidation and develop different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians. We Will Shoot Back argues that without armed resistance, primarily organized by local people, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists would not have been able to organize in Mississippi. After organizing by SNCC and CORE, armed resistance served as a complement to selfproclaimed nonviolent organizers and organizations from 1961 through 1964. By 1965, armed self-defense and militant rhetoric was chosen by a growing number of Mississippi human rights activists as the alternative to the nonviolent tactics and posture of the early 1960s. This study argues that a tradition of armed resistance existed in the culture of southern Blacks that produced a variety of organizational forms to respond to the necessity of protecting Black communities, their leaders, allies, and institutions. The way armed resistance was organized varied in different stages of the freedom struggle in Mississippi. Armed self-defense tended to be informal and loosely organized by community activists and supporters from the 1950s through 1964 in Mississippi. After 1964, paramilitary groups with a specific chain of command and discipline emerged in some Mississippi communities and Movement centers. The open advocacy of armed resistance and the abandonment of the rhetoric of nonviolence also became the common practice of Movement spokespersons after 1964. Introduction 3 Historiography...