212“We must obey the law”: Cutrer, quoted in Strain, Pure Fire, 102.
213“CORE is nonviolent,” Farmer said later: Farmer, quoted in ibid., 103.
213“CORE had projects throughout this part of Louisiana”: Dave Dennis, interview with author, March 9, 2013.
213“They were telling me how dangerous it was”: Mateo Suarez, interview with author, June 23, 2012.
213“were the forerunners of the Deacons for Defense”: James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 149.
214“aggressive violence”: Hamilton Bims, quoted in Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 162.
214“I’m gonna kill me a nigger tonight”: Thomas A. Parker, ed., Violence in the U.S., vol. 1, 1956–67 (New York: Facts on File, 1974), 69.
215“between witnessing change or experiencing destruction”: Richardson, Geltson, and Citizens’ Council spokesman, all quoted in “Gloria Richardson: Lady General of Civil Rights,” Ebony, July 1964, 23–31.
215kidnapping of local movement leader Dr. Robert Hayling: Dr. Hayling and the others were rescued because Reverend Irvin Cheney, a white minister who had slipped into the Klan rally, called the Florida Highway Patrol. By the time the police arrived, Hayling and his fellow activists had been beaten and were stacked like firewood in preparation for being doused with gasoline and burned alive.
215“This was about the roughest city we’ve had”: Cotton, quoted in Guy and Candie Carawan, eds. Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2007), 115.
216“I and the others have armed”: Hayling, quoted in Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Touchstone Edition, 1997), 111.
217“I’m tired”: Herzfeld, quoted in Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun, 48.
218His wife, LaPelzia Rogers, stood in sharp contrast: Ibid., 52.
219“At that time, I wasn’t a civil rights man”: Quoted in ibid., 54.
220“If we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it right”: Quoted in Harold A. Nelson, “The Defenders,” Social Problems 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1967): 131. This study, the only one I have found on the Tuscaloosa group, is cited in Simon Wendt’s The Spirit and the Shotgun, 57, and that reference is what led me to it. The study is unusual because Nelson uses pseudonyms; most of his sources demanded anonymity (128–129). Thus, Nelson calls Mallisham’s unnamed group “The Defenders,” Mallisham is called “William Smith,” Tuscaloosa is called “Southville,” and TCAC is called the Southville Action Organization (SAO). In any case, Nelson’s study was published by a refereed journal.
220“The organization functions in a semi-secret manner”: Nelson, “The Defenders,” 131–134.
221“As soon as [Mallisham] is informed of an incident”: Ibid., 138.
223“I’m here to see that the struggle remains nonviolent”: Quoted in Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun, 60.
224“violence-cannot-be-allowed-to-stop-the-movement reflex”: Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (New York: Scribner, 2003), 449.
225“It was obvious to me from the beginning”: Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC, with Robert Terrell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 162.
225“We did not want the march to lose its militancy”: Stokely Carmichael, comment to author, 1997.
226“Tactically and strategically the Deacons knew they couldn’t maintain their usual posture”: Watkins, quoted in Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 158.
Epilogue: “The King of Love Is Dead”
227The title quotation is from Gene Taylor’s song “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” which can be heard at www.npr.org/2008/04/06/89418339/why-remembering-nina-simones-tribute-to-the-rev-martin-luther-king-jr. Taylor, singer Nina Simone’s bass player, wrote this song in reaction to hearing that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
227“can mean in the end only black death”: Crisis, August–September 1984, 58.
227“unfortunate”: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Companion: Quotations from the Speeches, Essays, and Books of Martin Luther King, Jr., selected by Coretta Scott King (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 78.
227“betrayed the movement”: Lawson, www.breachofpeace.com/blog/?paged=4.
228“We are all, let us face it, Mississippians”: Quoted in Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 146.
229“Are our [Negroes] to be presented with freedom and a dagger?”: Jefferson to Adams, January 22, 1821, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” Jefferson Monticello website, www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.
229“The movement’s no place for guns”: Seamons, quoted in Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2006), 483.
230“We been head-lifted and upstarted”: Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, press conference, May 23, 1966, quoted in Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 469. Her words are a play on “uplift” and the then new Head Start antipoverty program.
231enough additional participants to create a white majority: A few days later, one of these whites stopped by the NAACP leader’s drugstore and told him, “I’m sure glad y’all went there to the voting place,” Henry recalled in his autobiography. “They never let us get involved before, but when y’all showed up, they called us and let us have something to say at last.” Aaron Henry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, with Constance Curry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 172.
232“We didn’t come all this way”: Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 5.
232“We were trying”: Bob Moses, quoted in Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 82.
232“The national Democratic Party’s rejection of the MFDP”: Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC, with Robert Terrell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 111.
233Alabama law required political parties to have a visual symbol: The symbol of Alabama’s Democratic Party was a white rooster, usually displayed with the slogan “White supremacy for the right.” Stokely sometimes called the party “the white cock party.”
233“The black panther … said”: Hulett, quoted in Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (New York: Scribner, 2003), 464.
234“There ain’t no Negro in Alabama”: Hosea Williams, quoted in Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 167.
234“We just told folks to pull the lever”: Courtland Cox, interview with author, January 6, 2013.
234“What you have in this country”: Carmichael, quoted in Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes, 170.
236“Mrs. Hamer is no longer relevant”: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 240.
237“We were all tired”: Cleveland Sellers, interview with author in 1997 for Emerge magazine article, “From Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Ture,” republished in Callaloo 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 89–97.
Afterword: Understanding History
239“I tried to aim my gun”: Walter White, A Man Called White (New York: Viking, 1948), 10–11.
240“full retaliation from the black community”: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 20
01), 254.
243“The same low-income young people of color”: James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87, no. 1 (February 2012).
243“There are many inner-city communities where individuals work”: Maria Varela, e-mail to author, August 17, 2013.
244“We are a very violent culture”: Ivanhoe Donaldson, interview with author, August 15, 2013.
244“It would certainly be a lot nicer”: Thomas Sowell, “Egyptian Mirages,” Real Clear Politics, August 20, 2013, www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/20/reality_versus_mirages_in_egypt_119642.html.
245“It’s still always about the mission”: Ivanhoe Donaldson, interview with author, August 15, 2013.
245“SNCC was very rare”: Ibid.
246“In order for us as poor and oppressed people”: Ella Baker, quoted in Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Books, 2001), 3.
247“Rosa sat down”: Julian Bond, comment to author.
247“When I read about the Albany Movement”: Emilye Crosby, “The Politics of Movement History,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, ed. Emilye Crosby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 19.
247“The mistake I made there”: Martin Luther King Jr., interview by Alex Haley, Playboy, January 1965, as republished in: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 344.
248“gave me the power to challenge any line”: Quoted in Crosby, “The Politics of Movement History,” 9.
248“What did we win?”: Searles, quoted in Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 81.
250“In the practice of guerilla history”: Staughton Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Chicago: Haymarket Books, forthcoming), preface.
INDEX
Abernathy, Ralph, 154, 218, 223
Adams, John, 33–34
Afro-American, 59
Afro-American League. See National Afro-American League
Alabama Citizen, 216
Albany (Georgia), 119, 163, 167, 179–180, 247
Albany Movement, 163, 168, 247–248
Albany State College, 163–164, 247
Algeria, 11
Allen, Benjamin Levin “Lev,” 53
Allen, Louis, 96
American Missionary Society, 41
Americus (Georgia), 179
Amin, Al-, Jamil Abdullah. See Brown, Hubert
Amos, Henry, 205, 206
Amos, Ruth, 206
Anniston (Alabama), 241
Aptheker, Herbert, 37
Arkansas State Press, 8
Army Research Laboratory, 105
Arnall, Ellis, 103
Atlanta (Georgia), 177–179, 204
terrorism in, 69–70
Atlanta Daily World, 160
Atlanta University, 165
Atlantic City (New Jersey), 230, 233, 234
Attucks, Crispus, 36
Avery, Annie Pearl, 161
Bacon, Nathaniel
and Bacon’s Rebellion, 30, 31
Baker County (Georgia), 180
Baker, Ella Josephine, 87–88, 89, 167–168, 174, 239, 245–246
Baldwin, James, 34
Baltimore, Charles W., 75–76
Banks, Nathaniel P., 41
Barbershop Harmony Society
and the Confederates, 102
Bates, Daisy, 8
Bates, Lucious Christopher “L. C.,” 8
Baton Rouge (Louisiana), 164
Belafonte, Harry, 244
Bell, Inge Powell (CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence), 204–205
Belzoni (Mississippi), 135
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE), 195
Bennett College, 155
Bevel, James, 169, 223
Bilbo, Theodore, 80, 83, 101, 131, 133
Bilboism, 133
Birmingham (Alabama), 154, 161, 208, 218, 241
Birth of a Nation, The, 42
Black Arts movement, 13
Black-Belt South, 70, 88, 90, 167–168
black consciousness, 72, 76, 87, 94, 202–203, 226, 235–236
Black Guard. See Monroe Rifle Club
black militias, 14, 36, 49
in Grant Parish, 50–51, 53
Black Organizing Project (BOP), 16
Black Panther Party, 234, 236, 240
origins of, 233, 235
Black Power era, 3, 4, 13, 227–229, 233
black rebellion. See slave revolts
Blair, Ezell, 155
Blair, Julius, 57–58, 64
Blair, Sol, 63
Block, Margaret, 181
Block, Sam, 146, 178, 181
Bogalusa Civic and Voters Leagues (BCVL), 209
Bolivar County (Mississippi), 136
Bond, Julian, 160, 161, 163, 247
Booker, Simeon, 132
Boston University
and Marsh Chapel, 150
Bowers, Samuel, 198
Boyd, Helen Nela, 133
Bradford, Percy Lee, 205
Branch, Taylor, 248
Brewer, Janie, 181, 191
Britt, Travis, 172
Brooks, Fred, 196–197, 201, 214
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 73
Broughton, Joseph Melville, 62
Brown, Hubert “Rap,” 10
Brown, Luvaugn, 146
Brown v. Board of Education, 62, 80, 102, 110, 115, 132, 133, 134, 135, 214, 248
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 120
Bryant, Charlie and Ora, 144
Bryant, Curtis Conway “C. C.,” 143–144, 170, 173
Bucks of America, 37
Bullock County (Alabama), 44
Burks, Marylene, 22
Byrd, II, William, 32–33
Byrnes, James F., 101
Calhoun, John C., 102
Calhoun, William Smith, 52
Cambridge (Maryland), 215
Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), 215
Campbell, Cecil, 19–20
Canton (Mississippi), 175, 188, 189
Carmichael, Stokely, 3, 15, 183, 236–237
and Black Panther Party, 233–234
Black Power speech (1966) of, 4, 13, 227–230, 234–235, 237, 247
and nonviolence, 4, 179
and Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), 162–163
self-exile of, 236–237
and SNCC, 162, 182, 204, 224–225, 233, 237
Carroll, Edward, 150
Carroll, Phenola Valentine, 150
Carson, Clayborne (In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening in America), 248
Carter, Joseph, 192
Carter III, Hodding, 126–127
Castor–Knott Department Store, 55–56
Catilina, Lucius Sergius “Catiline,” 33
Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, 244
Chafe, William H. (Civilities and Civil Rights), 248
Chaney, James Earl, 142, 176, 184–185, 198, 214, 227
Charles, Robert, 69
Charlotte (North Carolina), 164
Chicago (Illinois), 67
Chinn, C. O., 8, 187–191, 208
Chinn Jr., Clarence, 187, 189
Chinn, Mamie, 188–189
Chinn, Minnie Lou, 189
Choate, Henry, 63–64
Cicero (Illinois), 228
Cincinnati (Ohio), 38
Citizens’ Council, 19, 23, 117, 215
creation of, 134
influence of, 135
Citizenship Schools, 218
Civil Rights Act (1866), 45
Civil Rights Act (1957
), 96–97, 172
Civil Rights Act (1964), 1, 191, 195, 196, 203, 209, 214, 221, 240, 242
civil rights law, 2
Civil War, 10, 28, 102, 194, 230
aftermath of, 6, 14
and Battle of Fort Pillow (1864), 41
and Battle of Nashville (1863), 40–41
black soldiers in, 14, 40–41
black veterans of, 44–45, 137
black women in, 41
and education, 41
Clark College, 165
Clark, Felton, 164
Clark, Jim, 147
Clark, Kenneth, 150–151
Clarksdale (Mississippi), 98–99, 106, 175, 231
and Citizens’ Council, 134
Clarksdale Press Register, 134
Clayton, Powell, 49
Cleveland (Mississippi), 87, 178
Coahoma County (Mississippi), 99, 100
Colfax (Louisiana), 50, 52–54
Collins, John A., 249
Colson, William N., 77, 78–79
Columbia (Tennessee), 55, 57, 63, 64, 70, 91, 107, 241
lynching in, 58
violence in, 59
Columbia Daily Herald, 63
Columbus (Ohio), 151
Combs, Doyle, 106
Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), 157, 163
Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. See Urban League
Committees of Correspondence, 39
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 61
and Operation Dixie, 103
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 4, 79, 142, 184–185, 187, 195, 214
and armed defense, 8, 15–16, 139, 175–176, 201–204, 210–211, 230
as Black Nationalist organization, 205, 240
in Bogalusa, LA, 209–213
and civil rights workshop, 20
nonviolence of, 130, 151, 182, 189–191, 196–199, 203
Resolutions and Constitution Committee of, 203
and voting rights, 90, 167–168, 175
Continental Army, 37
Continental Can Company, 194
Continental Congress, 35
Cooper, Annie, 147
Cooper, Robert, 142
Cotton, Dorothy, 215
Council for Human Relations, 221
Council of College Presidents, 165
Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), 98, 130, 136, 175, 230, 232
Courts, Gus, 135–136
Cox, Courtland, 102, 162–163, 234
Crisis magazine, 59, 63, 72, 73, 76, 81
Crosby, Emilye, 249
Crown Zellerback paper mill, 208, 209