“Somebody in the crowd fired a pistol and the people again started to
scream hysterically, ‘Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Pour gasoline on the
niggers!’ The mob started to throw stones on top of my car. So I opened
the door of the car and I put one foot on the ground and stood up in the
door holding an Italian carbine.
All this time three policeman had been standing about fifty feet
away from us while we kept waiting in the car for them to come and rescue
us. Then when they saw that we were armed and the mob couldn’t take us,
two of the policemen started running. One ran straight to me, grabbed me
on the shoulder, and said, ‘Surrender your weapon! Surrender your
weapon!’ I struck him in the face and knocked him back away from the car
and put my carbine in his face, and told him that we didn’t intend to be
lynched. The other policeman who had run around the side of the car
started to draw his revolver out of the holster. He was hoping to shoot me
in the back. They didn’t know that we had more than one gun. One of the
students (who was seventeen years old) put a .45 in the policeman’s face
and told him that if he pulled out his pistol he would kill him. The policeman
started putting his gun back into the holster and backing away from the car,
and he fell into the ditch.
There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and
he started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he
said, ‘God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to
that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t
even arrest them!’ He kept crying and somebody led him away through the
crowd.”
Negroes with Guns, documenting a 1961 NAACP campaign to integrate a public swimming pool.-from
