Reply #12: Here's some non-rich, white or privileged men practicing shooting

[friendly_iconoclast]

This especially for ejbrush:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond
This also happened in 1958

Apparently Klansmen make great targets!

And this from a Marxist listserv, no less (tho I don't buy Tyson's analysis of the
Lumbee's victory):


http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/1999w42/msg00022.htm

From "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power", by Timothy Tyson

(snip)One night while Dr. Perry was at an NAACP meeting, Bertha Perry called and
told him that the Ku Klux Klan had threatened to blow up their house. Even
though death threats were hardly unusual among black activists, "most of
the guys left the meeting and went home and got their guns and went to his
house," Robert Williams recalled. Sipping coffee in Perry's garage with
shotguns across their laps, the men agreed that defending their families
was too important to do in haphazard fashion. "We started to really getting
organized and setting up, digging foxholes and started getting up
ammunition and training guys," Williams recalled. "In fact, we had started
building our own rifle range, and we got our own M-1's and got our own
Mausers and German semi-automatic rifles, and steel helmets. We had
everything." About sixty men guarded the Perry house in rotating shifts,
sleeping in the garage on cots next to the stacks of rifles and shotguns
beside the washing machine. The women in the NAACP organized a "snowball
system" for telephone alerts, since all of their families remained at risk.


"Most important," Williams wrote, "we had a strong representation of
veterans who were militant and didn't scare easily." This resolve, though
genuine, may have contained a certain amount of bluster. In any case, Mabel
Williams did not always share her husband's faith in their capacity to
defend themselves. "Oh, God, we were afraid for our lives," she said of
those times. "The kids were young, but they were both trained to use a gun.
I remember nights when the four of us, me, Rob's father, and the two
boys, we'd sit up all night with our guns, afraid someone would come kill us
while Rob was at Dr. Perry's."?

On October 5, 1957, Catfish Cole's Ku Klux Klan held a huge rally near
Monroe. After the rally, a large, heavily armed Klan motorcade roared out
to Dr. Perry's place, firing their guns at the house and howling at the top
of their lungs. The hooded terrorists met a hail of disciplined gunfire
from Robert Williams and his men, who fired their weapons from behind
sandbag fortifications and earthen entrenchments. Shooting low, they
quickly turned the Klan raid into a complete rout. " Mauney
wouldn't stop them," B. J. Winfield said later, "and he knew they were
coming, because he was in the Klan. When we started firing, they run. We
run them out and they started just crying and going on." The Klan "hauled
it and never did come back," Woodrow Wilson recalled. "The Klans was
low-down people what would do dirty things. But if they found out that you
would do dirty things, too, then they'd let you alone," he said. "We shot
it out with the Klan and repelled their attack," Williams said, "and the
Klan didn't have any more stomach for this type of fight. They stopped
raiding our community." The Monroe Journal blamed the Klan's "robed
assemblies," calling the shootout "an uncivilized incident" that "should be
sufficient grounds to outlaw such provocative assemblies in Union County."
The following day, the Monroe city council held an emergency session and
passed an ordinance banning Ku Klux Klan motorcades.(snip)

Tyson's view of the Battle of Hayes Pond, from the same page as the above:

The rout of Catfish Cole's bedsheet brigade by the Monroe NAACP on October
5, 1957, crushed the evangelist's aspiration to unite the Ku Klux Klan in
the Carolinas under his charismatic leadership. His manly honor in tatters,
Cole retreated from Union County to Robeson County in southeastern North
Carolina to rebuild his following. "Both counties," one observer noted,
"were Catfish Cole's territory." In Robeson County, which had a history of
strong support for the Klan, Cole hoped to rally his forces in a population
divided almost evenly among African Americans, whites, and Lumbee Indians.
"There's about 30,000 half-breeds in Robeson County and we are going to
have a cross burning and scare them up," Cole announced. Asked whether he
intended to use violence to stop the race-mixing in Robeson County, Cole
replied that the guns his Klansmen carried "speak for themselves, and if
they don't, they will." On January 13, 1958, the Klan burned a cross on the
lawn of an Indian woman in the town of St. Pauls as "a warning" because,
Cole claimed, she was "having an affair" with a white man. The cross
burnings continued, with the former carnival barker ranting at each
gathering about the terrible evils of "mongrelization," the loose morals of
Lumbee women, and the manly duties of white men "to fight
enemies anywhere, anytime." As one visitor to Monroe later wrote to a
friend, "Cole was in a particular mad dog fury" because of rumors that Ava
Gardner, eastern North Carolina's own homegrown movie star, was having a
Hollywood affair with Sammy Davis Jr., whom Cole contemptuously referred to
as "that one-eyed nigger."

The climax of the Klan's Robeson County campaign was to be a heavily armed
rally on January 18, 1958, near the small town of Maxton, at which, Cole
predicted, 5,000 Klansmen would remind Indians of "their place" in the
racial order. "He said that, did he?" asked Simeon Oxendine, who had flown
more than thirty missions against the Germans in World War II and now
headed the Lumbee chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Well, we'll
just wait and see."

Cole's references to Lumbee women were particularly galling. Robeson County
sheriff Malcolm McLeod visited the grand wizard at his South Carolina home
and "told him that his life would be in danger if he came to Maxton and
made the same speech he'd been making." That Friday night, as a few dozen
Klansmen gathered in a roadside field in darkness lit only by a single
hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, more than five hundred Lumbee
men assembled across the road with rifles and shotguns. The Lumbees fanned
out across the highway to encircle the Klansmen. When Cole began to speak,
a Lumbee dashed up and smashed the light with his rifle barrel. Hundreds of
Indians let out a thunderous whoop and fired their weapons repeatedly into
the air. Only four people were injured, none seriously; all but one were
apparently hit by falling bullets. The Klansmen dropped their guns and
scrambled for their cars, abandoning the unlit cross, their public address
system, and an array of KKK paraphernalia. Magnanimous in victory, the
Lumbees allowed the white supremacists to escape. The war party even helped
push Cole's Cadillac out of the ditch where his wife, Carolyn, had driven
in her panic. The grand wizard himself had abandoned "white womanhood" and
fled on foot into the swamps. Laughing, the Lumbees set fire to the cross,
hanged Catfish Cole in effigy, and had a rollicking victory bash. Draped in
captured Klan regalia, they celebrated into the night. "If the Negroes had
done something like this a long time ago, we wouldn't be bothered with the
KKK," Oxendine said in a remark that kept his Lumbee troops clearly on a
side of the color line different from that of African Americans.(snip)

Robert F. Williams is remembered by very few people these days, but there was
a special about him on PBS recently:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/index.html

Another bunch of non-rich, white, or priveleged men with guns:

The Deacons for Defense

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice


There was even a made-for-cable movie about them, with Forest Whitaker (it's on DVD):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335034/


So you see, shooting *is* for everyone!