“I Knew Then Who I Was. I Was a Negro”: Black Armed Defense in Walter White’s A Man Called White

Abstract

This essay investigates literary and autobiographical representations of the defense of Black-owned property in the face of anti-Black mob violence during the first decades of the twentieth century. In his autobiography, A Man Called White (1948), NAACP leader Walter White represents guns as desperate tools of an always tenuous security marked by the violence of the world wars, lynchings, and racially motivated massacres. The backdrop for these struggles is woven from White’s youth amid terrifying events that will later come to be known as the Atlanta “race riot” of 1906. Repeating those events in his autobiography, White unmasks the juridical and sociopolitical order of its civilizing appurtenances and invokes the gun as a symbol of Black armed self-defense. In White’s autobiography, even as guns are used to enforce anti-Blackness they may yet be turned against the white mob to secure Black lives at the local level and turned into legal arguments by a Black collective at the national level via an organization such as the NAACP.