Thaddeus Russell on How “Crazy Negroes” With Guns Helped Kill Jim Crow

Thaddeus Russell writes in the August/September
issue of Reason that he has a dream that one day
children in seventh grade will have an American history textbook
that is not like his son’s. Its heroes will not just be people
from the past who upheld the middle-class values of modesty,
chastity, sobriety, thrift, and industry. The rebels it celebrates
will include not only abolitionists, suffragists, labor unionists,
and civil rights leaders who confined their protests to peaceful
and respectable writing, speaking, striking, and marching. In
Russell’s dream, schoolchildren will read about people like C.O.
Chinn. Chinn was a black man in Canton, Mississippi, who in the
1960s owned a farm, a rhythm and blues nightclub, a bootlegging
operation, and a large collection of pistols, rifles, and shotguns
with which he threatened local Klansmen and police when they
attempted to encroach on his businesses or intimidate civil rights
activists working to desegregate Canton and register black
residents to vote. 

View this article.