Columbia (Tennessee) Race Riot of 1946
By
John C Abercrombie
This incident began on February 25, 1946. This was a post war incident and the racial attitudes of Whites had not changed, but Blacks felt they were entitled to the benefits of citizenship in this country after fighting for the country, suffering injuries and even death. The returning veterans were unwilling to accept the prevailing racial norms of second-class citizenship.
Race relations here as in so many parts of America were tense and had been so for many years. Since 1925, there had been two lynchings in the town of five thousand Whites and three thousand Blacks.
Lynchings are the taking of human life under without the benefit of a trial and are extremely inhumane and intended to intimidate others. It is an act of domestic terrorism.
The incident in question began on February 25, 1946, when a United States Navy veteran James Stephenson accompanied his mother, Gladys Stephenson to a local department store to pick up a radio that had been left for repairs. A young boisterous White make clerk began to argue about the repair order and became verbally abusive and threatened Mrs. Stephenson. James, the Navy veteran stepped between the two and a scuffle ensued with the clerk crashing through a window in the department store. Local White police arrested both James and Gladys Stephenson for disturbing the peace to which they pleaded guilty and paid a fifty dollar fine. This seems like a simple case resolved by the guilty plea, but due to the justice system which tries Blacks before all-White juries which always decide against the Black defendants. It becomes questionable as to the reason for the pleas.
That same day, February 25, James Stephenson was arrested again, this time due to a warrant brought by the White clerk’s father, charging Stephenson with assault with intent to commit murder. A local Black businessman posted bond and Stephenson was able to return home that same evening.
Just as in the past, the slightest notion of a charge against a Black resulting in an angry mob of Whites, who feel entitled to take the law into their own hands and inflict capital punishment for any and all offenses. They were more than willing to dispense with the rules of justice, no trial just vigilante justice. It denies citizens of the rights of citizenship.
That same night, February 25, an angry White mob gathered along the Maury County Courthouse a block south of the segregated Black business section known as the Mink Slide. Black citizens and military veterans gathered also. The Columbia police chief then sent four patrolmen into the heart of the Mink Slide district. Someone shouted for the police to stop, they did not, and shots rang out leaving all four officers wounded.
The state highway patrol and state safety commissioner arrived and surrounded the area. Early on the morning of February 26 highway patrolmen entered the district firing randomly into buildings, stealing cash and other goods, searching homes without warrants, taking guns, rifles, and shotguns. In total they arrested more than one hundred Blacks. None of the accused were granted bail or allowed legal counsel.
Of course, this made headlines across the nation. Walter White * and Thurgood Marshall* of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People went to organize a legal defense.
Things intensified on February 28 when Columbia policemen killed two Black prisoners in custody. Again, it is necessary to look at the history of justice and race in America and it does not take a super sleuth to discover that nothing is going to happen to the White officers.
Police claimed that during an interrogation of James Johnson, William Gordon, and Napoleon Stewart two prisoners grabbed guns from the White officers and began shooting, causing the police to retaliate, killing two and wounding the third suspect.
A federal grand jury was convened to investigate the charges of misconduct by the White policemen, but the local all-White jury absolved the officers of any wrongdoing. Twenty-five Blacks were tried in the shooting of the White officers.
There is no surprise that the White police are found not guilty and there is so much detail on trumped up charges against Blacks. This is normal for all-White juries and the justice system. This is the norm in America.
By November 1946 the case was over and as Marshall, Looby and Weaver, the Black attorneys were being escorted out of town the police stopped the attorneys twice for imaginary highway violations. Just like in two recent cases of the police pulling over buses of Black college students for alleged minor traffic infractions by professional drivers and being subjected to person searches.
The police in the Columbia pulled the attorneys over a third time they arrested Thurgood Marshall for drunk driving and placed him in a patrol car speeding away. Finally, the police stopped at a local magistrate’s office and dropped the charges against Marshall. Fearing for Marshall’s life the attorneys asked for friends form Columbia to form a convoy to escort them safely to Nashville.
This may sound like a fabrication, but it is not out of the normal for Southern justice. It is incidents like this that helped gather strength for the civil rights push of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Columbia Race Riot
1946 Columbia Race Riot
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Book
The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
On February 25, 1946, African Americans in Columbia, Tennessee, averted the lynching of James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old, black Navy veteran accused of attacking a white radio repairman at a local department store. That night, after Stephenson was safely out of town, four of Columbia’s police officers were shot and wounded when they tried to enter the town’s black business district. The next morning, the Tennessee Highway Patrol invaded the district, wrecking establishments and beating men as they arrested them. By day’s end, more than one hundred African Americans had been jailed. Two days later, highway patrolmen killed two of the arrestees while they were awaiting release from jail.
Review this book and others using links below, even sample the book. Purchases of Kindle and Audible are delivered instantly.
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“Columbia 1946: Riot or Rising?” – Middle Tennessee Backyard History
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Book
This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Visiting Martin Luther King Jr., at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal”.
Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self protection – yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr., describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing – and, when necessary, using – firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement’s success.
Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom. This audio edition is masterfully narrated by Leon Nixon, a listener favorite.
ABH – This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed
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Dialysis Apparatus
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1946 Columbia, TN Race Riots & The Myth Of Black American Cowardice
This episode we discuss the 1946 Columbia, TN Race Riot and the myth of Black American Cowardice. This will be one of many episodes documenting Counter-Racist Violence practiced by people who are classified as Black.We play an interview Of author Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussing his book titled ‘This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed’. We also play a verbal history of the 1946 Columbia, TN Race Riot, which took place on the black side of town called The Mink Slide/The Bottoms, given by Emory University Associate Professor of African American Studies Carol Anderson. The program concludes with a segment of Neely Fuller Junior’s show Titled ‘The Compensatory Concept’ found on talktainmentradio.com.
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Book
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction.
In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.
America’s first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last—an opportunity to choose hope over fear.
ABH – The Third Reconstruction
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Race Riot in Columbia, Tennessee February 25-27 1946: Mink Slide Black Community
This video talks about one of the First defensive action of the Black Community after World War II. This took place in Columbia, Tennessee February 25-27, 1946. Black Veterans took control of the community defenses in the Black Community of Columbia, Tennessee know as “Mink Slide”
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Book
White Fear: How the Browning of America Is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds
White fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning—and today, it’s more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it.
White fear is not new. It enabled the rise of Donald Trump. It’s behind the recent flood of restrictive voting laws disproportionately impacting people of color. It’s why reactions to movements like Black Lives Matter and a football player taking a knee have been so negative and so strong.
For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel—of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular “way of life”—has been the driving force behind American politics and culture. And as we approach a future where White people will become a racial minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country’s inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?
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COLUMBIA (“Mink Slide”) RACE RIOT 1946
You may not know, but there was a city in Tennessee that wasn’t going for the non-sense, and that city was Columbia. Let’s take a look at how this riot was started and how the black warrior class handled things, enjoy!
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Many see the need of Black History as telling of accomplishments, which is excellent but leaves out the depth of the struggle of being a Black person in America. This Black History Month, 2023 we are featuring some of the disgraceful, shameful, degrading events that for the most part have gone unrecognized, yet we have survived and paid the price of citizenship in America, something we are still striving to enjoy.
Many will rely on the myth that every American had an equal chance to succeed, that is until the ugly truth is revealed. There is animosity that persists from the days of slavery when many believed that Blacks were less than human. Notice that the word is many, not all. We have placed a burden on, and most Whites have assumed the burden that every White was a slaveholding, race hating person which is totally untrue, but based on the fear that America has in talking about the shameful history. We can not change it, but we can make the future better if we learn the truth, face it and resolve to solve the problems that result.