There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.
Ida B. Wells
The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.
Ida B. Wells
For Wells and for many of her contemporaries — the “New Negroes” of the late nineteenth century — the Winchester Rifle was a potent rhetorical tool. At a meeting of the Afro-American Press Association, fiery editor of the
New York Age, T. Thomas Fortune, spurred by a recent spate of lynchings erupted, “We have cringed and crawled long enough. I don’t want any more ‘good ******s.’ I want ‘bad ******s.’ It’s the ‘bad ******’ with the Winchester who can defend his home and child and wife.” W. A. Pledger of the
Atlanta Age followed Fortune on the dais and affirmed the sentiments of the group that terrorists were “afraid to lynch us where they know the Black man is standing behind the door with a Winchester.”
But the Winchester was more than just a rhetorical tool of militant journalists. In Memphis, after the lynching of Ida Wells’ good friend Tom Moss, Reverend Taylor Nightingale pressed his congregation all to buy Winchesters as a practical response to the surrounding threats. And from the Black settlements of the west comes the report that “the colored men of Oklahoma Territory mean business. They have an exalted ideal of their own rights and liberties and they dare to maintain them. In nearly every cabin visited was a modern Winchester oiled and ready for use.”
This sort of preparedness was rewarded in 1891 when Edwin McCabe, an early advocate of Black emigration to the American west was attacked by a gang intent on discouraging Blacks from staking claims in the opening Oklahoma Territory. Blacks had been run out of several staging towns. But in Langston City, more than two thousand armed Blacks assembled in preparation for the land rush. After sporadic threats, McCabe was accosted and fired on. He was rescued by a superior force of Black men wielding Winchester rifles.