Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

of Mink Slide . When the Chief of Police and three officers attempted to enter
Mink Slide to investigate gunfire, they were ordered to halt by Columbia's Black
sentry. The Chief and the other officers were shot and wounded, after refusing to
recognize the orders of the black civilian patrol . After the engagement between
the Columbia police and the Black sentry, the Maury County Sheriff, J .J .
Underwood, contacted Tennessee Governor Jim Nance to get the assistance of the
state Highway Patrol and State Guard to put down the armed mobilization of
Blacks in Columbia. On the morning of February 26th, a superior force of over
500 Tennessee state police and militia was able to suppress the armed Black
sentry. Not only did the state Patrol and Guard disarm Columbia's Blacks, but
Mink Slide was ransacked . Thirty-one members of Columbia's Black community
were indicted, twenty-five of them charged with attempted murder of the four
policemen . The case of the Columbia defendants became a national cause for the
NAACP and other human rights organizations . One important argument for the
defense was that given the memory of lynchings and recent history of police
brutality, Columbia's Blacks were reasonably acting in self-defense . To the sur-
prise of many, a jury in Lawrence County (where the trial took place) only found
two of the Columbia defendants guilty of attempted murder. One of the two
convicted defendants was later retried and exonerated . The Columbia case was
significant for the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement because it served as
a national mobilizing point immediately after the War."
Another case of Black self-defense would also serve as a national and
international case for the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement . The case of
Rosa Ingram emphasized the right of Black women to protection from white