The 1946 Columbia Race Riot: Attempted murder or self-defense?

By Logan LangloisNASHVILLE, TN — On February 25, 1946, a Black woman named Gladys Stephenson returned to the Castner-Knott department store in downtown Columbia to pick up the radio she had taken to be repaired. She had been told to come back several times by the shop, always with a higher price attached to the repair, and once so the shop would buy the radio back from a different customer they had sold it to. This time, she brought her son James Stephenson, an American naval veteran, upon which the two received the radio at around double the original price, and still broken. After this, Gladys and the white department store employee William Fleming had a heated argument, during which sources differ as to whether Gladys was assaulted, or physically threatened, by Fleming.“This veteran used to box, this veteran was not going to let someone smack his mother,” said Emory University Associate Professor of African American studies Carol Anderson during a video posted by the university about the event.& “He steps in-between, and the fact that you have a Black man in Tennessee, in 1946, basically stepping up saying, ‘oh no, you are not going to lay your hands on...