Disarm the Negros: The Racist Roots of Georgia's Gun Laws

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I came across this PDF today while searching for getting my concealed carry license and figured I'd share it. The PDF has pictures/footnotes but long story short, cacery at it's finest:

http://www.georgiacarry.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/racist-roots-of-ga-gun-laws.pdf

Georgia's Gun Laws – Racism, Oppression and White Supremacy
Georgia's gun laws were designed to disarm slaves, freedmen, and black Georgians. Whenever blacks used arms to fight against racism and discrimination, the General Assembly responded with laws criminalizing their actions. Georgia's gun laws were not a crime prevention measure; they were Georgia's way to perpetuate racism, oppression and white supremacy. These racist laws still apply in Georgia.

The Early Days – The First Gun Bans
From the founding days of Georgia, whites had a great fear of armed blacks rebelling against white power and privilege. In 1739, eighty slaves from Stono, South Carolina rebelled and killed twenty-five whites before they were defeated in a pitched battle by a better armed white militia. In August 1831, Nat Turner and seventy slaves and freedmen traveled from house to house through Southampton County, Virginia axing and beating to death all of the whites that they could find, including women and children. 57 white men, women and children were murdered during Turner’s two day killing spree.

The General Assembly responded to Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion by enacting harsh laws limiting the rights of free blacks in Georgia and prohibiting the entry of free blacks from other states. Prior to this time, slaves and free blacks were allowed to have firearms during the weekdays when they had the permission of their owner or guardian. Slave children were often provided a gun and were tasked to shoot birds and other vermin on the plantation. Those practices ended when the General Assembly passed Georgia’s first gun ban. The 1833 law provided that “it shall not be lawful for any free person of colour in this state, to own, use, or carry fire arms of any description whatever.” The penalty was thirty-nine lashes and the firearm was to be sold and the proceeds given to the Justice of the Peace, akin to today’s Magistrate. In 1846, the Georgia Supreme Court held in Nunn v State that there was a constitutional right to carry a pistol openly in Georgia. Then two years later, the Georgia Supreme Court clarified in Cooper and Worsham v. Savannah that this right did not extend to free blacks. The court proclaimed that "Free persons of color have never been recognized here as citizens; they are not entitled to bear arms, vote for members of the legislature, or to hold any civil office." This ruling would form the basis for the expulsion of black legislators in 1868.

Camilla Massacre – Birthplace of the Public Gathering Prohibition
On September 19, 1868, several hundred blacks and Republicans, nearly all armed with muskets and shotguns, marched 25 miles from Albany to Camilla Georgia to protest the General Assembly’s expulsion of 32 newly elected black legislators. The elected black legislators were expelled on the grounds that the right to vote granted in the state constitution did not include the right to hold civil office. As the marchers arrived at Camilla’s courthouse, they were ambushed by a posse of white townsmen organized by Mitchell County Sheriff, Mumford Poore. The Sheriff's posse continued its assault on the marchers as they fled into the surrounding woods, killing and wounding them as they tried to escape. One of the fleeing blacks, Daniel Howard, was struck in the head with the butt of a gun while fleeing. He was forced to return to Camilla where he overheard the whites lamenting that if only the freedmen had come without arms, the whites would have surrounded the blacks and killed them all. Over a dozen blacks were killed and more than 30 were wounded in the massacre.

At the time of the Camilla Massacre, voting age black men outnumbered white men in 65 of Georgia’s 137 counties. Blacks represented 44% of the population of Georgia. The vision of armed blacks marching into Camilla sent fear into the outnumbered white elite who remembered Stono and Nat Turner. With the ratification of the 14th Amendment by Georgia in 1868, the legal construct that blacks were not entitled to the rights of citizenship was destroyed. In response, the General Assembly enacted, in October, 1870, a seemingly race-neutral law that they had intended to apply only to blacks. The law said, “no person in said State of Georgia be permitted or allowed to carry about his or her person any dirk, bowieknife, pistol or revolver, or any kind of deadly weapon, to any court of justice, or any election ground or precinct, or any place of public worship, or any other public gathering in this State, except militia muster-grounds.” The penalty was either “a fine of not less than twenty nor more than fifty dollars for each and every such offense, or imprisonment in the common jail of the county, not less than ten nor more than twenty days, or both, at the discretion of the court.”

As written, this public gathering law would have prevented the black marchers from carrying arms during their march to Camilla but not the townsmen waiting for them. The selective application of the law started immediately as the law was ignored by white supremacists that had armed themselves and gathered at the polls to prevent blacks and Republicans from voting on Election Day in November 1870.

The law and subsequent court decisions worked well enough that the General Assembly did not seek more laws aimed at disarming blacks until the twentieth century, when the circumstance of armed blacks defending their lives, neighborhoods and property during the Atlanta Race Riot forced the white elite to act once again.

Atlanta Race Riot – “Disarm The Negroes.”
On Saturday, September 22, 1906, Atlanta exploded in racial violence that would last 4 days. During the months prior, the Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Constitution, and other newspapers published a continuous stream of sensational articles about a "Negro Crime Wave" involving black men sexually assaulting southern white women. The newspapers exaggerated facts and printed fabrications to inflame tensions in the city and increase their sales. On Saturday night, 5,000 white men and boys gathered at Five Points in downtown Atlanta. The newspapers enflamed the crowd's anger with their "extra editions" that were sold to the crowd with headlines of "Bold Negro Kisses White Girl's Hand", "Negro Attempts to Assault Mrs. Mary Cafin Near Sugar Creek Bridge", "Two Assaults", and "Third Assault". The "extra editions" and the newsboys who sold them challenged the white men to defend the honor of white women. After 9PM, the mob frenzy couldn't be contained and the mob surged in bloodlust in all directions away from Five Points.

The mob attacked and murdered with clubs, bottles, knives, bricks, and fists any blacks unfortunate enough to be seen by the mob. As the night went on, the whites escalated their attacks with guns and mutilated the bodies of their black victims. As fewer blacks were found on the streets, the mobs moved into the black neighborhoods to attack blacks in their homes. The next morning, the newspapers blamed the blacks for the violence. The headline in the Atlanta Constitution was “Atlanta Is Swept By Raging Mob Due To Assaults On White Women; Negroes Reported To Be Dead”. The headline from another newspaper was “Race Riots On The Streets Last Night The Inevitable Result Of A Carnival Of Crime Against Our White Women."

During the calm of daylight hours of Sunday, the black community armed themselves with smuggled guns hidden in rags, caskets, and lumber wagons. Although there was no law against blacks purchasing arms, the pawnshops and hardware stores refused to sell to them. Blacks who could pass for white bought weapons for themselves and their neighbors. Blacks bravely began to patrol their neighborhoods with weapons ready to stop attackers. One such neighborhood was Brownsville, a middle class black neighborhood south of Five Points and home to Clark University and Gammon Theological Institute. Many blacks from smaller communities sought refuge in the college buildings. In response to rumors of an impending attack by whites, armed blacks began to patrol the streets and gathered together for the purpose of defending their homes and families. On the night of Monday Sept 24th, seven Fulton County policemen and three armed white citizens arrived in Brownsville. Upon seeing a group of 25 armed black men congregated on the street, the Policemen divided up into squads and attacked the blacks from different directions.

By the end of the night, one police officer was killed and several whites were wounded. Six blacks were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Two of the arrested blacks, still in their shackles, were killed hours later by a white mob. An unknown number of causalities were inflicted on the blacks that night.

In response to Monday night’s skirmish, the state militia, Fulton County Police, and the Governor’s Horse Guard were dispatched to Brownsville with orders to confiscate the black’s weapons. At dawn on Tuesday, the soldiers commenced a house to house sweep, ransacking the homes as they proceeded. The residents were evicted at the point of a bayonet from their homes and forced to assemble in the street. They were thoroughly searched for weapons under the watchful gaze of soldiers manning a Gatling gun with ten thousand rounds of ammunition. During the house to house search, Fulton County police officers accompanied by “deputized” white citizens found a black man severely wounded from the prior night’s battle. The police officers put their pistols to the man's chest and murdered him in front of his family. 257 black men were detained during the searches. 75 are arrested for possession of firearms and other weapons and transported to the county jail.

Later on Tuesday, the newspapers continued to blame the blacks for the rioting. The Atlanta Constitution front page headline read “Riot’s End All Depends On Negroes”. Another paper lamented, “The deepest spot in this crisis is in existence and liberty at large of Negroes heavily armed and full of malice and vengeance." The Atlanta Journal advocated the forcible disarming of all blacks in an editorial titled “Disarm the Negroes.” The Journal would get their wish in 1910, four years later.

 

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Atlanta Constitution's Crusade – Disarm By Licensing
Following the Civil War, Georgia needed northern money to rebuild its economy. To create the proper investment climate and to avoid antagonizing the northern states, Georgia developed myths and illusions to hide the true extent of racial prejudice in Georgia. One of those illusions was that the 1908 Constitutional Amendment that disfranchised blacks was racially neutral. This amendment required voters to be either:
(a) of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. or Georgia constitutions, OR (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. To avoid disenfranchising poor white voters, the law provided that any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish-American War was exempt from these qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 most white Georgia males were grandsons of Confederate veterans, this exemption became known as the "grandfather clause." Essentially, the qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, literacy, and property ownership applied only to blacks wanting to register to vote. Since most blacks at that time were former slaves and poor tenant farmers, the literacy and property ownership requirement eliminated them from the voter rolls. The good character clause eliminated educated and wealthy blacks through its subjective application. The law had its intended effect, as it reduced black voter registration from 28.3 percent in 1904 to 4.3 percent in 1910.

Occasionally, the race-neutral mask would slip to reveal the true intent of Georgia’s white power structure. One such time was when the Atlanta Journal published its celebration of the 1908 disfranchisement amendment’s passage by opining that “the white man is to rule”. During this period, other states began to disarm the blacks through various legal schemes. Alabama passed a law banning the possession of all guns smaller than 24 inches. The illusion was that this law was race neutral; however everyone understood that the law would only apply to blacks and troublesome whites. In an article about Alabama’s law, the Atlanta Journal explained who the true target of the law was:

Later when the Atlanta Constitution reported that the law was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court, it clearly stated to whom the law was intended to apply:

Alabama was not alone in developing seemingly race-neutral gun control laws that in reality selectively applied only to blacks. In a very candid opinion from the Florida Supreme Court, Justice Buford explained:

“I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and sawmill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”

Since 1887, the Atlanta Constitution had crusaded for laws prohibiting the carrying of firearms. Following the Atlanta Race Riot, the Constitution unleashed a torrent of editorials criticizing the carrying of firearms and blaming them for all of the crime in the state. Examples of the editorial titles include:

Eliminate The Pistol Toter - Jul. 8, 1907
Crusade Against Pistol “Toters” – Dec. 11, 1907
Make Pistol Toter An Extinct Species - Jan 15, 1908
The Pistol-Toter A National Menace - Aug 4, 1908
The Pistol Carrying Nuisance - Jan 18, 1910
Making the Pistol-Toter a Pariah - May 22, 1910
The Pistol-Toter -- Master Criminal - Sep. 7, 1910
The Toll of the Pistol-Toter - Oct 2, 1910

In December of 1910, a little more than 4 years after the riot, the Governor signed a law that required a license to carry a firearm in public issued by the Ordinary (now issued by a Probate Judge). The qualifications and method was similar to those that disfranchised blacks two years earlier. Most importantly, there was no requirement for the Ordinary to issue a license. In order to obtain a license,
applicants had to be:

a) at least eighteen years old or over
b) give a bond payable to the Governor of the State in the sum of one hundred dollars,
AND c) a fee of fifty cents.

$100 in 1910 is equivalent to over $2000 in 2007 dollars. In the unlikely event a black man could post the bond, the Ordinary, who was always white since blacks could not hold civil office, could be counted on not to issue licenses to blacks. Not surprisingly, the first arrest under the licensing law was a black man named
Dock Carter.

Closing
Since the earliest days of Georgia, gun control played a critical role in the oppression of blacks. In the antebellum period, slaves and freedmen were prohibited from possessing firearms since they were not considered citizens. After the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the General Assembly developed new strategies to achieve their goal of disarming blacks with the public gathering and licensing laws that appeared to be race neutral but were selectively applied to blacks only. These laws and subsequent court decisions with their offensive history and basis are still in effect in Georgia. Georgians continue to suffer with location prohibitions more restrictive than any other state and a licensing process that in some respects is still capricious and discriminatory. Our nation's forefathers knew that for the people to remain in a free state, the right to keep and bear arms had to be protected from government regulation. Today, some Georgians claim that gun control is a "reasonable restriction.” Is denying the right of self defense to the marchers in Camilla and the families in Brownsville a "reasonable restriction"? The participants in these events would say that these laws enforce and perpetuate racism, oppression and white supremacy.

 

[kp404]

5 Star thread. The history presented here

 

[The D-List Vet]

I hate living in this country and still in school

 

[Blackking]

You should change the title.. and include all the laws like this that stem from race.

Especially in Cali.

 

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5 Star thread. The history presented here

Breh, taking a step back and looking at our history hear, I think it's safe to assume that black people are NOT citizen's in this country. We're viewed as a foreign, invading force that needs to be exterminated.

Stay strapped brehs

 

[Blackking]

It is no accident that the two seminal Second Amendment cases of our age were led by Black plaintiffs. The concerns of people like Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald, have long driven the robust Black tradition of arms. The benefit of arms in the hands of good people like this, for example reductions in hot burglaries and a general disincentive to criminals, are arguably more important in Black neighborhoods than elsewhere. Moreover the fundamental justification for self-defense – the structural limits on the state’s ability to interdict imminent threats – is more pervasive in Black communities than in other places. Police response is slower. Personal threats are more common. Public resources are spread more thinly.

The only possible foundation for comments like Whitlock’s is the erroneous assumption that personal firearms render no benefits. That is demonstrably false as summarized in my previous post and illustrated extensively in my other work. And there is no indication that the benefits of firearms ownership and use discriminate on the basis of race.

Finally, one wonders whether Whitlock even appreciates that the history of supply-side gun control in America is rooted in racism. As described in detail in my book Firearms law and the Second Amendment, the first generation of supply-side gun controls were explicitly racist. Ironically, these laws worked hand-in-hand with oppressive state regimes and terrorist organizations like the KKK. On this score Whitlock’s invocation of the KKK is ironic and perverse.

By invoking the specter of racism, Whitlock appropriates and exploits a public good that has been paid for in the sweat and blood of countless Black folk both here and gone. His cavalier deployment of this resource degrades those people and their sacrifice. Whitlock makes hay by presuming to speak for Black people as a group. Through the grossest invective he smears those who would disagree with him. I have to believe that he does not realize that this includes millions of lawful Black gun owners who reject the demonstrably flawed approach of relying on the state for their personal security.

Whitlock seems pervasively ignorant of the basic moving parts of the gun issue and yet his “analysis” has been elevated in our conversation as if it constitutes a serious policy critique. It is an indictment of our culture and bodes ill for the Republic, that this is the nature of our public debates.

 

[Blackking]

Black community from the leadership to the grassroots has explicitly and aggressively endorsed the right of armed self-defense and firearms ownership. Kentucky firebrand Ida B. Wells urged that “the Winchester rifle deserved a place of honor in every Negro home.” The first generation of legal battles by the NAACP were centered on defending Blacks who had used firearms in self-defense – e.g., hiring Clarence Darrow to defend Dr. Ossian Sweet who was mobbed for attempting move into a white neighborhood.

In every generation armed Black folk have used guns in self-defense both prosaically and heroically. And since at least the middle of the 19th century Blacks have embraced a dual policy of nonviolent social change concurrent with a clear endorsement of individual self-defense. This approach is vividly illustrated in Martin Luther King’s commentary during one of the high profile debates about the implications of the approach. After affirming the strategy of nonviolence in pursuit of group goals King says this:

Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi … . When the Negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects.

King plainly condemned political violence. At the same time he and most everyone else recognized, that armed self-defense was a crucial private resource for Blacks(as it is for anyone who faces imminent violent threats).

 

[Blackking]

After the Civil War and the legal abolition of slavery, reactionary whites sought to re-establish their dominance over African people. In the section “Second Slavery after the Civil War,” the authors emphasize that “white southern identity was grounded in a belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans.

“Following the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor. Plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom. In May 1866, in Memphis, Tennessee, forty-six African Americans were killed; ninety-one houses, four churches, and twelve schools were burned to the ground; at least five women were raped; and many black people fled the city permanently.” (p. 7)

Ida B. Wells began anti-lynching campaign

This report continues the work done by other scholars and Civil Rights organizations since the late 19th century. By 1892, public lynchings attracted the attention of African-American journalist Ida B. Wells. She started an international campaign after African-Americans Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart were taken from a jail cell in Memphis and fatally shot by law-enforcement agents.

Surveying the landscape in the summer of 1892, Ida B. Wells advised, that “the Winchester rifle deserved a place of honor in every Black home.”

 

[Blackking]

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 theNew 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.

 

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Even though it doesn't get nearly as much recognition, we have a LONG history of getting armed and fighting back against white agression:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...long_tradition_of_black_americans_taking.html

The Long History of Blacks Arming Themselves in Self Defense
In 1919, white Americans visited awful violence on black Americans. So black Americans decided to fight back.

In Longview, Texas, in July 1919, S.L. Jones, who was a teacher and a local distributor of the blacknewspaper the Chicago Defender, investigated the suspicious death of Lemuel Walters. Walters was a black man who was accused of raping a white woman, jailed, and ultimately found dead under “mysterious” circumstances. When the Defender published a story about Walters’ death, asserting that the alleged rape had been a love affair and Walters’ death the result of a lynching, Jones came under attack, beaten by the woman’s brothers.

Hearing a rumor that Jones was in trouble, Dr. C.P. Davis, a black physician and friend of the teacher, tried to get law enforcement to protect him from further violence. When it became clear that this help was not forthcoming, Davis organized two-dozen black volunteers to guard Jones’ house. That same night, a mob surrounded the dwelling. Four armed white men knocked on the door, then tried to ram it down. The black defenders, who were arranged around Jones’ property, opened fire. A half-hour gun battle ensued, in which several attackers were wounded; the posse retreated.

Hearing the town’s fire bell ringing to summon reinforcements, Jones and Davis went into hiding, knowing that they wouldn't be able to defend themselves against a larger mob. Davis borrowed a soldier’s uniform, put it on, and took the first of several trains out of the area. At one point, he asked a group of black soldiers he found in a train car to conceal him in their ranks, which they did, contributing to his disguise by giving him an overseas cap and a gas mask. Later that day, Jones also managed to escape. But their successful resistance and flight were bittersweet victories: Before the episode was over, Davis’ and Jones’ homes were burned, along with Davis’ medical practice and the meeting place of the town’s Negro Business Men’s League. Davis’ father-in-law was killed in the violence.

In his new book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back, David F. Krugler, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, looks at the actions of people like Jones and Davis, who resisted white incursions against the black community through the press, the courts, and armed defensive action. The year 1919 was a notable one for racial violence, with major episodes of unrest in Chicago; Washington; and Elaine, Arkansas, and many smaller clashes in both the North and the South. (James Weldon Johnson, then the field secretary of the NAACP, called this time of violence the “Red Summer.”) White mobs killed 77 black Americans, including 11 demobilized servicemen (according to the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis). The property damage to black businesses and homes—attacks on which betrayed white anxiety over new levels of black prosperity and social power—was immense.

The history of black responses to the violence of 1919—which ranged from the use of a single weapon against a home invader, to the organization of defensive posses like Davis’ that were meant to protect potential victims of lynching, to the deployment of groups of men who patrolled city streets during unrest—makes it clear that armed self-defense, far from being an invention of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, is a strategy with deep roots. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement, the story of nonviolence—a beautiful strategy with uncontestable moral force—has taken center stage. However the story of active self-defense against violence—a tradition that developed before, and then alongside, nonviolent resistance—is too often dismissed or simply ignored. Even before slavery had been outlawed, black Americans took up arms when their lives and livelihoods were threatened. Their experiences make the familiar history of marches and peaceful protest more complex. But the story of the civil rights struggle is incomplete without them.

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Activists followed these calls for resistance with attempts to work within the legal system to defend those who fought back. After each episode of violence, the NAACP took new legal initiative in prosecuting white rioters and representing black people who had acted to defend themselves. Sometimes, as in the aftermath of the violence in Longview, Texas, NAACP lawyers were able to get prisoners who had been found with weapons released by arguing that their actions were taken in self-defense. These legal victories—though somewhat diminished by the difficulty lawyers had in landing convictions of white rioters—were nonetheless significant.

 

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Continued

While there is a notable cluster of examples of black communities fighting back in the racial conflicts of 1919, the history of armed self-defense goes back even further. Law professor Nicholas Johnson points to fugitive slaves who armed themselves against slave-catchers as some of the earliest examples of the practice. In another dark period of racial violence at the end of the 19th century, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a journalist and investigator of lynching, advocated “boycott, emigration, and the press” as weapons against white aggression, outlining the rationale in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. When those peaceful strategies failed, Wells-Barnett thought a more active strategy was the answer, observing: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.” For this reason, she wrote, “[A] Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

Some citizens caught up in racial violence at the turn of the 20th century shared Wells-Barnett’s philosophy. Krugler cites instances of self-defense in turn-of-the-century racial strife in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898; Evansville, Indiana, in 1903; Atlanta in 1906; and Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. In Evansville, Krugler writes, “[A]pproximately thirty black men assembled to drive away white vigilantes attempting to break into the county jail to lynch a black prisoner.” In Springfield, “black snipers fired on white rioters from a saloon window, and twelve armed black men formed a patrol and fired on members of a mob leaving the site of one attack.”

In his research on the unrest of 1919, Krugler found evidence of self-defense that was both highly coordinated and ad hoc. “In Chicago,” he told me, “we have examples of individual stockyard workers who go to work, are attacked, and turn and fight. That’s not premeditated; that’s a human response to a life-threatening danger and risk—but it still counts as self-defense.” Also during the unrest in Chicago, “The veterans of the 8th Regiment put on their uniforms, found weapons, and took to the streets to try to stop the mob violence”—a preplanned action that took advantage of their military training and status in the community.

One of the problems with writing a history of armed self-defense during episodes of racial violence lies in establishing what actually happened. The events are obscured by the motivations of the authors of many of the historical sources, as well as the simple fog of war—these conflicts were complex events unfolding, in some cases, over many city blocks. Krugler triangulates between sources, looking at black and white newspapers, records of the tribunals held after some of the riots, and the reports of investigators from the Military Intelligence Division and the Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was called in its first two decades of operation).

Comparing-and-contrasting these sources, as Krugler does in a section on the Chicago unrest called “The Fictional Riot,” shows how self-defense could look very different depending on the point of view of the witness. The soldiers from the 8th Regiment, who, black onlookers reported, instilled a sense of calm in the community merely by their presence, showed up very differently in the Chicago Daily News’coverage. One detachment of veterans was described as “a group of twelve discharged negro soldiers, all armed,” who had “terrorized small groups of whites in various parts of the south side all afternoon.” The Herald-Examiner reported that several thousand decommissioned members of the 8th Regiment had stormed the regiment’s armory, wounding more than 50 people as they seized weapons. “Black Chicagoans, menaced by gangs and mistreated by the police, now [confronted] a white-written narrative about the riot that cast them as the wrongdoers,” Krugler writes. This was one of the drawbacks of self-defense, which, in a racist society, put those who resisted in perilous positions, vulnerable to further violence and legal prosecution.

Americans have wholeheartedly adopted the history of nonviolent protest as part of our national mythology. But we’re hesitant to commemorate the history of black self-defense. As historian Peniel E. Joseph writes, radical strains of resistance during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—the activism of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement—are often remembered as “politically naïve, largely ineffectual, and ultimately stillborn.” Yet, Joseph (and a host of other historians who have looked anew at Black Power and related activism in the past decade or so) argues that the activists who believed in Black Power precepts of armed self-defense and radical self-determination were always a part of the civil rights movement, acting alongside people who believed in nonviolence. Joseph and other scholars of Black Power look at civil rights and Black Power as “part of the same historical family tree.”

Perhaps our eagerness to dismiss self-defense stems from the fact that it makes us confront uncomfortable questions about our present-day realities. The history of armed black self-defense is a story of individual resistance in the face of unfairness and of successful community organization in places where the dominant culture refused protection. Like the history of nonviolence, it’s a stirring story, reminding us of the real dangers black people faced and of their refusal to submit, despite the prospect of reprisal and the possibility of legal consequences. But given the fact that black Americans still face life-threatening violence at a disproportionate rate, and that some of this violence—now, as in years past—comes from officials sworn to protect and serve, the history of armed self-defense is less readily adaptable for anodyne commemorative purposes.

Still, this other aspect of civil rights history can be found even in the more traditional narratives, once you start to look. I asked Krugler to comment on the relationship between the history of self-defense and the dominant story of civil rights. He pointed to a recent article in the Washington Post about the unveiling of the Rosa Parks papers collection at the Library of Congress. The author, Michael E. Ruane, began the piece by referring to one of Parks’ childhood memories. Rosa Parks remembered staying up late with her grandfather as a young girl in rural Alabama, as he sat with a shotgun and guarded against possible attacks from the members of the Ku Klux Klan. “Even someone who’s a mainstay of the nonviolent part of the civil rights movement grew up understanding the importance of armed self-defense against racial terrorism,” Krugler pointed out. Rosa Parks was 6 years old in 1919.

 

[Blackking]

U.S. gun control laws are intentionally, inherently, profoundly, unforgivably racist. By design. From the long sad history of disarming freed slaves, to [then] California Ronald Reagan’s unconscionable anti-Black Panther firearms restrictions, to Rahm Emanuel’s middle finger salute to the U.S. Supreme Court’s McDonald decision, gun control advocates have discriminated against minority Americans.

If some racist b*stard IS trying to murder or maim or rape a black man or woman, if a black man or woman is in fear of a racist “hate crime,” they’re best advised to buy a gun, carry a gun, stand their ground and defend their life or the life of their loved ones with deadly force (if the attack is credible and imminent).

 

[Blackking]

Ever since slaves were imported to Jamestown in 1619, armed self defense was an authentic part of the African American experience. I don’t just mean well-known rebellions like Nat Turner’s, but ordinary day to day. Almost every household I ever visited in the south had a hidden shotgun or pistol under the bed. This contradicted MLK’s dominant peace-and-love message, his honestly-held outreach to whites, many of whom (like me) flocked to his Gandhian banner. Less publicly known is that wherever “Martin” traveled he was bodyguarded by men with guns. Indeed, his own Atlanta home was a discreet arsenal of weapons.

Even less public was the role of armed black women who for decades had to endure sexual and physical assaults by white southern cops and other thugs who, given immunity from prosecution, felt they could rape at will. Attending church services in Tuscaloosa, Selma or Montgomery, I was no longer surprised sitting next to a respectable black woman who opened her purse to fan herself revealing a modest little .22. Cobb cites the well-known story of Mama Dolly Raines in southwest Georgia (where I stayed with SNCC) sitting by her window with her shotgun to protect the Rev. Charles Sherrod, a passionate believer in nonviolence, who was staying with her.

 

[kp404]

Breh, taking a step back and looking at our history hear, I think it's safe to assume that black people are NOT citizen's in this country. We're viewed as a foreign, invading force that needs to be exterminated.

Stay strapped brehs

That's actually one of the arguments of my dissertation :smugcastro: