Harriet Tubman rescued more than 300 people from slavery with a gun under her arm. Frederick Douglass wrote in 1854 that a good revolver was critical to staying free: “Every slave hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.”
Even after the Civil War, when slavery had ended, so-called “Black Codes” limited the rights of African-Americans in the South, banning them from owning guns (or liquor, for that matter). African-Americans lost the right to vote in many states because of poll taxes and literacy tests, and therefore the right to serve on juries (which was limited to voters). In 1892 alone, 161 African-Americans were lynched* across the country. Self-defense was an absolute necessity. Ida B. Wells, an African-American journalist and civil rights activist, wrote in a pamphlet entitled “Southern Horrors”:
The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that 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. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
That conflict — between the fears of racist whites and the needs of African-Americans to defend themselves — arose again in the late 1960s. The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement recognized that the need for self-defense still existed — in fact, Martin Luther King Jr. applied for (and was denied) a concealed carry permit. Recounting his memories of “Freedom Summer” and the Civil Rights Movement, Charles E. Cobb Jr., former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said, “I know from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive, kept communities safe, and all you have to do to understand this is simply think of black people as human beings and they’re gonna respond to terrorism the way anybody else would.”
More radical voices, including Malcolm X and leading members of the Black Panthers, believed that “nonviolence” was a lie that would only put more African-Americans at risk. Charles C.W. Cooke, online editor of the National Review, told MTV News, “America had a tyranny in it. It was just not perpetrated against white people. America had a tyranny in the South, and people were lynched. It was institutionalized, organized violence.” Better to be armed and able to defend oneself than to give up one’s rights, the thinking went.
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