American Book and Gun Review
by
Professor Brian Anse Patrick
University of Toledo
Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. Nicholas Johnson, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 379 pages, 2014.
In response to a
nonviolent civil rights worker who was surprised to see a firearm in the
house of a well known black southern civil rights activist, the
activist explained, “That’s a non-violent gun.”
This is one of scores of
telling incidents and historical events documented by Professor Nicholas
Johnson as he traces the American black tradition of gun ownership from
its painful beginnings in slave days, through
the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the black diaspora to the
industrial north, to the Civil Rights movement and on into the present.
The black tradition of
arms is a neglected and, to some, perhaps, an inconvenient history.
Although many will find it inspiring, modern progressives will probably
wish to swish it away because it doesn’t align with
their characteristic approach to social regulation, i.e., “We the
government/elite will save you.” The progressive social cartoon poises
black people as victims of the gun rather than proponents of the gun for
personal defense and freedom. But history as revealed
by Johnson says otherwise. American Blacks by necessity took up arms.
They used them often and responsibly, and the presence of guns in black
hands averted more violence than it caused, although as always the gun
is a tool as well as a symbol, and taking up
a gun can cause unforeseen (but not unforeseeable) problems.
Frederick Douglass
counseled, “A good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to
shoot,” as a way for former slaves to counter the man-hunters who
attempted to seize blacks who had escaped to the North. Free
state blacks often resisted and repelled incursions of slavers who came
to reclaim what was then legally viewed as lost property. Armed groups
of black men assembled at times to interdict slavers. Harriet Tubman of
Underground Railroad fame was well known
for carrying firearms and is often depicted rifle in hand. Many white
southerners could not abide the idea of armed, independent black voters.
This too much resembled true citizenship. After the Civil War when
southern militias and nightriders attempted to
disarm blacks, many of whom had been federal soldiers, there was often
armed resistance. The subsequently adopted 14th Amendment
attempted to assure that the rights, immunities and privileges of
citizenship as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution
also applied to the residents of the various American states,
especially the new black citizens. Amazingly, in recent times in
Chicago, the 14th Amendment had to be invoked once again in defense of the 2nd Amendment, a battle refought
in a manner of speaking, in McDonald v Chicago, where a black
man, the late Otis McDonald, had to go to all the way to the Supreme
court to plead his right to own a gun in the city of Chicago. McDonald
won. But Chicago, much like the southern Democrats
of the Reconstruction Era, is still spending taxpayer money to impede
the 2nd Amendment rights of good citizens. And as Johnson
makes clear, there is also no doubt that many gun control laws of the
last century-and-a-half were largely aimed at
blacks.
And back in the Reconstruction Era South, the 14th
Amendment, lawful authorities and the federal system were often a long
way away, especially at night in the countryside. And as some of
accounts documented
by Johnson reveal, when blacks resisted armed terrorists, it sometimes
it turned out after the sun rose that the bloodied attackers left behind
were in fact the local authorities—sheriffs and deputies.
Violence was often
lopsided. Early on in the days of the Underground Railroad blacks
generally had only single shot weapons while the slavers tended to have
the more modern repeating weapons. After the Emancipation
and the War, blacks sometimes won, sometimes lost and often hung on,
maintaining a sort of stasis made possible by the potential for
defensive gun use. Armed blacks could not be attacked with impunity.
The storied NAACP enters
the picture as a major player in legal cases involving armed
self-defense by blacks, defending (unsuccessfully) WWI veteran Sgt.
Edgar Caldwell for using his service revolver to kill a train
conductor and wound a motorman who had been trying to stomp him to
death after he resisted being thrown out of the white passenger
section. Johnson presents more cases than can be recounted here, some
virtually municipal in scale. In Elaine, Arkansas a white
deputy was shot dead after he fired into a group of Negro farmers,
veterans, who had formed a farmers union. In the ensuing violence, the
governor mobilized troops, deputies roamed the countryside, resulting in
5 white and 25 black casualties. Murder indictments
in the “scores” for the blacks were followed by kangaroo trials, some
only an hour long. Eventually, with NAACP help, at the SCOTUS level of
appeal the convictions were reversed. Justice Holmes justified the
reversal on the grounds that the trials were merely
an extension of mob violence. In Detroit, NAACP brought famous
litigator Clarence Darrow into the Ossian Sweet case. Sweet, a dentist,
along with friends and relatives, had been indicted for murder after a
white mob attacked the house that he had purchased
in an all white neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Threats had been
made and Sweet and friends armed themselves. Shots were fired and
afterward a white man lay dead. The prosecutor’s office tried to present
the case as incidence of armed Negroes firing
on a peaceful community. In court, Darrow pointed out that prosecutors
had called up a mob of eyewitnesses to testify there was no mob outside
the house. After an initial mistrial Sweet was eventually acquitted. A
compliment to Johnson as a scholar, being
myself very interested in 2nd Amendment issues and having
published extensively in this field, I had thought myself quite well
acquainted with the Sweet case, but in this book I learned much more.
Of course the big problem
to NAACP and black community leaders was balancing a non-violent
political movement with the needs of personal home and self-defense.
Non-violence wasn’t an effective political tactic for
the dead. But neither was retaliatory violence good for the movement.
The notion of armed aggressive black freedom fighters was more than
enough to incite an unwinnable race war, and at the least could reverse
progress and good will hard earned over the years.
Hence the public commitment of Civil Rights Movement leadership to
non-violence while privately their homes and sometimes their persons
bristled with guns. It was a balancing act between political symbolism
and survival. A movement of armed black men known
as the Deacons protected non-violent marchers and the homes of
community and movement leaders, all as unobtrusively as possible. When
during the era of the Black Panthers, the Deacons and other
organizational sympathizers morphed into a more militant movement,
the checkbooks of northern white liberals closed to them, and support
went to more moderate non-violent leaders.
In a time of threats,
church bombings and burnings, Martin Luther King applied for a concealed
carry permit and was turned down on the grounds that he had not
demonstrated need. This is how the old unreformed “may
issue” concealed carry licensing boards worked—back when boards had
total discretionary power, the concealed carry permit became a boon
granted to friends, cronies and brother-in- laws. Still, King was uneasy
about the political ramifications of guns, so he
stressed a low profile for his armed protectors. Another civil rights
activist packed her gun in a paper bag everywhere she went, people
thought it contained her lunch. Activists are quoted as stating that
non violent or not, there were guns everywhere in
the homes of movement leaders and members.
Back in the 19th
Century, journalist/social commentator and provocative black essayist
Ida B. Wells wrote: “The Winchester rifle should have a place of honor
in every black home. The more the Afro-American
yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged and
lynched.”
Unlike most professors
Johnson knows whereof he writes when it comes to firearms. In an apt
analogy he shows that the Winchester repeating level action rifle was
the “assault weapon” of its time, being capable of
a high rate of fire and easily reloadable. I know from personal
conversations with Professor Johnson in the context of academic
conferences (e.g., last year’s Second Amendment Symposium at Fordham Law
School on that island of antigun sentiment known as Manhattan)
that he owns and delights in an old Winchester .351 caliber rifle from
1907 or so. He enjoys showing antigun academic acquaintances that the
idea of a semiautomatic so-called assault rifle has been around for a
long time, and is not some new satanic invention
causing havoc on society, but has long been part of the healthy social
order. In the same way the Winchester rifle became a useful,
freedom-preserving part of the emergent social order of the South, the
Black tradition of arms. I may be attributing my own
construal of meaning to Professor Johnson’s work here, if so I
apologize, but you, dear reader, will get the idea. My point is that
Johnson is not one of the hoplophobic hysterics that one encounters so
frequently in academia. He is knowledgeable; his language
is restrained, objective; his interpretations buoyed by an abundance of
facts, documentation and experience.
Johnson’s book is
extremely well researched. A Professor at Fordham Law School, Johnson’s
scholarship is carefully anchored in citations. The depth of the
research is impressive. This is not the sort of book that
one takes in at a sitting. Its chapters and organization lend
themselves well to episodic reading, however. Overall, though, one
thing becomes certain: a commitment to non-violent political means and
peace does not equate with lying down and dying when it
comes to matters of self, life, home and family. Defense of home hearth
and family is the opposite of violence.
Johnson’s last chapter is
especially impressive. He faces down many of the current progressive
objections and myths concerning guns in private hands, even looking at
the troubling differences between black and white
homicide/victimizations. Recent and early 20th century
victimization and crime studies show rates of blacks as victims and
perpetrators at 10 times (or more) higher than the white population.
Modern academics and journalists tend blame this on
the NRA and evil gun manufacturers. Johnson more rationally attributes
the disproportion to a criminal “microculture,” even quoting W.E.B.
Dubois on the subject. One of the big negative effects of unjust,
broadly sweeping gun legislation is that it makes
it difficult or impossible for blacks to defend themselves against this
criminal microculture, the promise of imminence/omnipotence of the
progressive state, being so much nonsense. The police or the state
cannot defend: they can only appear after the fact.
We should recall the reason that Otis McDonald was forced to go to law
was so he could effectively defend self and family against Chicago gangs
in his own home and city.
Also dealt with and
dismissed is the myth that guns in the home are more of a risk to the
home owner than to invaders, a much cited myth based on a lopsided study
based on bad sampling and comparisons published
in the consistently hoplophobic New England Journal of Medicine.
Johnson also dispels the common myth that high numbers of guns are
correlated with high levels of gun violence, showing that the amazing
increases in gun ownership and owners in recent
years have not correlated with increases in crime, quite the reverse.
He sheds light of DGUs (Defensive Gun Uses), using a variety of survey
sources, that show most gun uses are non-violent, good citizens use guns
to deter but nor shoot predators. Johnson
attributes current antigun policies of black urban leaders to political
alliances with progressives, who provide a great many incentives and
blandishments to black communities in exchange for what are regarded as
reliable voting blocks for progressive causes.
He cites survey information that suggests current blacks are not as
antigun as some imagine, providing guns go to good people.
A final anecdote, not from
Johnson’s book, but which suggests some reasons for the disappearance
of the black tradition of arms under an educational and informational
system dominated by modern so-called progressive
values. A professor and lawyer of my acquaintance, a black man, well
educated and urbane, fairly affluent, returned recently with his family
to Atlanta to set in order the effects and property of his recently
deceased grandfather. In the home in a drawer
by the old man’s bed they discovered a revolver in a box along with
ammunition. It should be mentioned Atlanta had been, long ago, the scene
of one of the race riots discussed in Johnson’s book, wherein many
blacks armed themselves to resist attackers. My
acquaintance and his family were terrified and alarmed by the gun and
worried that it would go off or harm them in some way. They placed the
box with the gun in a plastic garbage bag and put it in the trashcan
behind the house, and called police. The police
removed the gun. A few hours later, it must have been a nice revolver
with an unsullied history, a police officer came back with a waiver the
professor could sign transferring the gun to the officer personally.
The professor did. So the revolver wasn’t wastefully
destroyed. The moral? You see here what progressive propaganda can
achieve in a generation or so. An item of utility, a means of freedom
from terror and coercion, an heirloom, was transformed into a symbol of
death and evil. As you can imagine, Dear Reader,
Johnson’s account will not be well received in some circles because it
says things that for some are unthinkable.
Johnson’s book is a blow against Orwellian history. A fine and illuminating book it is!
BAP
7 October 2014Source
Here is a link to the Amazon site.
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