Armed Self-Defense IS About Civil Rights


Never doubt it for a second
People certainly noticed the implications of the Thomas dissent in McDonald V. Chicago. This one is from Reason Magazine. Emphasis added.

This focus on African-American history left more than a few liberal commentators scratching their heads. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy—who recently said he would like to “knock every racist and homophobic tooth” out of the mouths of Tea Party activists—was shocked by the stirring words of the conservative justice. “This was no muttering from an Uncle Tom, as many black people have accused him of being,” Milloy wrote, perhaps alluding to his own previous unguarded thoughts about Thomas. “His advocacy for black self-defense is straight from the heart of Malcolm X.”

Had he followed Thomas’ career more carefully, Milloy would have discovered that the justice’s views stretch back even further than that. Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three.

Similarly, Mississippi doctor, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist T.R.M. Howard saw no reason to separate the struggle for racial equality from the case for armed self-defense. A founder of the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership and a longtime ally of the NAACP, Howard acted as unofficial head of security during the highly publicized murder trial that followed the death of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American savagely murdered in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Among other duties, Howard transported Till’s grieving mother, Ebony reporter Clyde Murdock, Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), and others who gathered to observe the trial to and from the courthouse each day in a heavily-armed caravan. Back at his large, lavishly provisioned home, Howard slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. Like Douglass before him, Howard understood all too well the deep ties between the white supremacist regime and a disarmed black populace.

Just in case you may have forgotten, I had a few things to say long before the case was decided.


Most importantly, let's not forget this classic piece by Clayton E. Cramer, The Racist Roots of Gun Control.

Read. Make up your own mind.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - July 12, 2010 at 11:06 AM  Tag


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