Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  2. These quotations are sourced and discussed in detail in chapter 1, chapter 7, and chapter 9.

  CHAPTER 1: BOUNDARY-LAND

  1. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (1999) at 57.

  2. Ibid., at 49.

  3. Ibid., at 1-2, 18-25, 49-50, 57; Christopher B. Strain, “Civil Rights & Self-Defense: The Fiction of Nonviolence, 1955-1968,” PhD dissertation, Univ. California, Berkley (2000) at 40.

  4. Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns (1962) at 46.

  5. Tyson, Radio Free, at 86.

  6. Ibid., at 87.

  7. Ibid., at 50-75, 79-88.

  8. Julian Mayfield, in James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972) at 167.

  9. Strain, Civil Rights, at 56; William Worthy, “Black Muslims NAACP Target: Raise Funds for Arms for Carolinian,” Baltimore Afro-American (July 22, 1961); Tyson, Radio Free, at 89, 137.

  10. Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) at 57.

  11. Tyson, Radio Free, at 138; Tim Hashaw, Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed Race America (2006) at 70-71.

  12. For discussion of defensive gun use, see Nicholas J. Johnson, “Firearms and the Black Community: An Assessment of the Modern Orthodoxy,” Connecticut L. Review (2013); Nicholas J. Johnson et al., Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (2012) and chapter 9 of this book.

  13. David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (2009) at 67-68; E. Franklin Frazier, “The Negro and Non-Resistance,” Crisis, March 1924, at 213-214, reprinted in Herbert Apkether, Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vol. 3 (1951) at 449-451, 451.

  14. Williams, at 62; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response (1988) at 459; Forman, at 175; Tyson, Radio Free, at 86-89, 137-65.

  15. “NAACP Leader Urges Violence,” New York Times, May 7, 1959.

  16. Carolina Times, January 5, 1960; News and Courier, May 7, 1959, clipping in box A333, group 3, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; Tyson, Radio Free, at 150.

  17. Telegram from NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins to Robert Williams, president of branch in Monroe, North Carolina, May 6, 1959, box A333, group 3, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress. Wilkins’s account is quoted in Julian Mayfield, “Challenge to Negro Leadership: The Case of Robert Williams,” Commentary (April 1961) at 299. See also Tyson, Radio Free, at 86-89, 137-65.

  18. Williams, Negroes with Guns, at 67. For full text of the resolutions, see Glocester B. Current, “Fiftieth Annual Convention,” in Crisis (August-September 1959) at 400-10.

  19. Both essays are printed in Southern Patriot 18, no. 2 (January 1960) at 3; edited versions of the essays appear in Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, edited by Clayborne Carson et al. (1991) at 110 -113. See also Williams, Negroes with Guns, at 12-15 (quoting Martin Luther King Jr.).

  20. Baltimore Afro-American, May 30, 1959; Ark. State Press, May 23, 1959; Ark. State Press, May 23, 1959; Southern Patriot 18, no. 2 (January 1960): 3; Southern Patriot 21 no. 2 (February 1963): 2; see also Tyson, Radio Free, at 163-164.

  21. For continuing support in Monroe, see Williams, Negroes with Guns, at 111; Strain, Civil Rights & Self-Defense, at 49. For support in the branches, see Brooklyn Branch to Roy Wilkins, May 8, 1959, and Flint Michigan Branch Resolution to the National Board NAACP, May 24, 1959, box 2, CCRI Papers; Charles J. Adams to Roy Wilkins, May 8, 1959, box A 333, group 3, NAACP Papers. Adams wrote to Wilkins, “I support Williams one million percent. . . . Why can’t we do like the Indians did down in Carolina last year?”; the Flint Michigan Branch demanded Williams’s “immediate reinstatement.” Tyson, Radio Free, at 156-57.

  22. John McCray, “There’s Nothing New about It,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 23, 1959.

  23. Roy Wilkins, The Single Issue in the Robert Williams Case, box A333, group 3, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; Address of Roy Wilkins, Freedom Fund Dinner of the Chicago Branch, Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Ill., June 12, 1959.

  24. Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (1982) at 265; Meet the Press transcript, July 16, 1967, at 9.

  CHAPTER 2: FOUNDATION

  1. “The True Remedy for the Fugitive Slave,” Frederick Douglass Paper, June 9, 1854, reprinted in John R. McKivigan and Heather L. Kaufman, In the Words of Frederick Douglass: Quotations from Liberty’s Champion (2012) at 111.

  2. Robin Santos Doak, Slave Rebellions (2006) at 16; Enrico Dal Lago, Constantina Katsari, Slave Systems: Ancient And Modern (2008) at 249; Ella Forbes, But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana Pennsylvania Resistance (1998) at 137.

  3. Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture and Identity Formation in Early America (2007) at 4-5; Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South 1817–80 (1998) at 11; Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1776 (1974) at 150-151; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974); Harriet C. Frazier, Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773–1865 (2001).

  4. Greenberg, at 74, 138-139.

  5. Ibid., at 129.

  6. The account here is detailed in Frederick Douglass, The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, reprinted in Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings (1984) at 26-56, 68-82. See also William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (1991) at 8, 13, 43.

  7. Greenberg, at 74.

  8. Harriet C. Fraizer, Slavery and Crime in Missouri 1773 to 1865 (2001) at 197, 201, 204-205; Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) at 90.

  9. Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self Reconstruction in the South 1865–1867 (1985) at 188.

  10. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857).

  11. McFeely, at 5, 8.

  12. Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984) at 188; Frederick Douglass, Not Afraid to Die, reprinted in Ronald T. Takaki, Violence in the Black Imagination (1993) at 17-35.

  13. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (2010) at 25-27, 32, 95; Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (2005) at 47-51; Robert C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (1883) at 26-29.

  14. Nicholas J. Johnson, David Kopel, George Mocsary, and Michael O’Shea, Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (2012) at 114.

  15. Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, at 9-10, 25, 29-34.

  16. Nicholas J. Johnson, Clayton Cramer, and George Mocsary, “‘This Right Is Not Allowed by Governments That Are Afraid of the People’: The Public Meaning of the Second Amendment When the Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified,” 17 George Mason Law Review (2010) at 853.

  17. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (2004) at 46; Clifton Paisley, The Red Hills Florida 1528–1865 (1989) at 134; Harrold, at 129-130.

  18. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (2005) at 84.

  19. Leon Litwack, Been in the in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979) at 104.

  20. Harrold, at 129-130.

  21. Ibid., at 131, 177.

  22. Elijah P. Marrs, Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs (1885) at 17-20, 131, 177.

  23. These findings are discussed at length in chapter 9.

  24. William Loren Katz, The Black West (2005) at 85; Keith P Griffler, Frontline of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (2004) at 62; Francis Fredric, Escaped Slave, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky (2010) at 86; Harrold, at 131, 179.

  25. John P. Parker, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (Stuart S. Sprague, ed., 1996) at 119, 118-121.

  26. Katz, Black West, at 277.

  27. William St
ill, Still’s Underground Railroad Records, with a Life of the Author (1872) at 124-126; George Hendrick, ed., Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad (2004) at 148-155.

  28. Still, at 124-126; Hendrick, at 148-155.

  29. Still, at 48-51.

  30. Harrold, at 46, 62.

  31. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (1999) at 367.

  32. Harrold, at 10, 15, 21-22.

  33. Ibid., at 135, 139 -143, 155.

  34. “Unconstitutional Laws of Ohio,” Liberator, April 6, 1838, at 53; Johnson et al. Public Meaning, at 838.

  35. Lysander Spooner, “The Fugitive Slave Bill,” Liberator, January 3, 1851, at 1.

  36. “The New England Antislavery Convention,” Liberator, June 3, 1853, at 23; Johnson et al., Public Meaning, at 840.

  37. Forman, at 376.

  38. Harrold, at 101-102, 109.

  39. Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (2004) at 54.

  40. Harrold, at 102.

  41. Ibid., at 103, 111.

  42. Ibid., at 98.

  43. Ibid., at 177-178.

  44. Ibid., at 136.

  45. Ibid., at 150- 153, 156- 157, 181.

  46. Katz, Black West, at 48-52, 63-64.

  47. Forbes, at 131-133, 137, 139-140.

  48. Earl Ofari, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (1972) at 43.

  49. Forbes, at 138.

  50. Ofari, at 44; Phillip Foner, Frederick Douglass (1964) at 138.

  51. Liberator, September 8, 1843.

  52. Ofari, at 38-39; Liberator, December 3, 1843.

  53. Forbes, at 134; Liberator, September 26, 1851.

  54. Jermaine W. Loguen, The Reverend J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Free Man (1968) at 393-394.

  55. Forbes, at 109-110.

  56. Ibid., at 111, 119, 123; William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” Atlantic Monthly, February 17, 1866, at 281.

  57. Forbes, at 124, 129; Liberator, November 1, 1850.

  58. William J. Simmons, Henry McNeal Turner, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887) at 1011.

  59. Forbes, at 127.

  60. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, at 196-197.

  61. Ofari, at 44, 61; Frederick Douglass Paper, August 20, 1852; “Impartial Citizen,” Liberator, October 11, 1850.

  62. Forbes, at 120-121, 126.

  63. Parker’s account, The Freedman’s Story, was published in 1866 in the Atlantic Monthly. Dispute about whether this is entirely Parker’s work stems from doubts about when and how well he learned to read and write. The work also reflects a level of bravado that cautions skepticism.

  64. Forbes, at 296.

  65. Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851 (1974) at 232; Forbes, at 296; Harrold, at 153-154.

  66. Johathan Katz, at 234-236; Forbes, at 143-144.

  67. Forbes, at 144.

  68. Ibid., at 145.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ofari, at 45; Liberator, March 12, 1858.

  71. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself (1892) at 281-282; Johathan Katz, at 261.

  CHAPTER 3: PROMISE AND BREACH

  1. Martin B. Pasternak, “Rise Now and Fly to Arms: The Life of Henry Highland Garnet,” PhD dissertation Univ. Mass. (1981) at xi.

  2. Joel Schor, Henry Hyland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (1977) at 12.

  3. Ibid., at 4-5, 15.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (2005) at 99, 301.

  6. Joseph Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (1990) at 122, 129-130, 135.

  7. Ibid., at 153, 161.

  8. David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (2012) at 48; Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (2011); Adam Goodheart, “To Have a Revolver,” Opinionator (blog), Opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com.

  9. Cecelski, at 75.

  10. Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Oxford 1998) at 5-8.

  11. Cecelski, at 64-66, 75, 78, 119.

  12. Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 (1998) at 85.

  13. Cecelski, at 62, 76, 80-82, 92, 96, 118-119.

  14. Glatthaar, at 157-158. Spelling, capitalization, and spacing in this letter have been reproduced to reflect the original.

  15. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (2003); Cecelski, at 71.

  16. Schecter, at 107, 205, 289.

  17. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (1970) at 132.

  18. Garnet apparently decided not to engage the New York rioters, on the rationale that he would best serve the community by surviving to care for the injured survivors. Schecter, at 154; Cecelski, at 140.

  19. Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, at 93.

  20. Richard M. Reid, Freedom for Themselves (2008) at 255; Stephen Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) at 133.

  21. Reid, at 258, 284; Roberta Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen (1985) at 130-133; State v. Joiner (1850).

  22. William McKee Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (1995) at 23.

  23. Evans, at 64.

  24. Reid, at 273-274.

  25. Cecelski, at 182-183.

  26. Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, at 94.

  27. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979) at 269.

  28. Ibid., at 208.

  29. Ibid. at 102, 114, 274, 428, 439.

  30. Stephen P. Halbrook, Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866–1876 (1998) at 2, 12.

  31. Nicholas Johnson, David Kopel, George Mocsary, and Michael O’Shea, Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (2012) at 290-292.

  32. Clayton Cramer, Nicholas Johnson, and George Mocsary, “This Right Is Not Allowed by Governments That Are Afraid of the People: The Public Meaning of the Second Amendment When the Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified,” 17 George Mason Law Review (2010) at 854; Edward McPhearson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (1875) at 118.

  33. Halbrook, at 2, 5, 27.

  34. Hahn, at 267.

  35. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 854; “Right To Bear Arms,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 24, 1866, at 1-2.

  36. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 858; Letter to the Editor, Loyal Georgian (Augusta), February 3, 1866, at 3.

  37. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 856; 2 Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840 through 1865, at 302 (Foner and Walker edition 1980).

  38. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 858; “Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,” 39th Cong. 1st Sess. 219 (1866); Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 371 (1866).

  39. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 856-859; “Joint Committee on Reconstruction,” 39th Cong., “Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,” 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 140, 219 (1866).

  40. Halbrook, at 110-111; Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1996 (March 19, 1868); House Executive Document 329, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1868).

  41. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 859; Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1033-34 (1866).

  42. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 860-861; Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1848 (1868).

  43. Kenneth W. Howell, Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865–1874 (2012) at 296.

  44. Halbrook, at 97; Donald G. Nieman, �
��African-American Communities, Politics, and Justice: Washington County Texas, 1865–1890,” in Christopher Waldrep and Donald Nieman, Local Matters: Race Crime and Justice in the 19th Century South (2011) at 204, 205.

  45. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule and “Legal Lynchings” (1990) at 46.

  46. Elijah Marrs, Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P Marrs (1885) at 74-75.

  47. Ibid. at 78, 87, 89-90.

  48. Halbrook, at 16; “Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, HR,” Report number 30, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 110, 112, 658.

  49. Halbrook, at 18, 22, 34, 183.

  50. Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, at 10, 94, 123, 140-141.

  51. Hahn, at 80.

  52. Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, at 123, 137.

  53. Johnson et al., “Public Meaning,” at 853; Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie after the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South, during the 12 Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (1906) at 263-78; Dan Carter, When the War Was Over (1985) at 197.

  54. Reid, at 310-311.

  55. Halbook, at 77, 78; “President Johnson Asks Advice in Colored Militia Case,” Press, Philadelphia, PA, November 8, 1867, at 1; “Concerning the Disbandment of the Freedman’s Military Organizations,” Press, Philadelphia, PA, November 7, 1867, at 1.

  56. Reid, at 310-311; Evans, at 98-102.

  57. Hahn, at 223.

  58. Ibid., at 174-177, 181, 186, 274-275, 281.

  59. Michael W. Fitzgerald, “Extralegal Violence and the Planter Class: The Ku Klux Klan in the Alabama Black Belt during Reconstruction,” in Christopher Waldrep and Donald Nieman, Local Matters: Race Crime and Justice in the 19th Century South (2011) at 156-169.

  60. Hahn, at, 90, 289-292.

  61. Otis A. Singletary, Negro Militias and Reconstruction (1984) at 8-13; Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 2nd Sess. at 217.

  62. Singletary, at 8-13.

  63. Evans, at 71, 99; Singletary, at 8-13.

  64. Evans, at 80-81, 84-85, 101-102.

  65. Cecelski, at 202, 204.

  66. Halbrook, at 121; House of Representatives Report Number 22, February 1, 1871, at 219, 222.

  67. Halbrook, at 126-128, 146.

  68. Donald G. Nieman, “African-American Communities, Politics, and Justice: Washington County Texas, 1865–1890,” in Christopher Waldrep and Donald Nieman, Local Matters: Race Crime and Justice in the 19th Century South (2011) at 212.