Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  104. Wendt, Spirit, at 118; Rains, Soul, at 266; Studs Terkel, “Hartman Turnbow: The Diploma,” in American Dreams Lost and Found (1980) at 192.

  105. Raines, Soul, at 265.

  106. Robert Cooper, in Youth of the Rural Organizing Cultural Center, at 93-94.

  107. Hill, Deacons, at 104; Tuscaloosa News, February 20, 2000 (Bolden interview).

  108. Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1998) at 173.

  109. Dittmer, Local People, at 286.

  110. Raines, Soul, at 267.

  111. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1985) at 376.

  112. Raines, Soul, at 267.

  113. Dittmer, Local People, at 254.

  114. Vanderbilt Roby, in Youth of the Rural Organizing Cultural Center, at 55.

  115. Bee Jenkins, in Youth of the Rural Organizing Cultural Center, at 139.

  116. Anger Winson Gates Hudson was commonly known as Winson Hudson. References here are to Winson Hudson or Hudson or Winson.

  117. Winson Hudson, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (2002) at 8-9.

  118. Hudson, at 58-59.

  119. Ibid.

  120. Hudson, Harmony, at 2, 51-52, 58- 59, 88.

  121. Dittmer, Local People; Barbara Summers, I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (1989) at 160.

  122. Hudson, Harmony, at 77.

  123. Alice Lake, “Last Summer in Mississippi,” Redbook Magazine, November 1964, reprinted in Library of America, Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1963–1973 (2003) at 112.

  124. Wendt, Spirit, at 120.

  125. Hudson, Harmony, at 28.

  126. John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998) at 48-49.

  127. Wendt, Spirit, at 111, 113; Lewis, Walking, at 254-55.

  128. Wendt, Spirit, at 123; “Shocking Notes on Mississippi Brutality,” Jet, July 2, 1964 at 6.

  129. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972) at 375; Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (1988) at 32; Claiborne Carson, In the Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1995) at 123; Nicholas von Hoffman, Mississippi Notebook (1964) at 95.

  130. Lewis, Walking, at 188-201; Wendt, Spirit, at 124; William Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1994) at 107.

  131. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (1976) at 212.

  132. Wendt, Spirit, at 123-124; Rustin, “Nonviolence on Trial,” Fellowship Magazine (July 1964) at 5.

  133. SCLC (pronounced “S Cee L Cee”) is the common reference to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

  134. Emily Stoper, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Growth of Radicalism in a Civil Rights Organization (1989) at 29.

  135. Wendt, Spirit, at 117; Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia (1977) at 114, 210; Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (1973) at 88, 90, 210.

  136. Strain, “Civil Rights, at 155-156.

  137. Lake, “Last Summer,” at 113.

  138. Wendt, Spirit, at 112; Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (1987) at 318.

  139. King, Freedom Song, at 318.

  140. Wendt, Spirit, at 109; Baltimore Afro-American, March 6, 1965; Umoja, “Eye,” at 100.

  141. Rains, Soul, at 380; Payne, Light of Freedom, at 121; Umoja, We Will Shoot Back (2013) at 59.

  142. Umoja, “Eye,” at 103-104.

  143. Dittmer, Local People, at 150-151; Foreman, Black Revolutionaries, at 296; Payne, Light of Freedom, at 168-169.

  144. Payne, Light of Freedom, at 208-209.

  145. Ibid., at 213-214; Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (1988) at 279.

  146. Austry Kirklin, in Youth of the Rural Organizing Cultural Center, at 39.

  147. Evers, at 216.

  148. Sugarman, Stranger, at 75.

  149. Tyson, Radio Free, at 251-252.

  150. Ibid., at 193, 240, 250-255.

  151. Ibid., at 259.

  152. Ibid., at 271-272.

  153. Ibid., at 256-270.

  154. Ibid., at 278-285; Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 64.

  155. Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 225-227; Andrew Young, in Raines, Soul, at 425.

  156. Raines, Soul, at 38. (The reference to insurance “mens” is in the original.)

  157. Ibid., at 38, 48-49; Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 227.

  158. Stephen B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, at 89-90; Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 6.

  159. Oates, at 90.

  160. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1959) at 131; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, at 60-62; Wendt, Spirit, at 8.

  161. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 7-8; Nicholas J. Johnson, “A Second Amendment Moment: The Constitutional Politics of Gun Control,” 71 Brooklyn L. Rev. 715-796 (2005).

  162. Wendt, Spirit, at 9; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, at 62; Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 229.

  163. Wendt, Spirit, at 9; Bayard Rustin, “Montgomery Diary,” 1 Liberation April 1956, at 7-8; Raines, Soul, at 53; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1995) at 25.

  164. Stewart Burns, Day Break of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1997) at 22-23 (italics added).

  165. Wendt, Sprit, at 24; Raines, Soul, at 53; Fairclough, Redeem the Soul of America, at 25.

  166. Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 260, 326.

  167. Simone Wendt, “Urge People Not to Carry Guns: Armed Self Defense in the Louisiana Civil Rights Movement and the Radicalization of the Congress of Racial Equality,” 45 Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 261-286 (2004) at 281.

  168. Roy Reed, “Meredith Regrets He Was Not Armed,” New York Times, June 8, 1966; James H. Meredith, “Big Changes Are Coming,” Saturday Evening Post, August 13, 1966, at 23-27; Wendt, Spirit, at 13; “He Shot Me Like . . . a God Damn Rabbit,” Newsweek, June 20, 1966, at 30.

  169. Chester Higgins, “Meredith’s Threat to Arm Not Answer, Says Dr. King,” Jet June 23, 1966, at 17.

  170. Cleveland Sellers, in Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, at 284-286.

  171. Hill, Deacons, at 246; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, at 477; Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, at 397-398; Sellers, River of No Return, at 162.

  172. Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, at 287.

  173. Evers, at 214.

  174. Hill, Deacons, at 246; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, at 477; Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, at 397-398, Sellers, River of No Return, at 162, 166; Raines, Soul, at 422; Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, at 281-295.

  175. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 137; “Marchers Upset by Apathy,” New York Times, June 14, 1966, at 19.

  176. Wendt, Spirit, at 137; New York Times, June 14, 1966; “Earnest Thomas, Deacons,” New York Times, June 10, 1966; Hill, Deacons, at 10.

  177. Wendt, “Urge the People,” at 280; Margaret Long, “Black Power in the Black Belt,” Progressive, October 1966, at 21.

  178. New York Times, June 21, 1966; Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) at 30; Joanne Grant says that SNCC staffer Willie Ricks was actually the first to shout the phrase from the crowd and Carmichael took it from there. Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1998) at 193; Dittmer, Local People, at 396.

  179. Wendt, “Urge the People,” at 280; interview with James Farmer, WABC-TV, April 25, 1965 (CORE Papers); Hill, Deacons, at 17. (Italics added.)

  180. Wendt, “Urge the People,” at 280.

  181. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 125; James Farmer, “Deacons for Defense,” Amsterdam News, July 1965, at 15.

  182. James J. Farmer, “A Night of Terror in Plaquemine, Louisiana” (1963), reprinted in Henry Steele Commager, The Struggle for Racial Equality (1972) at 134-144.

  183. Wendt, Spirit, at 109; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) at 303, 3
31.

  184. Moody, at 333-365.

  185. Wendt, “Urge People,” at 277-278; Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 199; Fred Powerledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (1991) at 573; Wendt, Spirit, at 140; Neil A. Maxwell, “Militancy on the March,” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1966.

  186. Wendt, “Urge People,” at 279-282.

  187. Ibid., at 279; James Farmer, Freedom When? (1965) at 65.

  188. Ibid., at 281-85; Tyson, Radio Free, at 290-91; Lester A. Sobel, Civil Rights 1960–66 (1967) at 376.

  189. Wendt, Spirit, at 141; New York Times, June 10, 1966. Harlem branch president and future CORE chairman Roy Innis would lose a son to gun violence and serve on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association.

  190. Wendt, Spirit, at 141.

  191. Hill, Deacons, at 2, 134-135.

  192. Ibid., at 25, 35-39, 43-45; Wendt, Spirit, at 142.

  193. Ibid., at 40.

  194. Ibid., at 45, 50, 55.

  195. Ibid., at 56-57, 62; New York Times, February 21, 1965.

  196. Hill, Deacons, at 76-77.

  197. Ibid., at 69, 108- 109.

  198. Ibid., at 109.

  199. Ibid., at 93-94, 109-110.

  200. Raines, Soul, at 418; Hill, Deacons, at 97- 98, 105, 107.

  201. New York Post, April 8, 1965; “Bogalusa Riflemen Fight off KKK Attack,” Jet, April 22, 1965, at 5; Hill, Deacons, at 118-119.

  202. Hill, Deacons, at 119, 128; Louisiana Weekly, May 30, 1965; Bogalusa Daily News, May 24, 1965.

  203. Hill, Deacons, at 133; New York Times, June 6, 1965; Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 121; Grant, Black Protest, at 358; “Deacons Organize Chicago Chapter,” New York Times, April 6, 1966 at 29.

  204. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 141; Grant, Black Protest, at 361. For nonshooting defensive gun uses, see chapter 9.

  205. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 126; Fred L. Zimmerman, “Race and Violence: More Dixie Negroes Buy Arms to Retaliate against White Attacks,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1965, at 1, 15.

  206. Hill, Deacons, at 134-135; Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1965.

  207. Shana Alexander, “Visit Bogalusa and You Will Look for Me,” Life, July 2, 1965 at 28.

  208. Hill, Deacons, at 138-139.

  209. Ibid., at 136-138.

  210. “CORE Shifts to Politics: Tackles Media Money Problem,” Jet, July 1965, at 8-9; Hill, Deacons, at 140-142.

  211. Zimmerman, “Race and Violence”; Hill, Deacons, at 142-143. Lance Hill conducted numerous personal interviews of Deacons members in his definitive work on the group. Hill reports that Henry Austin was not prosecuted for the shooting of Alton Crowe. Local authorities, anxious to avoid further confrontation, apparently determined not to prosecute Austin if he would leave town. Austin shows up in New Orleans shortly after the shooting and remained active in the Deacons chapter there. Hill, Deacons, at 213, 220, 240, 253. Communications with Lance Hill, July 2013.

  212. Hill, Deacons, at 144.

  213. “Investigative Report, Deacons for Defense and Justice,” November 22, 1966, FBI Files citied in Hill, Deacons, at 144, 231-232; Louisiana Weekly, July 17, 1965; Hill, Deacons, at 144, 231-232.

  214. “The Deacons,” Newsweek, August 2, 1965, at 28-29; Louis Robinson and Charles Brown, “Negro Most Feared by Whites,” Jet, July 15, 1965, at 14-17.

  215. “Guns, Pickets Down: Talks Begin in Bogalusa Racial Crisis,” Jet, June 24, 1965; “Bogalusa Riflemen Fight off KKK Attack,” Jet, April 22, 1965, at 5; “Denied Deacons Shot Bogalusa White Youth,” Jet, July 22, 1965, at 5; New Orleans Times Picayune, July 15, 1965; Bogalusa Daily News, July 15, 1965; Hill, Deacons, at 149, 167.

  216. Hill, Deacons, at 193.

  217. Ibid., at 211, 218-224; New York Times, September 5, 1967.

  CHAPTER 8: PIVOT

  1. Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., “Handgun Control: Constitutional and Critically Needed,” 8 N. C. Cent. L. J. (1976) at 189; District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).

  2. Roy Wilkins, The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins: Standing Fast (1963) at 341; Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special (1975) at 23; Kellogg v. City of Gary, 562 N.E.2d 685, 688 (Ind. 1990). Rep. Major Owens (D–Brooklyn, NY) proposed repeal of the Second Amendment at 102d Cong. 2nd Sess., H.J. Res. 438; 139 Cong. Rec. H9088 at H9094, Nov. 10, 1993; Illinois congressman Bobby Rush proposed gun confiscation at Evan Osnos, “Bobby Rush; Democrat, U.S. House of Representatives,” Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1999; Archer v. Arms Technology 669 N.W.2d 845, 854–55 (Mich. Ct. App. 2003).

  3. “Rev. Jesse Jackson Arrested at Gun Shop Protest,” Associated Press, Sunday, June 24, 2007; NAACP v. AccuSport, Inc.; Michael B. de Leeuw, “Ready, Aim, Fire? District of Columbia v. Heller and Communities of Color,” Harv. Blackletter L. J. (2009) at 133, 137.

  4. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (1988) at 90; Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (1982) at 153-154, 183-185.

  5. Akinyele O. Umoja, “The Ballot and the Bullet: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” 29 Journal of Black Studies (1999) at 558, 568.

  6. Ibid., at 568.

  7. Michael Levine, African Americans and Civil Rights: From 1619 to the Present (1996) at 198-208. See also Umoja, at 563.

  8. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (1982) at 183. “We Love Everybody Who Loves Us,” youtube.com/watch?v=Cz3isgUZe5Y, uploaded April 9, 2007, by “Malcolm X,” http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/; “The Complete Malcolm X.”

  9. This conflation was evident in Malcolm X’s declaration that “the biggest criminal against whom Blacks need to defend themselves [was] Uncle Sam.” Ultimate assessment of Malcolm X is complicated by the evident shift in his outlook after his pilgrimage to Mecca. After a fiery speech in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm whispered to Coretta King, “will you tell Dr. King that I’m sorry I won’t get to see him? I had planned to visit him in jail, but I have to leave. I want him to know that I didn’t come to make his job more difficult. I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was, that they would be willing to listen to Dr. King.” Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (1990) at 221-222.

  10. Simon Wendt, “The New Black Power History, Protection or Path Toward Revolution? Black Power and Self-Defense,” Souls, October-December 2007, at 320, 328.

  11. Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, at 327-328, 515- 516.

  12. Strain, “Civil Rights & Self-Defense: The Fiction of Nonviolence, 1955–1968,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkley (2000) at 164; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1968) at 71, 116-117.

  13. Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 172; Don Cox, in “The Black Panther Party: Its Origin and Development as Reflected in Its Official Weekly Newspaper The Black Panther Black Community News Service,” Staff Study by the Committee on Internal Security, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, 91st Congress, Second Session, October 6, 1971 at page 26.

  14. Kenneth O’Reily, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (1989) at 321.

  15. Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 325; Strain, “Civil Rights,” at 215.

  16. Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (1994).

  17. Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 314; Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, at 298.

  18. Some people who were there say it was SNCC staffer Willie Ricks who said it first, but one account indicates that it was already sufficiently in use that to Ricks’s shouted question “What do you want?” the crowd was already primed to demand “Black Power!” Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1999) at 193.

  19. Meet the Press transcript, August 21, 1966, at 10- 26.

  20. Wendt, Spirit, at 145; Herbert Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream 1954–1970 (1988) at 8
4; Manfred Berg, “Black Power: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Resurgence of Black Nationalism during the 1960s,” in The American Nation-National Identity-Nationalism (Knud Krakau, ed., 1997) at 235-262. (“Almost quadrupling its income between 1966 and 1968, the NAACP undoubtedly benefited from its adamant opposition to the new slogan.”) Id. at 239.

  21. Wilkins, Standing Fast, at 316.

  22. Ibid., at 317.

  23. Roy Wilkins, “Whither Black Power,” Crisis, August-September, 1966, at 353- 354; Wendt, Spirit, at 141-146.

  24. Wendt, Spirit, at 144; Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) at 54; David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (2004) at 490.

  25. Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998) at 334.

  26. Sherrill, at 283-295; Nicholas J. Johnson et al., Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (2012) at 731.

  27. Meet the Press, Sunday, July 16, 1967, at 9; Sherrill, at 283-295.

  28. Michael L. Levine, African Americans and Civil Rights: From 1619 to the Present (1996) at 193, 211; “Progress Report 1967: Political Victories Climax Year of Strife and Explosion in Nations Black Ghettos,” Ebony, January 1968 at 118-122; Charles Evers, Have no Fear: The Charles Evers Story (1996) at 241-243, 256, 263-264. Coleman Young of Detroit was an outlier, declaring “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, and where you have vigilantes practicing Ku Klux Klan in the wilderness with automatic weapons.” Bill McGraw, The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young (2005) at 29.

  29. See, for example, the incidents recorded by the Southern Poverty Law Center at http://www.splcenter.org/get-involved/stand-strong-against-hate.

  30. Nicholas J. Johnson, “Self Defense,” J. L. Econ. & Pol’y (2006) at 187. Nicholas J. Johnson, “Principles and Passions, the Intersection of Abortion and Gun Rights,” 50 Rutgers L. Rev. (1997) at 97-197.

  31. I address the objection that opposition to gun control is the cause of this government failure in Nicholas J. Johnson, “Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem,” 43 Wake Forest L. Rev. (2008) at 837.