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es and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
Author(s): Nicholas Johnson (Author)
- Publisher: Prometheus
- Publication Date: 14 Jan. 2014
- Language: English
- Print length: 384 pages
- ISBN-10: 161614839X
- ISBN-13: 9781616148393
Book Description
Nicholas Johnson points out that this story has been submerged because it is hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence during the civil rights era. His book, however, resolves that tension by showing how the black tradition of arms maintained and demanded a critical distinction between private self-defense and political violence.
Johnson also addresses the unavoidable issue of young black men with guns and the toll that gun violence takes on many in the inner city. He shows how complicated this issue is by highlighting the surprising diversity of views on gun ownership in the black community. In fact, recent Supreme Court affirmations of the right to bear arms resulted from cases led by black plaintiffs.
Surprising and informative, this well-researched book strips away many stock assumptions of conventional wisdom on the issue of guns and the black freedom struggle.
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Adam Winkler, professor of law, UCLA School of Law, author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America
“With
Negroes and the Gun, Nicholas Johnson has provided a definitive and compelling history of the importance of arms for a people who have not been able to rely on the state for protection. This is must-reading for those who are interested in the history of race in America and in the enduring controversy over the right to bear arms.”—Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and professor of history and sociology, the George Washington University, and author of
The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere“Race has always been part of the unspoken motive for gun control in the United States. Johnson provides the best, most thorough history of the topic, telling the story mainly from the perspective and voices of blacks themselves. Shattering the myth of black passivity in the face of violent racism, the book is full of inspiring stories of genuine American heroes—some of them famous and many who were not—who used their Second Amendment rights to defend the civil rights of their people. Never shying away from the hardest questions, Johnson addresses the moral and practical complexities of armed self-defense, past and present. A major contribution to cultural studies and to the history of race in America.”
—David B. Kopel, research director, Independence Institute, Denver, Colorado
“Johnson opens a window on the increasingly airless and ever more heated dispute over the Second Amendment by examining blacks’ ambiguous relationship with guns over the centuries. He demonstrates that the right to armed self-defense was critical to saving black lives and livelihoods when confronted by violent hostility. This
remarkable book remembers for us a long-forgotten, or possibly selectively forgotten, black tradition of arms—one too often overlooked in current debates over civil rights and gun legislation.”—Alexander Rose, author of
American Rifle: A Biography“A fascinating and subtle history of the black tradition of armed self-defense. Carefully weaving social with political history from slave times to the present, Johnson explores the complex relation between this legitimate tradition and the occasional fruitless temptation of armed political resistance to oppression. He concludes with a strong argument for restoring the legitimate tradition even in the face of its rejection by the black political establishment and the inescapable reality that blacks are very disproportionately found among the perpetrators and victims of gun violence today. Provocative and illuminating.”
—Nelson Lund, University Professor, George Mason University School of Law
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
NEGROES AND THE GUN
THE BLACK TRADITION OF ARMS
By NICHOLAS JOHNSON
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2014 Nicholas Johnson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-839-3
Contents
Acknowledgments, 9,
Author's Note, 11,
Introduction, 13,
1. Boundary-Land, 17,
2. Foundation, 31,
3. Promise and Breach, 69,
4. Nadir, 105,
5. Crisis, 151,
6. Leonidas, 181,
7. Freedom Fight, 209,
8. Pivot, 285,
9. The Black Tradition of Arms and the Modern Orthodoxy, 297,
Notes, 319,
Select Bibliography, 355,
Index, 365,
CHAPTER 1
BOUNDARY-LAND
Robert Williams returned home from the army in the spring of 1946to the same bitter irony that had confronted countless black veteransbefore him. They shed blood to protect democracy abroad, and bled again underracial apartheid at home.
Monroe, North Carolina, remained much the same as when Williams was a boyand witnessed a scene of petty brutality that confirmed what it meant to be on thewrong side of the color line. Turning the corner toward the courthouse, he steppedinto the scene of a burly white cop arresting a woman in a fashion that captured thestatus of Negroes across the South. The man with a badge was "Big Jesse" Helms Sr.,father of the future United States senator. For the rest of his life, Williams carriedthe image of Big Jesse flattening that woman with a sock to the jaw, and then draggingher off to jail with her dress up over her head and screaming as the concretesinged her back and thighs. As an old man, Williams the revolutionary—leaning ona cane, sporting a big, grey afro—would talk like it was yesterday about the laughterof the white bystanders and how the cluster of black courthouse loiterers hung theirheads and scurried away.
The courthouse loiterers represented a particular stripe of man. Some would saythat Robert Williams was a different kind of man. Maybe so. But more importantis that Robert Williams was not alone. He is an exemplar, but he was not unusual.He was part of a long tradition of black men and women who thought it just andnatural to answer aggression with corresponding force. They kept and carried gunsand believed in self-defense as a fundamental right. Their story is obscured by thepopular narrative of the nonviolent civil-rights movement. But alongside that narrative,deep in the culture, is a rich vein of grit and steel. Robert Williams was heirto that tradition. His bloodline was thick with it.
Williams's early experiences confirmed the privilege of white skin, but that didnot cow him. Even though his people were no match for the power of the state andthe culture of Jim Crow, when pushed to the wall, they bucked up and fought back.There is a hint of this in the Williams clan back as far as grandfather Sikes. Over thecourse of his life, Sikes Williams was a slave, a farmer, a reconstruction newspapereditor, a perpetual optimist, and finally, always, a realist. In the middle of a hostileenvironment, with powerful reasons to despair, Sikes Williams worked hard andhoped for the best for himself and his family. He also understood his responsibilityin that moment where his next breath or the safety of those he loved was threatenedby imminent violence. One of Robert's prized possessions was a rifle that, accordingto family lore, had been used by Sikes Williams in matters of life or death.
Grandpa Sikes was a hero of Robert's imagination. But the firsthand confirmationof the Williams family backbone came in another childhood episode, whenword spread that a mob was forming to lynch a Negro who had fought with police.Rumor circulated that in addition to dragging the man from his cell for a hangingor burning, the mob also was planning to run some black folk out of town. The oldpeople, and some young ones, who had witnessed the terror of the lynch mob, hidor prepared to flee.
Williams's father, "Daddy John" heard the rumors too. But when it was timeto head out for work on the graveyard shift at the mill, he picked up his lunch pailand left the house as usual. The only difference this time was, before stepping outthe door, he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his overalls. Fortunately, neither thelynching nor the chasing came that night. But Robert never forgot his father's steelin that environment of fear and carried with him the image of that pistol, slippedquietly into the overalls pocket of a man who was not looking for trouble.
Later, when Robert Williams became an inflammatory figure, white peoplewould say he should be more like his father, someone they considered a good Negrowho kept his place. Robert knew the only difference between them was that DaddyJohn had the luck never to face a threat that would have turned him into a badNegro with a gun. While the casual observer might take his kindness for weakness,even as an old man, Daddy John thanked his luck and still prepared for the worst."Always the shotgun was there," Robert remembered, "it was always loaded and itwas always at the door. And that was the tradition."
Robert Williams was honorably discharged from the service, but only barelyso. He served at least one stint in the brig for insubordination, or, in his words,"refusing to be a nigger." Back home, he faced a similar problem. Monroe in 1946was Klan territory. And it was not long before the insubordinate soldier was in conflictwith the Invisible Empire.
Bennie Montgomery was Williams's childhood friend. Bennie was woundedin the Battle of the Bulge and discharged with a metal plate in his head. He wasnever really the same after that. Out of the service, Bennie cycled quickly back tohis ordained place in the Jim Crow South—into the fields, chopping and shoveling.Home only a few months, he got into a scrap with his white employer. With thepleasures of Saturday night on his mind, Bennie approached the boss around noonand asked for his wages. Workers were always paid at the end of the day, and Bennieknew it. The boss rewarded his impudence with a slap and a kick. They tussled. Bythe end of it, Bennie had pulled a knife and killed the man. Later, police foundBennie, still in bloody clothes, drinking beer at a local dive, just sitting there likenothing had happened.
The Klan threatened to lynch Bennie. So the authorities moved him fromMonroe. He was quickly convicted of murder and executed. But the execution ofBennie Montgomery did not satisfy the Klan. When the state shipped his bodyback home for burial, the Klan proclaimed that the remains belonged to them. Theyplanned to drag Bennie's body through the streets.
Before that could happen, the black men of the community met at a barbershopand worked up a plan. By the time the Klan motorcade reached the HarrisFuneral Home to seize Bennie's body, forty black men with rifles and shotgunswere already in place, hidden where the cover allowed. The motorcade stopped. Theblack men showed themselves and leveled their guns. Unprepared for a real fight,the Klansmen drove away and Bennie got a civilized burial.
Robert Williams was one of the men who drew down on the Klan that night.That same year across the South, black veterans marched and protested and armedthemselves against reprisals in Birmingham, Alabama; Decatur, Mississippi; andDurham, North Carolina. Among these men was a young Medgar Evers, home fromthe army and pressed to the edge of an armed confrontation at the Decatur courthouse,where a mob rose against his attempt to register to vote. Robert Williamswas not alone.
Monroe had a slippery hold on Williams. After marrying Mabel and seeinghis first son born, he...
