Dec. 3, 2015
How Guns Helped Secure Civil Rights and Expand Liberty
Firearms played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement.
Damon Root
Yesterday's brutal shootings in San Bernardino, California, have reignited America's long-running debate over guns. Much of that debate is currently focused on violent criminal acts committed with the help of firearms. That focus is understandable in the aftermath of this horrific event. But it's important to remember that firearms routinely serve noble purposes as well. For example, guns played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement and its long campaign to achieve racial equality. To illustrate that point, here are three stories from the Reason archives that discuss the ways in which privately owned guns helped to expand freedom and secure civil rights for countless numbers of black Americans.
Why Civil Rights and Gun Rights Are Inseparable:
- [A] vast number of nonviolent civil rights activists either carried
arms themselves or were surrounded by others who did, including Rosa
Parks, who described her dinner table "covered with guns" at a
typical strategy session in her home, and Daisy Bates, "the first
lady of Little Rock," who played a pivotal role in the famous battle
to integrate her city's Central High School. Thurgood Marshall, who
stayed with Bates in 1957 while litigating the Central High case, called
her residence "an armed camp." Bates herself packed a .45
automatic pistol.
- Indeed, from the time of Frederick Douglass, who called a "good revolver" the "true remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill," to that of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, who braved the worst of 20th century Jim Crow and declared, "I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom," armed self-defense has always gone hand in hand with the fight for racial equality in America.
- Indeed, from the time of Frederick Douglass, who called a "good revolver" the "true remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill," to that of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, who braved the worst of 20th century Jim Crow and declared, "I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom," armed self-defense has always gone hand in hand with the fight for racial equality in America.
- "I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural
right to keep and bear arms," declared John R. Salter Jr., one of
the organizers of the famous non-violent sit-ins against segregated lunch
counters in Jackson, Mississippi. Writing in 1994, Salter noted that he
always "traveled armed" while working as a civil rights
organizer in the Deep South. "Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP
staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too,
traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40
Winchester carbine," Salter wrote. "The knowledge that I had
these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at
bay."
- 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 Tilla
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 [Frederick] Douglass before him, Howard understood all too well the
deep ties between the white supremacist regime and a disarmed black
populace.
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