Negroes and the Gun

Published 2014 by Prometheus Books

Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Johnson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

 

Johnson, Nicholas, 1959-

Negroes and the gun : the Black tradition of arms / by Nicholas Johnson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61614-839-3 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-61614-840-9 (ebook)

1. African Americans—Civil rights—United States—History. 2. Firearms ownership—United States—History. 3. Firearms—United States—Use in crime prevention—History. 4. Self-defense—United States—History. I. Title.

 

E185.61.J695 2014

323.1196'073—dc23

2013033057

Printed in the United States of America

 

To
Jane, Nicky and Ellen
Mom and Dad
Than and Nita
Cleo and Buddy
The Crump Brothers
and the Church Folk

      
Acknowledgments

      
Author's Note

      
Introduction

1.   Boundary-Land

2.   Foundation

3.   Promise and Breach

4.   Nadir

5.   Crisis

6.   Leonidas

7.   Freedom Fight

8.   Pivot

9.   The Black Tradition of Arms and the Modern Orthodoxy

      
Notes

      
Select Bibliography

      
Index

This book started with an essay I was asked to write for the
Harvard Law and Policy Review
. That work produced a manuscript so long that it was unsuitable for the format. It expanded from there, and I finally whittled it down into an article published as the centerpiece of the
Connecticut Law Review
's 2013
Commentary Edition
. Along the way I realized that the essay turned article was really a book.

I have benefited from the insights and comments of people who read versions of this work. Thanks to Bob Kaczorowski, Shelia Foster, Marc Arkin, Russ Pearce, Howie Erickson, Dan Richmond, Kimani Paul-Emile, Jack Krill, Nelson Lund, Jenny Brown, Laura Bair, Dick Lohkamp, Bob Levy, Steve Halbrook, Alice Marie Beard, Joyce Malcolm, Robin Lenhardt, Tanya Hernandez, and to the participants in the 2010 Fordham Law School Faculty Scholarship Retreat where I presented a version of this work. Thanks also to my coauthors on
Firearms Law and the Second Amendment
, Dave Kopel, George Mocsary, and Mike O'Shea, for their insights along the way. I owe a particular debt to Robert Cottrol and Don B. Kates for their friendship and pioneering scholarship.

Thanks to the research assistants who worked on different versions of this project. Tammem Zainulbhai and John Hunt helped at the beginning, before I thought that this was a book. John Paul Sardi, Giancarlo Stanton, Jacob Laksin, and Ellen Johnson saw it through to the end. Thanks to my wife, Jane, who, in typical fashion, was adept at something I was not good at and tracked down many of the images that appear in the book. Thanks to Katherine Epanchin-Butuc, Juan Fernandez, and Larry Abraham at the Fordham Law Library for retrieving a variety of obscure texts. Thanks to Fordham University for the sabbatical grant that gave me the time to distill a mountain of information into 150,000 words. And thanks generally to family and friends for tolerating in good cheer the countless hours that this project drained from other equally worthwhile things.

This book raised two notable stylistic challenges. The first was whether to capitalize
black
in the frequent references to Black people. Many consider capitalization the new norm. And some have argued that the failure to capitalize
Black
is a slight that sensitive writers will avoid. But people are plainly divided. My daughter observes that her Black professors uniformly capitalize
Black
and her white professors generally use the traditional lowercase form. In many contexts, including my textbook and in the law-review article that is the foundation for this book, I have capitalized references to Black people and Black concerns. The publisher of this book, on the other hand, follows the traditional usage of referencing black people in the lowercase. After extensive conversations, we chose to use the lowercase form here primarily as a matter of aesthetics. This book makes frequent reference to black and white people within the same sentence or paragraph. Capitalizing
Black
but not
white
seemed visually distracting. Capitalizing both
Black
and
White
seemed equally distracting.

The second challenge was in sourcing. This book uses the sourcing style familiar to readers of law reviews and other legal texts. Notes at the end of paragraphs or a sequence of paragraphs will identify the sources for the quotations and the factual claims that appear above them. My goal was to provide sources for every significant factual claim and quotation in the book. That goal was in tension with the practical constraints of book publishing. Sourcing in the precise style of law reviews would have produced well over one hundred pages of endnotes. (The forty-thousand-word law-review article on which this book is based came in at more than six hundred source notes). The endnotes here run roughly thirty-five pages. In some instances, for the sake of efficiency, I have collapsed references for several paragraphs into a single endnote. This may require readers to proceed through several paragraphs to reach the endnote that provides the source. The text of an endnote may contain references to several sets of pages from a single source, and it might also list more than one source. The cited sources here will generally proceed in sequence. So, for example, an endnote following a sequence of three paragraphs indicating pages “3-4, 12, and 23-24” will designate the sources for those paragraphs in sequence.

Gun!
Just the word raises the temperature. Add
Negroes
and the mixture is incendiary, evoking images of hopeless young gangsters terrorizing blighted neighborhoods.

This book tells a dramatically different story. It chronicles a tradition of church folk, merchants, and strivers, the very best people in the community, armed and committed to the principle of individual self-defense. This black tradition of arms takes root early and ranges fully into the modern era. It is demonstrated in Frederick Douglass's advice of a good revolver as the best response to slave catchers. It is evident in mature form in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow of Mississippi fought off a Klan attack with rifle fire. Turnbow considered this fully consistent with the principles of the freedom movement, explaining, “I wasn't being
non-nonviolent
, I was just protectin' my family.”

The black tradition of arms has been submerged because it seems hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence in the modern civil-rights movement. But that superficial tension is resolved by the long-standing distinction that was vividly evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer's approach to segregationists who dominated Mississippi politics was, “Baby you just got to love 'em. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But, asked how she survived the threats from midnight terrorists, Hamer responded, “I'll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again.”
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