ROWLAND EVANS: Mr. Wilkins, I want to ask you [about Carmichael’s] last statement, do you think it serves the Negro or the white man, his purpose in any way to threaten that the ten percent of the Negro population can, if it has to, drag down this whole country?
. . .
WILKINS: I think Mr. Carmichael—if he weren’t where he is, he ought to be on Madison Avenue. He is a public relations man par excellence. He abounds in the provocative phrase. Of course, no one believes that the Negro minority in this country is going to take up arms and try to rectify every wrong that has been done [to] the Negro race if somebody doesn’t rectify it through the regular channels.19
It is easy to understand how in this environment, the conservative leadership became more circumspect about explaining or excusing black violence, even in self-defense. The distinction between self-defense and political violence was always slippery, and cautious players gave the boundary-land berth. Now, amidst the radicals’ chants of Black Power, prudence demanded extreme caution in the treatment of any sort of violence.
For Roy Wilkins, some have argued, the approach had broader strategic implications. Critics point to Wilkins’s widely circulated fundraising letter denouncing the Black Power movement while underscoring the NAACP’s continued support of integration and nonviolence. Donations to the NAACP quadrupled during 1966 to 1968 when he was vigorously opposing radical cries for Black Power.20
Wilkins always denied the accusation that he exploited the fears of Black Power and defended his record in a fashion that rested soundly on the long black tradition of arms. “For 60 years,” Wilkins reminded, “the NAACP has asserted the right of Negroes to self-defense against the violence of white oppression. During the Parker affair in the thirties, in the elections of 1948 and 1960s, Negroes have amply shown how aware they were of their own political power. None of these things was new. The younger people were either ignorant of the long record or they chose to ignore it.”21
Years later, looking back on that time, Wilkins framed the question as,
whether [the new radicals] were after a revolution. I always believed that for American Negroes revolutionary fantasies were suicidal. To oppose revolution did not mean to fear whites; I knew that anyone who was not cautious in leading a one-tenth minority into a conflict with an overwhelming majority was a fool. You can force a lion one way when you have real artillery, but when you have a powder puff you have to handle yourself differently—if you want to keep your people alive. For all [the radicals’] reckless talk of guns and power back then, I still don’t think [they] could tell the difference between a pistol and a powder puff.22
Whatever his motivation, Roy Wilkins plainly opposed the radical formulation of political violence as self-defense. Still, in other venues, he continued rhetorical support of a careful, conservative version of the black tradition of arms. In his keynote address at the 1966 NAACP convention, Wilkins both endorsed traditional self-defense and repudiated the radical agenda:
One organization [CORE] which has been meeting in Baltimore has passed a resolution declaring for defense of themselves by Negro citizens if they are attacked. This is not new as far as the NAACP is concerned. Historically our association has defended in court those persons who have defended themselves and their homes with firearms. . . . But the more serious division in the civil rights movement is the one posed by a word formulation that implies clearly a difference in goals. No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term “black power” means anti-white power. . . . It has to mean separatism. . . . It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan. . . .
We of the NAACP will have none of this.23
Fig. 8.1. Roy Wilkins in the 1960s. (Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, April 5, 1963, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)
Martin Luther King displayed his own objection to CORE’s radical turn and the Black Power rhetoric by refusing to attend CORE’s 1966 convention. King also criticized SNCC radicals, arguing that talk of retaliatory violence failed to appreciate that “the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.”24
This was an important moment of converging trends. While the radical strategy of political violence as self-defense would soon flame out, coalition politics and the conservative strategy of institutional change within the system were paying off. CORE, SNCC, and even the SCLC (laboring under King’s antiwar stance) experienced a decline in external support. The NAACP, on the other hand, enjoyed a substantial increase in outside funding. For many who wanted to support the movement, the NAACP was, increasingly, the only acceptable option.
Important institutional changes were also unfolding. President Lyndon Johnson advanced the War on Poverty with spoils to the black underclass. He pressed for and signed landmark civil-rights legislation and appointed the first black, Thurgood Marshall, to the post of solicitor general and then to the United States Supreme Court. In preparation for Marshall’s confirmation hearings, Johnson put him on a national commission to study crime and violence in American cities. “The idea was to keep Marshall’s name in the news as a sober, rational voice able to respond to black militants.”25 Adding to the list of firsts, Johnson appointed the first-ever black cabinet officer, Robert Weaver, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development and sent black ambassadors to Finland and Luxembourg.
Within this whirlwind of black advancement, Johnson also signed the 1968 Gun Control Act, six months after the gusher of violence that followed Martin Luther King’s April 4 death by gunshot. The timing and meager substance of the law left one prominent liberal skeptic to charge that the Gun Control Act was more a reflex against black violence than a well-considered policy. Among the act’s most significant restrictions were import limits on small, cheap handguns derided as “Saturday Night Specials”—a label that combined references to cheap little guns dubbed “Suicide Specials” and the tumult of “Niggertown Saturday Night.”26
One of the first evident moves in the tip over to the modern orthodoxy occurred in Roy Wilkins’s allusion in 1967 to the ongoing work driving the 1968 Gun Control Act. In questioning reflecting the critique that the act was substantially a reflex against black violence, Wilkins, on another Meet the Press appearance, was asked by Robert Novak, “Would you be in favor of a massive effort to disarm the Negroes in the ghettoes, just to try to prevent these open-shooting wars such as occurred in Newark last night?” Wilkins’s principle response tracked the long tradition of arms. “I wouldn’t disarm the Negroes and leave them helpless prey to the people who wanted to go in and shoot them up. . . . Every American wants to own a rifle. Why shouldn’t the Negroes own rifles?”
This is a staunchly pro-gun statement, but this was not all that Wilkins said. In a fashion that recalls his 1936 criticism of the killing of William and Cora Wales, Wilkins’s first parry actually cut the other way and shows a nascent support for the program of supply-side gun controls that was gaining traction among progressives. Before standing up for the interests of Negroes to own rifles, Wilkins said, “I would be in favor of disarming everybody, not just the Negroes.”27 It is unclear whether Wilkins was referring to nationwide disarmament or disarming everyone in riot-torn cities. Either way, the statement is in tension with the NAACP’s long support of armed self-defense and is an early signal of movement toward a stringent gun-control agenda.
Moving into the 1970s, as blacks registered to vote in greater numbers, more black representatives were elected to legislatures. Blacks gained increasingly influential positions in the executive branch, and black administrations came to power in various cities. Even in little Fayette, Mississippi, where a restaurant still thrived on Main Street exhibiting a sign warning, “Every cent spent by a nigger to be donated to the Ku Klux Klan,” Charles Evers defeated “Turnip Green” Allen to become the town’s first black mayor. Once installed, Mayor Evers adopted a common approach of newly minted black bureaucrats and implemented a ban on the concealed carry of firearms.28
&
nbsp; This emerging black political class faced a new reality. Products of successful coalition politics and beneficiaries of legislation forged by progressive alliances, they disconnected from the tradition of armed self-defense that was now sullied by the radicals’ blurring of the boundary against political violence. With access to new fields of power, the growing political class now could plausibly view the historic reasons for blacks’ distrusting the state to protect them as having faded with their own ascendency to power.
This is precisely the time that the national gun-control movement emerged and was quickly ensconced in the progressive coalition. With cities burning and black radicals bent on revolution, politicians and editorialists called for stricter gun legislation. Black mayors and local, state, and national representatives and appointees—having gained power, and now facing the burden of exercising it—embraced the progressive program of supply-side gun control as an answer to the crime and unrest afflicting their new domains.
From here, the modern orthodoxy took hold and flourished as supply-side gun control became an article of faith for progressives. Today, the worry that this demands a level of trust and dependency on government that is incompatible with the black experience is answered with the assertion that “things have changed.” And considering the toll that gun crime takes on the black community, we are tempted to conclude that the “things have changed” assessment fully explains and justifies the modern orthodoxy.
But on closer analysis, even stipulating that racist violence and the malevolent state are now nominal concerns (what to do though, with sporadic modern episodes that jolt us back to a darker time?29), the “things have changed” assessment raises a series of unexamined questions. Consider, for example, the tacit assumptions about black-on-black crime. This scourge, perpetrated largely by desperate, young, urban men and boys, prompts many to embrace the promise of supply-side gun control. But is this really a new variable that easily explains the shift to the modern orthodoxy? What if it turns out that the black tradition of arms always has required the balancing of violence among the criminal microculture against the self-defense interests of good people? If so, how should we strike that balance today, where some might dismiss the counterweight of self-defense against racist terrorism as a faded concern of an earlier age. And is that even the right balance? Does the tradition of arms just dissolve with the sense that the complexion and character of criminal threats has changed? What about good people in distressed communities who want guns to defend themselves against the predators in their midst?
Wading into these concerns sends us to the root of the black tradition of arms and the realization that the tradition is only incidentally an outgrowth of America’s racist past. Fundamentally, the tradition rests on universal principles of self-defense. Those principles are a basic response to structural state failure within the hard boundaries of physics—episodes of imminent violence where it is impossible for the government to act.30 It is true that the black tradition of arms evolved in a context where state failure was often pernicious. But from the perspective of people at risk, the reason for state failure matters little.31
More than a century ago, T. Thomas Fortune urged, “in the absence of law . . . we maintain that every individual has every right . . . to protect himself.”32 Ida B. Wells advocated armed self-defense as a response to government failure, noting the folly of trusting the government “that gave Blacks the ballot, to be strong enough to protect the exercise of that ballot.”33 Wells championed the Winchester repeating rifle on the view that even if the federal government was not overtly hostile, it was not equipped to protect blacks from imminent threats. W. E. B. Du Bois operated on the same impulse, wielding a shotgun to protect his home and family, with a clear appreciation that, for some undetermined period, he was on his own.
A century later, Shelly Parker in Washington, DC, and Otis McDonald in Chicago were similarly besieged. The difference was that their tormentors were not racist terrorists but young black thugs and drug criminals. Within a specific window of risk, they also were on their own against looming threats. We do not begrudge earlier generations of black folk their guns, and their grit might even raise a patch of prideful gooseflesh. But Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald, under the full weight of the modern orthodoxy and over the objection of America’s leading civil-rights organization, required intervention by the United States Supreme Court to validate their right to armed self-defense.
Some found it perplexing that when the Court affirmed the individual right to arms, the litigation was fueled by these black plaintiffs. Were they serious? Were they dupes? The answer is that Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald, laboring under the two most restrictive gun-control regimes in the country, were just seeking what generations of black folk before them had sought in response to an array of threats. They wanted access to tools that might give them some additional chance of escaping or defeating violent attackers who were on them before help could arrive.
Standing solidly on the black tradition of arms, Otis McDonald and Shelly Parker agitated through the courts in separate civil-rights challenges, seeking access to handguns to combat threats primarily from a slim criminal microculture of young black men. And that, in a nutshell, fuels the hard questions about the current implications of the black tradition of arms.
How then should the complexion of the threats to the lives and safety of innocents like Shelley Parker and Otis McDonald affect our assessment of supply-side gun-control policies that ground the modern orthodoxy? People must do their own thinking about this. But we all are constrained by the basic inputs. The next chapter details those variables.
The black tradition of arms evokes heroic images like Hartman Turnbow repelling Klansmen with rifle fire. The modern orthodoxy responds to the tragic scene of swaggering neighborhood tyrants warring over turf, their gunfire piercing the kitchens and bedrooms of innocent people. These images evoke vastly different reflexes. And that largely explains the appeal of modern orthodoxy.
Supply-control policies at the heart of modern orthodoxy rest on the straightforward logic that no guns equals no gun crime. But fuller consideration raises a litany of questions that reveal the modern orthodoxy as more reflex than considered policy. For example, is the no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime formula realistic in a country that is already saturated with more than 300 million firearms? And what about people who want guns for self-defense? Does the traditional self-defense calculation change when the focus shifts to black-on-black crime? And even granting that modern intraracial violence may resonate differently from the story of Hartman Turnbow, is that enough to turn the tradition of arms on its head? Is it enough to justify, in the name of civil rights, policies like zip code–targeted gun bans that some earnest friends have proposed? These questions trigger wide-ranging intuitions that undergird both the modern orthodoxy and the black tradition of arms. Critical evaluation of these competing approaches requires careful unpacking of the undergirding intuitions and assumptions.
To start, consider the self-defense foundation on which the black tradition of arms rests. Self-defense is a universal exception to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. State failure drives the self-defense doctrine through the imminence requirement. Private violence is justified where one faces an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to which the government cannot respond. The imminence requirement defines that space where the state, regardless of its motives and ambitions, simply cannot help.
State failure within the window of imminence is a reality for everyone. But one might expect blacks to be particularly sensitive to it. The window of imminence is often larger in black neighborhoods where various challenges stretch public resources. Certainly state failure is less galling today. Under slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, the state was often just another layer of threat, and reliance on the state for personal security was more obviously an absurd proposition.
Today, the malevolent state is thankfully an anachronism. That makes it easier for those ensco
nced in government bureaucracies to urge reliance on the state and to ignore the continuing failure of government within the window of imminence. But it is sheer hubris for public officials to ignore the inherent limits on state power and claim that they can protect people within a space where that is impossible as a matter of simple physics.
The odd reticence of modern orthodoxy to acknowledge structural state failure within the window of imminence is highlighted by contrast to the thinking about state failure in the context of other issues on the progressive agenda. For example, progressives have keyed on state failure to support reproductive rights and to expand the range of legitimate violence by abused women. In advocacy for expansion of the battered-woman defense, one school of thought would actually eliminate the imminence requirement in favor of a “no genuine alternatives standard,” wherein state failure would justify self-defense absent an immediate threat of death or injury.1 Here, state failure is urged as the justification for a woman, who endures years of torment, to kill her partner in his sleep. Notice how this feminist advocacy does not depend on any assertion that the state is overtly hostile to the interests of women. It is simply the fact of state failure that would justify a broader range of legitimate self-defense by battered women. Compare now the “things have changed” justification for the modern orthodoxy. It would constrict armed self-defense for black folk on the view that government failure is no longer malicious.
Other progressive arguments invoke state failure to justify the right to abortion. One says that “to whatever degree we fail to create the minimal conditions for a just society, we also have a right, individually and fundamentally, to be shielded from the most dire or simply the most damaging consequences of that failure. . . . We must have the right to opt out of an unjust patriarchal world that visits unequal but unparalleled harms upon women . . . with unwanted pregnancies.”2 The modern orthodoxy defies this reasoning even though the principle resonates at least as strongly in the context of armed self-defense. In a society where physical attack is a real danger (especially in communities where the risk is generally higher) and government is a demonstrably incomplete response, the feminist abortion justification is a solid foundation for a robust right of self-defense using standard civilian technology.
Negroes and the Gun Page 39