Negroes and the Gun (57 page)

Mr. Meredith, don't you think we ought to get straight on the difference between non-violence and self-defense? . . . I think that when Dr. King and others speak about nonviolence they say that groups of Negroes shouldn't take to arms. . . . I don't think that there are many of us who don't believe in the right of self-defense of any Negro against anyone who attacks him. . . . When we talk about non-violence, we are saying that the Negro ought not in groups or alone take up a gun . . . in order to take what he believes belongs to him.

Meredith, perhaps still nursing his gunshot wounds, plunged headlong into forbidden territory.

 

MEREDITH: The Negro has never entertained the idea of taking up arms against the whites. . . . But now I think the Negro must become part of this mainstream, and if the whites— now in you take Mississippi, for instance—I know the people who shot in my home years ago. They know the people that killed all of the Negroes that have been killed. . . . The Negro has no choice but to remove these men, and they have to be removed.

SPIVAK: Are you suggesting then that if several Negroes are killed or any white men are killed and the law does not punish them, as happens very often in the case of white men too, that people ought to organize as vigilantes and go out and take the law into their own hands and commit violence? You are not saying that, are you Mr. Meredith?

MEREDITH:
That is exactly what I am saying. Exactly
. [Emphasis added.]

CARMICHAEL: If you don't want us to do it, who is going to going to do it?

. . .

SPIVAK: Mr. Meredith, do you mean to tell me that you believe Negroes in this country ought to organize, take up guns?

MEREDITH: This is precisely, I will tell you why, because the white supremacy is a system.

SPIVAK: Mr. Meredith, this doesn't even make sense against 180 million people. If you do it, they are going to do it.

. . .

CARL ROWAN: Mr. Carmichael, do I detect that you agree with Mr. Meredith that the Negro may have to take up arms.

CARMICHAEL: . . . I agree 150 percent that black people have to move to the position where they organize themselves and they are in fact a protection for each other. . . . If in fact 180 million people just think they are going to turn on us and we are going to sit there, like the Nazis did to the Jews, they are wrong. We are going to go down together, all of us.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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?