Black Men with Guns
By Tanya Metaksa
From FrontPagemag.com | August 21, 2000
THE FIRST NIGHT of the Democratic convention featured a no-holds-barred attack on the Second Amendment. The Democratic women members of the United States Senate led by Diane Feinstein denigrated gun owners, self-defense, and, of course, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The Atlanta Journal Constitution summarized the onslaught in these words: "On the podium, on the airwaves, and on political buttons, the issue of guns and children permeated the party's national convention, including a prime-time appearance by a parent who lost a child at last year's Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colo.."
As the cameras panned across the delegates on the floor of the Staples Center, one saw them cheering Senators Feinstein, Boxer and Mikulski as they excoriated Governor George W. Bush for signing a right-to-carry law in Texas - a law which granted law-abiding and peaceable Texas citizens the right to defend themselves outside their homes for the first time in over a century.
Watching on television, I wondered if any of those folks in Staples Center knew that the roots of gun control in the English-speaking world are deeply buried in racist soil. Arms control has been a tool of the majority used against vulnerable and weak minorities.
In 1181, the Jews in what is today Great Britain were disarmed and left helpless against the pogroms waged against them. Five hundred years later, in the colonies settled by men and women seeking religious and economic freedom from the British crown, slaves were not allowed the use of arms.
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation and the victory of the Union over the Confederacy, most legislatures in the defeated Southern states passed laws denying blacks the right to own firearms. Although the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 in order to keep Southern legislatures from enacting "Black Codes," it didn't stop the passage of bans on handgun sales in South Carolina or laws against small, inexpensive, and easily concealed handguns - the nineteenth century version of today's "Saturday Night Special" laws.
The Black Codes made it easy for the Klu Klux Klan to run rampant -- burning crosses, harassing, terrorizing, and killing blacks in their communities. In Monroe, N.C., during the decade of the fifties, the Klan was still practicing intimidation. They were driving through black neighborhoods terrorizing the homes of the leaders of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP, especially the home of the chapter vice president, Dr. Albert E. Perry.
In 1957, the Monroe chapter of the NAACP initiated their struggle for self-defense. Sixty members of that chapter became affiliated with the National Rifle Association.
Through the NRA, they received firearms training; training in safety and responsibility that led to freedom. They became knowledgeable and proficient in the use of their privately owned firearms. So when the Klan came driving through the chapter vice-president's neighborhood, they came face to face with the true meaning of the Second Amendment: a color-blind right to self-defense.
One of the members of the Monroe NAACP and an NRA Life member, Robert Williams, wrote in his book, Negroes with Guns, "An armed motorcade attacked Dr. Perry's house. We shot it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan didn't have any more stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community."
The women Senators at the Democratic convention cheer for victims' rights, but ignore the victim's fundamental right to self-defense. They would deny future generations of Americans the very right the Monroe chapter of the NAACP exercised forty years ago. Those sixty members of the Monroe NAACP would be the first to petition those Senators to fight for our right to keep and bear arms.
Tanya K. Metaksa is the former executive director of the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action. She is the author of Safe, Not Sorry, a self-protection manual, published in 1997. She has appeared on numerous talk and interview shows such as "Crossfire," the "Today" show, "Nightline," "This Week with David Brinkley" and the "McNeil-Lehrer Hour," among others.