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June 3 - June 16, 2022
Castile’s death came just one day after Alton Sterling’s down in Louisiana. He, too, was carrying a gun, which was not unusual in this right-to-carry state.
The back-to-back deaths of these two Black men police had shot for carrying guns should have jolted into action the Second Amendment’s staunchest advocate, the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Yet here the guardian of the Second Amendment was now deliberately ignoring the inconvenient fact that Black men had been killed for merely possessing a firearm.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote that he saw that old Jim Crow “whites only” sign plastered above the Second Amendment.
The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.
enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.”
state militias quashed slave rebellions.
Since at least 1680, Black people have not had the right to self-defense, especially when it comes to protecting themselves from white violence.
To be clear, this is not a pro-gun or anti-gun book. Guns are not the key variable here. It’s Black people.
In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their “ ‘master’ and/or Whites.”
voiced by George Washington himself, that if the enslaved or free Blacks were armed, it would only “further irritate those remaining in servitude.”
John Dickinson, a delegate from Pennsylvania who drafted the original Articles of Confederation, noted that the very omission of “ ‘the WORD’ slavery … [from the Constitution was to] conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.”
“great as the evil is” of the Atlantic slave trade, “the dismemberment of the Union would be worse.”
Rufus King, a delegate from Massachusetts, while labeling the three-fifths clause “one of the Constitution’s ‘greatest blemishes,’
What the militia could do rather well, however, as George Mason noted, was keep slave owners safe.
the Second Amendment continued to buttress slavery. The language is “what Patrick Henry claimed to want
The fear of retribution for slavery and the flat-out denial of citizenship only strengthened the anti-Blackness of the Second Amendment and shaped whether Blacks, even free Blacks, had the right to bear arms,
until 1952, when the legislators finally “eliminated race as a basis for naturalization.”
the land, Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church would note, that African-descended people “watered with our tears and our blood and is now our mother country.”
His wife, Martha Washington, was even more determined to “shield … her slaves from the contagion of liberty.”
the North “was no Eden.” As the number of free Blacks increased, so, too, did the laws to curtail their access to rights.
It was “illegal in most states for [free Blacks] to possess a shotgun, musket, rifle or shot unless by special permit.”
Washington was also distressed. “Lamentable!”—there was no other word for it—“to see such a spirit of revolt among the Blacks.”
the Haitians waged a textbook version of guerrilla warfare. Then, just as Louverture predicted, the rainy season came, as did the mosquitoes and yellow fever.
For white slaveholders in the United States, the Haitian Revolution had set a “terrifying precedent.”60 It “rendered white supremacy vulnerable and thereby surmountable.”
“American blacks inspired by the Haitians were to be feared above all else.”81 Every one of them could now be infected with “ideas about emancipation and liberty;
Militia Acts of 1792, which Congress passed under the shadow of the Haitian Revolution, further solidified the parameters of race, rights, and citizenship.
What patriots saw as heroic in whites, such as Patrick Henry’s clarion call “Give me liberty or give me death,” was dangerous when espoused by Blacks.
In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.”
Whites understood that firearms were the only thing that stood between them and Black people’s freedom.
“Nowhere in America was slavery as exploitative, or were profits as high, as in the cane fields of Louisiana.
On January 8, 1811, on what was known as the German Coast of Louisiana, a group of enslaved people led by Charles Deslondes gathered in the rain and began their thirty-six-mile liberation trek to New Orleans.
Failed uprisings, like the one a few years earlier in Pointe Coupée, had a horrific, gory ending—“planters hanged twenty-three slaves, decapitated them, and nailed their heads to posts.”
A replay of Saint Domingue had just been averted, and for that, he was thankful. The governor noted, in particular, the role of the Black militia in saving New Orleans.
Charles Perret, wrote to the city’s main French-language newspaper also praising the Black militia. He “singled out seven free men of color ‘who in [his] own presence, helped to defeat the enemy with indefatigable zeal and intrepid courage.’ ”149
At war’s end, the ideological and narrative power of “a white man’s republic defended by white arms” held.
Louisiana Territory’s very inception as an American domain, Thomas Jefferson was adamant that only “white inhabitants would be granted citizenship
The Second Amendment’s well-regulated militia simply could not countenance, include, or embrace Black men. Being part of the militia “reflect[ed] … the idea that citizens had a duty to participate in the governing of the country.”
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, however, now made Northern states active, complicit participants in upholding slavery, in denying freedom.
The brutal reality of turning the entire United States into a slave catchers’ paradise meant that Blacks had very few places to run;
But because they are not now, have never been, and never will be citizens, he asserted, they don’t have any rights “that a white man is bound to respect.”
The real source of the problem, whites explained, was the presence of Black troops. Just “the sight of Negro troops stirred the bosoms of our soldiers with courageous madness,”
the assumption that Black soldiers bred defiance and a sense of citizenship in African American civilians was equally appalling and unacceptable.
the Fourteenth would incorporate the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights, including the Second, and, make those protections not only applicable against federal encroachment but protected under state law, as well.
“Black people had learned since the end of Reconstruction that what the federal government gave with one hand, it could take with another.”
Unarmed, African Americans were vulnerable. Very vulnerable. They knew, however, that it was not the presence of weapons or lack of weapons that put crosshairs on their lives; it was their Blackness.
“The duty of the Negro, therefore, … is to make it as perilous as possible for the mob … The only thing which these cowards respect … is force, brute force.”
“Many white Americans were not prepared to accept large numbers of black males in one place, especially if they were armed.”
When the troops went into the city, white civilians’ attitude was “that a nigger is a nigger and that his status is not effected [sic] by the uniform he wears.”
It was much more honorable to protect a Black woman “than to have you die … in the trenches of Europe, fighting to make the world safe for a democracy that you can’t enjoy.”
