The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

This understanding of rights as predicated on whiteness and white benevolence affected even those who weren’t Black but appeared to have a Black-driven agenda. Elijah Lovejoy, a white abolitionist in Illinois, had his printing press destroyed multiple times by angry white mobs. In 1837, they came to burn it down again. He’d had enough. He got his gun, but the mob got to him first and shot him dead. His assailants, although they were the aggressors, potential arsonists, and actual murderers, were found “not guilty.” Lovejoy, while just trying to protect himself and his property, clearly did not have the right to self-defense. Worse yet, some of his allies in the abolitionist movement blamed him for his own death, surmising that “the mob would not have killed Lovejoy if he had not taken up arms.”208