The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

In the KKK stronghold of South Carolina in 1871, five hundred masked men attacked the local jail in Union County and killed African Americans whose primary offense was shooting at whites in self-defense.48

“In York County, nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan and committed at least eleven murders and hundreds of whippings.”

Black men who dared exercise their right to vote were met at the polls “by whites equipped with rifles and a six-pounder cannon.”50

In short, the Democrats did not believe in democracy. They believed, instead, that terror would bleed the Republicans into submission.

President Ulysses S. Grant was outraged. The killings were bad enough. What the court did, however, was nearly unforgivable. For all the Southern talk about “civilization” and “Christianity,” he railed, Colfax was nothing but “bloodthirstiness and barbarity.” Yet now, with the Enforcement Act shredded, “no way can be found … to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime.” The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision not only meant that the “Colfax murderers … walked off scot-free,” but the ruling also sent “a powerful message to white supremacists that they could slay blacks without any penalty.”

No city street was safe. No park was carefree. No home secure. All were made unsafe by the presence of Blackness. Although the stories of Black men gone wild, replete with eroticized descriptions of hands and lips and torn bodices, were false or overdramatized for shock effect, the stories sold papers.

That realization crystallized on August 23, 1917. On that hot summer day, police chased a man into the home of a Black woman, Mrs. Sarah Travers. While she wasn’t the object of their manhunt, she was the one whom they dragged out of her house “half naked.” With neighbors everywhere, a grown woman barely clothed and exposed. The humiliation was too much. Private Alonzo Edwards of the Twenty-Fourth offered to pay whatever her fine was so that she could get back in the house with some dignity. The cops beat him savagely for that. Then they arrested him. When Corporal Charles Baltimore, an MP, went to the station to check on Edwards, police beat him, too. Then chased and repeatedly shot at him.

Blacks retreated deeper into the neighborhood. The machine guns and troops moved forward and unloaded another lethal blast. Although it had been the white mob that broke into the jail, beat the sheriff, and ransacked his home looking to lynch a Black man accused of rape and murder, the state’s lethal power was fully directed at African Americans engaged in community self-defense. None of this was lost on Black people in Knoxville.

In 1956 and 1957 alone, the NAACP had brought six criminal cases and ten civil suits against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for subjecting the Black community to “exceptional levels of brutality.”

State-sponsored violence, however, was not isolated to the LAPD. In the 1950s, there was an investigation into the Oakland Police Department, where “over fifty witnesses testified before legislators and an audience of hundreds of West Oakland residents on a ‘range of brutalities contradicted only by the police themselves.’ ”9

Rather than the Civil Rights Movement’s emphasis on nonviolence and being willing, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, to “wear you down by our capacity to suffer,” the Panthers offered overt militance.

This inability to grapple with and recognize systemic inequality when there were no “colored only” signs led the public to define what they saw in the North and the West as just Black people’s natural tendency toward theft (looting), arson, and violence. In a 1965 Gallup poll, 64 percent of whites in California believed that the uprising in Watts, an area of Los Angeles, was due to “lack of respect for law enforcement and outside agitators.”

This was the frustration of the Oakland Police, too. When they stopped the Panthers, hoping to get the leaders and the members on some kind of violation, the guns were always up to code. The way the weapons were carried—never concealed, always visible, and never pointed at anyone directly—was perfectly lawful.

This law-abiding behavior, however, was not to be commended or celebrated. Instead, police determined that the Black Panthers “represent … a threat to the peace of any community in which they choose to appear.”

Many white Americans couldn’t get over their first impression of the Black Panthers. Coverage of the 1967 protest introduced them to the party, and the fear of black people exercising their rights in an empowered, intimidating fashion left its mark. To them the Black Panthers were little more than a group of thugs unified behind militaristic trappings and a leftist political ideology.

It was early in the morning, close to Thanksgiving 2006, when ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston, a Black woman, heard the clanking of burglar bars being pried off the door in her Atlanta home. Fearing the worst, Johnston grabbed her “rusty revolver” to defend herself and the place where she had lived for nearly seventeen years. When three men “kicked that door down,” she pulled the trigger. Her one shot was answered with a hail of bullets, thirty-nine of them. Five of which hit the elderly woman.

It was a no-knock warrant, where police do not have to announce themselves before entering a residence, in order to prevent key evidence from being destroyed. The police had received this warrant, however, based on an extorted confession from a dealer whom the police had planted drugs on, in order to get him to reveal his supplier.

Brionna Taylor

On March 13, 2020, twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor, an emergency room technician, was in her apartment with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.

Whether the police announced themselves or not, however, could not be fully verified because, in violation of the department’s policy, not one of the seven officers in the raid had turned on his body camera.

The point, as columnist Zerlina Maxwell noted, was an “attempt to portray Zimmerman as a do-gooder neighborhood watchman, with no racial biases and black friends, who was attacked for no reason by dangerous thug Trayvon while he was just doing his job of patrolling his gated community with a nine millimeter.” Martin, as a commenter at Breitbart wrote, was “just another black punk who got what he deserved.”122

The big, Black, scary, gangsta imagery of dying “in the streets,” especially, for someone unarmed who was still a minor, had transformed Trayvon Martin “from a 5’8”, 158 lbs. tall, 17-year-old,” into a six-foot-tall, “pot-smoking, hoodie-wearing, jewelry stealing, aggressive thug, who had attacked a man who was older, less athletic, and vulnerable. The only equalizer was a 9mm.”

The Tampa Bay Times conducted an investigation and found that since stand your ground had been enacted in Florida, “nearly seventy percent of those who invoked it as a defense had gone free.” Moreover, “there was a racial imbalance: a person was more likely to be found innocent if the victim was black.”130 This racial imbalance was affirmed by another study, which found that from 2005 to 2013, “juries were twice as likely to convict the perpetrator of a crime against a white person than against a person of color.”131

White people see an African American, and they’re immediately looking for something illegal. They almost instantly see a threat.”134 As the studies on police killings of African Americans indicate, this is the case even when Blacks are unarmed. Thus, when African Americans openly carry a gun, although allowed by law, it raises exponentially the sense of danger about them and to them.

The aura of Black threat loomed. Like Trayvon Martin, Rice, too, aged dramatically from a minor into adulthood the moment they died.

Columnist Charles P. Pierce wrote, “At its heart, open carry is about open season on the people who scare you. It’s certainly not about an absolute Second Amendment right that applies to black people as well as white.”159 The descriptors that often provide a cover of innocence—elderly, teenager, child, health care provider, mother—when applied to African Americans, were no match for the societal fear of Black people.

Yet as the police, media, and elected officials made clear, Rittenhouse still had Second Amendment rights not available to Tamir Rice, who had been sitting alone in a pavilion with a toy gun.10

The right to bear arms has its own tally of casualties, from the laws banning the enslaved and free Blacks from possessing guns, to the Dred Scott decision, to Reconstruction-era Black Codes, to the Atlanta Riot of 1906, to John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile. Similarly, the right to self-defense was quashed in seventeenth-century Virginia, denied in Cincinnati in 1841, machine-gunned into oblivion in 1919 Elaine, Arkansas, and brutally denied to Trayvon Martin, Kathryn Johnston, and Breonna Taylor. The centuries-long arc of these violations indicates how they are impervious to the citizenship status of African Americans. From enslaved to post–Civil Rights Black Americans, the application of the Second Amendment, in whatever traditional interpretation, was not applicable.

Even the NRA mantra of “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” could not stand up against anti-Blackness.11