Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover has created controversy for comments he made on the Second Amendment. Speaking at a recent event at Texas A&M University, Glover said the purpose of the amendment was to preserve slavery and keep down Native Americans.
“I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said during his campus visit. “The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their land, or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”
Similarly, responding to the argument that a gun control measure lacks the votes to pass through Congress, Fox News’ Shepard Smith compared guns and slavery. Smith offered, “If we stuck with the polls, though, we’d have had slavery a lot longer than we did.”
Glover and Smith are not the only people to make a comparison between gun control and social movements such as the struggle to abolish slavery. For example, others have made references to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Whether appropriate or not, slavery and civil rights have become part of the debate over gun control.
With regard to slavery, there is evidence that the Founding Fathers had that institution in mind when drafting the Second Amendment.
In a recent news analysis in Truthout, Thom Hartman argued the amendment was ratified to preserve the militias in the Southern states, also known as the slave patrols — a step which was necessary in order to secure Virginia’s vote for the Constitution. Ratification by nine states was necessary for passage, and Virginia was concerned about the federal abolition of slavery.
Professor Carl T. Bogus of the Roger Williams University School of Law challenges the notion that the Second Amendment provides a right of citizens to bear arms for their own individual purposes, or to fight a tyrannical government. Rather, according to Bogus, this right only applies to a right to bear arms within a militia. He maintains the Second Amendment was an assurance to the Southern States that Congress would not disarm their slave patrols.
“In effect, the Second Amendment supplemented the slavery compromise made at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and obliquely codified in other constitutional provisions,” Bogus writes. The Northern states were disgusted by slavery and wanted to do away with it. As Pierce Butler of South Carolina, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention said: “The security the Southn. States want is that their Negroes may not be taken from them which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.”
At the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of slave rebellions had taken place across the South, and in many areas, blacks outnumbered whites. The militias in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia were regulated slave patrols that protected whites against slave insurrection. Most Southern white men were obligated to serve on these slave patrols at some point in their lives.
But the Southern whites feared that if their slave patrol militias were not protected by law, the result would be the unraveling of the police state that maintained slavery.
Patrick Henry declared “If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.”
“In this state,” Henry noted of his native Virginia, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.”
In his first draft of the Second Amendment, James Madison wrote ,“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
However, to satisfy Patrick Henry, George Mason and others who wanted to preserve the state slave patrols, Madison replaced the word “country” with the word “state.” The result was the Second Amendment as we know it today: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Meanwhile, legal scholar Paul Finkelman disagrees that the purpose of the Second Amendment was to preserve the slave patrols. Although he concedes the patrols were important to the South and the maintenance of slavery, he argues the patrols were not the militias, and the amendment was directed toward the federal government, which was prohibited from disarming state militias.
If slavery is invoked in the current debate over gun control, so too is the civil rights movement.
Rock musician and gun enthusiast Ted Nugent compared gun owners to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955 and became a symbol for the movement to desegregate the South. “There will come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the bus, case closed,” he said.
Further, Larry Ward, an organizer of “Gun Appreciation Day” – a nationwide rally organized by conservative groups in opposition to the president’s gun control efforts— argued Dr. King would have approved of their goals.
“I think Martin Luther King Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African-Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history,” Ward told CNN.
Gun Appreciation Day took place on January 19th, coinciding with the presidential inauguration and Martin Luther King’s birthday. Across America, 79 people were shot that day, 32 of whom died.
And journalists Bob Schieffer and Tom Brokaw, commenting on President Obama’s executive orders on gun control, invoked the civil rights movement as well.
“Let’s remember: there was considerable opposition when Lyndon Johnson went to the Congress and…presented some of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of this country,” Schieffer said. “Most people told him he couldn’t get it done, but he figured out a way to do it. And that’s what Barack Obama is going to have to do.”
The veteran broadcaster added, “Surely, finding Osama bin Laden; surely, passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do; and before that, surely, defeating the Nazis, was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby.
Brokaw echoed Schieffer’s sentiments in an appearance on Morning Joe. “Now it’s time for the people who do have strong feelings, who are feeling that they can’t do anything about it, to kind of band together and have something to say here,” Brokaw said, speaking to Rev. Al Sharpton.
“Good people stayed in their houses and didn’t speak up when there was carnage in the streets and the total violation of a fundamental rights of African-Americans as they marched in Selma, and they let Bull Connor and the redneck elements of the South and the Klan take over their culture in effect and become a face of it,” Brokaw continued. “And now a lot of people who I know who grew up during that time have deep regrets about not speaking out.”
Martin Luther King was known for his philosophy of nonviolence, yet in the 1950s he owned firearms for protection, and applied for a concealed weapon permit. King adviser Glenn Smiley called the civil rights leader’s home “an arsenal.” And Dr. King, his home and family were protected by armed followers.
The target of death threats, King and many civil rights activists maintained guns for self-defense. According to journalist and veteran civil rights activist Charles E. Cobb Jr. in an interview with Richard Prince in The Root, “without the armed protection given to civil rights workers by farmers and others, there would have been a lot more deaths.”
In 1964, a group of black men in Jonesboro, Louisiana—mostly war veterans—formed the Deacons of Defense and Justice to protect the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) against the terrorist violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the police. The group grew to several hundred members and twenty-one chapters in the South, an often untold story of the civil rights movement that led to the federal government going after the Klan. The existence of the Deacons dispels the notion of a completely nonviolent civil resistance movement, reflecting a self-defense stance resembling Malcolm X and subsequently the Black Panther Party.
However, Martin Luther King ultimately turned away from self-defense and more fully embraced nonviolence. And in 1967, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York, Dr. King spoke out against the war in Vietnam.
In his speech, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient decried what he called “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” He said, “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.”
“Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government,” he declared.
Speaking of the Vietnamese people, Dr. King asked, “What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”
Martin Luther King became a victim of gun violence when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis in 1968. Six years later, his mother, Alberta, was shot to death at a Sunday service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta as she played “The Lord’s Prayer” on the organ.
Meanwhile, as the gun control debate continues across America, along with comparisons to slavery and civil rights, communities of color are far more likely to express dissatisfaction with the nation’s gun policies and want stricter laws—49 percent versus 34 percent of whites.
Moreover, people of color are the majority of gun violence victims. In 2010, blacks accounted for 56 percent of all gun homicides, and in 2008 and 2009 gun homicide was the leading cause of death among black teens. Black teens are 25 times more likely to be injured by a gun than their white counterparts.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove