Free Republic

A few days ago I pointed out that it was wrong to act like it was controversial for African Americans to consider arming themselves in order to protect themselves from violent attack. The Second Amendment is for black people, white people, and every other color. Since then Reason.com has uncovered some material about the civil rights movement: Dylann Roof’s racially motivated murders of nine black churchgoers have brought predictable calls for new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. How ironic this is we shall soon see. Advocates of gun rights argue that the best way to prevent...

Many images that came out of Ferguson, Mo., last month looked like scenes from Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s: the gun-wielding police officers, the sign-carrying protesters and the chants demanding equal treatment and human dignity. But that’s where the similarities ended. For all the righteous indignation it inspired, the Ferguson turmoil has become the latest in a series of flash-in-the-pan causes that peter out without inspiring lasting movements for racial justice. As an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during the ’60s, what I learned was the importance of organizing at the grass-roots and how even...

Cobb, author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, and Danielle McGuire, a historian at Wayne State University, discuss the fundamental role of armed resistance in the civil rights movement.**********On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said. In his new...

The liberals at National Public Radio can’t really imagine guns being necessary for anything...unless perhaps it’s to keep Southern segregationists at bay. On Thursday afternoon’s Tell Me More talk show, host Michel Martin brought on Charles Cobb, who wrote the book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made The Civil Rights Movement Possible. She called it a “hiding in plain sight story” and asked why he wrote the book: COBB: I'm very conscious of the gaps in the history, and one important gap in the history and the portrayal of the movement is the role of guns in...

Most Americans are unaware of the connection between the civil rights movement and the Second Amendment. Via Guns.com: Charles Cobb, a professor and former activist, is telling the little known story of how guns protected the non-violent, civil rights advocates of the 1960s in a new book. A noted journalist and professor at Brown University, Cobb recently published, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed,” a look at firearms inside the Civil Rights movement, which includes a firsthand account of his experiences. Cobb maintained in a recent interview with NPR that he witnessed the untold story of guns inside the civil...

In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made The Civil Rights Movement Possible, journalist Charles Cobb shows how important guns were not only to leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. but also to many black Southerners who "believed in both nonviolence and self-defense."

Gun rights is a topic which seems all too readily broken down among racial lines if you get all of your news from cable TV or the New York Times. Black Americans don’t like guns and white people are just crazy about them, right? (Or just crazy, I suppose.) But while there are some definite trends to support the stereotype, no group is ever as homogeneous as the press would have you believe. While I rarely turn to NPR for my news, I ran across an interesting interview this month conducted by Karen Grigsby Bates, speaking with one black gun...

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Black people are disproportionately victimized by gun violence, and prominent African-American leaders are among those calling for tighter gun control. Yet as Karen Grigsby Bates of NPR's Code Switch team found out, many other African-Americans believe that owning guns is crucial to protecting themselves and their rights. KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Know how some people can't do without something? April Howard has three possessions that are non-negotiable. APRIL HOWARD: I have a .22, a .38 and a rifle. BATES: And she's keeping them all. Howard's had guns for several years now, the result of a close call...