Equal protection. Nice foot shot.
is pronounced void by the jurists and courts of the South. Florida makes it a misdemeanor for colored men to carry weapons without a license to do so from a probate judge, and the punishment of the offense is whipping and the pillory. South Carolina has the same enactments.... Cunning legislative devices are being invented in most of the States to restore slavery in fact.[136]
It is hardly surprising that the arms question was viewed as part of a partisan struggle: “As you once needed the muskets of the colored persons, so now you need their votes,” explained Senator Sumner to his fellow Republicans in support of black suffrage in the District of Columbia.[137] At the opposite extreme, Representative Michael C. Kerr (D., Ind.), an opponent of black suffrage and of the fourteenth amendment, attacked a military ordinance in Alabama that set up a volunteer militia of all males between ages 18 and 45 “without regard to race or color” on these grounds:(p.25)