>> guest: and then finally, there is a public policy implication for your presentation of the black tradition of arms. so i look forward to really getting into those three areas with you. but before i was interested in hearing from you a little wit about your background -- a little bit about your background and how did you arrive at this topic. >> guest: sure. well, happy to be here, and i think your sense about the way the book encounters the current

conversation is accurate. my background in this is, there are two influences, i suppose. so i grew up in rural gun culture which was black gun culture. so everyone that i knew, all of the, you know, the good people of the community, my grandfather and father were both ministers, both owned guns and so did everybody else in the community really unapologetically. and when i got to law school, i found that there was a quite different impression about something that i took as being sort of one of the clear, fundamental rights and importance of practical resources even before i could articulate something about fundamental rights. so there was this tension that operated in the way that i was sort of dealing with what i knew in my bones versus what i heard in law school and then the kind of cultural response to firearms

issues that i got in lots of the venues that i was operating in after law school. so certainly at harvard the sense in the early '80s when i was there was, oh, well, that second amendment thing, we don't really need to talk about that, and it was sort of a glib dismissal of something that culturally was quite important to me in the community i had grown up in. >> host: that's interesting. where did you grow up? >> guest: i grew up in rural west virginia. so my grandparents had a garden. they didn't have a telephone. i remember at 7 years old they still did not have a telephone. they were half an hour away from any sort of police response, and they also needed and used guns in terms of sort of daily life. so, you know, there was hog killing, there was keeping the pests out of the garden. but there were also sort of a clear recognition, i think, in the community that on matters of

personal security the government, the state was really sort of deep in the background and almost irrelevant. >> host: so in your book you really, i feel, try to recover this tradition and put it this a long historical context. so let's -- i wanted to hear, you know, when you talk about the black tradition of arms, what exactly is the black tradition of arms? >> guest: sure. so it is almost a repeat of what i suggested. it is, it is church people and strivers and merchants embracing gun ownership, gun use, carrying guns, armed self-defense as a sort of practical necessity and as an important response to that period of state failure; that is, that place in any sort of violent encounter where the state just is not able to respond. and you find this occurring very early on. so as you said, the book

actually after the introduction which focuses on the robert williams case that maybe we can talk about in a bit, the book talks in the chapter titled "foundations" about the earliest iterations of this. that is, fugitive slaves stealing guns, acquiring guns and fighting off slave catchers, sometimes very successfully in ways that just defy our sort of walking around expectations about how escaped slaves were faring and the kind of assistance that they got. but what we find be really is that this tradition dose back as far as -- goes back as far as we can trace the black american experience. >> host: yeah. so you started with frederick douglass, right? and i think for many people who have read the narrative, i think we're familiar with this fight he had with his former master that became the turning point in his kind of coming to sense of self. >> guest: right. >> host: what i didn't know about or what i knew less about was some of the other examples

that you gave, and i thought one in particular was the case, i don't know if you can talk about william parker? >> guest: so the christian that resistance in central, lower central pennsylvania was prompted by a fellow named william parker who was a conductor on the underground railroad. and there are lots of instances in the first chapter where you get sort of snippets, something -- a newspaper report, "slaves fire on pursuers," and then you don't hear anything more about it. the thing that is interesting about the parker case is that william parker who as a slave was illiterate at one point or another -- and people contest this -- at some point along the way learned how to read and write and wrote, actually, his own narrative recounting the christiana resistance. he was sheltering two or three slaves at his home in christiana. their slave master obtained a warrant in philadelphia under the new version of the fugitive slave law, the 1850 version.

there were black spies right there at the doorstep -- >> host: wow. >> guest: -- who found out that this fellow had gotten the warrant, was coming to parker's homestead with two u.s. marshals. the word got there ahead of the slave catchers and ahead of the marshals, and black folk from the surrounding community gathered together with guns and cutlery, and by the end of it the marshals, one of the slave catchers was dead, several others were wounded. then william parker and the two fugitives end up running north. on parker's telling, and it was just wonderful because i didn't actually know the details of all of this until i got deeply into the book. on parker's telling of this, he says we were sheltered at a friend's house in rochester, and then you read into frederick

douglass' narrative, and he talks about how these people from christiana, and then he names parker exlicitly, they came, sheltered at my house, i helped them across. and the ending scene, you couldn't write it better, the ending scene is douglass and parker on the ferry and as he's about to get off and go into canada, parker takes out of his pocket he calls it the revolver snatched from the ted hand of the slaver -- the dead hand of the slave. [laughter] so it's like the ending scene of a movie. but there are countless examples like this with less detail. and some of them appear actually in william still's account, william still who some call the founder of the underground railroad, who wrote this long, 800-page exposition on fugitive slaves who were coming through philadelphia. three of the images in the book showing fugitive slaves firing guns against slave catchers come from william still's images in

the original account. >> host: so one of the distinctions that you make early on in talking about the black tradition of arms is the distinction between self-defense and political violence. i wonder if you could walk us through -- >> guest: sure. >> host: -- why this distinction was -- what -- first of all, what self-defense is, how you're defining self-defense and how you're defining political violence and why the distinction is important. >> guest: sure: okay, so it is important, and it's my primary analytical contribution in the work. and so this book is based on a more scholarly piece than i published in the connecticut law review in 2012. and what i found and what i argue is or what i show over and over again is that black people made a distinction between political violence and self-defense, and they saw political violence as folly. political violence as a risk.

and by political violence, articulated in different details from using different details by different people. what they meant by political violence is trying to advance the race, trying to get political rights, arguing about the right to vote, arguing about, you know, access to schools. all of the things that we think about when we think about group rights. the idea was that we're not going to prevail using violence on those sorts of questions. on the other hand, self-defense is this individual response to a threat that occurs within that window of imminence; that is the place where it is impossible for the state even if the state turns out to be not a ma lev leapt state, even if state turns out to be motivated by goodwill. you still have to recognize there's a place just as a matter of physics where the state can't respond. and on those sorts of

fundamental self-defense scenarios that are baseline fundamental, there's this long embrace of the importance of firearms and armed self-defense as a private resource for black folk. and that's the dichotomy that runs really throughout the book. >> host: so is this, is this more like a spectrum that people have kind of floated back and forth? because i'm thinking of the case of william parker or frederick douglass or many of the people that you cover in especially the 19th century. >> guest: right, right. >> host: where the acts of violence were aggressive acts of violence by whites or by the state itself, right? or a collusion of the two. >> guest: sure, sure. >> host: and so was that self-defense and political violence, or is there a way that we can't see that as not political, right? those acts of self-defense? >> guest: and your point is well taken, and it allows me to sharpen the last answer. so the first chapter i actually title "boundary land," and what

i'm trying to evoke is this notion that there is this area of contested or contestable scenarios where there are people engaged in violent acts of either self-defense be or if you push be it, if you think about it and talk about it a different way, you could say, you know, that's really getting to the range of political violence. and what we see rather than people over time talking about being on one side of the line or the other, political violence versus self-defense -- >> host: right. >> guest: -- what you see is the more conservative and cautious members of the community talking about self-defense and talking about arms with a level of restraint that recognizes the possibility that you could very easily have something that started out as an act of legitimate self-defense leak into or filter into or swirl out into a scenario where now you're thinking this is political violence. now we've harmed the movement, we've harmed the quest for freedom by striking out in a way

that's going to produce this sort of political, violent political backlash. so that's -- it's a tension that runs through the conversation, and you see by the time we get to the end of it as i'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about, when we get to the end of the movement, we see this transition, this pivot into what i call the modern orthodoxy. one of the impulses that drive cans the modern orthodoxy, the rise of it, is the use of self-defense themes by, quote, black radicals in scenarios that we have to say really are political violence. and you see this debate and dissension within the community about whether that's a legitimate act of self-defense be or not. >> host: okay. so that's very interesting. so my sense is that you are arguing or suggesting that within the tradition there was a feeling that self-defense was an

easier explanation or it had a moral weight to it, it had maybe legal protection to it in ways that political violence did not. is that -- >> guest: i think that's right. political violence is essentially revolution. >> host: right. >> guest: political violence is we're going to upset the game board, and you see over and over and over again, you know, roy wilkens talking about it in the 20th century, but you also see w.e.b. dubois talking about it at the turn of the century, ida wells talking about it in the 19th century, t. thomas fortune talking about it at the end of the 19th century and lots of other people that folk probably maybe have not heard of expressing in the same way this idea that if you're a 10% minority, you are not going to win a revolution, and you're not going to achieve your goals of inclusion through violence. but that doesn't mean that you give up the right or that

there's an elimination of the need for these instances of individual self-defense. >> host: so you mentioned ida b. wells, and one of the things i thought was really interesting and great about your book is that you focused on women, right? there were women who participated in this tradition, right? >> guest: spilling over to. >> host: yeah. so tell us a little bit about some of the women who made up this tradition of arms. >> guest: sure. so in some sense it was not any sort of purposeful effort. it's just they were there. and just a bit of background, it's been, i've been working on these issues for two decades, and every six months i pick up a new book and think, well, there he is again with, there's this, there's this thing that, you know, years ago, 15 years ago i'm thinking this black tradition of arms. and as you said, there's lots of scholarship out there that starts to sort of affirm these things. well, ida b. wells is, or hopefully, is well known to lots of viewers of this show and

hopefully readers of the book. she was one of the foremost anti-lynch offing advocates -- lynching advocates in the 19th century. she's this pint of a woman, you know, just this very small, little, demure woman but just a firebrand. and so she goes to memphis, she's a newspaper editor there, then she ends up getting chased out of memphis because of some inflammatory things that she had written about lynching there. goes to new york where she partners with t. thomas fortune working for the new york age, and she is well known. so even people who aren't familiar with what i call the black tradition of arms, most people who are familiar with wells are familiar with her quip that the winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every black home. well, she was, she was not just off the cuff on sort of making these statements. the context was -- so, first,

she had survived an episode of violence which included a lynching of tom moss and three others in hem mys. moss was -- memphis. moss was one of her best friends in memphis. she also, though, was commenting on two episodes of averted lynchings, one in paducah, kentucky, another in jacksonville, florida. and she was, as she was going about her journalistic efforts and making these sort of by today's standards inflammatory statements, i guess, about firearms, etc., she was talking about what people in the community were doing in response to racist terrorism. and the other thing that we know is she's got a quote in one of her several books that talks about how right after the tom moss lynching she went out and bought a pistol and that she carried it. there are other reference, you know, these continuing references to wells advocating armed self-defense and preparing

herself for armed self-defense. we don't have an actual instance of wells firing a gun, but as we move through the history, over and over and over again. so people that one would not think of: rosa parks, daisy bates who shepherded the little rock nine through the process of integrating the high school, seem that you've never heard of, fannie lou hamer. one of my favorite parts of or quotes from fannie lou hamer captures the dynamic that you're talking about, that is, the political violence on one hand and self-defense on the other. so fannie lou hamer in response to people who were questioning her about beatings and abuse and, you know, she just had a horrible early life. she says, baby, you just gotta love 'em. and what she's talking about is sort of a scriptural response to her enemies. and it's exactly what you would think of in terms of the

nonviolent movement. she goes on to say hating just makes you weak and sick. and then someone asks her the second question. that is, well, how did you survive so many years of abuse and so forth? and in the finish without missing a beat she says, i'll the tell you why: i keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first one of these folks who wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again. [laughter] and it captures in a way you see occurring over and over again the dynamic we're talking about. and fannie lou hamer is one, i've mentioned just a few of the women, but the book really, as i said, just spills over with women who are just as engaged in this tradition as the men. and it seems to me that really it is an illustration of the pragmatism that undergirds the tradition. that is, if the threat arises, it's not a question of waiting or more your husband or whose

role is it is to pick up the gun and engage in an act of self-defense. if you are by yourself and the threat comes, then you're going to respond in a way that is consistent with what principle would dictate regardless of whether it's, you know, you're a man or woman. and it's an interesting reflection of sort of in this long dynamic between black men and black women particularly in the south, that there's a degree of equality here in terms of the way -- >> host: yeah. i thought the story of stagecoach mary was fascinating. if you can tell us a little bit about mary fields. >> guest: sure. so also called stagecoach mary, at one point or another called black mary. so she starts out this tennessee, moves to ohio. eventually she finds herself in cascade, montana. so she's six feet tall, she's 200 pounds. she's a dark black woman, and your instinct -- and she's in

cascade and operating in the west in the latter part of the 19th century. so your instinct about the life that someone like that would have in that context is completely different from the reality of stagecoach mary. she turns out to be just this iconic local hero. that's not to say that she didn't face instances where she had to pick up a gun in self-defense. she actually had a duel with a white man who they were working at a place where she was in charge, and the fellow says, well, i don't think i should have to take orders from a nigger slave. and she's diplomatic at first, and that didn't work. and then as they, the conflict escalates, he comes in close and sucker punches her, knocks her to the ground. >> host: wow. >> guest: she gets up, dusts herself off, says go get your gun and meet me behind the barn. [laughter] so the hen are hooting -- the men are hooting, and the nuns at

the mission where she was working were all aghast. they go behind the barn, she gives him the first move, and she shoots him. she kills this man. and that's the beginning of her, of the legend of mary fields, black mary. there's, you know, a very nice book on this x there actually was at least a snippet of film covering or trying to depict mary fields. esther roll was the star, i think back in the 1970s. mary fields goes on. she as other sorts of episodes. she becomes famous as a stagecoach driver for wells fargo. and while she has these altercations, she's not lynched. we don't have -- it's not an episode of violence where like many others that we saw in the 19th century where black self-defenders win the battle but lose the war, they end up in some episode of lynching. mary fields becomes a hero. you know, so much so that even gary cooper has, the movie

actor, has this famous quip sort of elevating mary fields as one of his childhood heroes. her house burned down in the early 20th century. the whole community got together, built her a new house. so it's this, another episode showing that you can't really stereotype the experiences that black folk were having in different parts of the country at different times. so like much of the book, this is a surprise, and it defies many of the expectations that people have about how folk were surviving during various periods of the experience. >> host: so during the 19th century, we've talked about how the distinction between self-defense and political violence could easily get blurred. but you suggest that moving into the 20th century that distinction becomes clearer. so i'm thinking of, you know, red summer, tulsa, rosewood.

can you talk about how those illustrated maybe the distinctions between the two? >> guest: sure. so you're right to see this, and i talk exlicitly in the book about -- explicitly in the book about the period pre-slavery. there was lots of advocacy from others who were in the sort of vanguard of the early freedom movement. and they were unapologetic about the idea that slavery was a state of war. you had at that period, prior to the civil war, lots of statements suggesting, listen, we've just got to fight. there's no reason to be reticent about political violence because we don't have any political rights, we're not really operating within the system. after the civil war and certainly during the period of reconstruction where there was some sense that we've got really a kind of promising political opportunity, we start to see people backing off a wit in

term -- a bit in terms of the rhetoric of political violence but still elevating individual self-defense. by 1876 when reconstruction ends, then we've got another sort of bump this the transformation -- in the transformation. now we're at a point where the concept of individual self-defense becomes much more important because people have lost lost their political rights. there's some sense that whatever political rights they have now in 1876 are all that they will get, and it's a bleaker period. so you start to see almost as just a residual matter lots of references to self-defense rather than political violence. you move into the 20th century, and there again is this sort of concern that for things to get better, we've got to proceed in a fashion that evokes the tools of the democratic process and maybe the guilt of the sort of

american population. so in a variety of ways, you've got instances that could move to, into the range of political violence, but the surrounding rhetoric from lots of the people who are sort of black people who are shaping the story, you know, the surrounding rhetoric from people like john hope franklin. john hope franklin, the great black american historian, who commented on the tulsa riots from the 1920s in a way that really casted, he casts it as heroic, but he casts it as self-defense rather than as political violence. you see the same thing in the naacp's reporting in the crisis magazine about the episode in rosewood and lots and lots of other lynchings. some of the best examples come from w.e. be. duboise -- w.e.b. dubois, black america's preeminent

intellectual, working at the crisis in that early period. he talks about a varian variety of episodes, and he actually urges vehemently self-defense by people who were facing mobs. but there are a couple of really salient quotes that i have in the book where he talks for half of the quote about the necessity of self-defense. and then he goes on in the other half and says but we shouldn't and can't seek to achieve reform by violence. so he's very cognizant of the fact that 10% of the population is not going to get their political agenda executed in any serious way through violation. but he's also -- violence. but he's also urging people to take up guns in self-defense against mobbers. and it is sometimes surprising. i show, when i was doing the early versions of the book, people would look at this and

say duboise said this? not only that, but he picked up a shotgun at the beginning of the atlanta riots and made some quite inflammatory statements about his willingness to defend himself and his family. >> host: is even though there's this long tradition, right, of arms, of self-defense, i think one of the reasons why people aren't aware of it or what has eclipsed it, certainly, is what happens in the '50s and '60s with the civil right movement and the push toward nonviolent civil disobedience, you know, with core, with the sclc. so talk about a little bit about what happens to the black tradition of arms during the height of what we would consider the civil rights movement in the south for desegregation. >> guest: sure, okay. so this is the period, and the book addresses this in two ways. the first chapter actually talks about a part of this era that is

central because it reflects this statement and talks in detail about the origins of the statement that we get from martin luther king that really crystallizes this dichotomy that i've been talking about, the difference between political violence and self-defense. and then as we get into chapter seven which is the longest chapter of the book, over and over again we see people this the movement engaging this question of how much we've got to worry about violence, we've got to project and demonstrate that this is an effort to achieve our political goals nonviolently. at the same time, you've dot this long tradition -- especially in the south and in the rural areas where lots of this work is going on -- of gun ownership, of gun use, of carrying guns. and so let me try to summarize it a couple different ways. in the first chapter, what i talk about is this conflict between robert williams whose

memoir, "negroes with guns," or the title of this book is a variation on that theme. williams and king end up in this debate, and this widespread, widely-published exchange of essays. and the genesis was that robert williams made inflammatory statements after a trial where a white man was acquitted of raping a black woman. and he made some statements that roy wilkens at the naacp considered to be advocacy of political violence. and wilkens removed robert williams from his post as president of the monroe county, north carolina, naacp. williams appeals that removal to the national board of the naacp, and at the annual meeting there is this vote. now, ultimately, the removal of williams is upheld. but in the process there is just

this wide engagement from across the community, across the country. branches of the naacp writing in, lots of statements in the crisis magazine. this big, this significant engagement of this question of whether robert williams stepped over the line into advocacy of political violence. lots of people disagreed. martin luther king crystallizes the debate by basically saying, all right, you've got three things to think about here. one possibility in terms of the nonviolent theme of the movement is pure pacifism. and king says it's a religious commitment, very few people are ever going to achieve it, it requires extraordinary discipline. later folks would say king never urged others or never condemned people for not achieving that level, that sense of nonviolence. and then he says there's self-defense even involving arms. he says even gandhi did not condemn that. and he also says that people who engage in that sort of

self-defense may even command a level of respect more the kind of grit that it shows. and then he says for purposes of what we're doing, that is, the freedom, achieving political goals, we've got to press through marching and nonviolent demonstration, and that's the way we're going to achieve our political goals. so king crystallizes this dichotomy. and then later roy wilkens, still sort of under pressure from lots of people at the branches, argues in a pamphlet called the single issue this the robert williams case. he says this is not an issue of self-defense. so wilkens looked at what williams said was self-defense and said that's not what you advocated. you advocated political violence, and we at the, the, ts aacp -- naacp will have none of this. at the same time, he says, listen, the naacp cut its teeth on supporting black folk who stood up with firearms and defends -- defended themselves.

the sweet case was actually the case that funded, was the impulse pulse for funding the naacp legal defense fund. there were steve green, another example. all of these early 20th century cases the naacp stood up and said we're going to support black people who have used firearms in self-defense. but, says wilkens, by, you know, the 1960s, 1970s we are not going to be in the lynching business, we're not going to be in the business of political violence. and this is the place where that distinction that runs through the book really becomes crucial. because in the next turn of the black tradition of arms it's the efforts of black radicals to conflate those two things that i think and that i argue in the book pushes the black establishment away from the long tradition and pushes them toward a kind of 'em race of this new -- embrace of this new,

modern orthodoxy and supportive of supply restrictions. >> host: well, we'll definitely get into this. i'll look forward to it after the break. >> guest: great. >> on the go? "after words" is available via podcast through itunes and xml. visit booktv.org and click podcast on the upper left side of the page. select which podcast you'd like to download and listen to "after words" while you travel. >> host: so i wanted to pick back up what we were talking about, this change, the challenge that was posed to the tradition of arms as people understood it as a result of the rise of activists who maybe didn't see the distinctions between self-defense and political violence, right? you have this quote from huey newton saying self-defense is politics, and politics is self-defense. >> guest: yes. >> host: i'm paraphrasing, but essentially this is a political

act, right in and then there's the question of is the defense of others self-defense, right? when you talk about the deacons for defense the. >> guest: right. >> host: so talk about a little bit about the challenges that the tradition as it had been evolving faced with the emergence of these new ideas in terms of how the two are related. >> guest: sure. so, again, there was always this worry, there was always this danger that acts of individual self-defense would spill into political violencement and i've got -- violence. and i've got countless instances where there's an episode of self-defense, it leads to backlash that becomes then a swirl of violence that you have to characterize ultimately as political violence. you know, where it's groups of seem fighting one another over something that over now an idea, over an episode. so it's not that imminent threat that you're just fighting off an individual situation.

so that's always been part of the worry, that's always been part of the -- a weakness, if you will, of the conceptual foundation that was running throughout the tradition. it comes to a head in the 1960s as we find, you know, not only are blacks protesting, still defending themselves individually against terrorist attacks, but also the cities are on fire. and in, within that context you've got new, more aggressively radical organizations. so the black panthers are emblematic, but the book talks about lots of others that are less well known. and the quote that you give from huey newton really crystallizes the problem for the black moderates. so what you see coming to a head

in this point is naacp, core, sncc, sclc, the urban league all sort of vying for influence during the early part of the 1960s. but as you get to the late 1960s, the naacp really becomes the sort of dominant organization in terms of fundraising, and partly that's a consequence of even the sort of radical shift, for example, of core. and sncc and even sclc because king at that point is anti-war. so people who are on the outside looking to fund the civil rights movement, the naacp becomes really the most viable option. and there's record levels of fundraising that occur during the that period. and part of this is a consequence of outside support coalescing around the sort of conservative, moderate naacp model and casting off or pushing to the edge the more radical

organizations. and one of the things that is important to think about in terms of this transition so who are the groups and who are the entities that are pressing the sort of new, mainstream black movement? those entities proceeding under the naacp model are sort of the new black political class. the new black political class looks at the tradition of arms and recognizes that that tradition is being conflated with political violence by the new radicals, and you start to see this policy separation. it becomes very hard now to stand up and say that black people have this right to arms, that self-defense is this crucial thing especially when huey newton and others are on the other side of the street saying that self-defense and political violence are exactly the same thing. so it's this turmoil, it's this

period where the sort of new, emerging, prevailing black leadership has to make a decision about whether to sort of embrace the tradition of arms or to abandon it. >> host: so when, so the distinction gets blurred again, right? >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: and do you see this expression coming from like the black panther party or even malcolm x calling for self-defense this a kind of programmatic way, right? so it's not like self-defense if someone, i'm in imminent danger, it's more like a program of self-defense, right? >> guest: yeah. >> host: so do you see this as part of the tradition, the tradition is now being transfarmed, or do you see this diminishing the tradition? you know, do you see the tradition -- is the black tradition of arms just the tradition of imminent self-defense or self-defense against be an imminent threat,

or does it have space for even if it's, you know, something that people find highly disagreeable, does it also have space for this kind of maybe aggressive or political, you know, collective self-defense or programmatic self-defense or -- >> guest: well, that radical strand that i talk about is quite clearly a part of the story. so one of the things that can happen here is that, you know, you'll use a term as a way of trying to capture the different aspects of a phenomenon, and then the term sort of takes on its own weight and its own inertia. i don't mean to say that the efforts and advocacy of the radicals is not a part of the story. quite clearly it is a significant catalyst that causes a significant change in sort of the mainstream attitude about firearms ownership and firearms use.

in the -- you're asking this kind of normative question; that is, can we embrace the radical attack or the radical tack in some way. and that embrace is, you know, i try not to be preachy here. what i try to do in the book is to say here's what happened. >> host: right. >> guest: you don't know these stories, and then let people make up their own minds. >> host: well, i'm asking because do you see that as part of the tradition as well as opposed to seeing that as harming the tradition or diminishing the tradition? >> guest: okay, i see. no, i think that has always been a part of the tradition in the sense that there were all, there was always this disagreement within the community about how far a certain episode has moved into that boundary land of dangerous -- >> host: right, right. >> guest: -- advocacy or action that we would say constituted political violence. so, you know, robert williams in the 1950s was on that line. >> host: right.

>> guest: you see lots of episodes in the late 19th century where people were -- some were pressing harder. t. thomas fortune, the great publisher of new york age, was criticized by other black publishers as pushing harder on the boundary line than was wise and of advocating certain sorts of action. so there was a point in the 1890s where after a lynching in georgia he says something like -- he has a essay called the shoot and stand rather than run and hide policy or something like that. >> host: right, right, right. almost like stand your ground. >> guest: sure, sure. absolutely. and other publishers at the time said this is insane, what are you talking about? you're pushing over the line again. you're not talking about self-defense, you're talking about a kind of policy and a program that is the sort of political violence that we've always, we think is crazy. and the white press certainly

excoriated him. >> host: right. >> guest: so this has always within part of the conversation going back and forth. and not only the conversation, but it's been part of just the physical dynamics. some people would engage in acts of violence that members of the community would look at and say, well, wait a minute, that's really over the line. >> host: right. >> guest: now you're endangering all of us because political violence means there's going to be retaliation, there's going to be backlash, and that's bad for the community. >> host: right. >> guest: so what happens in the 1960s with the rise of really -- ask now it's on television -- and now it's on television, of course, so it's more of a threat and people are getting a stage to make these statements that become more widely publicized than they might have been, you know, 60 years earlier. now what you see is this tension that's always been at the heart of what i call the black tradition of arms coming to a head and generating a scenario

where the new black leadership class has to make a choice. that is, do we align with the progressive coalition -- and this is early 1970s, it's exactly the point time when the newly-minted national gun control movement comes to the fore -- do we align with our progressive allies and push aside these conversations about self-defense and political violence and, by way, the long black tradition of arms, or do we embrace those things and risk losing our progressive allies? and what happens, certainly you can see this tracking in the middle of the 1970s, maynard jackson -- first black mayor of atlanta -- is now the president of the national coalition to ban handguns. he makes a variety of statements that are tully consistent -- fully consistent with the new

national gun control movement but quite at odds with the long black tradition of arms. and it's partly, as i argue in the book, partly a response to, you know, the choice that the radicals embrace -- >> right. you call it the emergence of the modern orthodoxy on -- >> guest: of supply. >> host: the supplier, right. >> guest: supply control. of. >> host: the gun control movement. >> guest: yes. >> host: what's interesting though is, of course, there's a black tradition of arms, but there's also an american or white american tradition of black disarmament, right? >> guest: yeah. >> host: that started in the 1600s in virginia, right? >> guest: yeah. >> host: even before slavery became the racialized labor exploitation system that it was, there was already this kind of racialized distinctions made between africans who were in the new so-called world and even whites, indentured servants, that outlawed their owning weapons, right? >> guest: right.

>> host: and so there is this -- i wonder or why do you think -- and then, of course, ronald reagan, you know, as governor, you know, one of his -- the reasons or for pushing through, pushing forward gun control is in response to the black panther party. so how is it that this modern orthodoxy as you call it, like these, the mainstream civil rights leadership, is able to embrace a policy of disarmament even with this history? why do you think that people did not you should back and say, you know, this is dangerous? >> guest: well, this is odd, and it's complicated, and i've written a lot about it. so one of the odd things is that the gun control movement, supply side gun controls really sort of push seem into a scenario where you're relying more and more and more on state and local governments to provide your personal security. and that's an odd perspective to

take for people who have had such long and enduring reasons to distrust the state. the first answer, though, quite clearly is the notion of political coalitions generating black political power. so what you see in the 1970s, moving through the 1980s is the progressive coalition is the place where black political power rests. and as a member of that, you know, sort of governing class you in the black political establishment are going to make lots of sacrifices, you're going to make lots of compromises. and in some sense to the degree that people tell you, listen, you're now in charge of washington, d.c. or detroit and you have got these problems with black-on-black crime, here is a theory of -- here's an idea, a set of protocols and legislation that will bring peace to blighted neighborhoods that are burdened by violence.

and again, it's quite clear that in theory the idea of supply controls resonates. if you say we're sitting in this room, there are no guns in this room, we know it for sure, and there's going to be no gun crime in this room, that's the instinct, the impulse on which the supply control argument rests. the problem in putting it into practice and the reason that it hasn't succeeded in the u.s. and has generated instances of failure that i talk about in the last chapter is that we in the u.s. already have 325 million guns. so talking about taking the supply of guns down to zero or asking where did that person get the gun, those are distractions. and i think it's taken a while as a matter of policy for these experiments to run through. ask we're now at a stage -- and we're now at a stage where people, especially now that we have overt embrace of the constitutional right to arms, again, pressed by black plaintiffs, we're probably now at a stage where those in the

black political class have to step back and reevaluate. at least i would hope that people would give some additional thought to the policies that have really been this place as dominant policies since the 1970s. your other point about why people haven't looked at the history of gun control and thought, well, it really is a history of kind of race-based distinctions starting from the 1600s moving quite clearly into the 1950s, even the 1960s, you know, there's a famous quote that's the title of an article that a friend of mine wrote called "never intended to apply to the white population" which is a statement made by a judge in south carolina about a series of gun controls in south carolina there was a white fellow who was being prosecuted, the judge says i'm dismissing

it, i know about these laws. these laws were never intended to apply to the white pop belation. so it's emblematic of the things that were also occurring under the black codes and jim crow and even in places where the statute was not explicitly discriminatory. we find that there was a quite discriminatory administration of the statutes. so even martin luther king in montgomery in the 19, probably 956, beginning of the montgomery bus bus boycott, after there was a bomb that went off at king's home, black man of the neighborhood -- men of the neighborhood come around with their guns to sort of defend him, he sends them all home. and the next day he and one of the other reverends from the surrounding area, they go down and alie for permits -- apply for permits to carry pistols. king's permit is denied because he doesn't show good cause. this is a man who had had multiple death threats. >> host: right. >> guest: and that's an example of the scenario where the

discretion that is vested in east a sheriff -- either a sheriff or a judge or sometimes a prosecutor, an example of a kind of latent discrimination, discrimination in terms of impact even though on the face of the statute the law is neutral. so there's this long history of that. and ultimately i guess people have to make up their own minds about whether they are impacted in terms of their current decisions about policy, whether they are influenced by that history. it influences lots of people that i know. but for the political class, i think it's -- if you're facing an immediate crisis, it's hard to look back and say i'm going to avoid some policy measure because its intention with things that happened 70 years ago. >> host: yeah. i mean, part of the discourse is the crossing of racial lines does alter how we see this, right? >> guest: absolutely. >> host: is -- and so when you

look around and see the most vocal advocates for gun control, it is usually for the acquisition or use of guns or violence to protect from a criminalized black or brown face, right? >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: and when you see as you talked about the calls for disarmament, it is to disarm the criminalized black or brown face, right? so it's never -- either side by whether is the side calling for protection of the second amendment doesn't seem to be speaking for black people, right? and the side calling for gun control is also -- do you see what i'm saying? it's, so how -- so here we are now, and, you know, you talked about the cases that kind of secured the second amendment, right? the shelley parker and otis

mcdonald you can tell us a little about those cases and why they were significant. >> guest: sure. >> host: what was interesting to me much of your book in shaping the understanding of the black tradition of arms focused on interracial, like the cross-racial violence, right? >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: of defense against white aggression. but the case of shelley parker and otis mcdonald was a case of intraracial violence. >> guest: sure, yes. >> host: right? >> guest: sure. >> host: so, again, this goes to my argument or my sense that the advocates for gun control are advocating when the perceived assailant or aggressor is black. >> guest: okay. so, well, this is interesting. so part of the response is that we've not to appreciate that all of the -- lots of this information, lots of this story is coming to us through a filter of popular media where you get a snapshot or a snatch of a claim that someone is making about the

right to arms. and it's that sort of caricatures the debate. so one of the things that i talk about in the last chapter of the book is the surprise -- so i'll do a couple of things here. the surprising diversity within the black community on the issue of the right to arms. and so there was recently a pew poll on, that asked a couple of -- two questions, basically. and it was essentially asking people, blacks and whites, whether they supported more gun control or more gun rights, whether they thought we should err in favor of one or other. and whites split, i believe, something like 60/40 in favor of more gun rights. but blacks actually split the other way, meaning 40% of the black community surveyed said they thought her attention should be paid to gun rights. now, that's remarkable component

of the community embracing what one would say is a kind of traditional gun rights view. it's a much bigger slice than you would presume given the tree to which -- the degree to which the democratic party commands support from black folk. so that's the first piece s that the details are more interesting than the sort of caricature that you get from the 30-second flash on some tv show. the next thing about this, though, is -- and you mentioned shelley parker and otis mcdonald. so most people know that other the last few years, in 2008 and 2010, the u.s. supreme court, first of all, in a case called heller, district of columbia v. heller and second in the case called mcdonald v. chicago, the u.s. supreme court upheld what i've been arguing and lots of people have been arguing for the last 20 years that the second amendment actually does guarantee an individual right to

arms. and so the first case, 2008, was out of chicago -- sorry, was out of washington d.c. the lead plaintiff initially, the case was initially denominated parker v. district of columbia. shelley parker, black woman, community activist, who was laboring under what was really the most draconian, most stringent gun control measure in the country, washington, d.c. said handguns are banned, other sorts of guns were grandfathered, you really cannot have a gun for self-defense because even if you have one, you have got to keep it in your house disassembled, so no practical armed self-defense in washington d.c. shelley parker represented by lawyers who were also instrumental in the mcdonald case, shelley parker argued i am under siege. i am this -- i'm an act visits who's been threatened -- activist who's been threatened by, basically, young men that

she described as thugs. she was afraid of them. they came after her in a variety of instances. at one point, you know, she had a little gate and fence area trying to keep her house safe, and they drove a car through it tries to get at her. she said i'm looking for a tool that will help me survive, maybe prevail during that period before help can get here. ask that was -- and that was, essentially, her claim rested to the united states supreme court, and the court said in -- once the case is now called heller v. district of columbia, the court said, yes, there is, in fact, an individual right to arms, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and the constitution actually means that, something like that with limitations that we're still sort of seizing out. same thing happens or similar thing happens two years later in chicago. so chicago is a case, another black plaintiff, otis mcdonald. and the reason the court takes up the second case is that the first case was in the district of columbia, ask all the -- and

all the first case established was that for purposes of limiting the central government, the second amendment established this individual right. but it was still unclear whether you had application of the second amendment to the states. the mcdonald case established that proposition, and mcdonald, otis mcdonald, was a 72-year-old black man, army veteran who was living in a neighborhood that where he, again, was besieged by young black men. and he said i want a gun for the same reason that shelley parker wanted a gun. and the court ultimately upheld his claim. >> host: so in the final moments that we have, we've traced the tradition of black arms and how it's been challenged in the mid 20th century and now the current kind of discourse over, you know, gun rights and the protection of black lives, many of whom fall at the hands of gun violence. how do you see the long, rich

tradition, black tradition of arms being revived in the this time, in the short time that we have left? >> guest: so is, ultimately, what i say in the book is people have to make up their own minds about. i try and give lots of data. this is something that i teach. i've got another textbook that deals with lots of the details on questions of the risks and the benefits. we've got all kinds of data about the benefits of firearms, defensive gun uses ranging into the millions per year. you don't hear about them because they're brandishing episodes, times when no shots are fired, detenter value of firearms -- tenter value of arms chronicled by the centers for disease control and the national crime victims survey. you can read all of that detail in the book. my assessment of this coming away is that on balance we are better off if members, the sober, the mature members of the black community have the choice of owning firearms for

self-protection, that we're better off on balance. doesn't mean that firearms don't have their costs. and i the think we're at a stage where hopefully we can have a less visceral, more, a calmer conversation about whether there's some role for the black tradition in the modern era. and we can move away from just the reflex that we've had over the last, certainly, 20 years that says, well, these are evil instruments that we need to get away and get out of the community. and so the 40% of black folk who answered in the pew poll that they thought it was more important to uphold the individual right to arms, this book in some ways gives voice to those people ask those concerns. and hopefully will cause others in the community to at least engage the question at a more serious level than just the

reflex reaction against guns that are sort of a caricature of what the actual conversation needs to be. >> host: well, it certainly has given me reason to revisit my thinking about guns and with a more historically-informed perspective, so thank you very much for that contribution. >> guest: thanks for the interview. >> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in