debate wednesday night at 8 eastern on c-span. >> up next op booktv, "after words" with guest host zaheer ali with columbia university. this week nicholas johnson and his book, "negroes and the gun." in it, the professor discusses the tradition of african-americans using firearms to defend their families and communities, a tradition that dates back to reconstruction. he argues that the nonviolence of the civil rights era helped bury this fact of black history. this program is about an hour. >> host: so negroes and guns strikes we as an important intervention in three ways. one, in the historiography of the blacking freedom movement. over the years there have been increasingly new works that revise the way we understand the role of violence relateed to the, you know, the kind of

pretom in a minute narrative of nonviolence. the other intervention, i think, is cultural in terms of who we see or think of when we think of gun owners, and also how we think about black resistance. 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 bit about your background and how you got into this topic. how did you arrive at 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 who were both ministers both owned guns and so did everybody else in the community. really unapologetically. and when i, 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 and the community that i had grown up in. >> host: that's interesting. so where did you grow up? >> guest: i grew up in rural west virginia. >> host: okay. >> guest: so, yeah. my grandparents had, you know, 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 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 in 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 armsesome. >> 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, how escaped slaves were faring and the kind of assistance that they got. but what we find really is that this tradition goes back as far as be we can trace -- 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 of the life of frederick douglass, we're familiar with this fight he had with his former master that became the turning point if his kind of coming to sense of self. >> guest: right. >> host: what i didn't know about, what i knew less about were some of the other examples you gave. and one in particular was the case, i don't know if you can talk about william parker and -- >> guest: sure. 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, 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 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. and word got there ahead of the slave catchers and ahead of the

marshals, and black folk from the surrounding community gathers together with guns and cutlery, and by the end of it, the marshal, one of the slave catchers was dead, several others were wounded. then william parker and the two fugitives end up running north. they -- 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 this rochester. and then you read into frederick douglass' narrative, and he says, he talks about how, well, these people from christiana, and then he names parker explicitly, they came, they 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 douglass is about to get

off and send them into canada, parker takes out of his pocket the, he calls it the revolver snatched from 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 worchedderred if you could walk -- wondered if you could walk us through why this dis2006

was important -- 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 that i published in the connecticut law review in 2012. and what i, 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 the, 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 malevolent state, even if the state turns out to be operating, 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, in those self-defense scenarios that are really just baseline fundamental, there's in 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 you cover especially in the 19th century -- >> guest: right, right. >> host: -- where the acts of violence were aggressive by whites or by the sate itself, right? -- state itself, or a collusion of the two. >> guest: sure, sure. >> host: and and so was that self-defense and political violence, or is there a way to, 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 in 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 violet acts of -- violent acts of either self-defense or if you push it, if you think about it and talk about it a different way, you

could say that's really getting to 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: finish what you see are 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 a 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 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 and we see this

transition, this pivot into what i call the modern orthodoxy, one of the impulses that drives 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 or not. >> okay. so that's very, or it's very interesting. so my sense is that you, you're arguing or suggesting that within the tradition there was a feeling that self-defense was an easier eczema nation 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 violation is essentially revolution. >> host: right. >> guest: political violence is, you know, 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 percent minority, you are not going to win a revolution, and you're not going to achieve your goals of inclusion through violation. but that doesn't mean that you give up the right or that there's then 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. >> 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 few book and think, well, there he is again, 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-lin offing advocates -- lynching advocates in the 19th century. and she's this pint of a woman. she's 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. the thomas fortune -- 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 particular 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 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 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 people called the first lady

of little rock who shepherded the little rock nine through the process of integrating the high school, people that you've never heard of, fannie lou hamer. one of my favorite parts or quotes from fannie lou hamer is, 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 the 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 without missing a beat, she says i'll 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 or something like that. [laughter] and it just captures in a way that you see occurring over and over and over again the dynamic that 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 metareally it is -- me it really is an illustration of the pragmatism that undergirds the tradition. if the threat arises, it's not a question of waiting for your husband or whose role 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, regard rest of

whether -- regardless of whether you're a man or a woman. and it's an interesting reflection of sort of this long dynamic between black men and black women, particularly in the south. there's a degree of equality here in terms of the way -- >> yeah. i thought the story of stagecoach mary was fascinating. if you can tell us a little bit about mary. >> guest: sure. so also called stagecoach mary, at one point or another called black mary. so she, she starts out in 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 stage coach 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. as the, you know, the conflict escalates, he comes in close and sucker punches here. 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 men are hooting, and the nuns of 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 a very nice book on this, and there actually was at

least a snippet of a film covering or trying to depict mary fields. esther roll was the star years -- i think back in the 1970s. mary fields goes on. she has 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. whole community got together, built her a new house. so it's 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, 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 explicitly in the book about the period pre-slavery. there was lots of advocacy from

frederick douglass, from henry forward net, from others who were -- garnet, 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. so you had at that period, you know, 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, was 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 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 in the transformation. now we're at a point where the concept of individual

self-defense p becomes much more important because people have lost their political rights. there's some sense that whatever political rights they have are now in 1876 are all that they will get, and it's a bleaker, bleaker period. so you start to see almost as just a residual matter lots of references to self-defense rather than political violencement you move into -- violation. 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 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 cast it as heroic, but he cast 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.b. dubois who, america's, black-america's preeminent intellectual. working at the crisis during that early period, he talks about a 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 violation. so he's very cognizant of the fact that 10% of the population is not going to get their political agenda executed in a serious way through violence. but he's also urging people to take up guns in self-defense against mobbers. and it is, it is sometimes surprising. i show, when i was doing the early versions of the book, people would look at this and say, duboise? 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: so 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, was what happened in the '50s and '60s and the civil rights movement and the push for nonviolent initiatives with core, with the sclc. so talk about a little bit about what happened 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, just over and over again we see people in the movement engaging this question of how much we've got to worry about violence. we have got to project and demonstrate that this is an effort to achieve our political goals nonviolently. at the same time, you've got 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 a couple of different ways. in the first chapter, what i talk about is this conflict between robert williams whose memoir, "negroes with guns," is -- or title of this book is a variation on that theme. williams and king end up in this debate, in this widespread exchange, widely republished 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 the 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. the 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 requires extraordinary discipline. later folks would say king never urged others to -- or never condemned people for not achieving that level, that sense of nonviolence. and then he says, and then there's self-defense, individual 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 for the kind of brit that it shows. and then he says -- grit that it shows. and then he says for purposes of what we're going; that is, political freedom, achieving goals. we've got to press through marching and nonviolent

demonstration, and that's the way we're going the achievement and our goals. so king crystallizes this dichotomy, and later roy will yens -- wilkens argues in a pamphlet called "the single issue in the robert issues 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 naacp will have none of this. and at the same time, roy wilkens said, listen, the naacp cut its organizational teeth on supporting black folk who stood the up with firearms and defended themselves. he talked about the pink franklin case, the sweet case was the one that actually funded, was the impulse 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 the 1960s, 1970s, we are not going to be in the lynching business, we're not going to be this the business of political violence, and this it is the place where that december 2006 that i, 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 embrace of 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 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 distinction between self-defense and political violence, right? you have this quote from huey newton saying self-defense is politics and politics is self-defense. i'm paraphrasing, right, but essentially, this is a political act, right? and then there's the question of is the defense of others self-defense, right? when you talk about the deacons for defense. >> guest: right. >> host: so talk 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 worry, there was always this danger that acts of self, individual self-defense would spill into political violence. and i've got count he is 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 people 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 in an individual situation. so that's always been part of the worry, that's always been part of the 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, you know, 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 book talks about lots of the 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, sclc, the urban league all vying for influence in the early part of the 1960s. but as you get to the hate 1960s, the naacp gets to be

the dominant organization in terms of fund raising, and parly that's a consequence of radical shift, for example, of core and sncc and even vclc -- sclc. so for people who are on the outside looking to fund the civil rights movement, naacp becomes really the most viable option. and there's record levels of fundraising that occur during that period. and part of in 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 it is important to think about in terms of this transition is so who are the groups, 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 looking 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 become withs very hard now to stand up -- 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 hugh i with newton and others are on the other side of the street saying that they're 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 this, so the distinction gets blurred again, right? and do you see this expression coming from, like, the black panther party or even malcolm x calling for self-defense in a kind of programmatic way, right? so it's not like self-defense, if someone -- i'm in imminent danger, it's more like our program is self-defense, right? >> guest: yeah. >> host: so do you see this as part of the tradition, that the tradition is now being transformed, or do you see this like, you know, diminishing the tradition? you know, do you see the tradition, is the black tradition in arms just the tradition of imminent self-defense or self-defense against an imminent threat, or does it have space for even if it's, you know, something that people are, find highly kiss agreeable, does -- disagreeable, does it also have space for this kind of maybe aggressive or political or collective self-defense or programmatic

self-defense or political violence? >> 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. it quite clearly is a significant catalyst that causes a significant change in sort of the mainstream attitude about firearms ownership and firearms use. and 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 about -- >> guest: what i'm asking is do you see that as part of the tradition as well as opposed to seeing that as harming the -- >> guest: okay, i see. i see. no, i think it is, that has always been a part of the tradition in the sense that there were always, there was always this disagreement within the community about how far a certain episode has moved into that boundary land -- >> host: right, right. doing. >> of dangerous 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 -- >> host: right, right. >> doing the great publisher of the 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 line again. you're not talking about just self-defense, you're talking about a kind of a policy and a program that 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 been part of the conversation going back and forth and not only the conversation, but it's been part of just the physical dynamic. some people would engage many 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 us all of us because retaliation means there's going to be backlash, and that's bad for the community. so what happens in the 1960s with the rise of really -- and now it's on television, of course, so it's more of a let and people are getting, you know, 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 in 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 the way, the long black tradition of 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 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 -- >> host: right. you call it the emergence of the

modern orthodoxy on -- >> guest: of supply control. >> host: supply control, right. >> guest: yeah, yeah. >> host: well, so interesting, of course, there's a black tradition of arms, but there's also an american or white-american tradition of black disapartmentment that startedded in the -- disarmament that started even before slavery became the labor exploitation system that it was. ..

able to embrace a positive disarmament even with this issue? why do you think people did not push back and say this is dangerous? >> guest: it's complicated and i've written a lot about it. one of the things is the gun control movement really is sortt of pushed people into a scenario where you are relying more and more and more on state and local governments to provide your personal security and that is an all-out perspective to take from the first people that have had such long reasons to distrust the state. the first thing quite clearly is the notion of political coalitions generating black political power so if you see ie

in the 1970s moving toward the 80s is the progressive coalition is the place where lack of political power rests and as a member of that sort of governing class in the black political establishment you are going to make lots of sacrific sacrifices, lots of compromises and in some sense to the degree people tell you listen you are now in charge of washington, d.c. or detroit and you've got these problems with black on black crime here is a theory or set of protocols and legislation that will bring peace to the neighborhoods that are burdened by violence. and again it is quite clear that in theory the idea of supply control is designated. there are no guns in this room, we know for sure and there's going to be no gun crime in this room.

that is the impulse on which the supply control argument. the problem putting it into practice has generated instances of failure 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 down to zero we are asking and those are our distractions and i think it's taken a while as a matter of policy for these extremists to run through and we are in the state where now we have this overt embrace of the constitutional right to arms. we are 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 get some additional thoughts to the policies that have really been

increased as dominant policies since the 1970s. the other point about why people haven't looked at the history of gun control and well it is a history of race-based distinctions starting from the 16 hundreds moving into the 1950s and eve 1960s. there is a famous quote as the title of an article 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 and there was a fellow being prosecuted into thinto the judge that i'm g it i know about these laws they were never intended to apply to the populations of this is emblematic of the things that also were occurring under the black codes and jim crow and what thwhere the statute was not explicitly discriminatory what

we find is that there was no discriminatory administration of the statute so even martin luther king in montgomery in the 1950s in the beginning of the montgomery bus boycott after there was a bomb that went off they would come around to sort of defend them and he send sendm all home and the next day one of the other reference go down and apply for permits to carry pistols in his permit is denied because he didn't show good cause. this was a man that had multiple death threats and that's an example of the scenario where the discretion that is nested in either a sheriff or judge or sometimes a prosecutor as an example of the kind of discrimination in terms of impact even though on the face of the statute it is natural.

so there is a history of that and ultimately people have to make up your own mind about whether they are impacted in terms of their current decisions in the policy or whether they are influenced by the history. it influences lots of people that i know but for the political class i think it's if you are facing an immediate crisis it is hard to look back and say i'm going to avoid some policy measure because it is intentioned with things that happened 70 years ago. it's been ago. >> part of it is the crossing of the racial lines does alter how we see this 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 and as you talk about the call for disarmament it is to disarm the criminalized. whether the site is calling for the protection of the amendment if it doesn't seem to be speaking for black people and besides calling for gun control is also -- do you see what i'm saying? so here we are now and you talked about the cases that kind of secure the second amendment. you can tell a little bit about those cases and why they are significant. much of the shaping of the tradition focused on interracial and cross racial violence.

but the case was of interracial violence. so again this goes to the argument in my sense is that the advocates for gun control are advocating when they perceived assailant is black. >> this is interesting. so, part of the response is we have to appreciate that lots of the information, lots of the story is coming through a filter of popular media where you get a snapshot of the claim that someone is making about the right to arms, and that sort of caricatures that the date. one of the things i talk about italked aboutin the last chaptek is a surprise -- a couple things. the surprising diversity within

the black community on the issue of the right to arms. and so there was recently a poll that asked two questions. it is eventually was asking people black and white whether they supported more gun control gun rights. whether they thought we should air in favor of one or the other. and they split i believe something like 60-40, but lacks actually split the other way. 40% of the black community surveyed said they felt more attention should be paid to gun rights. that is a remarkable component of the community embracing what one would say is a kind of traditional gun rights view. it's a much bigger slice and you would presume given the degree to which the democratic party commands support from.

so that is the first piece is that the details are more interesting than the sort of caricature that you get from the 32nd flash on some tv show. the nice thing about this thou though, most people know over the last few years in 2008 and in 2010 the supreme court first of all in a case called the district of columbia versus heller and mcdonald versus chicago, the supreme court upheld with lots of people had e been arguing the last 20 years fothat the second amendment actually does guarantee an individual right to arms. so the first case in 2008 was out of washington, d.c.. the lead plaintiff was dominated and shelly parker, community activist who was laboring under

what was the most draconian most stringent gun control measure in the country in washington, d.c. said handguns are banned and other sorts were grandfathered. you cannot have a gun for self defense because you have to keep it in your house disassembled. so no practical arms of defense in washington, d.c.. shelly parker represented by lawyers who were also instrumental in the mcdonald case, shelly parker argued iem under siege. i am an activist who has been threatened by basically young man that she described as funds. she was afraid of them and they came after her at a variety of instances she had a fenced area trying to keep her house safe and they drove a car trying to get at her and she said i'm looking for a tool that will

help me survive and may be prevailed or invent period before the help can get here. that was her claim pressed to the united states supreme court and they said once the case versus the district of columbia the court said yes there is in fact an individual right to arms for the people to keep and bear arms in the constitution and it actually means that with limitations that we are still seething out. the same thing happened or similar thing happened two years later in chicago. so chicago is a case, and other plaintiff and the reason that the court takes up the second case is that the first case was in the district of columbia and all of the first case established was for purposes of limiting the federal government, the second amendment established this individual right but it was not clear whether you have application on the second amendment to the states. the mcdonald case established

that and otis mcdonald was a 72-year-old black man army vitter in who was living in a neighborhooneighborhood that whe was besieged by young black men and he said i want a gun for the same reason shelly parker wanted a gun and the court ultimately upheld his claim. >> in the final moments that we have, we have traced the tradition of how it has been challenged in the 20th century and now the current kind of discourse over gun rights and protection of black rights and many of whom fall at the hands of gun violence. how do you see that rich tradition being revised in this short time that we have left? >> ultimately what i see is people have to make up their own mind about this. i try to give lots of data. this is something that i teach

and i have another text book thatextbook thatdeals with a los on the question of the risks and benefits. we have all kinds of data about the benefits of why your arms and defense if gun use ranging into the millions per year because the episodes when no shots were fired and the value of the firearm chronicled by the center 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 the members have the choice of owning firearms for self protection that we are better off on balance. it doesn't mean arms don't have their cost and i think we are at a stage where hopefully we can have a less visceral and more calm conversation about whether

there is some role for the black tradition in the modern era and we can move away from the reflex that we have had in the last certainly 20 years this as well these are evil instruments we need to get out of the community. so the 40% who answered in the poll that they thought it was more important to uphold the individual right to arms, this book in some ways gives a voice to those people into those concerns, and hopefully will cause others in the community to at least engage in the question at a more serious level than just the reflex reaction against guns that is a sort of caricature of what the actual conversation used to be. >> it certainly has given me a reason to revisit my thinking