This is really fascinating. Ask just about any American how Civil Rights was won for blacks in the South, and you'll hear about the doctrine of nonviolence as practiced by Martin Luther King and Gandhi. It's an uplifting story about the use of justice and fairness to overcome the tyranny of evil men.
But it's not the full story. While nonviolence was a potent media weapon, providing images of civil rights activists being attacked by police officers for daring to sit down in white cafes, it was only a portion of the fight. In this story over at the Volokh Conspiracy, John Salter Jr, once known as Hunter Gray, tells how the use of weapons was an important and untold story.
I was beaten and arrested many times and hospitalized twice. This happened to many, many people in the movement. No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grassroots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it.
When the campus of Tougaloo College was fired on by KKK-type racial night-riders, my home was shot up and a bullet missed my infant daughter by inches. We received no help from the Justice Department and we guarded our campus -- faculty and students together -- on that and subsequent occasions. We let this be known. The racist attacks slackened considerably. Night-riders are cowardly people -- in any time and place -- and they take advantage of fear and weakness.
Later, I worked for years in the Deep South as a full-time civil rights organizer. Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine.
The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay. Years later, in a changed Mississippi, this was confirmed by a former prominent leader of the White Knights of the KKK when we had an interesting dinner together at Jackson.
Salter is a strong guns rights supporter in addition to being a left socialist, a community organizer (spent a lot of time in Chicago), and what most conservatives would consider a radical. In retrospect, this should have been obvious. Gun restriction laws in the United States were originally intended to strip blacks from the ability to defend themselves. Some people point out this is still the case in cities like D.C., Detroit, and Chicago.
Though it's a nicer story to hear about good intentions and the practices of Gandhi as being the driving force behind Civil Rights, one should remember the role of the Second Amendment when the cameras were gone. And one should wonder what other hard truths our education system fails to teach.
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