White Supremacy as the Foundation of the Second Amendment

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Emory University historian and Black Studies chair, Carol Anderson joins me now with her new book about race and the Second Amendment called, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. It argues that there have been racial double standards throughout American history on this topic, including that the Second Amendment itself which might sound race-neutral on its face, was enacted in part as a guarantor of white supremacy. That history reverberates in the gun violence of today, as well as in things like how people are looking back on the Tulsa Race massacre this week.

You might know some of Professor Anderson's earlier books such as White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which came out in 2016, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, from 2018. Professor Anderson was on that one, even before the massive current wave of voter suppression laws. She was on the show, as a few of you might remember, as a guest for both of those books, and we welcome her back for this very relevant one today. Again, it's The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Professor Anderson, we always learn from you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Carol Anderson: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian: The second amendment says, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That doesn't mention race. Is race implied?

Professor Anderson: Yes, it is. It's implied because of the word militia, and the role of the militia in that period, and the fear that the Virginians had of Patrick Henry and Brian Lehrer-- Brian Lehrer, Lord, [laughs] and George Mason had in terms of what the federal control of the militia meant, that it would short circuit the ability of the slave-holding states to call upon militia in case of a slave uprising.

Brian: People have called me many things, but never a founding father. What was the conversation like before the Bill of Rights between northern states and southern states? Were northern states that didn't have slavery, less interested in the right to bear arms?

Professor Anderson: The northern states, and you have-- what was happening in the northern states is you had gradual emancipation. The northern states had slavery. That's one of the things that becomes part of our founding myths, is that slavery was only a southern thing. It was a national thing, but the southern states were beginning to emancipate their enslaved people.

They also had discriminatory laws, but they had this sense. Some of the members in these states had this strong sense that what was happening with slavery was undermining what they were trying to create with the United States of America. In the debates about the Constitution, for instance, you had these debates about the three-fifths clause, where the South had been arguing consistently that the enslaved were nothing but property, but then when it came time to count for representation in Congress, then the South was arguing that the enslaved should be counted, should be on the same level, on the same level of equality as whites, in terms of counting that way, to which the north pushed back hard.

They're like, "Do you count them for your state legislatures? Do you? Can they vote? If you can count them, surely then the men can vote. If they can't vote, then what are you doing here?" The South had threatened to basically not join the United States if they could not get that representation. That's where the compromise of three-fifths comes in, that the enslaved would be counted as three-fifths, basically, of a human being for representation purposes, which gave the South inordinate power in Congress, disproportionate power in Congress.

You saw this pushback in terms of the three-fifths clause, in terms of 20 additional years for the Atlantic slave trade, as well as for the fugitive slave clause, but the South basically held the United States hostage saying, "We will not become part of this unless we get the protection for slavery."

Brian: That cycles back into the Second Amendment.

Professor Anderson: Yes, it does. Because then you have the ratification of the Constitution. As it's going from state to state, it hits a roadblock. Virginia is one of those major roadblocks. James Madison, who's also a Virginian, goes into that ratification convention, trying to convince Virginia to ratify the Constitution. George Mason and Patrick Henry push back hard. They are the anti-federalists.

What they argue is that federal control of the militia, which is in the Constitution, means because you have these states like Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, that are part of the federal government, they can't count on, they can't trust that this federal government will send in the militia when there is a slave uprising, and they will be left, and the word is defenseless. Defenseless. They wanted that kind of state control. They wanted to neutralize federal control.

Part of the pushback becomes, "Well, we have to have a Bill of Rights in this Constitution so that our rights are protected." Madison leaves that ratification convention, where Virginia does ratify, with a series of amendments, including an amendment for a well-regulated militia. Madison takes that into the first Congress, where he is drafting, what would become our Bill of Rights.

He's drafting those amendments and when you think about it, you get this really weird outlier, where you have the right not to be illegally searched and seized, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of religion, where you will not have a state-sponsored religion, the right for freedom of the press. You get these incredible rights, and then you get the right to a well-regulated militia necessary for the security of a free state, given the right to bear arms. It's an outlier.

It's an outlier because that is the payoff, because the Virginians, the anti-federalists, were organizing to have a new constitutional convention. James Madison was absolutely afraid that if that move gained any more momentum, what that would mean was all of the work that he had done in pulling together this constitution, with a strong central government, would revert back to the Articles of Confederation that weren't working at all, and this dream of the United States of America would falter.

Brian: We're university historian, Carol Anderson with us, with her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. At the same time that the right to bear arms has been so prized by many white Americans, you describe in the book, how it has been denied to Black Americans, starting back as early as the colonial era, when there were laws in some places, explicitly forbidding Black people to own gun. It was controversial among whites, whether Blacks should be able to serve in the military and be armed. I'm curious, do you write about the Tulsa race massacre in your book?

Professor Anderson: No, I don't. I take us through red summer of 1919, and in that chapter with the Elaine, Arkansas massacre, so I don't go to 1921. In Tulsa, what you had there was a very prosperous community. You had a young Black man who had been accused of attempting to rape a white woman, and being held in the jail. You had a white mob circling, that meant a lynching. You had Black men, World War I veterans, coming down to the courthouse, to the jail, with their guns, to prevent a lynching, to ensure that there would be due process.

That so angered that white mob, angered them that they set out to destroy Greenwood. They set out to destroy the Black community in Tulsa. You had the officials deputizing the mob, giving them the license to do this mass killing, the mass arson, the mass looting, all in response to Black folks exercising their rights. The temerity of that, it incited that mob.

Brian: In the context of your book, you describe how over the last 230 or so years since the founding, and the Bill of Rights that included the Second Amendment, racial disparities on gun rights have been enacted, not by altering the Constitution, but by enacting local law after local law within the bounds of the Second Amendment. Can you give us an example of that or an overview of that?

Professor Anderson: Yes. Are you discussing, for instance, the Mulford Act?

Brian: I don't know the Mulford Act specifically, but I'm just thinking about ways in which Black Americans were restricted in place after place, from owning guns when there was interest in that, despite Second Amendment.

Professor Anderson: One of the things for instance, in Georgia, in the 1830s, 1840s, the state of Georgia passed a law banning open carry of guns for whites. They also had a law banning all guns for Blacks, including free Blacks. That case went up to the Georgia Supreme Court, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in, I believe it was 1846, that the law banning the open carry of guns was unconstitutional, because it violated the Second Amendment. The court also, though, ruled that the ban against Black people having guns was not in violation of the Second Amendment.

White men carry guns, if you ban white men from carrying guns, that violates the Second Amendment. If you ban Black people from carrying guns, that does not violate the Second Amendment. That's the kind of legal sophistry that we see happening in this period, and throughout, that you've got this disparity between who can have access to weapons. As you know, part of what I'm arguing in this book is that it is the fear of Black people that was the genesis for this Second Amendment. This fear of being left defenseless, that the white community would be left vulnerable to having all of these Black people in the space, because these Black people are dangerous.

Brian: Didn't Ronald Reagan as governor of California, who we might assume was pro-gun rights, enact gun control in the state largely in response to the Black Panthers movement of that era registering legal weapons?

Professor Anderson: Yes, that's the Mulford Act. [chuckles]

Brian: Aha.

Professor Anderson: That was the Black Panthers, The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, arose out of, and in response to the massive police brutality that was happening against the Black community, and that there were no consequences for that brutality. There were beatings, there were killings, and there was no response, no accountability. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, led by Huey P. Newton, and Bobby Seale, formed this organization that one of its key elements was to police the police. That was to monitor what the police were doing.

The Black Panthers knew the law. Huey P. Newton was a law student, he knew the law. It said the types of guns that you could carry, openly carry, how you could carry them. He also knew the distance that you had to maintain from a police officer when that police officer is making an arrest. The Black Panthers would roll up on a police officer making an arrest of a Black person, and they're openly carrying their weapons.

The police officers did not like that, and they would try to arrest the Panthers, but they couldn't arrest them because they weren't doing anything illegal. The guns that they were carrying, were legal guns, and they were registered. They were standing the appropriate distance away from the activity. The police went to Assemblyman Don Mulford and said, "We need help. We need to make what the Panthers are doing that's currently legal, we need to make it illegal." Mulford drafted, with the help of the NRA, the Mulford Act, that dealt with banning open carrying of weapons.

Ronald Reagan was eager to sign off on this. They identified, although Mulford said, "This law isn't targeted at any racial group, this is about the Klan as well," but the letters made clear that the Panthers were the catalyst for this law. It was how do we contain the Black Panthers? How do we make them illegal?

Brian: Listeners, we're opening up the phones. First priority for this conversation will be for Black listeners who want to talk about racism, and gun laws, the Second Amendment, or local gun laws as you experienced any of this personally, or with any opinions, or questions you may have, at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, for Emory University historian, Carol Anderson, author of the new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Professor Anderson, you probably saw that one of the demonstrations in Tulsa this week during the centennial observance was by a group of several hundred Black gun owners promoting the idea of more widespread Black gun ownership. How do you see that group's message in the context of the history you tell, or just in the context of today, or even in the context of today's urban crime rates with guns?

Professor Anderson: Black people have consistently fought for their right to bear arms. You'll have the self-defense communities, but one of the things that I track with this is that when Black people defend themselves, is that the state comes in with much more firepower, and just obliterate that community. That's what we saw happening in Knoxville. That's what we saw happening in Elaine, Arkansas. That disparity in the kind of sense that we can defend ourselves, defending yourself against this depth of state power doesn't get at the key element that it is Blackness that is the fear. Whether you're armed or unarmed, you are the threat, and we see that in the police killings.

When Philando Castile is gunned down, he informs the officer that he has a licensed weapon, and the officer begins shooting. Philando Castile wasn't brandishing a gun. He wasn't pointing it at anyone. He just said he had one, and that was more than enough. We see it when we have Black men killed who are holding a cell phone, and the officers are like, "We thought he had a gun." We see it when you have an Eric Garner, who is described as he was so big, he was like a monster. That fear of Blackness, that Black people are the threat, Black people are the danger in this society, is what is underlying all of this, the brutality, the violence, the fear. It's all there.

Brian: Keem in Lyndon, you're on WNYC. Hello, Keem.

Keem: How are you doing, everyone? Longtime listener, first-time caller.

Brian: Glad you're on.

Keem: Yes. My thing is, I feel like obviously host, you're 100% right, you're speaking the truth sister, that gun laws in this country like you mentioned, the Mulford Act, massive respect, are based on race. I feel, unfortunately, American citizens can't be trusted, and the only restriction on gun rights should be if you've committed a felony or domestic violence. That way people who abuse women don't get weapons, and if you've committed an actual crime, you don't get weapons. Otherwise, there's no restrictions, because even moderate things like shall issue, allow things like racist sheriffs and other government officials to restrict minorities like us, I'm Black as well, from having weapons. Anyway, thank you.

Brian: Keem, thank you very much. Professor Anderson, what were you thinking as you were listening to Keem?

Professor Anderson: That currently, we have a law that says that those who have a felony conviction should not have access to guns. We have that law already in place, but one of the things we have to be mindful of is the way that the criminal justice system has criminalized Blackness, so that you get this disparity in terms of who is a felon based on the ways that Blackness has been criminalized, so that the things that Black people do.

It's like with hyper policing in Black communities, it's like with the inequities in the drug laws, that has incarcerated so many Black people disproportionately for doing things that whites do, but aren't criminalized. They aren't arrested, they aren't put through the criminal justice system. Again, the disparities and the discrepancies are still there in that law.

Brian: Well, do you think if we look at history through the lens of institutionalized racism, that the movement for gun control and gun regulation today, generally seen as a progressive movement, and one that would protect low-income communities of color from the proliferation of illegal guns, and many of the shootings that come from those illegal guns as a rising threat this year, through the lens of your book, is the gun regulation less progressive than that?

Professor Anderson: Gun regulation is the conundrum around all of this. Let me give you an example, the NAACP sued gun manufacturers for flooding the Black community with cheap handguns, that helped spur the massive homicide rate. Similarly, you had CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, sue the US government for the Gun Control Act, which prevented the sale of these Saturday night specials, because the CORE argued that what it did was it left the Black community defenseless, because this was the weapon that they could afford, and now it was no longer available to them.

If we understand the way that race works in America, we understand that we don't have these kinds of simple solutions. That's one of the things that I argued is that the Second Amendment, unlike ending racism in voting rights laws, in terms of making the 15th amendment whole. With the Second Amendment, it's not clean like that, because the Second Amendment itself was so inflected with anti-Blackness, that it's not clean. It's not clear. We need to treat the Second Amendment the way we treat the three-fifths clause.

Brian Lehrer: Sha'eed in Bed Stuy, you're on WNYC with Carol Anderson. Hi, Sha'eed.

Sha'eed: Hi. Good morning, everyone. I think the discussion is a very warranted one. My point to your person on the phone was that if there's a serious effort in this city and country, to deal with racism, it has to look at institutionalized racism, in terms of how the police of New York City is being imported from counties outside of New York City. Counties that are segregated, that are white counties, with white people who are getting away from Black people, because of their racist attitudes towards us. That's the very same fear of Black people in the minds of these white people, being fed by white men who come here with guns to police us, and they kill us over and over and over.

The author's position around the Second Amendment, the police is indeed the militia, a racist band of white men, whose intention is to control Black men who they fear, and this government, both federal and local, city, hire them to monitor and police us, and they kill us, and they walk free. They do nothing to stop it, but talk on radios like they are genuinely concerned, but they are not. I commend this woman on her book, and that we need to arm ourselves, absolutely. Robert Williams was correct. The Deacons for Defense was correct that Black men with guns is the only solution to defending the Black community, Black women, and children. I will go off air, thank you.

Brian: Sha'eed, thank you. Well, that would be alarming to many people as the solution to safety from the police of Black citizens. Certainly, a lot of police officers, and some other people will say that his whole analysis was too reductionist, and we don't have to get into that. How do you deal in your book with those who might agree with Sha'eed about what the solution is to have Black citizens arm themselves against potential police violence?

Professor Anderson: One of the things, here I look at, for instance, I've several cases. One is Kathryn Johnston here in Atlanta, who was a 92-year-old Black woman. She heard somebody coming through her door in the middle of the night, she grabs her trusty, rusty revolver, and she shoots as they come through the door. It turns out to be police officers, and they shoot back, and they gun her down. They argued that they had the right to shoot, because she shot first.

They entered her home on a bogus warrant, on a warrant that was extracted via planted evidence. The case almost didn't come to light, until they put pressure on one of their informants, to back up their case that this was a major drug house, and it wasn't. He went to the media, because he was afraid if they did this to this 92-year-old Black woman, they're going to do it to me.

Think about the case of Breonna Taylor, where the police entered her home via a no-knock warrant. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot as the police are coming through the door, and they responded with a fusillade of bullets just pouring into that apartment. Five or six of them hit Breonna Taylor and she died. Being armed against police violence is the thing to recognize the disparity in access to weapons, the disparity in the terms of the access to the types of weapons, and the kill rate of those weapons.

What also happens is that it leads to the narrative of they had it coming. When you're looking for justice, justice is so elusive for Black folk. It's just what we're talking about with Tulsa. Justice is so elusive, that access to guns as a means to deal with police violence, that's not the means to deal with police violence. It is absolutely rethinking policing in the United States.

Brian: Well, there's so much more that we could say on this, but there you have some history and some current affairs from Emory University, Professor Carol Anderson, with her new book called, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. If you want to hear more, and participate in a virtual book event, there will be one sponsored by Cafe con Libros on Tuesday next week, June 8th at seven o'clock Eastern Time. You can Google Cafe con Libros and look for that event if you want to register. Professor Anderson, thank you so much.

Professor Anderson: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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