Blacks gun ownership in US: uneasy with NRA sometimes.

[surprise_i'm_armed]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/us/mi ... .html?_r=0]]

The above link is to an article by the New York Times Ms. Tanzina Vega. It contains a text article
as well as a news video.

I wasn't surprised as much about black gun ownership as the fact that the primary black man interviewed had
revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, a shotgun, and an AR15...and was a New Jersey resident.

Tanzina Vega writes about race relations with various ethnic groups. The piece doesn't seem overtly "anti",
although it's from the NYT.

SIA

[howdy]

Oh, I thought you meant "black gun" like an AR-15.

[The Annoyed Man]

See my book review here: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=73124" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

The black tradition of arms LONG precedes the more recent anti-gun political stance. And that black anti-gun stance, curiously, originates with white abolitionists in the early 19th century, and continued to be handed down through the civil rights movement of the 1950s/1960s. The tension has always existed—particularly during that latter time—within the civil rights community as to whether or not political "non-violence" extended into the realm of self-defense or not, and whether or not black ownership of firearms had a role to play in that......but what the current crop of inciters fails to recognize is that even MLK had no problem with the use of firearms by African-Americans for self-defense.........even self-defense against white people with violence on their minds.

“The true remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill is a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to enforce it.”
— Frederick Douglass in “The North Star”, 1860

So much for modern panty-waists.....

[surprise_i'm_armed]

I can't quite recall the exact location, but somewhere in the South a black woman
recalled that her family was regularly threatened by KKK/similar all the time during
the 1950's-60's.

Her family had a shotgun for each family member and they all knew how to shoot them.
Each family member was to cover a certain side of the house.

If an attack had actually been made on their home, the KKK would have been met
with significant armed resistance.

SIA

[The Annoyed Man]

I can't quite recall the exact location, but somewhere in the South a black woman
recalled that her family was regularly threatened by KKK/similar all the time during
the 1950's-60's.

Her family had a shotgun for each family member and they all knew how to shoot them.
Each family member was to cover a certain side of the house.

If an attack had actually been made on their home, the KKK would have been met
with significant armed resistance.

SIA

Here's the woman I think you're speaking of. This passage is quoted from the book I reviewed in my other thread, titled "Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms".

The black tradition of arms has been submerged because it seems hard to reconcile with dominant narrative of nonviolence in the modern civil rights movement. But that superficial tension is resolved by the long-standing distinction that was widely evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer's approach to segregationists who dominated Mississippi politics was, "Baby, you just got to love 'em. Hating 'em just makes you sick and weak. But, asked how she survived the threats from midnight terrorists, Hamer responded, "I'll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker who even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again."

Like Hartman Turbow, Fannie Lou Hamer embraced private self-defense and political non-violence without any sense of contradiction. In this, she channeled a more-than-century-old practice and philosophy that evolved through every generation, sharpened by icons like Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. DuBois, pressed by the burgeoning NAACP, and crystalized by Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it this way:

Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The concept of self-defense, and even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Ghandi. . . . . When the negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects. . . . . But violence as a tool of advancement, involving organization as in warfare. . . . .poses incalculable perils.

MLK modeled his pacifist political tactics after Ghandi.......and even Ghandi said that a man absolutely has the right to use violence, even deadly force, in self-defense, but that violence had no place in political discourse. But here is the bottom line:

Modern black political activists are squandering the capital built by their predecessors, and are using their power to divide, not to unite, and to segregate, not to integrate. And the giants on whose shoulders they stand absolutely disagree with them about firearms........Giants like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, the early leadership of NAACP, and Martin Luther King, Jr....... who UNANIMOUSLY supported the 2nd Amendment AND the legitimacy of the use of firearms in self-defense.