New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | February 24, 2005

Dave Kopel shows how the second amendment put some steel into the civil rights movement.

Comments

|2.24.05 @ 4:19PM|#

The review's quote from DuBois about the right to engage in armed self defense shoots down the notion he was a tom who was afraid to stand up to white racists.
While American blacks thankfully don't face persecution anymore, a disproportionately large number of them still live in bad neighborhoods where police protection is so poor it's pretty close to being the law of the jungle. Of course, this doesn't stop Democrats and so called "black leaders" (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Kweise Mfume, Louis Farakkhan, etc.) from screaming and crying for more "gun control" and "gun safety" to protect minorities against "cop killer bullets" and "military style assault weapons." You'll still hear the likes of them blaming DC, Detroit, and New York's high crime rates on guns being too widely available. (Getting beaten to death with a baseball bat doesn't rob someone of his dignity like shooting him does, so destroying the 2nd Amendment's the answer.) If politicians and "black leaders" ever succeeded in reducing crime rates, they'd eliminate one of the problems that makes a lot of people desparate enough to listen to them.

|2.24.05 @ 4:36PM|#

Mr X

DuBois is not regarded as an Uncle Tom by the left. He is their favorite.

I think you might be thinking of Booker T Washington.

|2.24.05 @ 4:54PM|#

X,

You must mean Booker T. Washington. DuBois is loved by many on the left because he was a leftist; indeed, he was a communist.

|2.24.05 @ 5:08PM|#

Give an oppressed man a gun and he'll figure out a way to assert his rights.

If it weren't so illegal, I'd like to start a charity to issue handguns and rifles to middle-aged inner city dwellers. After the initial unsolved murders ("Officer, I don't know how that crack dealer got shot 14 times in the head on my doorstep.") and the inevitable reprisals and massacres by increasingly desperate criminals, the neighborhoods would become very peaceful.

I don't know why people think they're safer when they're disarmed.

On the subject of DuBois, there is a dormitory at Penn that bears his name. Everyone there calls it "Dah-boys" but I would have thought "Dew-bwah" would be more accurate. Which way did the actual DuBois pronounce his name?

Which movie was it where the cops were hassling some guys with rifles and one of the characters spouted the penal code at them (the cops) and basically told the cops to piss off? That was a good scene.

|2.24.05 @ 5:11PM|#

Apostate Jew,

"Dah-boys"

R C Dean|2.24.05 @ 5:11PM|#

If it weren't so illegal, I'd like to start a charity to issue handguns and rifles to middle-aged inner city dwellers.

Shouldn't be hard to legalize - just get yourself a federal firearms dealer license, run background checks per the law, and you can give away guns to anyone who is a legal recipient of said gun.

|2.24.05 @ 5:19PM|#

Apostate,

Are you suggesting that someone doesn't have the right to engage in his trade of selling crack to willing buyers, who harm no one but themselves with their recreational crack use? Are you saying you'd murder someone whose career choice you don't approve of, for the simple crime of walking past your doorstep?

Why can't you libertarians keep your stories straight? : )

|2.24.05 @ 5:21PM|#

Do you really think I could collect charitable donations to just give guns away in NYC, DC or LA? I thought it was nearly impossible to legally own a gun in those cities and reasoned that it would be severely frowned upon to issue guns to people who might use them to, uhh, clean up the neighborhood, as it were.

It's not like I'd give them to just anyone. Angry grandmothers and fathers of murdered children seem like two very good target audiences.

|2.24.05 @ 5:27PM|#

W.E.B. BuBois' last name is pronounced "Dah-boys"? Really? I learn something new every day here. Thanks, GG. Hmm...

If it weren't so illegal, I'd like to start a charity to issue handguns and rifles to middle-aged inner city dwellers.

I like that idea. I would call it the "DeBois in the 'Hood Foundation," but I guess someone (probably a white liberal) might find that name somehow offensive.

By the way, Liberty magazine (of Port Townsend, WA, not the religious magazine), once ran an article, "When the NAACP Went Armed." I think it was in the Dec. 1999 issue but unfortunately is not available on the Web. (Liberty neglected its Web site for many years, until recently.)

Anyhow, as I recall, it told of a KKK motorcade that came barrelling down the street to intimidate or attack a houseful of civil rights activists who came to town. When they charged onto the property, the activists fired at them, and the KKK motorcade reversed out of there with considerable alacrity. Gary Kleck, the civil rights and 2nd Amendment legal scholar, was there.

This was a few decades ago, and I believe it took place in a town called Mobile (not in Alabama but somewhere else, I think). This is where my recollection of the details fails me, but it was a heartwarming story.

|2.24.05 @ 5:37PM|#

Oh damn.

W.E.B. BuBois = W.E.B. DuBois

"DeBois in the 'Hood Foundation" = "DuBois in the 'Hood Foundation,"

|2.24.05 @ 5:46PM|#

This was a few decades ago, and I believe it took place in a town called Mobile (not in Alabama but somewhere else, I think).

Stevo Darkly

If you read Kopel's article you'll find it about 3/4 of the way down. It says Monroe, NC.

Quote:

"The fire was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some had to abandon their automobiles and continue on foot."

I don't want to condone violence but given the ordeals blacks have suffered I can imagine that the sight of those crackers fleeing might give one a good deal of satisfaction.

Of course, given our history it could be that the Liberty story (which I also read but don't recall in detail) referred to an entirely different, but similar, event.

Gimme Back My Dog|2.24.05 @ 5:49PM|#

DuBois in the 'Hood

That is funny enough that it makes up for you stealing Walker's joke in the previous thread.

|2.24.05 @ 7:31PM|#

"Gun control" allows liberals to express two sentiments which they would be embarressed to express openly.
1. Classism - They would like for no one but licensed professionals to possess guns. If you can't afford a licensed professional to protect you, that's tough.
2. Raceism - It's nice to see multiple articles in Reason which document this. Nice work guys.

|2.24.05 @ 7:37PM|#

Nicely put North Carolina Dan

|2.24.05 @ 8:16PM|#

Great article. Here's a good parallel link - http://www.logicsouth.com/~lcoble/2ndamend/whyfight.txt
.

|2.24.05 @ 8:21PM|#

Isaac Bartram and Gary Gunnels, I'm going to do something that's almost unheard of on Hit and Run. I admit I got my facts wrong. More importantly, I also apologize to anyone who got the wrong idea because of the language I used in my initial post to describe how many people think of Booker T. Washington (who I confused with DuBois).

|2.24.05 @ 9:00PM|#

Stevo Darkly,

I got a rough talking to once by a DuBois scholar about this very issue; they get pretty fucking sensitive about his name. Anyway, that's how said his name (likely the change in pronunciation is due to the Americanization of the name) and that's how scholars, etc. still say it. Living in northern New England you run across all sorts of folks with French surnames who pronounce them in rather odd ways (odd to me at least). My wife works with a woman whose surname is "Lemoi," yet she pronounces it "Le-moise" (moise sounding like noise).

|2.24.05 @ 9:46PM|#

Gary G: Thanks, you've probably saved me from getting hollered at by an enraged DuBois scholar.

I should be more aware of the way French names get Americanized, living in St. Louis where we have such street names as Gravois (GRAV-oy -- pronouncing it "gruh-vwah" marks you as an out-of-towner) and St. Denis (Saint Dennis). And come to think of it, only out-of-town foreigners call the city "Saint Louie" -- residents never call it anything but "Saint Lewis." (Or "The Lou" if you're hip-hop.)

Isaac Bartram: If you read Kopel's article you'll find it about 3/4 of the way down. It says Monroe, NC.

That is the very incident I was thinking of, thank you! I remember now it involved a segregated swimming pool. Sorry, I should have carefully read the entire article, but an enduring, focused attention span is not one of my strong po

|2.24.05 @ 10:36PM|#

Anyway, DuBois was a pathbreaking scholar for his time. He was one of the first historians to chuck the "moonlight and magnolias" interpretation of the ante-bellum that had so dominated historical scholarship in that area since the last decades of the 19th century. Though his doctrinaire Marxist vision has since suffered a de-bunking, he contributed to the understanding of American slavery by actually studying the lives of the slaves as opposed to the study of what masters thought of slavery.

|2.24.05 @ 11:58PM|#

Stevo: Don't forget DeBaliviere (Duh-baliver).

|2.25.05 @ 10:04AM|#

....but an enduring, focused attention span is not one of my strong po....

chuckle

|2.25.05 @ 1:10PM|#

Great article, thanks for bringing us more informative, rational historical analysis. If only this was the sort of story that made it into the history books they forced us to read in school; I think a lot more kids would be interested in brothers and sisters doing it for themselves than 100 years of "well, black people lived in America after slavery was abolished, but nothing happened until the Civil Rights movement".

|2.25.05 @ 3:15PM|#

I'm surprised that joe hasn't shown up on this thread. He was all over the last one... Probably just lying low after the thrashing he took last time.

NCDan,
What an exceptionally accurate depiction. That one's going in my file of "keepers."

|2.26.05 @ 12:39AM|#

DuBois did not really sign up with the pro-Communist left until his later years. At the time he wrote the quoted article for *The Crisis* he was well within the mainstream of African American opinion.

Harold Cruse in *The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual*, written a few decades ago, summed it up best (p. 335): "Regrettably, the winning over of W.E.B. DuBois was a grand feather-in-the-caps of the incompetent Communist Party leadership. Yet as an individual, DuBois' intellectual reputation stands above and beyond the influences of Marxist Communism--a philosophy which aded nothing to *his* intellectual stature..."

Larry A|2.27.05 @ 9:25PM|#

Isaac: ["The fire was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some had to abandon their automobiles and continue on foot."

I don't want to condone violence but given the ordeals blacks have suffered I can imagine that the sight of those crackers fleeing might give one a good deal of satisfaction.]

Pardon me, but if the government takes away the black's firearms and allows the "robed men" to burn down homes and assault and murder the people living in them, "in a spirit of good fellowship" of course, isn't that, well, pretty close to "condoning violence?"

Sort of like the anti-gun folks today who say that when a criminal pulls a weapon and climbs in your bedroom window, allowing you to have a pistol to shoot back is "condoning violence."

|2.28.05 @ 10:08AM|#

Larry A

Perhaps I should have said "..take pleasure in.." rather than "..condone..".