Academic

MORE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING?S GUNS: There?s nothing unusual about this. Many civil rights activi?

By Glenn Reynolds

MORE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING’S GUNS:

There?s nothing unusual about this. Many civil rights activists?including those who publicly engaged in non-violent forms of resistance?kept guns for self-defense. T.R.M. Howard, the Mississippi doctor and mutual aid leader who founded the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership, slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. During the murder trial that followed the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Howard escorted Till?s grieving mother and various others to and from the courthouse in a heavily-armed caravan.

Similarly, John R. Salter, one of the organizers of the famous 1963 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, said he always ?traveled armed? while working as a civil rights organizer in the South. ?I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,? Salter said.

Around ten years ago, maybe a bit longer, my law school had a program where ex-Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (with whom I went to law school) came to speak. It was heavily attended by Knoxville civil-rights veterans, and I think some of my colleagues were surprised when an elderly black preacher launched into a defense of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. I wasn?t, though.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 20, 2011 (boomark / email).