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Frederick Bailey had had enough.
He’d been raised as the slave-companion to a young white boy
in a big-brother role and was “coddled.” His owner,
therefore, thought it best that the sometimes-impudent
Frederick be sent away and “broken.” But headstrong
Frederick wouldn’t have any of that and he fought back.
Frederick (Bailey) Douglass was “far from the first to
fight,” says Johnson; in fact, both slaves and black freemen
in the early-to-mid 1800s used guns to defend themselves.
For that, “Punishment was swift.” Still, pre-Civil War
records from Vicksburg, Mississippi show that slaves had
“direct access” to firearms and that merchants who illegally
sold guns to slaves were “periodically” prosecuted.
Later, when Lincoln opened the Union Army to “Negro
soldiers,” black men took up arms, “intent on proving
themselves” and fighting for their freedom. Once the war was
over, black veterans petitioned Congress for their
Second-Amendment rights to bear arms and then for a
Fourteenth Amendment.
Using their guns, Negroes helped settle the Old West by
cowboyin’ and stagecoaching. The “color line became blurred”
then as “red, black, and white men mixed together, but it
wasn’t just a man’s world. “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (a.k.a.
“Black Mary”) was known to be a better shot than any man in
the state of Montana.
By the turn of the century, being armed was a near-necessity
for many Negroes. It was a time of lynchings; race riots;
Jim Crow laws; and occasional, surprising pockets of legal
protection. Still, any white person who thought that a black
man or woman wouldn’t dare shoot in self-defense was
woefully mistaken.
That sentiment was still around during the Civil Rights
Movement, despite “cautions” against violence from Martin
Luther King – and, once again, women took up arms, too. But
by the mid-1970s, black mayors and other officials were
petitioning the government for a different action: to help
take guns away from their black constituents.
When I first started Negroes and the Gun, I figured
that I was in for something dry and maybe a little boring.
I was wrong.
Author Nicholas Johnson tells the story of African-American
history through firearms, but his is a lively account. Not
only are we given a thorough timeline that reflects this
books’ title, but we’re treated to individual stories of
people, famous and infamous: Ida B. Wells, Frederick
Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Louis Armstrong, Walter
White, and, yes, the fascinating gunwoman of whom “men were
rightly afraid…”
In the end, I highly enjoyed this book and I think you will,
too, whether you’re pro-gun-ownership or not. For the
history and its accompanying final, thought-provoking
chapter, Negroes and the Gun is worth a shot. |
