The 13th chapter of Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion has a provocative title: "Lynching as an Act of Freedom." Cowie explains: "A person did not have to see a dead and mutilated body to know that white people relished a uniquely sinister form of liberty: the freedom to take a life with impunity" (233). White people lynching black people expressed the freedom of white people to dominate others.
Cowie observes: "The only cure, short of changing the hearts of white people or the armed resistance of Black people, was the power of the federal government" (241). But while the federal government had restrained the freedom of the dominant white class to inflict violence on the blacks during Reconstruction, once Reconstruction was over, the federal government never made lynching illegal until the "Second Reconstruction," in the 1960s, when major civil rights legislation was passed.
But notice how Cowie quickly passes over "the armed resistance of Black people" as a possible restraint on lynching, which suggests that black people never saw this as a serious option. Cowie thus ignores the black tradition of armed self-defense. For example, while Cowie makes one brief reference to Ida B. Wells, who was a famous black journalist known for her national campaign to expose the brutal injustices of lynching, he says nothing about her argument that armed self-defense was the best way to prevent lynchings. In one case, after telling the stories of blacks using firearms to stop lynchings in Jacksonville, Florida, and Paducah, Kentucky, she declared: "The lesson this teaches us and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched" (Johnson 2014: 109-110). We should remember that the Winchester was the best lever-action repeating rifle of that time. It could be considered the assault rifle of its day. One full fifteen-shot magazine could be fired in 11 seconds.
The white fear of armed blacks was manifested in the "Black Codes" enacted in the Southern States after the Civil War, which prohibited blacks from having guns. The law in Alabama, for example, prohibited "any freedman, mulatto or free person of color in this state, to own fire-arms, or carry about this person a pistol or other deadly weapon" (Johnson 2014: 79). Cowie is silent about this.
Similarly, although Cowie has an entire chapter on the "convict lease system" as a disguised form of black enslavement, he is silent about the fact that one of the most common charges against these black convicts was the crime of carrying a concealed weapon (191-209). Thus, Cowie does not allow his readers to see this as evidence for a widespread culture of black gun ownership that threatened white dominance.
Cowie also gives his readers a brief account of the race riots after World War One that is silent about how blacks fought back with guns (242-43). One example is the Tulsa riot of 1921, in which as many as 100 people were killed, and over one thousand black homes were destroyed. John Hope Franklin, who became a prominent black historian, moved to Tulsa in 1925 at age ten. Franklin reported that "many more whites were killed during the riot than many whites were willing to admit," because they didn't want to admit that armed blacks had fought back heroically. Franklin observed:
"The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites. After 1921, an altercation in Tusa between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident, even if there was a loss of life. It was just an incident. Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicating the fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might have felt in the years following the riot" (Johnson 2014: 189).
Cowie says nothing about this.
He is also silent about black armed self-defense in Alabama during the modern civil rights movement. For instance, he writes about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the bus system and about Autherine Lucy's attempt to enroll at the University of Alabama. But he says nothing about Rosa Parks' account of how important armed defense was for the black community, and he says nothing about how a group of armed black men protected Autherine Lucy from a violent mob (Johnson 2014:220-222).
Similarly, Cowie says nothing about Condoleezza Rice's testimony about the importance of black armed self-defense for her family when she was growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. She has said: "Because of this experience, I'm a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or even worse" (Johnson 2014: 223). Cowie does not even mention the Second Amendment.
Cowie does not recognize armed self-defense as a natural or constitutional right, and that points to the fundamental flaw in his understanding of American freedom. He agrees with Orlando Patterson that there are three kinds of freedom. The first is the freedom to enjoy individual liberty as long as one does not infringe on the equal liberty of others. The second is the civic freedom to participate in political life--freedom as democracy. The third is the most ominous--the freedom of some people to dominate or even enslave others (6, 415-416).
The problem is how to defend the first two forms of freedom against the third. In America, the only way to do that, Cowie suggests, is to have the federal government protect individual freedom and democratic freedom at the local and state levels of government, which means overriding "states' rights." The flaw in Cowie's reasoning here is that he does not allow people to defend their natural rights from attack when government fails to defend them.
This governmental failure can either be malevolent or structural. A malevolent governmental failure is when government becomes the tool of an oppressive ruling class in dominating an inferior class, as when local and state governments enforced white supremacy in the South.
A structural governmental failure is when government either cannot or will not protect the equal liberty of all people. When the federal government refused to protect equal liberty in the American South, that was a structural governmental failure. But even when a government strives to protect the rights of all of its people, it often fails because the governmental agents of law enforcement are often not present when there is some imminent threat to someone's life or liberty. In either case, where people cannot rely on government to protect them, they have a natural right to armed self-defense, which is also made a constitutional right by the Second Amendment.
Although this right to self-defense is important for all people, it has been especially important for black people in America because they have so often not been able to depend on government to defend them from violent attack. Previously, I have written about how guns made the civil rights movement possible. But in my next post, I will extend the story of the black tradition of armed self-defense that stretches over 200 years of American history, from the Founding to the present. The most comprehensive account of that story is Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and the Gun (Prometheus Books, 2014). It is remarkable that Cowie has no place for that story in his history.
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