surprise_i'm_armed wrote: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.