Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
Originally published on December 22, 2020 3:37 pm
Guns are just about as American as apple pie. To many, especially white folks, they ve represented all the highfalutin ideals enshrined in the constitution: independence, self-reliance and the ability to live freely. For Black folks, guns often symbolize all those same things but, as we like to say on the show, it s complicated.
As we talked about on our latest episode of the pod, firearms have always loomed large in Black people s lives going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery. Right from the jump, guns were tied up in America s thorny relationship with race; you can actually tell the story of how America s racial order takes shape, in part, by tracing the history of guns in the U.S. and who was allowed to own them.
As we talked about on our latest episode of the pod, firearms have always loomed large in Black people s lives going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery. Right from the jump, guns were tied up in America s thorny relationship with race; you can actually tell the story of how America s racial order takes shape, in part, by tracing the history of guns in the U.S. and who was allowed to own them.
To try to understand that (
very long) history of race and guns and make it digestible, we talked to Alain Stephens, a reporter with The Trace who has been reading about the history of Black gun ownership for a long while. Here s the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity. And we also asked Stephens to recommend some of the books he read for his research, which you can find here.
to commemorate Freedom Summer, Tell Me More
is diving into books that explore that theme.
One of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement was non-violent resistance. During lunch counter sit-ins and protest marches Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders instructed participants not to take up arms. Instead, when violence erupted or force was used to disrupt their activities, people would non-violently resist attempts by law enforcement to end the protest.
But this passive resistance did not necessarily mean an unwillingness to use force to protect themselves from violence in other circumstances.
This hiding in plain sight story is recounted to NPR s Michel Martin by author, professor and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary Charles E. Cobb Jr. in his new book,