It turns out that the Second Amendment — through its many incarnations of interpretation — has never been color-blind. The first of the two chapters I’m excerpting this week highlights how that’s played out.
After the Civil War, Lincoln decreed that thousands of Black soldiers who’d fought for the Union were allowed to keep their guns and rifles in lieu of back pay; it was the first time in American history that Black men in the South were legally armed, and the response from white southerners was immediate. Within months of Appomattox, southern state legislatures passed Black Codes barring those freedmen from owning guns, and bands of hooded and masked white men began riding at night to invade Black homes and seize every weapon they could find. They called themselves the Knights of the White Camellia, the Black Cavalry, and the Knights of the Rising Sun, although we eventually came to know them by the one name the Klu Klux Klan.
The second chapter jumps to Oakland, California in 1967 where open carry laws let Huey Newton and Bobby Seale walk the streets with loaded rifles as they followed police around to make sure their enforcement of the law was as color-blind as the law required.
This led to a total freak-out by Governor Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who ran that state’s legislature — the Mulford Act — and the NRA fully supported what was then the most rigorous gun control law in the country.
From The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, Chapters 15 and 17
The Failure of Reconstruction and the Rise of the Klan
Armed police forces and their predecessors throughout history have been the major institutions that define hierarchies in a given area. A prime example of this is how Irish immigrants in America began to be accepted as “white” in the early 20th century as urban police forces became staffed with Irish immigrants, while Italian immigrants (who mostly came to the US in large numbers a few generations later in the late 19th century) became a more noticeable “other” who could be blamed for crime and “general seediness” in a community.
Before the Civil War, law enforcement was an all-white matter in the South. During Reconstruction, the Union Army disbanded the slave patrols and created new police departments in the South—with emancipated black freedmen acting as police officers and justices of the peace. Reconstruction was turning the Old South on its head—but not for long.
By removing Lincoln from power, John Wilkes Booth succeeded in using his gun to end the aspects of Reconstruction that southerners found most egregious. The vice president, whom Lincoln had chosen in a misplaced burst of hope for national unity, was Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat.
Not only was Johnson a fan of slavery and a slaveholder, but the first slave he had bought, early in his life, was a 14-year-old girl, Dolly, who bore him three children. This fact became widely known while Johnson was still a state senator, and he addressed it by saying that Dolly had explicitly asked him to buy her because, he said, “she liked my looks.” It was a thin excuse, but more than enough for southerners.