Vivek Is Right about Blacks and Guns

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

The exchange between Don Lemon and Vivek Ramaswamy on CNN last week won’t exactly go down in cable TV history, but it is a footnote insofar as it reportedly played a role in the ouster of Lemon from the network.

 

The former prime-time anchor’s behavior was another display of ill temper and arrogance, when morning TV demands at least faux cheerfulness and modesty.

 

But the exchange, occasioned by a remark made by Ramaswamy in a speech to the NRA convention about the racist motivation of early gun-control laws, was more telling for what it displayed about Lemon’s ignorance — and about the broader ignorance of his side, which has been loudly claiming that Lemon was fired for being right.

 

As in any such cable fight, there was cross talk, imprecision, and jumping from one topic to another, and Ramaswamy overstated his case in certain respects. There’s no doubt, though, that he is correct in his main contention and that Lemon (and by extension, his defenders) really has no idea what he’s talking about.

 

Everyone should know the history here, but by Lemon’s own logic — that, as a black man, he has unique, unassailable insights into civil rights — it’s especially egregious that he doesn’t know it.

 

In his NRA speech, Ramaswamy said that the first gun-control laws dated to 1865 and that they were part and parcel of a campaign to deny blacks their rights.

 

To be fair, Lemon might have been distracted by the bitchy exchange he was having with the producers talking in his ear, but he reacted to this claim with indignant incomprehension.

 

What Ramaswamy said was simply a matter of history, as Clarence Thomas explained in his concurring opinion in the gun-rights case McDonald v. Chicago and as Charlie Cooke and Robert VerBruggen have written at National Review (I draw on all three in what follows).

 

Ramaswamy could have taken it further back than 1865. In his opinion, Thomas noted how in the wake of slave rebellions in the 1820s, “many legislatures amended their laws prohibiting slaves from carrying firearms to apply the prohibition to free blacks as well.”

 

It’d be hard to be more explicit than Tennessee, which in 1834 made it clear that only “the free white men of this State,” and no longer “the freemen of this State,” enjoyed the “right to keep and to bear arms.”

 

The end of the Civil War brought a new urgency in the South to keep blacks from bearing arms. The gun-control laws were clearly discriminatory, targeting blacks alone, while white militias took it upon themselves to disarm blacks.

 

A group of black citizens of South Carolina petitioned Congress: “We ask that, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States explicitly declares that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed . . . that the late efforts of the Legislature of this State to pass an act to deprive us [of] arms be forbidden, as a plain violation of the Constitution.”

 

These laws were an impetus for post-war federal civil-rights measures. In 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act stipulated that “the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens . . . without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery.”

 

Everyone knew, pro and con, that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 included the right to keep and bear arms in its protections. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois remarked that former slave states had passed laws “depriving persons of Afri­can descent of privileges which are essential to freemen.” That included prohibiting blacks from “having fire-arms.” The purpose of the bill, he added, was “to destroy all these discriminations.”

 

When such measures were ignored in the South, Congress went further with the passage of the 14th Amendment. After its adoption, southern states became less open about their objectives, but those objectives remained the same.

 

Black activists and writers certainly understood the stakes. Ida B. Wells wrote in 1892:

 

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

 

Wells believed that “when the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”

 

As Charlie Cooke notes, in 1850, Frederick Douglass had this advice for runaway slaves trying to escape the men hunting them down: They should have “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” them and return them to bondage.

 

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney certainly understood the stakes, as well, from the other side of the ledger. In his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, part of his argument against granting citizenship to blacks was that they’d be able “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

 

There’s a literature out there devoted to this element of the struggle for civil rights, which Cooke draws from for his essay, including Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms; Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms; and This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

 

The author of that last book, Charles E. Cobb, an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told an NPR interviewer: “I lived with families in the South. There was never a family I stayed with that didn’t have a gun. I know, from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive.”

 

Now, it’s obviously not the case that blacks got guns and the civil-rights revolution was instantly complete. But it is true that the rights of blacks weren’t fully recognized until they, too, had Second Amendment rights. Gun ownership is a powerful means of protecting oneself, one’s property, and one’s rights.

 

The late Otis McDonald, the plaintiff in the McDonald case, deeply felt the truth of this. As the Chicago Tribune wrote after his death:

 

The tall, elderly, soft-spoken man insisted he needed a gun to shield his family from gangs and drug dealers that terrorized his Morgan Park neighborhood. He felt the Constitution gave him that right.

 

“His love for family drove him,” said his nephew Fred Jones. “He loved the Second Amendment but he was more concerned about protecting his family, and the Second Amendment was the avenue to help him do that.”

 

But he was also driven by a force much deeper. Mr. McDonald felt strongly that he had a duty to stand up for the rights that had been taken away from African-Americans during slavery. As he and his wife, Laura, sat in the Supreme Court gallery listening to oral arguments in the lawsuit, it reaffirmed what he felt was his calling.

 

In an interview with the Tribune after winning the suit, Mr. McDonald said the journey had been a lesson in history. He had come to understand more about his ancestors and the “slave codes” enacted in Southern states during the Civil War that prohibited slaves from owning guns. After slavery was abolished, states adopted “black codes” that kept guns out of the hands of freed blacks.

 

“There was a wrong done a long time ago that dates back to slavery time,” he said in the interview. “I could feel the spirit of those people running through me as I sat in the Supreme Court.”

 

The history and logic here shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if that logic doesn’t compute for anyone on the left, as Don Lemon demonstrated in his last big argument on CNN.