My colleague Jack Wolfsohn beat me to the punch on this recent campaign ad from Arizona congressional candidate Jerone Davison. The ad shows Davison, who is black, fending off a mob of Ku Klux Klan members with an AR-15. As Jack notes, the ad is quite over the top, even distasteful. At the same time, as Jack also points out, “firearms can help minorities defend themselves against people who pose threats to them and their families.”
The ad does have a basis in history, as there were several times in the Jim Crow South when blacks took advantage of their Second Amendment rights to defend themselves from racists who wanted to hurt or kill them.
The hub of armed resistance to racism in the 20th century was Monroe, N.C. In 1946, a black World War II veteran, Bennie Montgomery, was working for a white sharecropper, W. W. Magnum. One day, Montgomery asked for his wages early, explaining that he needed to have his father’s car repaired. Magnum reportedly kicked and slapped the young man; Montgomery then cut his boss’s throat with a pocket knife.
KKK members in the area wanted to lynch Montgomery, but the authorities moved him to Raleigh before the Klan could catch him. There, he was found guilty of murder and executed in a gas chamber, after which authorities shipped his remains back to Monroe so his family could bury him.
Because they were unable to make a public example of Montgomery, Klansmen publicized their plan to steal his body and parade it through the streets as a warning to the city’s black residents. A group of black veterans in the community devised a plan to ward off the coming racist attack.
When the KKK motorcade rolled up on the funeral home, the drivers saw a group of 40 armed black men level their rifles at them. Fortunately, they did not need to fire a shot, as the cars pulled away. The men who defended Montgomery’s remains spent the night clutching their rifles. But they had successfully stood up to the Klan.
The person who catalogued this incident and many others, Robert F. Williams, was heavily involved in black armed resistance. In the 1950s, Williams joined the Monroe branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, later becoming its president. In his time leading the NAACP branch, he chartered a local chapter of the National Rifle Association. Today, we think of these two groups in opposition to each other, but many southern blacks such as Williams saw self-defense as a right necessary to their crusade.
Williams’s tendency toward violent struggle eventually proved to be less successful than Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience, but even King saw virtue in gun ownership early in his career. In 1956, Alabama authorities denied his application for a concealed-carry permit, which he requested after his house was bombed (though he would later say he felt less safe when he was armed).
Our constitutional rights are not to be trifled with. The Second Amendment has contributed to black people’s self-preservation, and disarming law-abiding Americans — black or white — can have disastrous consequences.