From the Philly Inquirer. It almost seems like Harold Jackson is afraid to say too many good things about her, but what tripped over my alerts was this passage:
Rice’s recollection of events that night comes pretty close to my own, although we were in different households. “The men of the community took up their neighborhood watch,” she said. Rice explained that these watches had begun months earlier, after homes and churches were bombed.
She said that when her father was on watch, he would sit on the porch with a “gun on his lap . . . looking for white night riders.” Because of that experience, seeing her father take up a weapon to protect his family, Rice said, she was “a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.”
My father and other men in our housing project also armed themselves to protect us after Sixteenth Street Baptist was bombed. That never made me want to join the NRA. But as I said, my life and Rice’s were very different. The little gun violence I saw as a teenager convinced me that it should be harder to get a gun.
Except it it had been harder to get a gun, you can bet the hoops one had to jump through would be enforced vigorously against the black community, while the Klan would have had all the guns they want. What few gun control laws exist in this country were mostly targeted at disarming minorities. Read the whole article. It’s quite good.
Yup. Sounds about right. With all kinds of violence like bombings, lynchings, beatings, stabbings that went down, and people using guns to protect themselves, family, and property, these guns are what needs to be restricted.
That was definitely very interesting. It also shows how two different people can look at the same events and come to widely differing conclusions.
Rice said similar things in an interview on the Daily Show recently. She said her dad’s believe in the right to defend himself led him to stay clear of King’s movement altogether.
The Civil Rights movement relied heavily on armed resistance, as several noted scholars & even a cursory reading of first-hand accounts have shown. It’s very unfortunate that the self-reliance, i.e. armed self-defense, that was part & parcel to that movement’s success have largely been edited out of the official versions.