The Second Amendment Was Not Written for White People Only — The History They Don’t Teach

On the night of September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, who was eleven years old. In the hours that followed, white mobs roamed the streets of Birmingham. They were not met exclusively with nonviolent resistance. In the home of Condoleezza Rice — then eight years old, a friend of Carol Denise McNair, a resident of the same neighborhood — her father, John Wesley Rice Jr., sat on the front porch with a shotgun across his lap. He was not alone. The men of the neighborhood organized armed patrols. They stood guard through the night. No one attacked the Rice home or any home those men protected. Decades later, when Condoleezza Rice became the sixty-sixth Secretary of State of the United States, she testified before the Senate with absolute clarity: “My father and his friends defended our community in Birmingham with their Second Amendment rights.” She opposed gun control legislation. The press treated this as a contradiction. It was not a contradiction. It was a memory.

I begin with this story because the history of Black Americans and the Second Amendment has been so thoroughly erased from the national conversation that most Americans — Black and white — believe that gun rights are a white conservative issue with no relevance to Black life. This belief is not merely wrong. It is a product of the same historical amnesia that afflicts every narrative designed to keep Black people dependent on institutions that have repeatedly failed to protect them. The documented history of Black America’s relationship with firearms is not a sidebar to the civil rights movement. It is a central chapter — a chapter that has been deliberately removed because it complicates the narrative that both parties need Black Americans to believe.

The Black Codes: Disarmament as Control

The relationship between gun control and racial control in America is not a theory. It is a documented, legislative, unambiguous historical fact. And it begins at the beginning.

Immediately following the Civil War, the former Confederate states enacted a series of laws known as the Black Codes. Their purpose was explicit: to restore, as nearly as possible, the conditions of slavery through legal mechanisms. Among the most consistent provisions of the Black Codes, across every state that enacted them, was the prohibition of Black gun ownership. Mississippi’s Black Code of 1865 stated that no freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition.” South Carolina’s Black Code required Black citizens to obtain a license from a district judge to possess a firearm — a license that judges, uniformly white, uniformly former Confederates, uniformly refused to grant. Louisiana, Alabama, Florida — every former Confederate state included firearms restrictions targeted specifically at Black people.

The reason was not public safety. The reason was the same reason that every authoritarian regime in history has disarmed the population it intended to control: an armed population cannot be terrorized with impunity. The Klan could operate freely in communities where Black people were disarmed. It could not operate freely where they were not. The Black Codes understood this. The men who wrote them understood that the Second Amendment, if applied equally, would make the restoration of white supremacy impossible. So they ensured it was not applied equally. The first gun control laws in American history were not about guns. They were about Black people having guns.

This is not ancient history. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was designed in significant part to ensure that the Second Amendment applied to all citizens regardless of race. Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the Amendment in the Senate, stated explicitly that its purpose was to protect “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution” — including the right to bear arms — from being violated by state governments. The freedmen had been disarmed. The Fourteenth Amendment was, among other things, a gun rights amendment. This is documented in the Congressional Record. It is not taught in any public school in America.

Frederick Douglass Carried a Gun. Harriet Tubman Carried a Revolver.

The foundational figures of Black American liberation were not pacifists. They were armed. And their willingness to use force was not incidental to their mission. It was central to it.

Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography, described the moment he physically fought back against the slave-breaker Edward Covey as the turning point of his life: “I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” After escaping slavery, Douglass consistently advocated for the right of Black people to bear arms. During the Civil War, he urged Black men to enlist: “Let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Douglass understood — as every serious student of power understands — that the right to self-defense is not downstream of citizenship. It is the foundation of citizenship.

Harriet Tubman carried a revolver on every trip she made on the Underground Railroad. The gun served two purposes: defense against slave catchers and the enforcement of discipline among the people she was rescuing. If a fugitive wanted to turn back — risking the exposure of the entire group — Tubman pointed the revolver and said, according to multiple documented accounts: “You’ll be free or die a slave.” She was not a symbol. She was an operator. And she operated armed.

Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist, wrote in 1892, after the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis: “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.” She was not speaking metaphorically. She was speaking from the documented reality that between 1882 and 1968, over 4,700 Black Americans were lynched in the United States, and law enforcement participated in or failed to prevent the overwhelming majority of those killings. Wells understood that when the government will not protect you, the responsibility to protect yourself is not optional. It is existential.

The Deacons for Defense

In 1964, in Jonesboro, Louisiana, a group of Black men formed an organization that the civil rights movement has spent sixty years trying to forget: the Deacons for Defense and Justice. They were armed. They patrolled their neighborhoods. They escorted civil rights workers. They stood guard at meetings, marches, and voter registration drives. And they were effective — measurably, documentably effective — in ways that nonviolent resistance alone had not been.

The Deacons were founded because the community had learned, through experience, that nonviolent resistance worked only when the federal government was willing to enforce federal law. In communities where the local police, the state troopers, and the Klan were functionally the same organization — which was the case across much of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama — nonviolent protesters were beaten, shot at, and killed with no legal consequence. The Deacons provided what the government would not: physical protection.

In Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons’ presence transformed the civil rights struggle. When Klan members drove through Black neighborhoods firing guns at homes, the Deacons fired back. When white mobs gathered at the edges of marches, the Deacons stood at the perimeter, visibly armed. The violence against civil rights workers in Bogalusa dropped measurably after the Deacons’ arrival. This is documented. It is not disputed by serious historians. The presence of armed Black men who were willing to defend themselves changed the calculus of white violence in a way that moral appeals alone had not.

The Deacons had chapters in at least twenty-one communities across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. They operated in coordination with — not in opposition to — the nonviolent movement. Martin Luther King Jr. publicly maintained his commitment to nonviolence, but it is documented that armed guards, including Deacons, provided security at his events. The relationship was symbiotic: the nonviolent movement provided the moral authority; the armed defense provided the physical safety that made the moral authority possible. Without the Deacons and men like them, many of the marches and voter registration drives that defined the civil rights movement would not have survived the first mile.

Robert F. Williams: The Man Who Said “No”

In 1957, Robert F. Williams was president of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. After two Black children — aged eight and ten — were arrested and sentenced to reform school for kissing a white girl on the cheek, and after a series of Klan attacks on the Black community that the local police refused to investigate, Williams did something that the NAACP national office considered unthinkable: he organized an armed guard, obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association, and publicly declared that Black people in Monroe would meet violence with violence.

The NRA, it should be noted, issued that charter without hesitation. In 1957, the NRA had not yet become the political organization it is today. It was a marksmanship and gun safety organization, and it issued charters to gun clubs across the country regardless of race. Williams’s Monroe gun club was an official NRA affiliate. The NRA armed Black men in North Carolina in 1957. This is an inconvenient fact for both political parties, which is precisely why neither mentions it.

Williams was suspended by the NAACP for his advocacy of armed self-defense. He went on to write Negroes with Guns (1962), which became one of the most influential texts of the emerging Black Power movement. His argument was simple: “We as men should stand up as men and protect our women and children. I am a man and I will walk upright as a man should. I will not crawl.” The NAACP considered this radical. The Black community of Monroe considered it survival.

“The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” — Malcolm X, speech, May 22, 1962

Malcolm X’s famous observation acquires a different weight in the context of armed self-defense. The protection of Black women and children was the primary motivation of every armed self-defense organization in the civil rights era. The Deacons protected families. Williams protected children. John Wesley Rice Jr. protected his daughter. The question was never theoretical: when the state will not protect your family, what will you do? The answer, for the most courageous Black men of the twentieth century, was not to write a letter. It was to load a rifle.

The Mulford Act: When the Government Got Scared

In May 1967, thirty members of the Black Panther Party walked into the California State Capitol in Sacramento carrying loaded firearms. They were exercising their legal right under California law, which at the time permitted the open carry of loaded weapons. Their purpose was to protest Assembly Bill 1591, introduced by Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford — a bill designed specifically to ban the open carry of loaded firearms in California. The bill had been introduced specifically because the Black Panthers were exercising their existing right to carry weapons in public while monitoring police activity in Oakland.

The Mulford Act was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan on July 28, 1967. The NRA supported it. Read that sentence again. The Republican governor who would become the patron saint of the American conservative movement signed a gun control law. The NRA, which would become the nation’s most powerful anti-gun-control lobby, supported it. They supported it because the people carrying the guns were Black. The principle was never “all citizens have the right to bear arms.” The principle was “all citizens we are comfortable with have the right to bear arms.” When the citizens were Black Panthers in leather jackets, the principle evaporated overnight.

This is the history of gun control in America, stripped of its progressive packaging: every major gun control initiative in American history has its roots in the fear of armed Black people. The Black Codes. The Sullivan Act of 1911 in New York, designed to disarm Italian and Irish immigrants but applied with particular rigor to Black residents. The Gun Control Act of 1968, passed in the wake of the Black Power movement and the urban uprisings. The Mulford Act. The pattern is not ambiguous. It is not subject to interpretation. It is a straight line from the Black Codes of 1865 to the gun control legislation of today: disarm the people you intend to control.

The Modern Reality

Black gun ownership in the United States has increased 58 percent since 2019, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Black women are the fastest-growing demographic of new gun owners in America. The National African American Gun Association (NAAGA), founded in 2015, has grown to over 45,000 members. These are not theoretical numbers. They represent millions of Black Americans who have made a decision that the mainstream political narrative does not accommodate: the decision that their safety is their own responsibility.

The reasons are not mysterious. In cities where police response times average ten to fifteen minutes in high-crime neighborhoods — and significantly longer in some communities — self-defense is not a philosophical position. It is a mathematical reality. If a threat arrives at your door and the police arrive in twelve minutes, you have twelve minutes in which no institution in America is protecting you. What you do in those twelve minutes is not a political question. It is a survival question. And an increasing number of Black Americans are answering it the same way Condoleezza Rice’s father answered it, the same way the Deacons answered it, the same way Robert F. Williams answered it: by taking responsibility for their own protection.

The Political Manipulation

The current political alignment — in which Black Americans are expected to support gun control as a progressive value — is a historical anomaly that collapses under the weight of the evidence. For the first century of the Second Amendment’s existence, it was explicitly denied to Black people. For the next century, it was implicitly restricted through laws designed to disarm Black communities while leaving white communities armed. The progressive position that asks Black Americans to support further restrictions on gun ownership is asking them to support the latest iteration of a legislative tradition that has always had the same target.

I am not suggesting that Black Americans should join the NRA or vote Republican or adopt any particular political identity. I am suggesting something simpler and more fundamental: that the right to self-defense is not a political position. It is a human right. It predates the Constitution, predates the founding of America, predates every political party and every political ideology. It is the right that makes all other rights enforceable. Without the capacity to defend yourself, every other right exists only at the pleasure of whoever has the power to take it away.

The communities that the gun control movement claims to protect — poor, urban, disproportionately Black communities — are the very communities where police protection is least reliable, where response times are longest, where criminal violence is most concentrated, and where the individual’s capacity for self-defense is most urgently needed. To disarm these communities in the name of protecting them is not progressivism. It is the same logic that animated the Black Codes: remove the capacity for resistance, then call it safety.

The Uncomfortable Data

John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime, now in its third edition, remains the most comprehensive statistical analysis of the relationship between legal gun ownership and crime rates ever published. Using county-level data across the entire United States over a period of decades, Lott found that shall-issue concealed carry laws — laws that allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons — are associated with measurable reductions in violent crime, including murder, rape, and aggravated assault. The effect was most pronounced in high-crime areas, which are disproportionately Black.

Lott’s work is controversial. Some researchers have challenged his methodology and conclusions. The debate is legitimate and ongoing. But the core finding — that legal gun ownership does not increase crime and may decrease it — has been replicated in multiple studies and has not been overturned. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed the evidence in 2004 and concluded that the data did not support the claim that gun control laws reduce violent crime. This is not a right-wing talking point. This is the National Academy of Sciences.

The data is not clean. It never is. But the claim that disarming law-abiding citizens — which is the only population affected by gun control laws, since criminals by definition do not comply with them — makes communities safer is not supported by the evidence. And in communities where the law-abiding citizens are disproportionately Black, and the police protection is disproportionately inadequate, the consequence of disarmament is not safety. It is vulnerability.

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin, “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

Baldwin understood rage. He understood that rage, uncontained, destroys the person who carries it. But he also understood something that the comfortable classes never have to learn: that rage, channeled into the capacity for self-defense, is not violence. It is dignity. It is the refusal to be a target. It is the decision, made by John Wesley Rice Jr. on a porch in Birmingham with a shotgun on his lap, that his daughter would not die tonight. Not because the government protected her. Not because the law protected her. Because her father protected her. With the Second Amendment right that the Black Codes tried to take, that the Mulford Act tried to take, that the modern gun control movement is still trying to take.

The Right That Underlies All Rights

I end where the founders ended, with a truth that is simultaneously the most American and the most human thing that can be said: the right to self-defense is not granted by any government. It is inherent in the fact of being alive. Every creature on earth defends itself. The rabbit runs. The porcupine raises its quills. The human being, who is neither fast enough to run nor armored enough to resist, reaches for a tool. The Second Amendment did not create this right. It recognized it. And the recognition was not limited to white people, no matter how desperately the Black Codes, the Mulford Act, and the modern gun control movement have tried to make it so.

Black Americans have more historical reason to exercise the right to self-defense than any demographic in this country. They were enslaved for 246 years. They were terrorized by the Klan for a century after that. They were denied police protection in the communities that needed it most. They were disarmed by law and then told that their disarmament was for their own good. And through all of it, the ones who survived — the ones who built Greenwood, who protected their families in Birmingham, who escorted civil rights workers through Mississippi, who stood on porches with shotguns while crosses burned on their lawns — were the ones who refused to surrender the tool that made resistance possible.

The Second Amendment was not written for white people only. It was written for citizens. For two centuries, the project of American racism was to ensure that Black people were not considered citizens and therefore could not access the right. That project failed. The Fourteenth Amendment made Black Americans citizens. The Second Amendment makes them armed. And the combination of citizenship and arms is the thing that every system of oppression, from the Black Codes to the present day, has tried to prevent — because a citizen who can defend himself is a citizen who cannot be controlled.

The right to self-defense is not a conservative position. It is not a liberal position. It is not a Republican position or a Democratic position. It is the position of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells and the Deacons for Defense and Robert F. Williams and the men who stood guard in Birmingham while four little girls were buried. It is the oldest and most fundamental right of the human being: the right to be alive tomorrow because you had the means to protect yourself today. And any political movement that asks Black Americans to surrender that right — regardless of its stated intentions — is asking them to trust the same institutions that have failed them for four centuries.

The answer to that request should be the same answer John Wesley Rice Jr. gave on a Birmingham porch in 1963. Not a speech. Not a petition. Not a vote. A loaded shotgun and the willingness to use it. That is not violence. That is the most ancient form of love: the protection of the people you brought into this world, by whatever means the world requires.