#gun studies

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During Reconstruction, blacks fought state repression with the very tool the state wished to deny them: the gun. After members of white rifle clubs in South Carolina tried to deter blacks from voting in an 1876 election, black citizens signed a public petition declaring, “We tell you it will not do to go too far in this thing. Remember there are 80,000 black men in this state who can bear Winchester rifles and know how to use them.”

Guns remained essential to black self-defense into the twentieth century. Beginning in 1917, a series of violent racial conflicts erupted in many northern cities. Labeled “race riots” by the white press, they are more accurately described as organized white-on-black violence. As the historian David Krugler explains, “African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counterattacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting.”

D.C.’s armed response was led by its black World War I veterans, most of whom had fought in the 368th and 372nd Infantry regiments. Upon their return, these men found that racial segregation had become more entrenched under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, the same president who had sent them off to war. Wilson restored segregation in federal government agencies and buildings, where screens were put up to separate black and white workers, and in 1915 he showed the racist film The Birth of a Nation in the White House. When the Boston newspaper editor Monroe Trotter led a black delegation to Washington to complain about Wilson’s policies, the president is alleged to have told them, “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

In 1919, when a white mob mobilized to attack blacks in D.C., the city’s black veterans were prepared to defend themselves and their families. As a military intelligence agent wrote in a confidential memo shortly before the fighting, “these officers and soldiers returning to their homes in Washington have told their grievances and ... have boasted of their ability to handle guns and of their determination to use the arms in their possession rather than submit to unjust treatment.” Meeting at the intersection of Seventh and T Streets, NW, black drivers assembled a convoy and headed to Baltimore, returning with trunks full of weapons. The fighting with the white mob lasted five days, and although black casualties were higher, the two sides were more closely matched than was true in other cities.

The resistance by D.C.’s black veterans earned the praise of the NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, who said, “The Negroes saved themselves and saved Washington by their determination not to run, but to fight ... fight in the defense of their lives and their homes. If the white mob had gone unchecked—and it was only the determined effort of black men that checked it—Washington would have been another and worse East St. Louis.” The Messenger, a publication cofounded by the labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, cited D.C.’s armed resistance as evidence that a “New Negro” had arrived. D.C.’s fighting blacks were hailed as an alternative to old-guard black establishment leaders like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, whom the paper lampooned for encouraging blacks to “be modest and unassuming” and to “forget our grievances.”

Forman, James Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017).

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