PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
MLK and his aides had guns for self-defense :: 01/21/2016
Each year Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated as the dreamer who led the nonviolent movement that toppled the segregated social order that stifled the lives of African-Americans.
It wasn’t easy.
For King and his followers, it meant being savaged by police dogs in Birmingham and being beaten bloody by baton-wielding police in Selma — and not fighting back.
It meant being spat upon and having food and condiments dumped on them as they tried to integrate lunch counters in Greensboro and other places.
In the end, it worked because the world saw the civil rights protesters as people being brutalized for attempting to enjoy the rights that America claimed it offered to all its citizens.
The hypocrisy was exposed; this country that was supposed to be an example of freedom for the rest of the world was refusing to give those freedoms to its African-American citizens.
But it also worked because when the cameras were turned off and the darkness descended, King and his followers did what they had to do to survive another day in the movement.
They guarded themselves and King with guns.
Charles Cobb Jr., a veteran of the civil rights movement who spent much of the 1960s in Mississippi as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, explored the role of guns in the civil rights movement in his 2014 book, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.”
In it, he examines how self-defense complemented peaceful resistance against segregation in the South.
“After King’s home was bombed in 1956, he applied for a gun permit and, of course, was denied,” Cobb told me. “As he became deeper involved in the movement, he embraced nonviolence.
“But he was protected by armed men … their attitude was that they weren’t going to let him be killed. King was a man fighting for social change, and the people around him were going to protect him.”
Cobb said he was driven to write his book about guns in the movement because much of what is taught and celebrated about King and nonviolence resistance is distorted.
“My criticism of the portrayals of King is that they lose all the complexity of the man,” Cobb said. “I blame the press for this because it is easy to oversimplify King. But even in his book, ‘Stride Toward Freedom,’ he acknowledges that self-defense is a way of life.”
The fact that people in the movement guarded King with guns, and that King understood the need for self-defense, does not diminish him as the enduring symbol of nonviolence as a means for social change. What it does, however, is clarify the differences.
Nonviolent resistance was a protest tactic necessary to evoke change, to expose the bigotry and savagery of racists who would spit on them, assault them or otherwise brutalize them for sitting at a public lunch counter, or trying to register to vote.
Fighting back would have simply played into the hands of racists who would have been anxious to portray them as racial aggressors and not victims of racism.
But King and his followers had to live to fight another day — so they got guns for self-defense.
And their reasons for doing so was not to arm themselves to rise up against some imagined governmental tyranny but to defend themselves against bombings, shootings and other forms of real life tyranny from the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorists who vowed to keep black people in their place.
Even though King was ultimately assassinated in 1968, at least they kept him safe long enough for him to see some victories.
