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
'Nonviolence hasn't worked': Georgia civil rights leader calls for black families to defend themselves :: 04/02/2015
The local Georgia leader of a famed civil rights group called for black families to defend themselves with force if necessary because "nonviolence hasn't worked."
The president of Georgia's chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rev. Samuel Mosteller, said black people need to protect themselves after the recent spate of police shootings of unarmed black men.
"We're going to have to do something in our community to let the rest of America know that we are not going to be victimized by just anybody," he said at a Tuesday rally in Atlanta. "Whether it be police or folks that decide that, 'Oh, black people are thugs and we need to control that black community.'"
Mosteller said every family should "avail themselves of their Second Amendment right."
But the local leader of the group founded by Martin Luther King Jr. said he was not calling on people to carry weapons — they can protect themselves by other means.
Mosteller's comments come a week after Smyrna police shot and killed Nicholas Thomas, 23, after they say he tried to run them over.
Weeks earlier, DeKalb County police fatally shot Anthony Hill, a mentally ill man authorities said charged an officer.
Mosteller also proposed recalls for sheriffs in counties where unarmed black people are shot.
Mosteller's call is a radical change from SCLC's historical stance of nonviolence. When King and other activists founded it in 1958, SCLC was a departure from other groups that advocated self-defense. The group orchestrated the march through Selma, Ala., years later.
"Undebatably, we believe in peace and nonviolence," SCLC's national president, Charles Steele, told WSB Radio.
Steele said people misinterpreted Mosteller's comments and wrongly thought he was suggesting "we should go and pick up our guns and take to violence."
Local activists have criticized Mosteller's comments for straying from nonviolent advocacy.
"Many of these institutions are out of touch with their own original mission," activist Rev. Markel Hutchins told 11Alive. "I support arming the entire community, but not with weapons, but with love."
