An excellent interview courtesy NPR with Charles E. Cobb and the untold story of firearms used by southern blacks before and during the Civil Rights movement.
Mr. Cobb succinctly sums up the liberal narrative and revisionist history of the civil rights movement...
Mr. Cobb succinctly sums up the liberal narrative and revisionist history of the civil rights movement...
But the reality was that civil rights in America were hard fought and earned through the blood and tears of the persecuted...the way the public understands the civil rights movement can be boiled down to one sentence. Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.
From the interview, it is easy to understand how firearms played a central role in securing the safety of southern black families from white supremacists, bigotry, and persecution. I would also argue that, without firearms and the constitutional right to self defense, the civil rights movement would have turned out very different.After the Civil War, guns were – you had all these black soldiers who had fought in the Union Army coming back home with weapons. So states, particularly in what’s called the first reconstruction, attempted to disarm blacks, and that was not all that successful. You see, if we were really doing a deep look at this period, say, between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I, you’d see instance after instance of blacks in the rural South fending off the Ku Klux Klan and others with weapons.