81. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 357–59; A. Scott Berg, Wilson (Putnam, 2013), 349; James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (Simon & Schuster, 2004), 43, 243–44. According to Chace, “Woodrow Wilson was in essence a white supremacist, holding a romantic view of the courtesy and graciousness of the antebellum southern plantation owners, as well as accepting uncritically the post-Reconstruction South that arranged to keep the black Americans in their place.” Ibid., 43.
82. “Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson,” The Crisis, January 1915, 119.
83. J. E. Cutler, “Race Riots in D.C.,” Memo for the Director of Military Intelligence, “Negro Subversion” file, 10218-350, RG 165, National Archives. Quoted in Delia Cunningham Mellis, “‘The Monsters We Defy’: Washington, D.C., in the Red Summer of 1919” (Ph.D. diss., CUNY, 2008), 81.
84. Randolph’s disagreement with Du Bois was rooted in Du Bois’s support for World War I. In 1918 Du Bois urged black Americans “to forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for our democracy.” Harlem radicals such as Randolph were highly critical of Du Bois’s statement. Andrew E. Kersten, A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard (Rowan & Littlefield, 2007), 20.
85. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York Age Print, 1892), 71; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking, 2011), 304.
86. Johnson, Negroes and the Gun, 13.
87. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (University of Washington Press, 1985), 376.
88. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (Putnam, 1977), 267.
89. Johnson, Negroes and the Gun, 251.
90. Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W. W. Norton, 2011), 245.
91. Ibid., 252.
92. Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special, 52.
93. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 71. Accounts of Carmichael’s precise words vary; guns remain a theme in all of them. Here’s how the historian Michael Flamm tells the story: “‘Go home and get your guns,’ Carmichael told a crowd after the looting had begun. ‘When the white man comes he is coming to kill you. I don’t want any black blood in the street. Go home and get you a gun.’” Flamm, Law and Order, 146.
94. Sanders Beburo, “Stokely: Education before Destruction,” The Hilltop, November 15, 1968.
95. Leon Dash and Phil Casey, “‘Front’ Raps Gun Control as ‘Racist,’” Washington Post, August 10, 1968.
96. Adrienne Manns, “New Officers Named, Others to be Ousted,” Washington Afro-American, October 5, 1968; Lawrence Feinberg and Reed Hundt, “Montgomery Rejects Strict Gun Curbs,” Washington Post, September 7, 1968.
97. Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 (D.C. Council Act No. 1-142).
98. The only poll, conducted by Georgetown University in March 1976, asked residents whether they would support a law “prohibiting the sale of handguns.” Sixty-nine percent of the city’s residents said yes, with 82 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks expressing approval. Robert A. Hitlin, director of the Georgetown University Poll, to Gregory Mize, Committee on the Judiciary and Criminal Law, Council of the District of Columbia, March 25, 1976, in Wilson Papers, Box 27, Folder 7.
99. Firearms Legislation, Part 2, Chicago, 688.
100. Richard Ryan, “Blacks, Victims Leading Pressure for Handgun Control Legislation in Congress,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1975.
101. “Dravidian Students Develop an Outer Hardness, Inner Peace,” Ebony, June 1970, 108.
102. Firearms Legislation, Part 2, Chicago, 694.
103. Sixty-five percent of blacks said they would have to be prepared to defend their homes themselves, compared with 52 percent of whites. Only 23 percent of blacks said they could rely on the police alone, compared with 40 percent of whites. Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Gun Control,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1972): 467.
104. Fred Steeple, “Push for Strong Gun Laws Eyed Cautiously by Atlanta Solons,” Atlanta Daily World, December 6, 1974.
105. Gun Control Legislation, Bills 1-24 and 1-42 (June 7, 1975), 80.
106. Ibid., 79.
107. Ibid., 79–80.
108. According to Conyers,
[I]t is clear that we are in an arms race within our country. This fact was not quite clear to many people inside our black communities when I began hearings on this subject two years ago. There was some ambivalence among blacks about surrendering weapons to a government and a country against which they feel they might need to use those weapons in self-defense. It was very commonly stated, “Why should I give up my gun? I may need it to defend myself against the police or against the government!” I have witnessed, however, the sharp change in the black community on the question of gun control. As we began to separate fact from fiction and to understand that we were the greatest victims of gun violence, we as a people began to come around. In fact, there are not many black people in the city who do not know someone who has been injured or killed in senseless handgun violence.
John Conyers, “Crime as a Concern of Congress,” in Herrington J. Bryce, ed., Black Crime: A Police View (U.S. Department of Justice, 1977), 22.
109. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (Vintage Books, 1998), 48.
110. Gun Control Legislation, Bills 1-24 and 1-42 (June 7, 1975), 22.
111. Ibid., 26.
112. Citing the rising black death rate, Wilson argued that “the black community is not surviving by means of the vigilante system.” John A. Wilson, untitled document, Wilson Papers, Box 24, Folder 7.
113. (My emphasis.) Cobb, This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 47.
114. Which is not to say that the promised protection was always forthcoming. In subsequent chapters I will discuss how, at times, law enforcement continued to underserve black neighborhoods, especially low-income ones. But for now the point is about motive, and the promise of change. In the mid-1970s the black political class had just taken office, and black citizens were willing to give them a chance.
115. Jacqueline Bobo, “Black Women’s Films,” in Alma M. Garcia, ed., Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture (AltaMira Press, 2012), 39. Almost thirty years later, her declaration was turned into a song by the group Sweet Honey in the Rock, whose founder, Bernice Johnson Reagon, had been a SNCC worker. Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Ella’s Song,” in Breaths, Songtalk Publishing Company, 1988.
116. “2 Whites Seized in Negro Slayings,” New York Times, November 7, 1964.
117. Congress typically pushed D.C. in a punitive direction, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. But the unique politics of gun control worked in the opposite direction, as congressional opposition to gun regulation served to stop D.C.’s leaders from passing a more punitive law.
118. Firearms Legislation, Part 6, Atlanta, 1909.
119. See Gun Control: Public Hearing (June 6, 1975) (statement of Kay Campbell McGrath, Woman’s National Democratic Club) (gun control supporter endorsing mandatory minimums), 76; Gun Control Legislation, Bills 1-24 and 1-42 (June 7, 1975) (statement of Michael Parker, general counsel to NRA Institute for Legislative Action) (“[W]e are not going to make any real progress on the crime problem until we start getting tough with the criminals”), 12; and Gun Control Legislation, Bills 1-24 and 1-42 (June 7, 1975) (statement of William Saunders, principal of Eastern High School) (proposing mandatory sentences and stringent penalties for those who use guns in a crime), 74.
120. Gun Control Legislation, Bills 1-24 and 1-42 (June 7, 1975), 80–86. The Capitol View Civic Association, representing a majority-black neighborhood, agreed with Moore. While they opposed taking guns from home and store owners—who should retain the right “to use their firearms freely against criminals and burglars who intrude on their property”—they endorsed legislation “to require an automatic, immediate jail sentence everytime [sic] a person is convicted of using a gun while committing a crime.” Capitol View Civic Association, Inc. Newsletter, January 1972, Washingtoniana Collection, CA Box 11, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C.
121. Firearms Legislation, Part 3, Detroit, 877.
122. Thomas Marvell, “The Impact of Enhanced Prison Terms for Felonies Committed with Guns,” Criminology 33 (1995): 259.
123. “Black Opinion Poll Presses for Strict Gun Control,” Chicago Metro News, October 30, 1976.
124. Firearms Legislation, Part 6, Atlanta, 1906.
125. William Taaffe, “House Panel Kills Anti-Handgun Bill,” Washington Star, October 30, 1975.
126. Flamm, Law and Order, 103.
127. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 313.
128. Nancy E. Marion, A History of Federal Crime Control Initiatives, 1960–1993 (Praeger, 1994), 70.
129. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (University of Georgia Press, 1984), 401.
130. Garland, Culture of Control, 76 (discussing the politics of the late 1970s, in which “welfare policies for the poor were increasingly represented as expensive luxuries that hardworking taxpayers could no longer afford”).