by Dan Gifford
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- In 1963, I saw Malcolm X speak in Harlem. Any who recall those times can appreciate how scary a figure he was claimed to be by our government and the news media.
Much later, I played a prison guard in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X film.
Through those and other experiences, I can attest that the real message of Malcolm X has been grossly misrepresented by people who want to destroy the Second Amendment by keeping racial animosity alive.
Considering the racial strife Black Lives Matter, Al Sharpton and George Soros, among others, keep fresh, I thought it may be instructive for all to revisit this article of mine that ran in a number of black audience publications during the early 90s.
The Heller Decision was roughly two decades away and though the Clintons were in the White House then, Obama has continued the same rights stripping politic of dependency which the distaff Clinton will recommence if she captures the presidency.
The Essential Malcolm X
Malcolm X has a message for the Clinton administration concerning two sacred Democratic Party cows it will soon be milking. Speaking to a new generation through Spike Lee’s excellent motion picture, he first transcends early anger and division to tell us how interracial harmony blooms when the dependent slavery of the welfare check is rejected and the backbone of self-reliance and self-respect is embraced.
That self-reliance and respect also includes a second message about self preservation. Listen closely and Malcolm will tell you a truth long silenced by those selling the bondage of paternal government: the history of gun control is the history of racial and class suppression.
Malcolm speaks openly about the inherent right of Americans to arm for their protection and about the need for blacks to form rifle clubs to exercise that right effectively. By joining the NRA, their clubs could receive military surplus arms to fight Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement agency violence, intimidation and murder – an important but no longer spoken of tactic that kept many civil rights workers and leaders alive.
Justifiable defense? Not then. It was a danger to the public’s safety and the existing order. All expected responses given gun control’s origins.
Slaves could be whipped or hanged for even touching a firearm. In a society where the Founding Fathers wisely empowered an armed citizenry as the ultimate barrier to government tyranny and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney told Dred Scott that one of the unquestioned “privileges and immunities” of American citizenship denied him as a slave was the right to own firearms and carry them wherever he went, white rulers understood all too well that freedom, like that recently gained from the British, grew out of the barrel of a gun.
After the Union Army’s guns broke the chains of slavery, Southern states maintained defacto enslavement by passing special laws to keep blacks from owning or carrying guns. The ensuing Klan intimidations and murders of unarmed blacks so enraged Congress that Mississippi wasn’t going to be readmitted to the union until it respected its black citizens Second Amendment rights – the specific issue prompting the Freedman’s Bureau Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the first portion of the 14th Amendment.
All three measures applied the entire Bill of Rights as limits on the powers of state governments. The 14th even echoed Justice Taney’s words. But racist court decisions thwarted Congress’ intent. In that vacuum, state laws could contradict the Bill of Rights until told otherwise by the courts (an incomplete process that to date has left the states immune from portions of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments and the Second, Third and Seventh Amendments entirely).
New gun control laws made no reference to race. But their passage and enforcement was specifically intended to keep blacks disarmed and helpless.
Later, states and towns outside the South followed suit but widened the target. New York City’s 1911 Sullivan Law was specifically passed to keep handguns away from Jews, Italians and “coloreds”. But the moneyed and politically connected prompting those statutes and their hired goons could always get permits to carry the guns that intimidated and killed troublesome blacks, immigrants and union agitators.
By Malcolm’s time, gun laws had become institutionalized to the point that few knew or even thought about their origins or the fact that they were constitutionally illegal. That’s still true.
Keep that in mind when the Clinton administration starts claiming the curtailment (and eventual loss) of a constitutional right is needed for a safer society. Safer how? Is there any real danger difference between a right protecting lethal hardware and other rights protecting lethal people (who’ll always be armed) from jail? Police officials like Chicago’s Leroy Martin advocate cutting those liberties too.
When that happens, nobody’s safe. Not the American people who’ll have had their ultimate check on abusive government power gutted. And certainly not blacks, Jews, gays, native Americans and others whom the system cannot, and in many cases will not, protect from the criminals in and out of uniform that prey on them. Rodney King (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Rodney_King) would certainly agree, as would Malice Wayne Green (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malice_Green) were he still alive.
Safer societies are had by living Malcolm’s first message. They’re ultimately protected by his second. So spread the word, pull the coats and give the politicians and others wanting to restrict and eventually take away the means to resist a message from Malcolm on behalf of the owners of the country. You’ll stand on your own and keep all your rights by all means necessary!
Dan Gifford is an Emmy winning, Oscar nominated film producer and former reporter for CNN, The MacNeil/Lehrer News, and The Village Voice. For more information visit patch.com/users/dan-gifford
Brother Malcolm was the best role model Black Americans ever had and they killed him.
Yes, Jan, and the they that killed Malcolm X were the ever so peaceful Nation of Islam, black Muslims.
I’m conservative and Malcolm X is one of my heroes. Only in America can a person of such low estate through sheer will and smarts rise as he did. Plus I am always impressed that he investigated challenges to his accepted truths as they arose. His message is one we could use today.
Very good article that brings up some important points in history, but was inexplicably sullied in the penultimate paragraph by comparing Rodney King and Malice Green to Black victims of violence. Both of them were career criminal felons who refused to submit to legal apprehension. That is not oppression, that is simple criminality. The officers involved in the Rodney King case were acquitted by a state trial before they were convicted by a hyper-sensitized federal court system. The officers involved in Malice Green’s incident were convicted by nearly all black Detroit juries, both officers appealed their convictions. “Black Man with… Read more »
it was not the North’s guns ended slavery in the South. No, slavery was already dying, and anyone in the South was well aware of it. Lincoln’s illegal invasion of the sovereign nation of the Confederate States threw the whole of the Americas into bitter and costly war for years. The South had seceded in protest of unfair and illegal economic pressure brought about by the North’s tariffs… illegal. When the conflict was ended and the slaves freed, by government diktat, overnight, hundreds of thousands of people who one day had work, homes, families, clothes, food, were turned out of… Read more »
40,000 too 50,000 white women are raped every year by black men. Does Malcolm X or Spike Lee have anything to say about that? Do you know how many black women are raped by white men every year? The number is so low it won’t show up on a graph. Black people are 27 times more likely to commit white collar crime. If they are white collar workers then they aren’t poor are they!! Oj Simpson, Bill Cosby, Coby Bryant, Ray Lewis, none of these were poor were they! Its time to realize that after 200 years of trying to… Read more »
How many white women are raped by white men? And what damned difference does the color of a rapist matter? Rape is no more nor any less horrific because of skin color.
Your entire post is a hateful strawman, and damages the cause of defending the 2nd Amendment. Back under your bridge, troll.
In a hurry to establish your liberal credentials, Laird? If you had read some of Michael’s other posts, you would know that he is a thoughtful commenters. He is just pushing back against the liberal propaganda machine whose scenario is all black people are victims of all white people.
Color doesn’t matter, now can you, Laird, convince Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, New Black Panther Party, the many legions of vultures that profit by race bating, and the Black Congressional Congress that they should drop the race hustle? Until then, no, we will not be silenced.
It should be commenter, not commenters. Damn spell check!
What difference does it make? It matters when it is part of a pattern of hatred and undeclared war against white people. I suspect if it was the other way around you wouldn’t so easily dismiss it. Rape has always been a component of warfare, and the ridiculously lopsided statistics are proof that black people consider themselves at war with white people, while white people foolishly consider themselves at peace with blacks. While I applaud the message of self-reliance, don’t be too quick to embrace the Nation of Islam’s Malcom X; as we see in world events, infidels cannot expect… Read more »
Racism,….. Hmmm,… The thing about being racist is that it’s a normal part of Human nature. It would be great if folks who hate some different race, religion, or national origin actually understood why they have those feelings. Yep, I’m saying that feeling hatred toward those who are different is actually the norm. All of this “everyone should like, tolerate, and get along with everyone else”, is BULL, it’s against human nature. Racism is just another word for xenophobia. It’s about the deep seated drive to pass on the countless generations of genetics you’re carrying around to the next generation,… Read more »
Please look up the definition of racism, you would realize black people don’t have the institutional power to do a damn thing to white folks. We may be prejudice but not racist, there is a difference. Mike you must be drinking too much moonshine, 40-50K white woman raped by black men, stop your foolishness. The reality, despite your false narrative, most people are harmed by people they know of their own race, so please get over yourselves. Finally black people will gladly more back to Africa, when you go back to whichever European country you came from! These comments are… Read more »
“We may be prejudice but not racist,…” Whom, exactly, are the “We” Mr. Rifle?
Well written.
Check out the book, Negroes and the Gun by N. Johnson. A good read and a great history lesson.
I always chuckle when ignorant, gun grabbing liberals talk about “Saturday Night Specials.” The original term was the very racist “Ni##er Town Saturday Night Special.” After all, the Democratic party was the party of the racist south. Not the Republicans as liberals claim.
That is the biggest hypocricy the lib dems have been able to bury every since the beginning of the Spanish American war. The dems have been able to appeal to the less informed citizens by virtue of spinning lies that they were the party of the socio-economic underprivileged. However, even without a truly non-partisan media elite, more less fortunate, lower income voters, as well as more minorities than ever, have come to realize that the dems have been using them for their votes, and then passing laws that further impede their ability to work their way up the socio-economic ladder.… Read more »