Conversation is accurate. My background in this is, there are two influences, i suppose. So i grew up in rural gun culture which was black gun culture. So everyone that i knew, all of the, you know, the good people of the community, my grandfather and father were both ministers, both owned guns and so did everybody else in the community really unapologetically. And when i got to law school, i found that there was a quite different impression about something that i took as being sort of one of the clear, fundamental rights and importance of practical resources even before i could articulate something about fundamental rights. So there was this tension that operated in the way that i was sort of dealing with what i knew in my bones versus what i heard in law school and then the kind of cultural response to firearms issues that i got in lots of the venues that i was operating in after law school. So certainly at harvard the sense in the early 80s when i was there was, oh, well, that Second Amendment thing, we dont really need to talk about that, and it was sort of a glib dismissal of something that culturally was quite important to me in the community i had grown up in. Host thats interesting. Where did you grow up . Guest i grew up in rural west virginia. So my grandparents had a garden. They didnt have a telephone. I remember at 7 years old they still did not have a telephone. They were half an hour away from any sort of police response, and they also needed and used guns in terms of sort of daily life. So, you know, there was hog killing, there was keeping the pests out of the garden. But there were also sort of a clear recognition, i think, in the community that on matters of personal security the government, the state was really sort of deep in the background and almost irrelevant. Host so in your book you really, i feel, try to recover this tradition and put it this a long historical context. So lets i wanted to hear, you know, when you talk about the black tradition of arms, what exactly is the black tradition of arms . Guest sure. So it is almost a repeat of what i suggested. It is, it is Church People and strivers and merchants embracing gun ownership, gun use, carrying guns, armed selfdefense as a sort of practical necessity and as an important response to that period of state failure; that is, that place in any sort of violent encounter where the state just is not able to respond. And you find this occurring very early on. So as you said, the book actually after the introduction which focuses on the Robert Williams case that maybe we can talk about in a bit, the book talks in the chapter titled foundations about the earliest iterations of this. That is, fugitive slaves stealing guns, acquiring guns and fighting off slave catchers, sometimes very successfully in ways that just defy our sort of Walking Around expectations about how escaped slaves were faring and the kind of assistance that they got. But what we find be really is that this tradition dose back as far as goes back as far as we can trace the black american experience. Host yeah. So you started with Frederick Douglass, right . And i think for many people who have read the narrative, i think were familiar with this fight he had with his former master that became the turning point in his kind of coming to sense of self. Guest right. Host what i didnt know about or what i knew less about was some of the other examples that you gave, and i thought one in particular was the case, i dont know if you can talk about William Parker . Guest so the christian that resistance in central, lower central pennsylvania was prompted by a fellow named William Parker who was a conductor on the underground railroad. And there are lots of instances in the first chapter where you get sort of snippets, something a newspaper report, slaves fire on pursuers, and then you dont hear anything more about it. The thing that is interesting about the parker case is that William Parker who as a slave was illiterate at one point or another and people contest this at some point along the way learned how to read and write and wrote, actually, his own narrative recounting the christiana resistance. He was sheltering two or three slaves at his home in christiana. Their slave master obtained a warrant in philadelphia under the new version of the fugitive slave law, the 1850 version. There were black spies right there at the doorstep host wow. Guest who found out that this fellow had gotten the warrant, was coming to parkers homestead with two u. S. Marshals. The word got there ahead of the slave catchers and ahead of the marshals, and black folk from the surrounding community gathered together with guns and cutlery, and by the end of it the marshals, one of the slave catchers was dead, several others were wounded. Then William Parker and the two fugitives end up running north. On parkers telling, and it was just wonderful because i didnt actually know the details of all of this until i got deeply into the book. On parkers telling of this, he says we were sheltered at a friends house in rochester, and then you read into Frederick Douglass narrative, and he talks about how these people from christiana, and then he names parker exlicitly, they came, sheltered at my house, i helped them across. And the ending scene, you couldnt write it better, the ending scene is douglass and parker on the ferry and as hes about to get off and go into canada, parker takes out of his pocket he calls it the revolver snatched from the ted hand of the slaver the dead hand of the slave. [laughter] so its like the ending scene of a movie. But there are countless examples like this with less detail. And some of them appear actually in William Stills account, William Still who some call the founder of the underground railroad, who wrote this long, 800page exposition on fugitive slaves who were coming through philadelphia. Three of the images in the book showing fugitive slaves firing guns against slave catchers come from William Stills images in the original account. Host so one of the distinctions that you make early on in talking about the black tradition of arms is the distinction between selfdefense and Political Violence. I wonder if you could walk us through guest sure. Host why this distinction was what first of all, what selfdefense is, how youre defining selfdefense and how youre defining Political Violence and why the distinction is important. Guest sure okay, so it is important, and its my primary analytical contribution in the work. And so this book is based on a more scholarly piece than i published in the connecticut law review in 2012. And what i found and what i argue is or what i show over and over again is that black people made a distinction between Political Violence and selfdefense, and they saw Political Violence as folly. Political violence as a risk. And by Political Violence, articulated in different details from using different details by different people. What they meant by Political Violence is trying to advance the race, trying to get Political Rights, arguing about the right to vote, arguing about, you know, access to schools. All of the things that we think about when we think about group rights. The idea was that were not going to prevail using violence on those sorts of questions. On the other hand, selfdefense is this individual response to a threat that occurs within that window of imminence; that is the place where it is impossible for the state even if the state turns out to be not a ma lev leapt state, even if state turns out to be motivated by goodwill. You still have to recognize theres a place just as a matter of physics where the state cant respond. And on those sorts of fundamental selfdefense scenarios that are baseline fundamental, theres this long embrace of the importance of firearms and armed selfdefense as a private resource for black folk. And thats the dichotomy that runs really throughout the book. Host so is this, is this more like a spectrum that people have kind of floated back and forth . Because im thinking of the case of William Parker or Frederick Douglass or many of the people that you cover in especially the 19th century. Guest right, right. Host where the acts of violence were aggressive acts of violence by whites or by the state itself, right . Or a collusion of the two. Guest sure, sure. Host and so was that selfdefense and Political Violence, or is there a way that we cant see that as not political, right . Those acts of selfdefense . Guest and your point is well taken, and it allows me to sharpen the last answer. So the first chapter i actually title boundary land, and what im trying to evoke is this notion that there is this area of contested or contestable scenarios where there are people engaged in violent acts of either selfdefense be or if you push be it, if you think about it and talk about it a different way, you could say, you know, thats really getting to the range of Political Violence. And what we see rather than people over time talking about being on one side of the line or the other, Political Violence versus selfdefense host right. Guest what you see is the more conservative and cautious members of the Community Talking about selfdefense and talking about arms with a level of restraint that recognizes the possibility that you could very easily have something that started out as an act of legitimate selfdefense leak into or filter into or swirl out into a scenario where now youre thinking this is Political Violence. Now weve harmed the movement, weve harmed the quest for freedom by striking out in a way thats going to produce this sort of political, violent political backlash. So thats its a tension that runs through the conversation, and you see by the time we get to the end of it as im sure well have a chance to talk about, when we get to the end of the movement, we see this transition, this pivot into what i call the modern orthodoxy. One of the impulses that drive cans the modern orthodoxy, the rise of it, is the use of selfdefense themes by, quote, black radicals in scenarios that we have to say really are Political Violence. And you see this debate and dissension within the community about whether thats a legitimate act of selfdefense be or not. Host okay. So thats very interesting. So my sense is that you are arguing or suggesting that within the tradition there was a feeling that selfdefense was an easier explanation or it had a moral weight to it, it had maybe Legal Protection to it in ways that Political Violence did not. Is that guest i think thats right. Political violence is essentially revolution. Host right. Guest Political Violence is were going to upset the game board, and you see over and over and over again, you know, roy wilkens talking about it in the 20th century, but you also see w. E. B. Dubois talking about it at the turn of the century, ida wells talking about it in the 19th century, t. Thomas fortune talking about it at the end of the 19th century and lots of other people that folk probably maybe have not heard of expressing in the same way this idea that if youre a 10 minority, you are not going to win a revolution, and youre not going to achieve your goals of inclusion through violence. But that doesnt mean that you give up the right or that theres an elimination of the need for these instances of individual selfdefense. Host so you mentioned ida b. Wells, and one of the things i thought was really interesting and great about your book is that you focused on women, right . There were women who participated in this tradition, right . Guest spilling over to. Host yeah. So tell us a little bit about some of the women who made up this tradition of arms. Guest sure. So in some sense it was not any sort of purposeful effort. Its just they were there. And just a bit of background, its been, ive been working on these issues for two decades, and every six months i pick up a new book and think, well, there he is again with, theres this, theres this thing that, you know, years ago, 15 years ago im thinking this black tradition of arms. And as you said, theres lots of scholarship out there that starts to sort of affirm these things. Well, ida b. Wells is, or hopefully, is well known to lots of viewers of this show and hopefully readers of the book. She was one of the foremost antilynch offing advocates lynching advocates in the 19th century. Shes this pint of a woman, you know, just this very small, little, demure woman but just a firebrand. And so she goes to memphis, shes a newspaper editor there, then she ends up getting chased out of memphis because of some inflammatory things that she had written about lynching there. Goes to new york where she partners with t. Thomas fortune working for the new york age, and she is well known. So even people who arent familiar with what i call the black tradition of arms, most people who are familiar with wells are familiar with her quip that the winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every black home. Well, she was, she was not just off the cuff on sort of making these statements. The context was so, first, she had survived an episode of violence which included a lynching of tom moss and three others in hem mys. Moss was memphis. Moss was one of her best friends in memphis. She also, though, was commenting on two episodes of averted lynchings, one in paducah, kentucky, another in jacksonville, florida. And she was, as she was going about her journalistic efforts and making these sort of by todays standards inflammatory statements, i guess, about firearms, etc. , she was talking about what people in the community were doing in response to racist terrorism. And the other thing that we know is shes got a quote in one of her several books that talks about how right after the tom moss lynching she went out and bought a pistol and that she carried it. There are other reference, you know, these continuing references to wells advocating armed selfdefense and preparing herself for armed selfdefense. We dont have an actual instance of wells firing a gun, but as we move through the history, over and over and over again. So people that one would not think of rosa parks, daisy bates who shepherded the little rock nine through the process of integrating the high school, seem that youve never heard of, Fannie Lou Hamer. One of my favorite parts of or quotes from Fannie Lou Hamer captures the dynamic that youre talking about, that is, the Political Violence on one hand and selfdefense on the other. So Fannie Lou Hamer in response to people who were questioning her about beatings and abuse and, you know, she just had a horrible early life. She says, baby, you just gotta love em. And what shes talking about is sort of a scriptural response to her enemies. And its exactly what you would think of in terms of the nonviolent movement. She goes on to say hating just makes you weak and sick. And then someone asks her the second question. That is, well, how did you survive so many years of abuse and so forth . And in the finish without missing a beat she says, ill the tell you why i keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first one of these folks who wants to throw some dynamite on my porch wont write his mama again. [laughter] and it captures in a way you see occurring over and over again the dynamic were talking about. And Fannie Lou Hamer is one, ive mentioned just a few of the women, but the book really, as i said, just spills over with women who are just as engaged in this tradition as the men. And it seems to me that really it is an illustration of the pragmatism that undergirds the tradition. That is, if the threat arises, its not a question of waiting or more your husband or whose role is it is to pick up the gun and engage in an act of selfdefense. If you are by yourself and the threat comes, then youre going to respond in a way that is consistent with what principle would dictate regardless of whether its, you know, youre a man or woman. And its an interesting reflection of sort of in this long dynamic between black men and black women particularly in the south, that theres a degree of equality here in terms of the way host yeah. I thought the story of stagecoach mary was fascinating. If you can tell us a little bit about mary fields. Guest sure. So also called stagecoach mary, at one point or another called black mary. So she starts out this tennessee, moves to ohio. Eventually she finds herself in cascade, montana. So shes six feet tall, shes 200 pounds. Shes a dark black woman, and your instinct and shes in cascade and operating in the west in the latter part of the 19th century. So your instinct about the life that someone like that would have in that context is completely different from the reality of stagecoach mary. She turns out to be just this iconic local hero. Thats not to say that she didnt face instances where she had to pick up a gun in selfdefense. She actually had a duel with a white man who they were working at a place where she was in charge, and the fellow says, well, i dont think i should have to take orders from a nigger slave. And shes diplomatic at first, and that didnt work. And then as they, the conflict escalates, he comes in close and sucker punches her, knocks her to the ground. Host wow. Guest she gets up, dusts herself off, says go get your gun and meet me behind the barn. [laughter] so the hen are hooting the men are hooting, and the nuns at the mission where she was working were all aghast. They go behind the barn, she gives him the first move, and she shoots him. She kills this man. And thats the beginning of her, of the legend of mary fields, black mary. Theres, you know, a very nice book on this x there actually was at least a snippet of film covering or trying to depict mary fiel