Was a very unique approach to a very desperate situation and he was left hanging out to dry. And he was able to hold off an army that outnumbered his probably 100 to one if not 100,000 to one. For more information on both tvs visit from china to tennessee and the many other cities visited by her content vehicles, go to cspan. Org local content. Up next on booktv, after words with the former Senior Researcher of columbia university. Nicholas johnson in his book negroes and the gun the black tradition of arms. In it, the Law School Professor discusses the tradition of African Americans using firearms to defend their families and communities. A tradition that dates back to reconstruction. He argues that the nonviolence of the civil rights help to bury this fact of black history. This program is about one hour. So this strikes me as an important intervention in three ways. One of the black Freedom Movement and over the years has been increasingly revising the way that we understand the role of violence related to nonviolence. The other intervention is cultural in terms of who we see or who we think of when we think of gun owners, and also how we think about black individuals. Finally there is a Public Policy implication for the presentation of the black tradition of arms. So i look forward to really getting into those three areas with you. And before i was interested in hearing a little bit about your background and how you got into this and how did you arrive at this topic . Im happy to be here. I think your sense about the way you encounter the Current Situation is accurate. And there are two influences. I grew up in rural on culture, which was black gun culture. So everyone that i knew, the good people of the community, they own guns and so did everyone honest in that community. Really quite unapologetically. And so when i got to law school, i found out that it was a quite different impression about something that i took as being a clear right and importance of the resources and so there was this tension in the way and i was doodling with what i knew in my bones versus what i had heard in law school and the cultural response to the firearms issues that i got in the venues that i was operating under after this. And certainly the sense in the early 80s when i was there was oh, well, the Second Amendment thing, we dont really need to talk about that. And it was sort of a grave dismissal is something that was culturally quite important to me in the community that i had grown up way. That is interesting. I grew up in rural west virginia. My grandparents had a garden. They did not have a telephone. They were half an hour away from any sort of police response. And they also use guns in terms of daily life. There was how killing and keeping the tests out of the garden. And a clear recognition in the community for matters of personal security that the state was deep in the background and almost irrelevant. So in your book you say you tried to recover this tradition and put it in a long historical content. So i wanted to hear when you talk about the black tradition of arms, what exactly is this black tradition of arms . Guest it is almost a repeat of what i suggested. It is those increasing gun ownership and carrying guns and armed selfdefense as a sort of practical necessity and an important response to that period of state failure. It is a place in any sort of encounter where the state is just not able to respond. And so you find is occurring very early on. So as he set the book actually, after the introduction which focuses on the case, it talks in the chapter about the earliest iterations of this, fugitive slaves acquiring guns and fighting off sleep captures, sometimes very successfully in ways that are defining our expectations of how escapes escaped slaves were treated in a kind of assistance that they got. And what we find is that this tradition goes back as far as we can trace this experience. Okay, so i think that we are familiar with this and became the turning point coming into itself. So what i knew less about was outside of today. And well from central pennsylvania. And there are lots of things in the first chapter where you get this on pursuers and you dont hear anything more. And William Parker, at one point or another that people will contend for contest this. And hugo actually his own narrative when he learned to this and he was sheltering two or three slaves in indiana. Including the 1850 version. And those who found out that this fellow had gotten one and come to parkers homestead with two u. S. Marshals. Including those from the surrounding community gathered together with guns and cutlery and one of the slave catchers was dead. So William Parker and the fugitives are running north and i didnt actually know the details of all of this and parker says that we were sheltered at a friends house in rochester and he says that these people and he names parker explicitly, i helped them across and you couldnt write it better. And he takes out of his pocket, he called it the revolver snatched from the late hand. It looks like the ending scene of the movie. Including less detail and some of them appear in william steeles account. The founder of the sound of the underground railroad who wrote this long exposition on what is going here. Showing firing slaves come from including this original account. Host so one of the distinctions that you make is the distinction between selfdefense and Political Violence. Some wondering if you could walk us through this. And how you are defining Political Violence and why this is important. Okay. So it is important and it is my primary analytical contribution. So this book is based upon a scholarly piece that i published including what i show over and over again. Is that black people made a distinction between Political Violence in selfdefense and they saw Political Violence as folly. And by this, it articulated in different details from using different details by different people. And what they meant was trying to advance the race, trying to get arguing the right to vote or access to school. All of the things we think about when you think about group rights. The idea is that we are not going to prevail using violence on the sort of question. But selfdefense is this individual response to a threat that occurred within that window where it is impossible for the state, even if the state turns out to be not a malevolent state. Even if they take this motivated by good well. You have to recognize that its a matter of physics were the state cant respond. And on those sorts of fundamental selfdefense scenarios, there is a long increase of firearms and armed selfdefense is a private resource and that is the dichotomy that runs throughout the book. Host so is this more like a fashion that people have floated back and forth . Many of the people that you cover in the 19th century. Were the acts of violence or an aggressive act of violence or by the state itself. And so was that selfdefense and Political Violence . Or can we not see that as political . Guest your point is well taken and it allows me to sharpen the last answer. So in the first chapter i entitled it 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 or if you push it, you can say that that is really getting to the range of Political Violence. What we see rather than people talking about being on one side or the other of Political Violence versus selfdefense, what we see as the conservative and cautious members of the Community Talking about selfdefense and talking about arms. The level of strength that recognizes the possibility that you could easily have something that started off as a legitimate selfdefense force were allowed into a scenario where you think this is Political Violence and we have harmed the movement and harmed the quest for freedom by striking out in a way that will produce this Political Violence backlash. So it is attention that runs through the conversation in dc by the time we get to the end of it as im sure we will have a chance to talk about. When we get to the end of the movement and we see this habit into what i call modern orthodoxy. It draws this to the rise including the use of black radicals in some areas that we have to say and do you see this debate within the community about whether that is a legitimate act of selfdefense or not. That is very interesting. So my sense is that within this it was an easier explanation and it had maybe Legal Protection to it in ways that Political Violence did not. Thats right. It essentially revolutionary. We are going to upset this gameboard and you see it over and over again. You see roy wilkins talking about it in the 20th century and you also see them talking about it at the turn of the century and ida wells talking about in the 19th century. Thomas worked in talking about it at the end of the 19th century and lots of other people that they may have not heard of. Its frustrating in the same way that the idea that you are a 10 minority and you are not going to win a revolution or achieve your goal through violence. But that doesnt mean that you give up an elimination in need for individual selfdefense. Host one of the things that i thought was very interesting was the focus on women who participated in the tradition. And so tell us about the women who made up this tradition. Guest sure. In some sense it was not a purposeful effort is just that they were there. And theres a bit of background. Ive been working on these issues for two decades. And every six months i picked up a new book and think, well, there he is again. Fifteen years ago and thinking and there are lots of scholars out there that starts to a firmness. Ida wells is well known to lots of viewers of the show in the book and she was one of the foremost antilynching advocates in the 19th century. She was a small pine double woman. And just a firebrand. And so she goes to memphis and is a newspaper editor there and she ends up getting chased out because of some inflammatory thing that she had written about lynching. She goes to new york and then she is wellknown. So even people who arent familiar with this tradition of arms, most of them are familiar with her that they will deserve a place of honor in every black home. The winchester rifle. So sort of making this statement, for she had survived an episode of violence with the lynching of tom maas and three others. He was one of her best friends in memphis and she was also commenting on two episodes of averted lynchings one in kentucky and another in jacksonville, florida. And she was going about her efforts in making it by todays standards inflammatory statement, she was talking about what people in the community were doing in response to racist terrorists. The other thing that we know is that she has a quote that talks about how she bought a pistol and carried it in their other references advocating selfdefense and in preparing herself. And as we move through the history, over and over again. One would not think of rosa parks, people called the first lady of little rock. She shuffled them in one of my favorites is that she captures the dynamic that youre talking about with Political Violence on one end and selfdefense on the other. So in response to people who are questioning her about the abuse and she had had a horrible early life and she said you just have to love. What shes talking about is a response. And did exactly what you would think of in terms of this thing that hating just makes you weak. Then someone asked her the second question of how did you survive so many years of abuse and so forth. And without missing a beat she says i will tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom in the first one of these folks that wants to throw dynamite on my porch will write his mother again. Or something to that effect. And so it captures this over and over again. The dynamic that we are talking about. And it is one of just a few of the women. But the book, really as i said, it spills over with women who are just as it engaged in this tradition. And it seems to me that it is an illustration of what the undercurrent of the tradition is. That is that if the threat arises, its not a question over whose role it is to pick up the gun and engage in an act of selfdefense. If youre by yourself in the threat comes, you will respond in a way that is consistent with countless of whether you are a man or a woman and its an interesting reflection of this long dynamic between black men in black women because there is a degree of quality and terms of this. Host if you could tell us a little bit about stagecoach mary, that would be fascinating. Guest yes, at one point she was called blackberry as well. And she starts in tennessee and eventually she finds herself in cascade, montana. Shes 6 feet tall, she is 200 pounds, shes a dark black woman and she is in cascade and operating in the west in the latter part of the 19th century and this includes the wife like this, it is completely different from stagecoach mary. She turns out to be an iconic local hero and thats not to say that she didnt face instances where she picked up a gun in selfdefense. They were working at a place where she was in charge and they said we dont have to take orders from a slave and she is diplomatic of person that did the work and then he comes and sucker punches her. And she does herself off and said go get your gun and meet me behind the barn. And the men are hooting and hollering and they are all aghast and she gives him the first move and she kills him. And that is the beginning of the legend of black mary. Theres a very nice book on this and there actually was a snippet of film trying to depict her back in the 1970s and it goes on and she has other sorts of episodes. She becomes famous as the stagecoach but untrained driver for wells fargo. And while she has these altercations she is not lynched. It is not an episode of violence. Where they lose the award and they end up in some episode. She becomes a hero that even gary cooper had the famous quip elevating her as one of his childhood heroes in the early 20th century and ultimately they got together and build her new house. And its another episode showing that you cannot read a stereotype that some of them are having at a different time. So this is a surprise and it defies many of the expectations that people have about how to survive during these various periods. Host during the 19th century we have talked about the distinction between selfdefense and political balance that could really get blurred. The distinction becomes clear and so im thinking of tulsa, rosewood. Can you talk about how those illustrated the distinctions between the two . Sure. You are right to see this and i have talked exclusively in the book about the period preslavery. Lots of advocacy from many of them and others who are the vanguard of the early Freedom Movement and they were unapologetic about the idea that slavery was a state of war. So at that time there were lots of statements saying that we just have to fight and theres no reason to be reticent about Political Violence because we dont have any Political Rights and we are not really operating from the system. After the civil war and certainly during the period of reconstruction were there a sense that we have this kind of promising political opportunity, we start to see people backing off a bit in terms of the rhetoric of Political Violence that still all of these individual selfdefense and by 1876 when reconstruction and then we have another bump in the transformation and now we are at a point where the concept becomes much more important because people have lost their Political Rights with some sense of what they have and its all that they will get. And its a bleaker time and so you start to see just as a residual matter, the loss to selfdefense rather than Political Violence and you move into the 20th century and there is a sort of concern that for things to get better we have to proceed in a fashion that will evoke the tools of the democratic process and may be the american population. And so in a variety of ways you have instances that could move into the range of Political Violence and the surrounding redick are those who are sort of shaping the story with surrounding rhetoric who commented on the tulsa riots and he cast it as a selfdefense rather than as Political Violence. So you see the same thing in the crisis magazine about the episode and rosewood and lots of other lynchings and some of this comes from the boys who is the preeminent intellectual group. So he talks about a variety of episodes and du bois actually urges them for selfdefense, people that were facing us and there are a couple of interesting things that we had whether he talks about the necessity of selfdefense and then he goes on and says that we should not and cannot seek to achieve reform by violence. So hes very cognizant that 10 of the population is not going to get their political agenda executed in a serious way through violence. But he is also urging people to take a gun in selfdefense and it is sometimes surprising. In the early versions of the book people would say du bois . And then i had to explain how he picked up a shotgun at the beginning of the implant of riots and its been quite an inflammatory statement with his willing willingness to defend his family in this way postmarks or you have been a part of this long tradition of arms in selfdefense. One of the reasons that people are aware of it is certainly what happened within the Civil Rights Movement and the push towards not being in civil disobedience. And so can you talk a little bit about what happens to this tradition of arms during the height of what we would consider desegregation in the south . Guest this is a time and the book addresses this in two ways, the first chapter actually talks about a part of this that is c