What My Students Taught Me: How the South Used Gun Control to Maintain White Supremacy

As part of my Campus Honors Program course (“Immigration and Race: Inequality in Labor”), students had end-of-semester presentations. I learned much from “How the South Used Gun Control to Maintain White Supremacy.”

Here are “highlights”:

Nat Turner Rebellion 1831: Virginia, Maryland made it completely illegal for Black people to own guns; Tennessee passed a constitutional amendment: “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense.”

Cooper v. Mayor of Savannah (Georgia State Supreme Court): “free persons of color have never been recognized here as citizens; they are not entitled to bear arms.”

Dred Scott case: Denial of citizenship to all blacks because “it would give them full liberty […] to keep and carry arms wherever they went (i.e., blacks would have Second Amendment rights).”

Post-Civil War: Southern states prohibited blacks from possessing weapons. Violators were jailed. Their guns were turned over to the Ku Klux Klan.

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Selected Works:

Cornell, S. (2006). The Early American Origins of the Modern Gun Control Debate: The Right to Bear Arms, Firearms Regulations, and the Lessons of History. Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev., 17, 571.

Cramer, C. E. (1994). The racist roots of gun control. Kan. JL & Pub. Pol'y, 4, 17.

Radiolab (2017, Oct. 12). The Gun Show. National Public Radio. Retrieved from: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/radiolab-presents/the-gun-show-a07VKgH1deC/#transcript

Tahmassebi, S. B. (1991). Gun control and racism. Geo. Mason UCRLJ, 2, 67.