Do African Americans have Second Amendment rights? That’s the question Emory University professor Carol Anderson set out to answer in her new book, “The Second,” which looks at the constitutional right to bear arms and its uneven application throughout U.S. history. She says she was prompted to write the book after the 2016 police killing of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop after he told the officer he had a legal firearm. Anderson says the Second Amendment was always intended to be a means of arming white people to control the Black population. “There was this massive fear about these slave revolts, Black people demanding their freedom, being willing to have an uprising to gain their freedom,” says Anderson. “What I saw was that it wasn’t about guns. It was about the fear of Black people.”
This emerged out of the fear of Black people, from slavery, that there was this massive fear about the slave revolt, Black people demanding their freedom, being willing to have an uprising to gain their freedom. And what that meant then was that you had this language of “We’ve got to keep this ferocious monster in chains.” And you saw, with each revolt, with each uprising, a series of statutes being put in place to say that African — that the enslaved, that Black people could not own weapons, that they could not have access to weapons. And you also saw the rise in the structure of slave patrols and militias, that were there and designed to contain that Black population.
As the nation began to develop, as you had this war of independence, there was this fear of arming Black people, the fear that even freed Blacks who were armed would get — would provide a kind of sense of what freedom looked like to the enslaved. But the exigencies of war required that arming, required having Black folks in the Continental Army. But as the nation developed after that war, one of the things that you had happening was with the Constitution, with the drafting of the Constitution. Because the militias themselves had proven so untrustworthy, unreliable as a force to fight against the British invasion, that James
— source democracynow.org | Jun 03, 2021