MORE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING’S GUNS:

There’s nothing unusual about this. Many civil rights activists—including those who publicly engaged in non-violent forms of resistance—kept guns for self-defense. T.R.M. Howard, the Mississippi doctor and mutual aid leader who founded the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership, slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. During the murder trial that followed the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Howard escorted Till’s grieving mother and various others to and from the courthouse in a heavily-armed caravan.

Similarly, John R. Salter, one of the organizers of the famous 1963 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, said he always “traveled armed” while working as a civil rights organizer in the South. “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” Salter said.

Around ten years ago, maybe a bit longer, my law school had a program where ex-Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (with whom I went to law school) came to speak. It was heavily attended by Knoxville civil-rights veterans, and I think some of my colleagues were surprised when an elderly black preacher launched into a defense of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. I wasn’t, though.