Candace Owens is a young American voice on the right, a black voice all too familiar with a certain political party\u2019s history of treating her people, going all the way back to the first days of the Ku Klux Klan. She founded Blexit, the movement which encourages African-Americans and other minorities to leave what she calls the \u201cDemocrat Plantation\u201d and vote conservative. In her recent book \u201cBlackout,\u201d she recalls her grandfather\u2019s stories of the children hiding under beds when the Klan shot up their neighborhoods, and relating to her, \u201cAnd my daddy would grab the shotgun and shoot back at them boys.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her very early thirties, Ms. Owens and her generation have learned something that many generations of African-Americans learned before them: when ugly waves of racial hate-motivated terror arise in this country, the human targets of that hatred may find themselves on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his 2014 book \u201cThis Non-Violent Stuff\u2019ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible\u201d Charles E. Cobb, Jr., an African-American National Geographic<\/em> Staff writer and former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2026as William Faulkner once put it, \u2018The past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.\u2019\u2019 Cobb notes, \u201dJournalist William Worthy learned as much on his first visit to the (Dr. Martin Luther) King parsonage in Montgomery. Worthy began to sink into an armchair, almost sitting on two pistols. \u2018Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!\u2019 warned the nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin, who had accompanied Worthy to the King home. \u2018You don\u2019t want to shoot yourself.\u2019 When Rustin asked about the weapons, King responded, \u2018Just for self-defense.\u2019 They apparently were not the only weapons King kept around the house for such a purpose; Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who during the Montgomery bus boycott advised King on techniques of nonviolent protest, described his home as \u2018an arsenal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After tracing the long history of black American using guns to defend themselves against night riders and lynch mobs, Cobb said of the 1960s: \u201cAlthough new federal laws were forcing white violence underground, so too were black-owned rifles and shotguns. \u2018Nighttime marauders had learned to keep a more respectful distance from their targets because the targets were increasingly prone to shoot back,\u2019 notes Charles Payne. Night riders could not be certain that they would not get killed by the blacks they assaulted. Since the end of World War II, black veterans had been consistently proving themselves willing to repel violent attack with gunfire, which helps explain why night riders turned to drive-by shootings \u2013 not lingering on the scene \u2013 or to bombs planted beneath churches and homes in the dead of night.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pundits have noted that a surprising number of traditionally Democrat voters in the African-American community voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. One wonders if gun owners\u2019 civil rights issues might have been one reason for that\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Candace Owens is a young American voice on the right, a black voice all too familiar with a certain political party\u2019s history of treating her people, going all the way back to the first days of the Ku Klux Klan. She founded Blexit, the movement which encourages African-Americans and other minorities to leave what she calls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6567,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions\/6567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}