“You have this history well before the Civil War of organized black self-defense in Northern communities,” says George Washington University Professor of Law Robert J. Cottrol, editor of Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment (1994). Guns have been essential for protecting black civil rights since the antebellum period, Cottrol tells Reason.
Following “the tremendous push” for black voter registration in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Ku Klux Klan decided to try to “intimidate and kill” those who were involved, Cottrol says, “you have [armed] groups beginning to be formed designed to protect the black community and the Civil Rights community.”
“I believe that I’m channeling my ancestors,” says Holmes.