Nervous Nellie Negroes tend to forget that the first thing Robert Franklin Williams did when he rejuvenated an NAACP chapter in Monroe, N.C., during the 1950s was to apply for an NRA charter. He got one.
After organizing Monroe blacks into routing KKK hoodlums that tried to shoot up Monroe’s black community in 1957, Williams had to appear in court several times. At one point, he told the judge he was a “card-carrying member” of the NRA.
Williams’ advocating that blacks arm themselves for self-defense caused skittishness among white liberals and the NNN’s of his day. Those NNN’s and white liberals were only too content to leave Monroe’s blacks to the tender mercies of the KKK.
The organization that did have the backs of Monroe’s blacks was the NRA.
Like Williams, Araminta Harriet Ross was not afraid to carry. Today’s NNN’s want to forget that. Several years ago, the Associated Black Charities group in Baltimore commissioned an artist to paint a mural on their building.
The mural depicted Ross carrying a rifle, which caused some consternation with the ABC’s NNN contingent.
“It might send the wrong message,” one of them lamented to me.
“What message might that be?” I answered. “That historical accuracy is something to be avoided?
Here was a sister that had to take slaves – sometimes as many as a dozen at a time – north through hostile territory where slave patrols roamed all the time. And today’s NNN’s expected her to do that UNARMED?
And slave patrols weren’t the only reason Ross carried. She used that handgun to persuade slaves who’d lost their nerve and wanted to turn back south to continue pressing north.
In her book Clinton told of one incident where a man escaping with Ross refused to move north with the others. He changed his mind after Ross put her pistol to his head and ordered him to “Move or die!”
I wonder what Araminta Harriet Ross would have to say about today’s crop of frightened NNN’s.
Are Guns Necessary? Araminta Harriet Ross Would Say ‘Yes’ and So Should You was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
