2nd Amendment Anti-Black Police Violence Left Forum

By Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio

25 May 16

o the Left Forum, 2016:

Friends, Sisters, Brothers, Comrades, as you meet today on the issue of the 2nd Amendment, self defense, and the left, I am in contemplation over an editorial cartoon from that old journal Harper's Weekly of October 28th, 1876, by A. B. Frost. No, I don't have a library that extensive, nor a computer. It was reprinted in the San Francisco Bay View, and the cartoon wasn't so much clever as it was revelatory, for it could have been drawn today. It showed a tall, ranging, bearded figure holding a smoking pistol in his right hand and a bayonet in his left. Beneath him is the fallen figure of an emaciated black boy, clad in rags - clearly dead. This cartoon bears a legend in bold print. It reads: "Self Defense." The bearded white man, identified as "Southern Chivalry," states: 'If I hadn't-a killed ya, you would'a growed up to rule me.' Think about that.

That was the voice of self defense in America during the Age of Reconstruction. Actually, it was a voice of self defense in white America. Blacks had a decidedly different voice, and what it said is that self defense is a human right, practiced throughout history, and shown by groups as divergent as the Deacons for Defense, headquartered in Louisiana but active throughout the South, to the first year of the Black Panther Party, born in Oakland as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. It was party co-founder Huey P. Newton, who in his 1967 essay "In Defense of Self Defense" called for the arming of black people to defend themselves from the repression of the state. "Men," Huey explained "were not created to obey laws. Laws were created to obey men."

Every law created throughout American history was designed to disarm black people while arming whites. That tension lies at the heart of any discussion of the 2nd amendment, which ostensibly protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. One wonders, what people? Even today we see that such a constitutional guarantee doesn't extend to black people. Today! Remember Tamir Rice, that beautiful little boy in Cleveland, killed by cops for possessing a toy gun? An armed black person is a target, an armed white person, a normality. That my friends is our reality. Yesterday, 1876, 1966, 2006 and 2015. The right to arms is as speculative as the right to self-defense. I thank you all. From in Prison Nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.