Armed for Freedom

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman. Each week, my co-host and I, all historians, explore a topic that’s been in the news. And today, our topic is going to be the history of protests. We’re going to begin 3 in Sacramento, California 50 years ago. The exact date actually is May, 2nd 1967.

BRIAN: That morning, 30 black men and women walked up the steps of the statehouse, carrying loaded guns. Those men and women were members of the Black Panther Party, and they were protesting a gun control bill under consideration by the state legislature.

NATHAN: And they walked right in the front door, there was no security that they had to pass, and walked right into the legislative chamber while it was in session with their loaded guns.

PETER: This is Adam Winkler, a professor of Constitutional Law at UCLA.

ADAM WINKLER: The Panthers weren’t there to commit violence or to take hostages, they were there as part of a political protest and they wanted to make it clear that they had a second amendment right to bear arms, and that they needed that right.

BRIAN: After the Panthers were turned away from the assembly chamber where the bill was being debated, they gathered on the lawn outside. One of the group’s leaders, Bobby Seale, read a prepared statement, warning black people to quote, “arm themselves before it’s too late.”

ADAM WINKLER: The Panthers were making a novel and that someone argued timely– argument– that the Panthers had the right to bear arms as a basic civil right, that it was as essential as the right to vote, the right to own property. And they believe that in order to protect their constitutional rights, they had to be able to, frankly, police the police.

BRIAN: In Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton began a practice of policing the police, where they’d send out armed police patrols to follow police cars as they patrolled. And when the police officers would pull over an African-American, the Panthers would stand– they’d pull over too. And they’d stand off to the side with their guns pointed straight up in the air or straight down at the ground, which under California law was lawful at the time, considered a non-threatening possession of the firearms– and they would shout out advice to the person being hassled, and also, just sort of keep a careful eye. A police officer was a lot less likely to beat up an African-American when he’s surrounded by other African-Americans who have loaded guns on them.

And this, as you can imagine, the Black Panthers policy of policing the police didn’t make the Oakland police very happy. And so they pushed one of their allies in the California state legislature, a guy named Don Mulford, to push for new gun control laws. Laws that would take guns out of the hands of the Black Panthers.

BRIAN: Which brings us back to that 1967 protest at the California’s statehouse. It was that gun control bill, Don Mulford’s bill, that was under consideration when Bobby Seale and his companions carried their guns into the state capitol. When that bill passed, it banned the public carrying of loaded firearms. The Panthers policing the police was outlawed.

ADAM WINKLEY: The very next year, President Lyndon Johnson signed a National Gun Control Act that outlawed the sale of guns by mail, it prohibited felons and people the mentally unstable from buying guns. And it was argued that the act was part of a number of different pieces of legislation brought on by the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

BRIAN: But, you know, the law sparked a lot of pushback. The gun lobby argued that it deprive law abiding citizens access to guns for self-defense. And before long, middle class whites began claiming that gun ownership was a constitutional right. It helped propel the modern gun rights movement, in fact. Today, the backbone of that movement is mostly white and conservative, a far cry from the Black Panthers.

JOANNE: That’s the funny thing about protest, it can start small and local, and then move through American society in all kinds of unexpected ways.

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ADAM WINKLEY: We’ve actually seen an Americans stage all kinds of protests just in the past several years, I mean, just think about it, we’ve had the Occupy Wall Street Movement, The Tea Party movement, protests against the Iraq war. And yet, all of this seems to pale in comparison with what we’re seeing just in the last few months. Right? I mean, we’ve seen record numbers of Americans protesting Trump in the Women’s March, we’ve seen the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, we’ve seen town hall meetings across America. I mean, this has been an amazing groundswell of activism.

BRIAN: So, today, on the show, we’ll be visiting some memorable moments from BackStory segements on protests. We’ll explore the media’s role in the 1963 March on Washington. And we’re also going to look at more unusual uprisings in American history, a protest by the wives of Confederate soldiers.