National

No Bullets, No Books

Published

11 years ago

July 22, 2015

For more than a century, descendants of enslaved Africans could be punished or put to death for learning to read or arming themselves. The strategy: Keep Black America ‘dumb’ and defenseless.

By Karsceal Turner
Special to the NNPA from The Florida Courier

From the beginning, America’s founders and their descendants in formal and informal leadership have been willing to go to great lengths to keep Africans – kidnapped from their ancestral homes and transported to North America – from gaining the means to defend themselves from their oppressors.

The strategy: keep Blacks dumb and defenseless. From the Pilgrims’ arrival until the present day, the descendants of those Africans have been denied the same liberty “to bear arms” as their White oppressors.

Unarmed since day one

From that fateful day in 1619, when the first African set foot in the North American colony of Jamestown, Va., to help produce tobacco and cotton, there has been a concentrated effort to keep Blacks unarmed and helpless.

And that effort took two avenues: (1) through racist laws that punished Black people found in possession of guns – laws that eventually morphed into current-day gun control efforts; (2) through efforts to convince Black Americans to disarm themselves, especially by historical corruption of the ‘non-violent’ civil rights movement.

Shoot to kill

Clayton E. Cramer, a history professor at the College of Western Idaho and the author of numerous books on gun ownership in America, writes, “Racist arms laws predate the establishment of the United States. Starting in 1751, the French Black Code required Louisiana colonists to stop any Blacks, and if necessary, beat ‘any Black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane.’ If a Black refused to stop on demand, and was on horseback, the colonist was authorized to shoot to kill.”

According to Cramer, “the historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws, and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of American history, gun control was openly stated as a method for keeping Blacks… ‘in their place’ and to quiet the racial fears of Whites.”

Although the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” it was not written with non-Whites in mind.

Different reasons

In the early years of America, the North and the South had their own respective justifications for keeping Blacks disarmed.

In both the colonial and immediate post-Revolutionary periods, the first laws regulating gun ownership were aimed squarely at Blacks and Native Americans. In both the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies, it was illegal for the colonists to sell guns to natives, while Virginia and Tennessee banned gun ownership by free Blacks.

The central importance of slavery to the South’s economy made it clear to White Southerners that allowing enslaved Africans to arm themselves was a non-starter.

The Northern states of the new republic remained in fear of armed Blacks, whether ‘free’ Blacks living “up North” or enslaved Blacks toiling “down South.”

Why? Revolts against slave owners often degenerated into generalized racial warfare. And there was the perception that free Blacks were sympathetic to the plight of their enslaved brothers and sisters.

Therefore, whether people of African descent were ‘free’ or enslaved, they would remain weaponless and defenseless anywhere in the young country named America.

Revolutionary impacts

During the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, enslaved Africans successfully threw off their French masters. This revolution was perceived to be a race war, aggravating existing fears in the French Louisiana colony and among Whites in the slave states of the United States.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, a movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength in the northern United States, led by free Blacks such as Frederick Douglass and White supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison.

In 1831, as a result of the Nat Turner revolt, Virginia and other Southern state legislators passed new laws to control enslaved Africans and free Blacks. They prohibited teaching any Black person – slave or free – how to read; restricted rights of assembly for free Blacks; and punished any Black person who was armed.

Three decades later in 1850, Douglass declared, “The best response is a good revolver” as a rebuttal to the Fugitive Slave Act that required any slave who escaped to be returned to Southern slavery.

Faulty ‘Reconstruction’

The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws. The former states of the Confederacy – many of which had recognized the right to carry arms openly before the Civil War – developed a very sudden willingness to qualify that right. Thus, the various “Black Codes” adopted after the Civil War required Blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or even Bowie knives.

During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period (1865-77), former slaves received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment (1868) and the right to vote in the 15th (1870), but the provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated.

Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African-Americans because of the restrictive gun laws and the violent resurgence of Southern White supremacy, which came in the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to withdraw federal troops from the South. The rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan was aided by the inability of newly freed enslaved Africans to defend themselves.

In 1892, Black newspaper owner Ida B. Wells noted that “the only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away was when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.” Wells offered some blunt advice: “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

Non-violent, not defenseless

The premise that the civil rights movement in the South was strictly a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme and a gross misrepresentation of history. In almost every Southern community, Black people picked up arms, organized, and met force with force to defend their leaders, their communities, and their own lives.

In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to protect them from the violence of racists and segregationists – who were often supported by local law enforcement.

At the height of the civil rights movement, Black freedom fighters took self-defense seriously.

Although he was denied a concealed-carry permit, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a veritable “arsenal” at home. Far from being a violation of the principle of nonviolence, King’s willingness to defend himself and his family was part of a long, proud tradition in Black America.

Modern gun control

Of note was the first major ban on the open carrying of firearms. It was a reaction to “Negroes with guns.”

A Republican-led bill was drafted in California after members of the Black Panther Party began hanging around the state legislature in Sacramento with their guns on display. The gun control bill was signed in 1967 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.

It was followed by the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, that was primarily a reaction to the dangers of “Saturday night specials” – cheap handguns owned by the poor and Blacks.

Next week: Gun control and the rise of the National Rifle Association.

Karsceal Turner is an award-winning independent journalist regularly covering Central Florida human interest features and sports.

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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”

Published

5 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology - City Limits

Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.

Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.

On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.

Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.

You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.

Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.

In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.

These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.

Where is that energy now?

Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?

Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.

Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.

This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.

I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.

Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.

Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.

I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.

What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.

Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.

You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.

The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.

Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.

Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.

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Black History

Oakland Protesters Rally to Defend Haitian Immigrants and TPS

The Haiti Action Committee traces its roots to the international movement that emerged following Haiti’s 1991 military coup, which overthrew the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Political violence sent thousands of Haitians fleeing the country, while U.S. policies resulted in refugees being intercepted at sea, repatriated, or detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Published

5 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Activists Gerald Smith and Romaine Charite at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland near City Hall protest in support of Haitian immigrant rights. Photo by Carla Thomas

By Carla Thomas

Protesters gathered in downtown Oakland near City Hall at 14th Street and Broadway on Thursday, Aug. 13, calling for protections for Haitian immigrants and an end to deportation policies affecting Haitian communities across the United States.

Organized as a call to action by the Legalization for All Network and supported by the Haiti Action Committee and other community organizations, the demonstration carried a clear message: “Defend TPS! Legalization, Not Deportation!”

Participants focused attention on the termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti and immigration policies protesters described as continuing attacks on Haitian immigrants under the Trump administration.

Haitian Romaine Charite of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization urged demonstrators to stand with Haitian families and led chants:

“When Haitians are under attack, what do we do? We fight back.”

Injustice to one is an injustice to us all.”

“Dump Trump!”

Charite and other protesters condemned the federal government’s treatment of Haitian immigrants, describing the policies as an attack on a population already facing extraordinary hardship.

Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated effective July 27, 2026, removing temporary deportation protections and work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitian beneficiaries who lacked another legal basis to remain in the United States.

Gerald Smith, a protester and former member of the Black Panther Party during the 1970s, said Haitians were being unfairly targeted and warned that ending TPS would have a devastating impact on Haitian families and communities.

“These policies are racially motivated and unfair,” Smith said. “Everyone deserves the right to self-determination and protection from persecution.”

The Haiti Action Committee cited the continuing political, economic and humanitarian crisis in Haiti as evidence that returning large numbers of immigrants to the country could place already vulnerable people at greater risk.

The Oakland gathering, which drew about 20 participants, reflected a decades-long history of Bay Area activism surrounding Haitian democracy, refugee rights and U.S. immigration policy.

Those policies sparked protests involving Haitian communities, Black activists, artists, college students, churches, labor organizations and human rights advocates. Prominent figures, including dancer and activist Katherine Dunham, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson, joined campaigns challenging the treatment of Haitian refugees.

In 1992, Haiti Action Committee joined other Bay Area organizations in a dramatic demonstration on San Francisco Bay. Boats carrying Haitian participants were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard while supporters gathered along the waterfront and reportedly chanted, “Let Them Land!”

More than three decades later, protesters have returned to the streets of Oakland, centering on protecting Haitian immigrants, opposing deportation and pressing for immigration policies that provide families with a pathway toward permanent legal residency.

For more information, visit Haitisolidarity.net.

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Community

First 5 Alameda County Celebrates First Year of Measure C’s Implementation

Measure C, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.

Published

5 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas (left) with Community Advisory Councilmember and childcare provider Nancy Harvey. Photo by Carla Thomas.

By Carla Thomas

First 5 Alameda County marked the first anniversary of the impact of Measure C with a community celebration Friday, Aug. 7, at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across Alameda County.

The celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.

“Oakland is on the move,” said Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.

First 5 Alameda County CEO Kristin Spanos said, “In the first 10 months of Measure C being available after the Board of Supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”

First 5 Alameda County, the public agency responsible for administering Measure C, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.

Alameda County District 5 Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas: “We’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”

Community Advisory Council member Nancy Harvey said, “We are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from County Supervisors Nate Miley and Nikki Fortunato Bas, the unions, and the late Supervisor Wilma Chan. This is a historic event – people are watching Measure C all over the nation.”

Harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.

Childcare advocate and provider Lisa Zarodney of Livermore said, “When I got my emergency funds, I was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”

In business for 27 years, Zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.

“I couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from Measure C.”

Harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.

“We are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.

First 5 Alameda County’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of Measure C, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.

Through Measure C and partnerships with initiatives including the Oakland Children’s Initiative, First 5 Alameda County has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.

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