MLK had complicated legacy over gun violence

Associated Press

Martin Luther King Jr. was surrounded by guns, even though he didn’t like them.

At times, armed foot soldiers protected the Baptist preacher and his family. As he led protests across the rural South, King often stood in proximity of guns — wielded by local police, state troopers or hostile people in the crowds.

On April 4, 1968, King became one of America’s most famous victims of gun violence.

Just as guns were a complicated issue for King in his lifetime, they loom large over the 30th anniversary of the holiday honoring his birthday. Urban violence, mass shootings and killings of unarmed black males by police have caused alarm, touched off protests and revived the nation’s conversation about gun control. President Barack Obama recently took executive action to tighten federal gun restrictions, invoking King as he urged citizens to press for change.

“There is nothing in the history that suggests that Martin Luther King felt that guns weren’t useful for self-defense,” said Adam Winkler, UCLA law professor and author of the book “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” “Clearly, guns were used protect (King) ... (He) could not rely on the government.”

Inside the civil rights movement, some activists saw guns as a necessary means of self-defense. As a Southerner, King understood that strong culture of gun possession, even though he came to reject it, said Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and author of the book, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.”

“If you went to King’s house in 1955 or 1956, there were guns,” Cobb said in an interview. “When they bombed his house in 1956, his first instinct was to apply for a gun permit. He moves toward nonviolence slowly. By the 1960s, he abandoned the idea of weapons for self-defense.”

Some blacks, Cobb recalled, jokingly referring to their personal weapons as “nonviolent pistols.”

“They would say, even as they were cleaning their rifles, how glad they were to be part of the movement,” Cobb said. “They knew King wasn’t going to be carrying a weapon, so people’s attitude was, ‘We’re not going to let the white people kill him.”’

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a King aide who was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was shot and killed, said King was mindful of the role of guns.

“Dr. King’s point was that the protection of one’s home is self-evident, but he was quick to add that you’re more likely to shoot a relative or commit suicide (with a gun),” Jackson said. “He refused to keep a gun in his house for that reason.”

After his home was bombed, King got rid of his gun and eschewed weapons, said King lieutenant Andrew Young. Before joining King, Young owned a shotgun and a handgun. The movement did not condemn defensive violence, Young explained; King simply did not engage in it.