A Free State? The Second Amendment and Anti-Blackness in America’s Past and Present
“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.”
The single, twenty-seven-word sentence that comprises the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution carries different meanings for different people. For many Americans, the Second Amendment means a physical defense of the liberties to which they are entitled and which “shall not be infringed.” For others, the Second evokes government paralysis in the face of mass shootings, police brutality, and children dead in their classrooms. Proposals of red flag laws to restrict those convicted of crimes or living with severe mental illnesses from gun ownership meet opposition from Second Amendment advocates, who decry the denial of rights to any group of people as a slippery slope.
However, the Second Amendment was not created to grant the right to “keep and bear arms” to every person born on American soil—for Black people, the Second’s promises have always rung hollow. As author and historian Carol Anderson argues in her book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (2021), the Second was created to win the favor of the slavery-reliant South and keep the African-descended population rightless and unthreatening, all for the greater success of newborn America. Via the objects in this digital archive, viewers will understand how anti-Blackness permeates the way that Second Amendment rights have been upheld and denied throughout history—from colonial America, through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, to the modern day. Discriminatory gun control laws, lurid news stories, images of doomed rebellions and brutal reprisals, all paint a picture of an all-consuming fear felt by many white Americans throughout history—the fear of Black people bearing arms against those who subjugated them.
As demonstrated in this archive, that fear outlasted the institution of slavery, led then-governor Ronald Reagan to sign gun control legislation intended to disarm the Black Panthers, and is made manifest to this day when Black Americans are murdered by police for exercising their Second Amendment rights. The contents of this archive underpin an unseen 300-year timeline of American history, told in the voices of artists, journalists, protesters, and legislators. They show that even as Black Americans fought for and were finally granted legal rights to freedom, to own guns, and to use deadly force in self-defense, the Second Amendment has served to maintain their subjugation and undermine those freedoms.
