On that NRA comment about MLK…
So, this NRA tweet that’s gone viral actually has some interesting history. Let’s dive in.
Early in the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King had begun receiving a steady stream of death threats. He had been thrust into leadership by others, and as the threats worsened he wrestled with a deep desire to leave that leadership behind. He wondered if he could find a way to do so without demoralizing Black Montgomerians and humiliating himself. After a death threat one night, he looked at his sleeping wife and new baby and imagined being taken from them, or them being murdered because he was a target. Out of this inner turmoil he had a major spiritual experience in which he essentially felt the presence of God commanding him to walk this difficult but righteous path. Shortly after this, King was at church when he received news that his house had been bombed. Knowing that his wife and baby were home, their death was very possible, but King’s recent spiritual experience allowed him to stay calm and to quiet a crowd of Black residents — many of them armed and wanting to retaliate — who had gathered around the bombed house. King convinced them to put down their weapons, but he decided he needed to at least protect his home, and applied for a handgun the next day. After he was denied a gun permit, King called the governor of Alabama to request the permit from him directly, but the governor told him that was a decision to be made by the local sheriff.
This all intersects with another major moment in King’s life: the entrance of Bayard Rustin as his advisor and mentor. When King’s home was bombed, a group of civil rights activists based in New York City sent support. They were worried that King would not be able to sustain a peaceful movement in the face of rising white violence. The situation felt especially serious because they had received word through A. Philip Randolph’s nationwide network of Black railroad workers that African Americans were smuggling large amounts of weapons into Montgomery. Fearing a possible race war, the group sent one of the most experienced nonviolent activists in the country to examine the situation and offer advice. That was, of course, Bayard Rustin.
When Rustin visited King, guns were scattered throughout the house. Rustin asked if having guns was compatible with the philosophy of nonviolence, and King replied that yes, it was. He intended to harm no one and would only use the guns in self-defense. Rustin cautioned King, telling him: “If, in the flow and heat of battle, a leader’s house is bombed, and he shoots back, that is an encouragement to his followers to pick up guns. If, on the other hand, he had no guns around him, and they all know it, they will rise to the nonviolent occasion.” The point was not that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if King started shooting: the point was that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if they thought that shooting was even a possibility.
Rustin told King a story that night: when he had gone to India, it became clear to him that most Indians who had followed Gandhi did not actually have a deep belief in nonviolence. They were ordinary people who would quickly engage in self-defense if provoked. Whereas Gandhi viewed nonviolence as a way of life that you lived and breathed at every moment, most Indians viewed it as a strategy to be used only when it was effective. This meant that, as soon as nonviolent resistance did not seem effective, that many Indians would abandon it.
However, they didn’t abandon it partly because Gandhi, by accepting nonviolence as a complete way of life, ensured that his followers would never have reason to doubt what kind of action he might take. Mahatma Gandhi’s absolute embrace of nonviolence allowed him to become a powerful symbol of nonviolence and allowed his leadership to be very clear, which helped to inspire and guide a mass movement. If King was to become such a symbol, Rustin said that he would have to adopt nonviolence not only as a strategy, but as a spiritual way of life as well. It was after King’s discussion with Rustin that he decided not to arm himself, partly in order to turn himself into a strategic symbol for a nonviolent movement. This was just a few months into King’s emergence as a movement leader. In other words, the viral NRA tweet is correct that King once applied for a gun permit, but it’s misleading given that King did so only in the very beginning of his life as a movement leader, before he began to significantly deepen his understanding of nonviolent strategy.
A more honest connection between the NRA and Martin Luther King would be the fact that his assassin was an escaped felon who was able to very easily purchase a high powered rifle with a fake name and no background check. That fact created huge public pressure for stronger gun laws… and the NRA fought those stronger gun laws fiercely. That’s the real NRA-King connection. (Anyone who wants to learn the full story on that, check out chapter 6 in civil rights historian Jason Sokol’s fantastic new book, “The Heaven’s Might Crack,” which traces the many responses to King’s death.)
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