The local chapter of the NAACP held its second annual Ida B. Wells “Hands Off Our Vote” Walk, in Hampton Roads over the weekend, with dozens of marchers showing up to, in the words of Gaylene Kanoyton, the regional vice president of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, "talk about the importance of turning out the vote in November,"as well as "the importance of having rights to our own body, for our own health.”
Kanoyton said the event is about honoring Ida B. Wells’ legacy, a journalist and activist who co-founded the NAACP and became a leading voice in the fight for racial and gender equality.
“She’s one of the founders of the NAACP, but she was also there during the women’s suffrage movement,” Kanoyton said. “Back then, women couldn’t march in front; they had to march in the back.”
For attendees like Virgil Thornton, the event was deeply personal.
“I have two girls, twin daughters, so definitely I want equal rights for them as far as their healthcare and education,” Thornton said. “Education is the great divider, but it’s also the great equalizer.”
Thornton said showing up to the walk was about more than just marching; it was about standing beside women in the fight for equality.
“It’s extremely important to let women know that men have their back, so to speak, that we’re in this fight as well for equality,” he said. “When we speak about community, it’s more than just men; it’s women too. I don’t know of any man who was born without a woman.”
In 1892 Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which included an essay entitled "Self Help". Wells documented the horrors of lynchings and acts of mob violence against African Americans throughout the South, and left no doubt where she stood on the issue of armed self-defense.
Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that 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. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
The Winchester rifle was the AR-15 of its day. I'd actually argue that the leap from single shot breech-loading rifles to multi-shot lever action rifles in the mid-to-late 1800s was an even bigger shift than the jump from lever action rifles to semi-automatic rifles, and certainly a more dramatic jump than from guns like the M1 carbine to the AR-15 platform.
If the AR-15 had been around in 1892, I have no doubt that Wells would have declared that is the rifle that should have "a place of honor in every black home". I'd be willing to bet, though, that most of the participants in Saturday's march were completely unaware of Wells' position on keeping and bearing arms and would absolutely disagree with her support for exercising our Second Amendment rights in order to stave off violent attacks by bigoted mobs and groups like the KKK.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, and if the organizers of the Ida B. Wells “Hands Off Our Vote” Walk want to include an open carry component next year I'm sure there are plenty of people in the Hampton Roads/Norfolk/Portsmouth area who'd love to take part. A march that saw "dozens" this year could easily see hundreds more if Wells' support for the Second Amendment was acknowledged, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that recognition.
Editor’s Note: Self-defense is a human right, and the right to keep and bear arms is a right of we the people, not a chosen few.
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