As MLK embraced civil disobedience, his view of guns shifted
Fifty years ago this week, one of the country’s most prominent advocates for pacifism became one of its most mourned victims of gun violence. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin’s bullet April 4, 1968.
Given the philosophy he advocated and the way he died, it might be tempting to make comparisons between the struggle he helped lead and the ongoing movement for gun control.
But King’s views on gun rights were more complicated. There was a time when King believed that, if he was to be killed by assassins, it wouldn’t be for lack of shooting back.
King came to Montgomery, Ala., in 1954 to serve as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25 years old. Just a year later, he found himself at the center of the Montgomery
King swung from belief in the use of firearms for self-defense to believing in total nonviolence in seven years.
bus boycott. He was arrested. His house was firebombed. Fearing for his life, King and his associates made sure they were well armed.
In his 2011 book “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler found that King applied for a concealed weapons permit. Unlike current Florida law, which dictates that the state must issue a concealed weapons permit to those who meet the qualifications, Alabama law read that authorities “may” issue one — and the authorities in Alabama denied King’s application.
Winkler wrote that Glenn Smiley, a white civil rights leader and student of Ghandi who pushed King to embrace nonviolence, described the reverend’s home as “an arsenal.”
When journalist Bill Worthy visited the home, he almost sat on a loaded gun.
Stories such as these have led gun-rights activists to claim King as one of their own, including African-American NRA spokesman Colion Noir.
But those claims are perhaps even more problematic than those of guncontrol advocates.
By the time of King’s first successful attempt at largescale nonviolent resistance against racism — the 1963 Birmingham Campaign — he had abandoned selfdefense entirely. Some of those around him would continue to carry guns, seeing no daylight between protecting King with violence if necessary and being part of a nonviolent movement, but the man himself had come around to the view of Smiley and others who pushed him in a nonviolent direction.
In 2001’s “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King,” a book cobbled together from King’s writing and speeches by Clayborne Carson, director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, King wrote, “I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid.”
The point is that King was complicated. He swung from belief in the use of firearms for selfdefense to believing in total nonviolence in seven years, from age 25 to 32.
Perhaps both sides can understand the words of his last speech, delivered in Memphis the day before he died.
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”