Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
A black liberal writing about black-on-black crime and not blaming “racism”?
Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy wrote about Professor Charles E. Cobb Jr’s book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. His book sounds similar to Nicholas Johnson’s, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms, about how blacks post-slavery bore arms for self-defense.
“These days, it appears that black people are being killed with impunity again but far more often by other black people,” Milloy wrote. “Baltimore is a shockingly sad example. After a black man died while in police custody, local activists protested, some people rioted, and eventually six police officers were charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray. In the weeks since then, homicides shot up in the city, with more than 30 in less than a month. The deadly spectacle has presented a challenge that few activists seem able to meet.”
Milloy made an inconvenient observation. He noted that the recent black-on-black killings didn’t generate riots. The people took to the streets to harm, burn, and destroy, however, only when a black man died in police custody.
I wonder how many “Uncle Tom” hate e-mails Milloy received after the paper published this column.
“[W]hile guns in the hands of courageous black people most certainly played a role in making the civil rights movement possible, as Cobb noted, guns in the hands of those who are being left behind continues to undermine that most precious of all civil rights — life itself.”
