Negroes and the Gun (60 page)

A report sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that very high rates of homicide victimization and violent crime among blacks is not new. Data from 1925 drawn from selected cities shows that “victimization rates were higher during that era than they are at present. It was not uncommon to find victimization rates in excess of 100 per 100,000.” Local government responses to these data reflected the times. Memphis, for example, was described in 1930 as the homicide capital of the nation. The city fathers discounted the news, arguing that “most of the murders were of Negroes by Negroes, so the police and government could not be held responsible.”
15

The 1925 victimization rate in several other cities exceeded modern rates by substantial measures. The black victimization rate per 100,000 of population in Chicago was 101. In Detroit, it was 102 per 100,000. In Cleveland, it was 113. The rate in Memphis peaked at 129 per 100,000. This was surpassed by peak rates of 189 and 207 per 100,000 in Cincinnati and Miami respectively.
16

Similar trends were reported by preeminent criminologist Marvin Wolfgang in his classic work,
Patterns in Criminal Homicide
. Wolfgang focused primarily on Philadelphia from 1948 through 1952 and surveyed the findings of a variety of earlier studies from around the country. Over the study period, blacks were 18 percent of the population but 73 percent of homicide victims and 75 percent of homicide offenders in Philadelphia.

Then, as now, black males dominated the ranks of victims (77 percent of black victims) and perpetrators (80 percent of black perpetrators). Wolfgang surmised that economic desperation drove the high rates of violence, calculating that 90 to 95 percent of all offenders in the study (black and white) were “in the lower end of the occupational scale.”

The availability of guns did not explain Wolfgang's findings. The instrument most used by black murderers was the blade, which accounted for the highest percentage (47 percent) of the homicides. It is unclear precisely how much this reflected the national trend, and Wolfgang noted studies from other cities where shooting was the leading cause of black homicide.

Wolfgang lamented the absence of solid, race-specific data prior to 1921 but summarized a variety of studies conducted as data became available. A 1940 assessment of seven sections of the southern United States concluded that the murder and manslaughter rate for blacks was twelve times that of whites. A study of Birmingham, Alabama, from 1937 through 1944 showed that blacks were 85 percent of homicide convictions and 40 percent of the population. In St. Louis from 1949 to 1951, blacks committed 73 percent of homicides and were 18 percent of the population. Wolfgang cautioned that these data are biased by consistently higher conviction rates for blacks than for whites in the southern states surveyed.

Outside the South, Wolfgang's survey of victimization studies showed a similar trend. Homicide victimization rates per 100,000 during 1920 and 1925 for Pennsylvania were considerably higher for blacks than for whites both in urban and rural areas. In urban areas, whites had a rate of 5.3 per 100,000, compared to 47.1 for blacks. In rural areas, the white rate was 3.4 and the black rate was 45.2. A similar disparity appeared between 1921 and 1930 in a study of 37 upstate New York counties where the homicide victimization rate for whites was 2.8 per 100,000 and 30.4 for blacks.
17

While we can embrace the modern orthodoxy on the worry about exceptional rates of black victimization and criminality, we cannot say that this is a
new
variable that automatically explains abandonment of the black tradition of arms. Historically, high intra-racial homicide rates show that the black tradition of arms long required balancing between the legitimate self-defense interests of good people against the costs imposed by a microculture of black criminals abusing guns.

More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed this microculture the “submerged tenth.”
18
In his incomparable exposition of Negro life,
The Souls of Black Folk
, Du Bois lamented the rise of “a distinct criminal class” in the urban slums.
19
In his sociological study
The Philadelphia Negro
, Du Bois tracked the activity of a black criminal class that in many ways mirrors the modern criminal microculture.
20
He reported that life in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward in the late 1890s was “hard, noisy and deadly for too many of the Black people there. On Saturday nights [the neighborhoods] disgorged [the] maimed and murdered. . . . Pushed out of economic opportunities . . . it was not surprising that many Seventh Ward Blacks sought release in drugs and crime or savagely turned on each other out of rage or a sense of hopelessness.”
21

Ida B. Wells, the great patron of the Winchester rifle, wrestled with a similarly dispiriting reality. In 1910, she debated a nominally sympathetic white member of the Negro Fellowship League who highlighted the disproportionate level of black crime in Chicago. Facing the difficult reality, Wells said that she could not refute
the empirical claims about disproportionate black criminality, “for that is what the figures seem to indicate.” She shifted instead to explain the phenomena. “The statistics,” she said, “do not mean, as it appears to mean, that the Negro race is the most criminal of the various race groups in Chicago. It does mean that ours is the most neglected group. All the other races in the city are welcomed into the settlements, YMCAs, YWCAs, gymnasiums and every other movement for uplift if only their skins are white. . . . Only one social center welcomes the Negro and that is the saloon. Ought we to wonder at the harvest which we have heard enumerated tonight?”
22

This is a familiar brand of response to discouraging news. And though it might blunt some of the harsher policy prescriptions by unsympathetic critics, making excuses for black criminality does not answer the immediate security concerns of black victims.

Black victims of intraracial violence were the dominant concern of leaders from the Mississippi Delta Committee for Better Citizenship. They agitated for “greater punishment for Black criminals who committed offenses against Blacks.” The reasoning was summed up by the famously well-armed T. R. M. Howard, who complained that failure to punish black-on-black crime was another manifestation of state malevolence. During a period where racist violence fueled black nightmares, Howard said that the “greatest danger to Negro life in Mississippi is not what white people do to Negroes but what the courts of Mississippi let Negroes of Mississippi do to each other.”
23

Roy Wilkins's 1925 critique of intraracial violence in Kansas City rings similar. Wilkins complained that “getting Kansas City police to enforce the law in black neighborhoods was almost impossible. For a time we ran a murder-a-week campaign . . . to draw attention to the bloodshed that took place at approximately that rate all through the twenties.” Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there's one more Negro killed—the more of 'em dead, the less to bother us. Don't spend too much money running down the killer—he may kill another.”
24

This phenomenon was actually systematized by Mississippi circuit judge Sidney Fant Davis, under the heading of “Negro Law.” The untutored reader, said Davis, might look at the state civil and criminal codes and conclude that they applied equally to blacks and whites, but “nothing could be farther from the truth.” Negro law, said Davis, “determined that certain crimes might be punished or not depending on the racial context.” Intraracial violence (which dominated black victimization), bigamy, and theft purely between blacks were routinely ignored or treated as minor matters.
25

Even black-on-black murder, which as early as 1890 was reportedly the most common form of homicide in Mississippi, passed through a Negro Law filter. Much
black-on-black violence was ignored. But where the black victim had some value to or was a favorite of local whites, the prosecution reflected that interest. This was vividly illustrated in the 1911 Sharkey County prosecution of a black man named Judge Collins for the murder of Rube Boyd. The prosecutor argued for the death penalty because “this bad nigger killed a good nigger. The dead nigger was a white man's nigger, and these bad niggers like to kill that kind.” The black defense attorney for Collins, thoroughly familiar with the nuances of Negro Law, couched his assessment accordingly. “The average white jury,” he explained, “would take it for granted that the killing of a white man's nigger is a more serious offense than the killing of a plain, everyday black man.”
26

Historic rates and treatment of intraracial violence are illuminating. But it is incomplete and ultimately unconvincing to say that exceptional rates of intra-racial violence are nothing new. Full assessment of competing policies requires examination of relative costs and benefits of firearms and value judgments that drive firearms policy.

We have already seen how very
high rates of gun violence among blacks are disproportionately attributable to young black men
. The tough question is, who are these men? General research shows that most murderers are extreme aberrants with long histories of criminal activity, psychopathology, and violence.
27
The aberrance of murderers is so solidly demonstrated that researchers consider it a general “criminological axiom.”
28
If the general trend holds true, the exceptional rate of black homicide is mainly attributable to a slim microculture of aberrants who fall at the extremes of various measures of risk.

The modern orthodoxy does not expressly reject the thesis that exceptional black victimization and criminality are attributable to a slim microculture. But blanket gun bans, like those urged as bedrock policy under the modern orthodoxy do carry the implication that the black community at large cannot be trusted with guns. This is an unavoidable implication of proposals for targeted de jure gun bans in black enclaves, which would be deemed unconstitutional everywhere else. Proponents of this approach probably would prefer that no one have guns. But short of that, some seem willing to settle for targeted gun bans just in places with concentrations of black folk. On the long view, this is quite odd.

Under the banner of civil rights, this strand of the modern orthodoxy brands the entire community with a badge of inferiority through a race-coded deprivation of an established prerogative of American citizenship. It rings similar to
nineteenth-century claims “that colored men were unfit for citizenship” and rationalizations of Black Code gun restrictions targeting freedmen.
29
The results of recently overturned gun prohibition laws in Washington, DC, and Chicago confirmed that this prescription only bars legal guns and does little about the flow of illegal guns to the violent microculture. So for a negligible impact on the real targets, these policies stigmatized entire urban enclaves as untrustworthy and left good people unilaterally disarmed against the criminals in their midst.

The focus on
gun control
as a response to the exceptional rate of violence among blacks, and especially among young black men,
is nonetheless politically appealing because it offers a seemingly straightforward solution to a far deeper problem that really has no easy answer
. Consider this summary of the various attempts to explain the exceptional rate of black male violence.

There exists little consensus among criminologists and other crime scholars regarding “the causes” of black male violence. Numerous explanations have been offered, including biological causes (e.g., head injuries); social disorganization and inadequate socialization; poverty and economic inequality; racial oppression and displaced aggression; adherence to the norms of a subculture of violence; joblessness and family disruption; the cheapening of black life as a result of the imposition of lenient sentences against blacks who assault or murder blacks; and involvement in self-destructive lifestyles centered around heavy drinking, drug abuse and drug trafficking and street gangs. . . . Although they represent a minority viewpoint, some criminologists maintain that racial differences in violent crime offending may stem form genetic/non-acquired biological factors.
30

This scattered assessment leaves the political class with two choices. One is to focus intently on the criminal microclass while at the same time acknowledging that there is no good, ready diagnosis of their behavior and therefore no easy solution. The alternative is to claim there is a ready solution to the problem—stringent supply-side gun control—but that has failed because of malevolent outsiders who block strong gun laws. On this choice, the appeal of the modern orthodoxy is plain.

The modern orthodoxy has two related advantages that lure the political class. First, it allows one to sidestep difficult conversations about violent self-help. Second, it avoids the stigmatizing class distinctions that come with a hard focus on the microcaste of violent young men.