The book is most effective in unearthing the stories of little-known, everyday rebellions, especially from the lives of Black women. These histories have been at best under-told, if not lost altogether. Her chapter on force, which builds upon her more academic book “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence,” is by far the sharpest, most convincing and surprising.
Force, a remedy of last resort, states Carter Jackson, can be a strike, a boycott, a vote — or it can be armed self-defense. She begins the chapter with the story of her grandmother, Reader Carter, who died in Detroit in 2003. When going through her belongings after her death, the family was shocked to open a night stand drawer and find a tiny .22 pistol — fully loaded: “Almost in unison, we bellowed, ‘Grandma has a gun!’”
Reader grew up in rural Louisiana in the 1930s before she became part of the Great Migration and went north. Carter Jackson remembers stories of the men in Louisiana, including her grandmother’s brothers, who spent weekends in jail to protect themselves from being lynched. “The white men in town used to get drunk on weekends and hang Black folks,” Carter Jackson’s grandmother explained, “so if you were already in jail, you were safe.” To Reader Carter, guns were force, “a bulwark against a hostile white supremacist world.”
Throughout the chapter, Carter Jackson offers a catalog of Black history heroes who owned guns, often unexpectedly so. In 1906, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, who was teaching in Georgia and had considered himself a pacifist, bought a double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells after a riot in Atlanta that left lynching victims hanging from lampposts. “If a white mob had stepped on the campus,” he wrote, “I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.”
“Few know better the utility of guns for Black liberation than Black women,” Carter Jackson writes. Though the image of Harriet Tubman hugging a rifle endures as one of the most indelible in Black history, many other notable Black women owned guns. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home,” the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells wrote, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
