Citation

Beito DT, Beito LR. J. Firearms Public Policy 2005; 17(1).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Second Amendment Foundation)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

T.R.M. Howard was a leading civil rights activists and businessman in Mississippi in the mid-twentieth century. Having grown up in the gun culture, he armed himself for self-defense against racist, helping to set a pattern of affirmative self-defense which was followed by other civil rights leaders.

Few blacks in Mississippi were more assertive in confronting Jim Crow and disfranchisement in the 1950s than Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard. When he spoke out, it was hard to ignore him. Howard was not only one of the wealthiest blacks in the state but headed the largest civil organization in the Delta. In honor of his efforts, The California Eagle called him the "Most Hated, and Best Loved, Man in Mississippi." From the beginning, armed self-defense was an important component of Howard’s civil rights strategy. In this respect, he followed in a long tradition that later found expression under the leadership of Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, and various civil rights activists in the Deep South in the 1960s who relied on the often interrelated strategies of "God, Gandhi, and Guns."