3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

Party in Oakland, California, as the first blacks in America to arm themselves ; clearly,
blacks were always armed--even before the Panthers--though perhaps not openly.2 ~
When the Deacons first organized, they used what they had--primarily shotguns,
and a few handguns . F.rnest Thomas sought to standac+dize weaponry for further savings,
and favored .30 M-1 carbines and .38 Spaial revolvers . How well they were armed is a
matter of speculation and conjecture . Thomas surreptitiously hinted that the Deacons
stashed grenades in Jonesboro, and that they had contacts in Houston and Chicago to
acquire machine guns . Local police fretted that the Deacons possessed automatic
weapons. While Governor John J . McKeithen orda+ed the seizure of guns found in cars
belonging to both Deacons and Klansmen, i ouisiana state police recognized that
confiscation of guns was illegal . Protected by the Second Amendment and the
constitutional right to bear arms, the Demons operated within the law . Of course,
machine guns and hand grenades were a different matter : under the National Firearms Act
of 1934 and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, these items were illegal contraband,
subject to seizure . For this reason, it seems unlikely that the Deacons would have owned
2~Sonia Sanchez, formerly associated with the Black Panther Party, has noted:
The whole image that went around the world of Panthers going into the
[California state] assembly with guns was something that said, simply, "Don't
mess with me: ' And I remember talking to some old folks at the time . They
said, "Well, girl, that ain't nothing new . We always owned guns . We just kept
them in our top drawer, you see." The whole point of the newspaper articles
was simply that this was a new phenomenon, that we never thought black men
had guns . But if you went south or out west, black folks always had guns
someplace in the house .
Sanchez quoted in Hampton, Voices ofFc+eedom , 370 .
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