Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And welcome to this live taping. We are so excited to be joined this evening by our dear friend, the incredible professor Carol Anderson, who is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She’s also the author of last year’s terrific book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Joanne Freeman:

Now Carol joined us last October to talk about voting rights, in the aftermath of the Brnovich decision, which pretty much gutted a lot of the power of the Voting Rights Act. And if anyone of you were there, it was a really lively conversation, really fun for us. And so it will definitely be fun for you again. She joins us now to talk about the recent mass of mass shootings, the Supreme Court’s rulings against gun control, and how the politicization of guns connects to the other, pretty much anti-democratic shifts, that we’re seeing in American society now. Welcome, Carol.

Carol Anderson:

Ah, thank you so much for having me. I’m just looking so forward to this conversation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let me start right off, and I have to confess that I have been waiting for this, because everybody always asks me to explain the origins of the Second Amendment. And I know Carol has discussed this at great length in the book, The Second. And Joanne and I actually discussed this not infrequently off camera, when we’re by ourselves, as historians tend to do. And I think that you both have a lot to contribute to this. And I have a third vision, and I don’t think any of them are incompatible. So, why don’t you Carol, start by taking us through what exactly the Second Amendment is all about.

Carol Anderson:

So, I started this research with the killing of Philando Castile. And so here you have a black man who has a license to carry weapon with him, and the police officer shoots him dead, simply because he has a license to carry weapon. And the NRA went silent. And so, pundits were asking, well, don’t black people have Second Amendment rights? And I thought, Lord, that is a great question. And it was one of the rights that I had not looked at previously. So I went hunting and went all the way back to the 17th century. And in there, I mean, I was in your Bailiwick. And in there, I’m finding all of this fear of black people, the fear of the enslaved, and the slave codes coming up, about the making sure that they were disarmed, that they did not have access to weapons. Also making sure that free blacks, didn’t have access to weapons. And also finding the love of the militia and the slave patrols. Because they are what protected the white community from this black threat.

And so as I’m seeing the constitution develop, and there’s the constitutional ratification convention in Virginia. And James Madison thinks he’s done something, right? Because, he’s crafted this constitution, and he’s like, woo, got that thing through Lord, yes, all we got to do now is just get it ratified. And Virginia’s sitting there going, nah, I’m not filling it. I’m just not filling it. And it’s Patrick Henry and George Mason, two key in slavers, and anti-federalists, who come at him hard, because of the power of the federal government in this newly crafted constitution. And because the militia is put under the control of the federal government. And George Mason is clear, we will be left defenseless against the slave revolt. Because under the feds, it’s going to be… We have to deal with Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, who are like getting rid of slavery in their states. And so, we can’t count on them. We can’t trust them to send the militia down to protect us.

And so they started threatening to scuttle the constitution. And if they couldn’t scuttle it, they were going to have a new constitutional convention, which was the last doggone thing James Madison wanted.

Joanne Freeman:

Pretty much anybody Carol.

Carol Anderson:

Right? Right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, they literally were like, we’re out of here. If you mess around with this.

Carol Anderson:

Oh yeah, they were really clear about that. But remember, they had played hardball before, with the drafting of the constitution itself. This is how we get the Three-Fifths Clause. This is how we get the 20 year extension on the Atlantic slave trade. And this is how we get the Fugitive Slave Clause. It is the south playing hardball saying, US, you’re on your own, we don’t get to protect slavery, we don’t get to enhance slavery, we don’t get to empower slave holders, that, peace out. And so, it was that threat again. It was that threat of dismantling the United States of America over slavery. And so, when James Madison goes to that first Congress, and he’s crafting the Bill of Rights, and one of the congressmen said, he felt like he was haunted by the ghost of Patrick Henry, as he’s crafting this thing. You get a Bill of Rights, that when you think about it, the state cannot support a religion.

You get freedom of the press, you get the right not to be illegally searched and seized. You get the right to have a speedy and fair trial. The right to a well-regulated militia, for the security of a free state, that thing is an outlier in this larger bill. And that was the bribe to the South, to not hold a new constitutional convention. And so sitting in this Bill of Rights, is an amendment that is about denying black people, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is about how do we contain and control this black threat? How do we keep the white community safe from this threat?

Joanne Freeman:

I wanted to, in a sense, build off something you just said, Carol. And that is, if you think about the Bill of Rights as something that came along, because people were scared of federal power, right? They were, for appeasing people. It’s the one thing that the anti-federalists did, that was concrete, that they suggested and that they got, in the constitutional period at the ratification debates. They were very nervous about this new constitution’s going to take all kinds of powers, and they were going to lose all of these rights in one way or another. So they wanted to restrain this brand new, far more powerful government. So on the one hand, first of all, that’s important to notice because, the Bill of Rights is from people who already were a little bit nervous about what was coming this brand new government, makes perfect sense that they’re saying, I don’t know about the power of that.

But equally, if not more important, if you think about in that context, what the main thing that people are thinking about is, they’re not thinking, as we do today in a very modern sense, my rights. My rights, this is my right. They’re thinking, the government can’t do this. I want this to put a wall up in front of the government. So the Bill of Rights in a sense, is about restraining government, not about empowering citizens. And that’s important because if you look at the idea of rights, over the course of American history, it changes its meaning. In time, it comes to be much more individualistic, these are my rights. But in the period we’re looking at, the constitutional period, it’s a response to a new powerful government. And it’s far more interested in putting up a wall, than it is in empowering people beyond what they already had and knew.

Carol Anderson:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So do you see The Second as an outlier, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

I guess, I don’t know if I see it as an outlier, because I never thought of it that way before. Because it feels to me like the same fear born, Bill of Rights moment, right? Like, oh, well they can’t take away our freedom of speech. Well, they can’t take away our right to a fair trial. And some of these are things that go back to the revolution that they were nervous about. The dynamics of that amendment, I don’t think necessarily make it an outlier. But what you’re suggesting Carol, and you correct me if I’m wrong, is that because of the explicitly race centered aspect of it, an extra layer that’s worked into that amendment.

Carol Anderson:

Absolutely. That’s the peace for me. And I understand the fear of a standing army, I understand that that was back there. But when I’m reading through the Virginia ratification debates, and I’m seeing how much George Mason and Patrick Henry are pounding on the fear of a slavery volt, and they absolute fear that you could not trust the federal government to send the militia down, to protect slaveholders, when the revolt came. And so this is where that dynamic is, and so this is about how do we contain and control, not a government, but how do we contain and control these enslaved folks? How do we contain these black folks?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Carol, is this an early manifestation of State’s rights?

Carol Anderson:

That is a great question. It really could be. It was this fear that you could not trust the federal government, but that tension had been there, like for so long. I mean, that tension was there with the Articles of Confederation. That they didn’t want a strong central federal government. And so you had each of these individual states acting like separate actors. And that thing was absolutely unworkable.

Joanne Freeman:

I think one way of thinking of that too, is kind of relates back to what I just said, which is, it’s not so much, hey states, you have more power. It was, scaring national government, you’re going to have limited power, right? And it depends on how you’re going to use that. Speaking at someone who works in early America on the founding period, the degree to which people are scared of things, or talking about things, or using words differently, in ways that suggest things that are happening back then mean something really different, from the way people interpret them today. A well-regulated militia, that’s very explicitly about the fact that, in that period, a standing army is like the ultimate threat of a freed country. Right? And there’s a new government, it’s going to be powerful, and nobody really knows how it’s going to work. So, yeah, we have to really be able to defend our militias, that would’ve been, these local militias would’ve been the equivalent of armies, that could stand up against the tyrannical national government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Of course, they were all over reading the Greeks. And, one of the things that this accomplishes by creating well-regulated militias, is it sort of harks back to the old Greek system. But it also says, we don’t have to come up with the money to put an army in the field. And we proved in the revolution, that we couldn’t actually do that. So I’m over here being an economic historian type going, well, maybe they were just cheap.

I’m over here being an economic historian type going, “Well, maybe they were just cheap.” Is that part of it or was that just an excuse for the ideology?

Carol Anderson:

I think that part of what we’re seeing is, one, is that militia wasn’t really effective in fending off a professional army. There were just these incredible reports about the militia not showing up when George Washington really needed them to, or the militia taking off running when George Washington really needed them to stay and fight. So this was one of the reasons why Madison put the control of the militia, the arming and the training of the militia under the feds. To beef that up, to get some kind of coherence and organization behind it. But what the anti-federalists saw was that you now have the federal government having control of these militias. And what does that mean?

For some it meant that it means that we’re really moving towards a standing army. What it meant for the slaveholders was that we will not have control over our own state militia, if the feds are in full control of this thing, when the enslaved come after us. So one of the things that I really lay out in the book The Second was the role of anti-blackness in driving the Second Amendment. That fear of how do we protect the white community from these folks who had the Stono Rebellion. From these folks who had numerous rebellions in Virginia and South Carolina. How do we defend ourselves? Whereas the militia would take off running. You couldn’t count on them during the Revolutionary War. You could count on them to put down a slave revolt. They were really good and really effective at that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So you two have convinced me that the Second is about walling off the federal government from hurting people’s rights or from defending white southerners against their Black neighbors. And then of course that’s overturned in 2008 by Heller. The Heller decision, we’ll get to and nothing happened in between. Is that right, Carol?

Carol Anderson:

Oh…

Heather Cox Richardson:

See, I love setting Joanne up like that.

Joanne Freeman:

She does. I was about to say, I am so enjoying watching Heather do that to someone else. I’m sorry, Carol. But I’m always the-

Carol Anderson:

You did warn me.

Joanne Freeman:

The brunt.

Carol Anderson:

You did warn me.

Heather Cox Richardson:

She did.

Joanne Freeman:

She does, almost every week you do that, Heather. So then this happened and everyone went home, right, Joanne?

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Joanne’s over there like, Franklin Beers, Franklin Beers.

Carol Anderson:

There was so much that happened in between then and Heller. One of the things that you continue to see happening is the push to disarm Black folk, regardless of their legal status. So when they were enslaved, they could not have arms. When they were free Blacks, they could not have arms. After the Civil War, you get the Black Codes. And one of the key elements in the Black Codes is disarming the free people.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Could you walk us through some of that because you have all these soldiers who go home, and they’re trained soldiers, and they have their guns, and now they have civil rights. And by 1870, they’re going to have voting rights.

Carol Anderson:

Rights.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What happened?

Carol Anderson:

Woo. And so again, what you see is coming out of Reconstruction. You see this language, this fear of armed Black people who are strutting around acting like they’re citizens, acting like they’re full blown American citizens, acting like they’re human beings. And it’s like, we can’t have this. And so you get the rise of these Neo Confederate governments that come in, that Andrew Johnson had basically provided amnesty to. And they implement Black Codes. And Black Codes were a way to try to reinstall slavery by another name, to control the labor of the free people, but also to control their lives and also to disarm them because they’ve got these guns. And one of the things is when folks know they’re free, they’re like, “I’m free.” And you want to strip them of that freedom. They’re like, “We’ve got to take the arms away from these really dangerous, violent Black people.” And so you continue to get the language of violent, criminal, dangerous happening when it comes to Black folk.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So literally what did that look like?

Carol Anderson:

So you got these white domestic terrorists, such as the Ku Klux Klan, and such as the Red Shirts, and the White Camellias, who are terrorizing these Black folks. The slaughter… Carl Schurz’s, basically travel log of atrocities, as he looks at the conditions in the South, after the Civil War, from like mid-1865 to December 1865. And you just see the bodies being piled up, being burned, being hung, being dismembered. I mean, you just see just torture and violence raining down on this Black community. Because Black folks are standing up. Black folks believe that they have rights. And so I saw these missives coming out of the Black churches, talking about don’t we have our Second Amendment rights. And they response was “No, no, no.” It’s like Amy Winehouse. So we’re switching generations here, but it was Amy Winehouse going, “No, no, no.” And so you hear these plaintive wails going up to the Freedmen’s Bureau, going, “We have our Second Amendment rights.” And the Freedmen’s Bureau is like, “Ah, this violence is a lot. I mean, it is a lot and we just don’t have the power to stop it.”

Joanne Freeman:

And America has a long tradition of violence as political repression, and really no response. And the other thing worth remembering here is that on a local level, the way that this kind of violence works is that if you have some really over the top nasty, violent, horrible punishments, not only are they punishing and destroying bodies and lives, but they stand there as repressive reminders.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

You don’t want to do what we just punished that person for doing.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

So you could have all your claims you want about your rights. You’re not going to want to demand them after you see these sorts of things.

Carol Anderson:

So after the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, which the US Supreme Court then overturned the Force Act and said, “No, the Federal government cannot stop white domestic terrorism because these are private acts, and the Force Act can only go against State acts.” And then after the Hamburg Massacre in 1874 in South Carolina, again, a slaughter, President Ulysses S Grant was just beside himself. And he said, “You know what these states all have in common. It’s not Christianity. It’s not civilization. It is the right to kill Negros.” Basically without any accountability and without any consequences. I paraphrased his last piece, but he was talking about being able to slaughter Black folks without accountability, without consequences.

Heather Cox Richardson:

When you talk about the taking away of guns, Carol, is that part of what’s driving the concept of Black Americans, and indigenous Americans in the same period, as criminals, the idea they’re criminals. You have to construct criminals in order to take their guns away.

Carol Anderson:

What I’m seeing is the need to construct them as violent, and as criminal, and as a threat in order to justify what’s being done to them. In order to justify enslaving them. In order to justify lynching them. In order to justify removing them from their land.

Joanne Freeman:

I was about to say, taking their land.

Carol Anderson:

Right.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, they’re horrible. They’re violent. They’re savages. They’re going to kill us. And so we’re defending ourselves by pushing them out and taking their land. It makes you the sort of virtuous I’m defending myself person.

Carol Anderson:

It’s a linguistic twist that is really powerful even today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I was going to say, I hate how much this echoes. I just hate how much this echos.

Joanne Freeman:

So what is going through your head, Heather? What echos are you talking about?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The idea that, for example, we in America have tended to talk about young Black Americans and young indigenous Americans as adults from extraordinarily young ages. Whereas white guys can be children. I mean, when we talked about Donald Trump Jr, as a child, and it’s like, “Wait a minute, isn’t he like in his forties?” And then we’ve got a 14 year old who is killed as an adult. It’s like that whole sort of reordering of American society.

Carol Anderson:

For me, one of the things about the role of anti-blackness is that once you have defined Black folks as criminals, as a threat, as inherently violent, then adding guns makes that violence exponentially. They become an exponential threat.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And obviously we haven’t gotten to the present yet, but you know what we’re not talking about at all is women. And you had some wonderful examples in your book of women who stand their ground.

Carol Anderson:

I’m going to go more contemporary now with women standing their ground. Think about Marissa Alexander, who was the Black woman in Florida around about the same time as Trayvon Martin. And she had been a victim of domestic violence. And she had just had a baby. And her partner came at her, threatening her, she’s running for her life. She gets the gun out of her car in the garage, and goes back into the house, and shoots a warning shock to tell him to back off. She didn’t shoot him. She shot a warning shot. She got hit with a 20 year sentence.

So clearly, in a stand your ground state, where you have documented domestic violence, a Black woman protecting herself-

Heather Cox Richardson:

And her baby.

Carol Anderson:

And her baby, by shooting a warning shot. She didn’t have that right to defend herself. And then I juxtapose that to George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, where again, a stand your ground state… Where you have Trayvon, who is a child. He’s 17. But in the media, he gets thugified. He gets heavier, taller, darker, more malicious. And you have a grown man who sees this Black child and says, “Ah, threat to my community.”

That child and says, “Ah! Threat to my community.” Zimmerman takes a loaded weapon and stalks this child through the neighborhood. But the way that it plays out is that Zimmerman, the grown man with the loaded gun, is the one who was fearful and Trayvon was the threat and so killing him was okay because he was a threatening, vicious, thugafied, drug smoking, dangerous Black man. That was the way that it played out in the thugification of Trayvon Martin.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that jumps out to me here for all of this work is it seems to me we are in different periods constructing a vision of America as being about one guy with all these rights defending himself and theoretically his family from that dangerous other. And that, of course, brings us to this current moment, which I think … Joanne, that’s fair to say that that’s kind of what was going on in the American south in the 1850s, right?

Joanne Freeman:

This fending yourself off from the dangerous other? Yeah. It becomes very important. In a sense, it’s part of your justification for being violent and aggressive and attacking is if you define it as being defensive. “Well, they’re out to get me in some way.” “They’re coming.” I remember in my most recent book there’s someone who reaches out to masons and says, “Look, we’re the masons and we’re all over the place and we’re a brotherhood and we can talk to each other and we can …”

Heather Cox Richardson:

“We’re all over the place.”

Joanne Freeman:

Okay, maybe he didn’t put it that way. That’s my summary. Paraphrase.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Paraphrase, I get it.

Carol Anderson:

Yeah, paraphrase.

Joanne Freeman:

They are all over the place. “And we are true to each other and we can talk to each other and we can bring down the tone of things.” This is like 1858 or 9. And someone responds to the letter in which this person is pleading and says, “Are you really kidding? You think I’m going to listen to this? You guys are about to come into my home and burn down my house and take my family. I don’t care. Why am I listening to you?” “This is life and death.” Right now, at that point, that’s not happening but that person who responds is totally in defense moment so anything goes. And sometimes that’s the best way to justify violence. And it’s not necessarily that people thing, “Time to justify violence. I think I’ll make myself be defensive.” But that dynamic is really important.

You always want to depict yourself as the victimized, virtuous person under attack and thus anything that you do is justifiable.

Carol Anderson:

And to me this is why, when we’re seeing the horrific evolution of the second amendment … It was bad enough as its anti-Blackness core continues through with the well-regulated militia. But watching the Heller decision of the US Supreme Court in 2008. Heller comes out of Washington, DC. And Washington, DC had really strict gun safety laws that dealt with how you had to maintain your gun within your own home because they knew that there was lots of violence in the home with weapons. And you had this case, then, where the US Supreme Court looks at this and says …. The US Supreme Court cherry-picked some history and came up with this founding fathers individual right to bear arms. And anybody who does the real work in this period knows that that second amendment was about the well-regulated militia. It wasn’t about an individual right to bear arms.

But now, the US Supreme Court, based on bad history, has created a judicial standard that you have this individual right to bear arms. But because that was Washington, DC it dealt with on a federal basis and so then the McDonald decision in 2010 dealt with Chicago and then that made it across the United States. But what this individual right to bear arms … When you read through those decisions what they keep harping on is that you have the right to self-defense. It is the right to self-defense and so it’s crafting a really hostile world where you have to … When you’re outside of your home … When you’re inside your home you got the castle doctrine, defend yourself. When you’re outside your home, anywhere you are, which is part of Stand Your Ground … Anywhere where you have a right to be and you perceive threat you have the right to defend yourself.

This ratcheting up of the fear of being in American society that you have to always be on guard, that you always have to know that you are under threat. And then it’s the way that the society defines threat. After Uvalde, the slaughter of this children and the two teachers in Texas … When folks are like, “So, let me see if I get this right. He turned 18 and he had immediate access to AR-15s?” Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas, was like, “Don’t talk to me about our laws. What about Chicago? What about Chicago?” Right? Chicago. That is dog whistle politics. Think about all of those Black folks there in Chicago who are violent. They had this huge homicide rate. And it’s that imagery of the slaughter, the imagery of the Black violence, the imagery Black threat.

Think about Bernard Getz in New York City in 1984, I want to say it was. And he was on the subway and there were Black teenagers who asked him if he had five dollars or if he had a cigarette or something like that and he pulls out a gun and he shoots all of them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I remember.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

I can remember, too.

Carol Anderson:

Yes. Yes. And you got this thing where he became a hero because he took on the threat of these Black teenagers who were unarmed. But he dealt with that threat and he walked. The jury said, “Yeah, you had the right to be afraid.”

Joanne Freeman:

What was your response, Carol? And also, Heather, when the decision came down about guns and that series of decisions? Carol, did you have a particularly distinctive … other than strong response? How did you respond as a person who works on this?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The New York state … The Bruen decision?

Joanne Freeman:

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Carol Anderson:

I thought a couple of things. One is that given where you had the republican national committee … The head of it … Rona Romney McDaniel … Saying that January 6th was legitimate political discourse so that violence was legitimate political discourse. And then when you think about Reuters … Reuters did that analysis of the threats going in to election officials and election workers from the 2020 election and how many times you have the second amendment invoked as the way to deal with these folks who stole the election.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s right out of reconstruction.

Carol Anderson:

So seeing the New York decision I went, “This is further down that slope.” I’ve talked about how American democracy is under a full blown assault. The land assault is the attack on our voting rights. We’re seeing state after state after state implement more barriers, more hurdles for access to the ballot box based on the big lie that this was a stolen election. The second assault is the sea assault where we’re getting the wiping away of American history, the teaching of real American history where you don’t talk about slavery, you don’t talk about the genocidal removal of indigenous people, where you don’t talk about xenophobia and the anti-immigrant strain coming through American society.

Joanne Freeman:

And the separation of church and state, apparently.

Carol Anderson:

Okay! You don’t walk about any of that. No, you made some stuff up that separation of church and state wasn’t even in the constitution. That is the sea assault. When you wipe away American history then you can craft your own self-serving narrative that deals with the relationship of people to power and that deals with who’s in and who’s out. And then, to me, there is the air assault. And that air assault is the loosening of these gun laws. We already saw it before the Supreme Court decision in Texas and in Georgia where you could get permitless carry, where you didn’t have to have any real training. And then you have the Supreme Court’s decision that basically says you’ve got the right to carry a weapon anywhere you are that isn’t sensitive. And we don’t think a lot of places that you’re defining as sensitive as being really sensitive.

When you link that in with the political violence that has already been demonstrated against election workers and already demonstrated in January 6th, we are in a heap of trouble. That’s what I thought.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I agree with the idea we’re in a terrible crisis here. But one of the things that was interesting about the Brewin decision which came down at the end of June and overturned a New York state law about whether or not people had access to guns under certain circumstances is that New York promptly passed a whole slew of far tighter regulations than were there before and so did New Jersey. And when you combine that with the fact that the Governor Newsom in California has all of a sudden been really ramping up California doing whatever it wants out there … I think today he announced that they are going to be manufacturing their own insulin and, of course, going to be a state where people can continue to get abortions.

It really makes me wonder … And to take us back to where we started about how this moment is going to play out. That is, when the Supreme Court that we have now, which has been utterly radicalized with these six people from the federalist society who want to throw everything back to the state, with these six people from the Federalist Society who want to throw everything back to the States, they’re clearly trying to kill business regulation and the protection of civil rights and a basic social safety net, but at the same time, just like in the years before the Civil War, what that means is that states can do whatever they want. New York has just basically said, Hey, we’re really cracking down on gun ownerships, so has New Jersey. California has said, Hey, we’re going to have abortion rights out here.

When you think about this moment, dear God, doesn’t that look like the 1850s? The difference between then and now is that then the enslavers, the largest slavers who basically ran the US economy were all in the South. They were like, we’d love to just go make our own country because we’re the ones with all the cash. Although, it wasn’t really cash, it was property and all that. Now, it’s the blue states that are the economic engines. I don’t think those red states are going to say, Yeah, it’s okay if you go off and do your own thing. I think they want to have their minority rule, not to create their own little minority fiefdom, but to impose it on the majority.

This is an entirely new moment and that dynamic of we’re focusing on the states who aren’t going to have rights, but what about the states that are going to have expanded rights? How does that play out? Does somebody in Mississippi go, Hey, Massachusetts is looking pretty good over there. Then somebody in Mississippi says, Well, you can’t go because we need workers. We’ve been there before too.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, we have. Yes, we have. We were there with the great migration. When Black folks were fleeing the South because of the lynching, because of the lack of education, because of the lack of economic opportunity. There were cities that were passing laws saying that black folks could not leave for economic opportunity. They couldn’t leave to get a better job.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The same was true after 1876, where they were literally labor conventions that said a white guy couldn’t hire a black person away from a neighbor.

Carol Anderson:

We talk about how capitalism is held up on high, this enshrined thing. One of the key laws of capitalism is labor has the right to take itself where it can get the best deal, except when you get these rules put in place saying, no, you can’t leave so what they were doing during the Great Migration was saying if you try to leave, we will criminalize you. We will incarcerate you, and then we will put you basically on a work farm. It was we’re going to extract your labor eight ways to Sunday, come hell or high water. We’re going to extract your labor and you cannot leave for the American dream.

Joanne Freeman:

People not being able to leave states or go to other states is the most obvious thing in the world, which is abortion, right?

Carol Anderson:

Abortion.

Joanne Freeman:

There we have basically, in one way or another, in some states they’re talking about making it so that you can’t leave to go to another state to get an abortion. Which is first of all, remarkably, I don’t have a word actually for that, as to what that means and what that entails and how anyone could possibly do that. It’s like the Fugitive Slave Act. Slaves would escape from the South, they would go north. Basically said well Northerners have to return those people to the South and law enforcement has to help in that process. You can’t help someone continue to escape.

What you have there in the 19th century is people fleeing from one state to another state for freedom, and people in the North being told, sorry, I know you like that kind of freedom here, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to take that back. We’re in this moment where women might go from a state that doesn’t allow abortion to a state that does and what we hear these people talking about essentially saying, no, I’m sorry, you can’t go to another state and if you’re there, will you be allowed to have an abortion? How will this work? We’ve talked before, Heather, you and I about how sometimes I’m the person screaming with my hair on fire. This puts me in a screaming-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think all historians are right now.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that is true. This is a screaming with my hair on fire kind of moment because even though I understand the logic of it and we’ve seen it coming bit by bit, and as historians we could predict parts of it living through it and watching it happening, it sucks.

Carol Anderson:

It sucks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It totally sucks.

Joanne Freeman:

I wasn’t going to quite say that, but I’ll take it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Sorry, it’s an unfortunate moment in our personal existence.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m always like, it’s unfortunate that… It does suck, it does. We should start bringing things to a close but part of what I want to say here relates to much of what was said and that is particularly in relation to this recent stream of Supreme Court’s cases, it’s easy for the implications and impact of some of this stuff to seem invisible. In history, when we look back, we have to look for it and then we could see it or in this case, it would’ve been easy for this to vanish and we wouldn’t know about it.

I always say to people, we’re at this moment where the implications and the impact matter beyond the beyond. That you need to be aware of what’s going on, thinking about the implications of what’s happening, and thinking about real history and what happened in the past and how that can actually inform what might happen going forward. We really need to be alert and aware and you just use the word active. We need to be activists to deal with this vision that’s being sent out into the world about a kind of America that the majority isn’t necessarily on board for.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let’s hand you the last word, Carol. What should we think about the second and what should we do to try and, at least as a historian, I’m suggesting that we need to get back to a pre-Heller understanding of the second. There was more to it in your book. You actually thought that the second, I believe as I wrote to you after I read it, that you were making a much larger argument about American society when you wrote about the second.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, and that argument deals with the way that anti-blackness is so embedded in the way that we operate in this nation. It is the way that insurrection that happened on January 6th was basically provoked by saying that those people in Atlanta, in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Philadelphia stole the election from good, honest, hardworking white folk and so because they stole it, we have to take our country back.

That kind of anti-blackness that delegitimizes the citizenship and the humanity of folks who live here, who are American citizens is so profound. It has major implications and repercussions for this democracy. We are teetering because we have not dealt with the anti-blackness. Part of what I’ve also argued about the second amendment, the reason why we don’t have real gun control laws, real gun safety laws, is because of that fear that I have to defend myself.

I think about Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying For Whiteness where he does a study and he finds that in rural Missouri folks, who have had gun violence in their families, are in a support group and they’re talking about they don’t want gun safety laws because those people from St. Louis will come down here and try to take everything that we have. This is the only thing that we have to defend ourselves and defend our property.

When we have that kind of fear coursing through this society, when we have that kind of dehumanization coursing through the way that we handle voting laws, the way that we handle the basic right to vote, we are in trouble in this democracy. It requires us to have real history so we can understand the way that anti-blackness has influenced and affected American society and so that we can begin to dismantle that anti-blackness and really live into the fullness of this nation.