The Federal Bureau of Investigation couldn't protect her from the Ku Klux Klan, she was told. But 74 year-old Eleanor Roosevelt didn't care--she was packing heat, and had been for decades.
It was 1958, and Mrs. Roosevelt had made plans to speak at a civil rights workshop at Tennessee's Highlander Folk School. There was just one problem:
The Ku Klux Klan learned about her plans. The day before her trip, the elderly, gray-haired woman was contacted by the FBI. "We can't guarantee your safety," they told her. "The Klan's put a bounty on your head, a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can't protect you. You can't go." But the little old lady answered, "I didn't ask for your protection...I have a commitment. I'm going."
And she did. She flew down to the Nashville airport, where she was joined by a friend, an elderly white woman aged 71. The pair got into the car, lay a loaded pistol on the front seat between them, and drove into the night. No Secret Service or police escort. Just the two little old ladies with a gun to keep them safe.
Conclusion: "It was the exercise of her Second Amendment rights that enabled Eleanor Roosevelt to use her First Amendment rights to crusade for the Fourteenth Amendment rights of blacks."
Outstanding. I never knew any of this, but I'm glad I've found out--and my disdain for gun control advocates is even more intense now than before, which I'd hardly thought possible. It's also worth pondering the nature of evil and how it can be fought, and defeated--we can follow the FBI or Department of Homeland Security model, or we can heed Eleanor Roosevelt:
In her 1960 book, You Learn by Living, Mrs. Roosevelt urged her readers not to cower before the world's dangers, but to stare them down: "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." (Emphasis in original.) Posted by Craig Ceely at July 9, 2003 03:11 PM