Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
Page Number: 59

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

53 

Opinion of the Court 

made to disarm blacks); id., at 845–847 (THOMAS, J., con-
curring  in  part  and  concurring  in  judgment);  see  also  S. 
Exec. Doc. No. 43, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 8 (1866) (“Pistols,
old  muskets,  and  shotguns  were  taken  away  from  [freed 
slaves] as such weapons would be wrested from the hands
of lunatics”).

In the years before the 39th Congress proposed the Four-
teenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau regularly kept
it  abreast  of  the  dangers  to  blacks  and  Union  men  in  the 
postbellum South.  The reports described how blacks used 
publicly  carried  weapons  to  defend  themselves  and  their
communities.  For  example,  the  Bureau  reported  that  a 
teacher from a Freedmen’s school in Maryland had written
to  say  that,  because  of  attacks  on  the  school,  “[b]oth  the
mayor  and  sheriff  have  warned  the  colored  people  to  go
armed to school, (which they do,)” and that the “[t]he super-
intendent of schools came down and brought [the teacher] 
a revolver” for his protection.  Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st 
Sess.,  658  (1866);  see  also  H. R.  Exec.  Doc.  No.  68,  39th 
Cong., 2d Sess., 91 (1867) (noting how, during the New Or-
leans  riots,  blacks  under  attack  “defended  themselves  . . . 
with such pistols as they had”).

Witnesses before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction 
also described the depredations visited on Southern blacks,
and the efforts they made to defend themselves.  One Vir-
ginia music professor related that when “[t]wo Union men 
were attacked . . . they drew their revolvers and held their
assailants at bay.”  H. R. Rep. No. 30, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 
pt. 2, p. 110 (1866).  An assistant commissioner to the Bu-
reau from Alabama similarly reported that men were “rob-
bing and disarming negroes upon the highway,” H. R. Exec.
Doc.  No.  70,  39th  Cong.,  1st  Sess.,  297  (1866),  indicating 
that  blacks  indeed  carried  arms  publicly  for  their  self-
protection, even if not always with success.  See also H. R. 
Exec. Doc. No. 329, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 41 (1868) (describ-
ing a Ku Klux Klan outfit that rode “through the country