The same thing can be said of Mississippi civil rights activist T.RM. Howard. In 1955, Howard correctly recognized that state officials had zero interest in conducting a thorough investigation into the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. So Howard, a successful doctor and entrepreneur, launched his own private investigation. He located, interviewed, and kept safe a number of important witnesses, stashing them in his own house.

One of those witnesses was Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley. Her testimony was crucial because it contradicted that of Tallahatchie County Sheriff Henry Clarence Strider, who insisted that the body pulled from the river was not that of Till, but was instead that of someone else “as white as I am.” The sheriff, a well-known racist, was lying in the hopes of bolstering the defense’s claim that outside “agitators” had faked the crime in order to stir up trouble.

Before Bradley and the other witnesses could participate in the trial, they had to get there unscathed. That’s where the Second Amendment came in. To use a modern expression, Howard was a “gun nut.” He slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed and walked around with a pistol at his waist. To keep Bradley and the others safe from hostile racist attacks—including attacks by those who wore government uniforms and wielded government power—Howard led an armed caravan to and from the courthouse.

The examples of John Salter and T.R.M. Howard are not unusual. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a conceal-carry permit (denied by the government) and declared, “the principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.” According to civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hammer, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom.” Rosa Parks once described her dinner table “covered with guns” while activists met in her home to plot strategy.

And, of course, the idea of the Second Amendment guarding personal liberty against racist government encroachment goes back even further than the era of Jim Crow. As the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass liked to say, “the true remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill” is a “good revolver.”