The Racist Massacre You Probably Never Heard Of

I’ve been looking at historic massacres for a little while now, and there’s always been one that looms slightly larger in my mind than most others. All but one, really. The one I’m talking about is called the Camilla Massacre.

You’ve probably never heard of it, and that’s fine. It’s local history to me, something that happened just a handful of miles down the road from where I sit as I type this, in a town I’ve been to countless times, both before I learned of this horrific event and afterward.

It happened in 1868. If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of American history, you know this was right after the Civil War. That’s right, this is the Reconstruction era, when the United States government maintained firm control over the South and essentially dictated what was what to the former Confederacy.

In 1868, though, something happened here in Georgia. See, the new state constitution gave black men the right to vote. For the people who used to own those black men, that was a terrible fate. I guess they figured they couldn’t hold office if the people they’d ordered to be whipped for not working hard enough had a say in the matter.

Imagine that.

Anyway, as the year progressed, 33 black men were elected to the General Assembly. White Democrats conspired with a handful of Republicans–Democrats were the minority at the time–and expelled them all. Why? Because they were black.

A lot of freedmen took issue with that, and they planned a march. They were going to march from my hometown of Albany, Georgia, to Camilla in protest. Led by Phillip Joiner, who was one of the expelled legislators, the 150 to 300 mostly black marchers planned to rally at the courthouse.

For the Ku Klux Klan, though, that was a terrible thing. After all, in their racist, diseased minds, it seemed obvious that black people didn’t really have rights, even if the Yankees freed them.

The sheriff and a “citizens committee” confronted the marchers and ordered them to surrender their guns. There was no law against them having them, of course, but that didn’t stop the attempt.

The marchers refused, and so the sheriff and his buddies fell back and waited to ambush them. When they did, the marchers fell back into the swamps of Southwest Georgia to try to evade their pursuers.

Even so, nine to 15 people were murdered that day, and the violence didn’t stop.

Over the next two weeks, freed slaves were attacked and beaten to prevent them from voting in the upcoming election.

In response to this heinous act, what did the General Assembly do? Did they recognize they were wrong, readmit the wrongfully expelled legislators, and commence in a kind of racial healing?

Nah. They did something else.

Among other things, they created a law that forbade the carrying of guns at public gatherings, including political rallies. That’s right, they passed gun control that would have disarmed the victims of the massacre.

I think about that when people like Kris Brown and other anti-gunners start trying to claim that the Second Amendment is inherently racist. We know that a lot of gun control has its roots in racist measures. The Biden DOJ would cite those as a defense for gun control rather routinely, as if it didn’t matter that the laws targeted black men and women, Native Americans, and Catholics, of all people. They would pretend it was irrelevant, then claim the Second Amendment was purely about fugitive slave patrols.

Georgia finally got rid of the public gathering clause a handful of years ago, but it wasn’t that long in the past that this law with blatantly racist roots was a part of the laws that every concealed carrier in the state needed to understand.

I won’t say there weren’t racist actions carried out with guns back in the day. There’s no excuse for it and we all know that. But there was nothing but racism behind far too many gun control laws.

While people were tearing down statues simply on the rumor that the person honored was racist in some way, the same people defended many of these laws, even after being told of their origin.

The Camilla Massacre doesn’t make most history books. It didn’t even make my Georgia History class.

That’s probably because it makes it easier to sell gun control later on.

Editor’s Note: The radical left hasn’t really changed all that much over the years and will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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