My Essay in the Boston Globe in honor of Independence Day

Go here.

Read the Constitutions Featured in America's Forgotten Constitutions

For readers interested in a closer look at the documents discussed in my book, America's Forgotten Constitutions, I have included links to the constitutions below.

1.  The Indian Stream Constitution (1832)

2.  Icarian Constitution (1850)

3.  John Brown's Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States (1858)

4.  Constitution for the Confederate States of America (1861)

5.  Constitution for the State of Sequoyah (1905)

6.  Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (1947)

7.  The Code of Umoja (amended 1985)

8.  Northwest American Republic Constitution (2006)

Seen on the Shelf at Politics & Prose

Write-Up in Hometown Paper

From the Port Townsend Leader.

Boston Globe Op-Ed: "From NSA to Race, A Protector of Rights Needed"

The Boston Globe has published my piece proposing the creation of a new office dedicated to protecting civil and human rights.

Update:  More context for the proposal here.

Self-Defense and the Fourteenth Amendment

Dance and sing you black creatures
of Mother Africa.
Move to the sound of the drums
of your forefathers.
Hold on to your drums and beat
them in defiance of the slavemaster and
let their thundering sound awaken those who sleep.
–Mabel Robinson Williams, Transition (1966)

Mabel Robinson Williams passed away last week.  Williams may have been most famous for being married to Robert F. Williams, the controversial former head of the NAACP in Monroe County, NC, but she was an intriguing theorist and fierce activist in her own right.  She recalled that her father slept every night with a pearl-handled pistol under his pillow in case the Klan’s night riders attacked.  As an adult, she served as Secretary of the local NAACP, co-founded a newsletter called The Crusader, organized a mutual aid society called CARE, and helped run Radio Free Dixie.  Mabel called herself a “co-warrior” and “helpmate” to Robert, even as she served as a nurse’s aid and later operated a day care.  When her sons joined a picket against a segregated swimming pool, she sat in the car with guns, keeping one eye out for armed whites.  She and other female members of a rifle club trained to protect their families against the Klan.  Once, Mabel came out of her house with a shotgun and chased off deputies trying to arrest her husband.

Husband and wife worked together on Negroes With Guns (1962), which articulated a theory of self-defense of constitutional rights.  The Williamses “did not advocate violence for its own sake,” nor did they urge “reprisals against whites.”  Instead, they argued that armed self-reliance was compatible with the tactics of peaceful protest promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. to promote legal change (but they blamed proponents of non-violence for inflexibility in demanding that blacks renounce their right to self-protection).  In their view, armed self-defense was justified because of a “breakdown of the law” in failing to protect black families from armed whites.  As they tell it, Brown v. Board of Education unleashed not only generalized racial unrest in the South, but also a wave of violence directly against NAACP members and their allies.  “[T]here was no such thing as a 14th Amendment to the Constitution in Monroe, NC,” because local officials refused to enforce the law and protect the life, liberty, and property of black families.  Federal and state officials, too, were nowhere to be found.  In fact, many in the community believed that state and local officials were conspiring to deprive black Americans of their constitutional rights. Black self-defense filled this gap in the constitutional order.

Any limited theory of armed self-defense became greatly complicated by the pair’s embrace of Marxist revolutionary ideas about the worldwide liberation of the oppressed.  Negroes With Guns predicted a day when racial violence in the United States became so pervasive that “non-violence will be suicidal in itself.”  It cited with approval the legacy of John Brown favoring the “righteous use” of weapons to “destroy those things that block [the American Negro's] path to a greater happiness in life.”  Linking armed tactics with revolutionary ends blurred the lines between constitutional preservation and constitutional usurpation–a recurring problem that faced all black power groups during this period.  In theory and practice, it became difficult to draw clear lines between self-defense and the armed instigation of foundational change.

After a protest turned unruly and Robert Williams was charged with kidnapping a white family (he claimed to be protecting the family from a mob), the pair fled.  While in exile in China, Robert briefly held the Presidency of the Republic of New Afrika, founded by the followers of Malcolm X after his assassination.  Professor Pero Gaglo Dagbovie recounts that in later years, Mabel became a community historian and keeper of an oral tradition of the Black Power period.  This tradition includes not only the major events that transpired during a tumultuous period of American history, but also popular interpretations of the law.


Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions.

Contested Ideas About Consent

One of the challenging things about studying popular constitutionalism is that theories of power, community, and tactics can be all jumbled together.

For instance, from what I can gather, Cliven Bundy appears to be a rancher who holds a strong, individualist view of property rights and espouses a theory of government in which the local somehow trumps the national (and likely the state as well).  Tactically, he favors the use of private force in defense of constitutional rights and powers (he also believes that he is entitled to the assistance of local and state authorities to resist the federal government).  For now, his statements justifying the use of force seem to be limited to repelling invasions of property (his cattle, money) and personal security (his body, the safety of his family), so they can be plausibly defended on self-defense grounds (in natural law or other ethical terms, not based on statute or a written constitution).  His vague call for a "range war" muddies his claim to principled use of extralegal tactics and opens him up to charges that he is advocating organized violence against the state, so you can bet his next words and actions will be carefully scrutinized (recall that John Brown was tried for insurrection, and black nationalists were often accused of such crimes).

What's harder to figure out is Bundy's theory of consent.  Every popular constitutionalist must present a coherent theory of consent to rebut arguments that simple lawlessness is being advocated.  Secessionists favored the "compact theory" of consent, which holds that each state agreed to the formation of the U.S. Constitution and that each state could withdraw its consent.  Abraham Lincoln and defenders of the Union rejected this approach, saying that the people in the several states gave their consent and that only the people as a whole could dissolve the bonds of political community.

John Brown argued that groups of Americans (slaves, freedmen, and abolitionists) joined by their conviction and shared tragedy could disaffiliate from the existing form of government without committing treason.  From there, group-based theories of consent flourished.  Modern black nationalists and white separatists argue that racial or ethnic identity provides the basis for giving or withdrawing consent.  Typically, disgruntled Americans signal their disaffiliation through a public act: meeting in convention and signing a public declaration.

What makes sovereign citizens and their ilk different is that they often argue that each individual has the power to withhold the consent of the governed. For many observers, this is a theory of consent that descends into anarchy.  There is also a more selective, and sometimes mysterious, quality to the extent of their disaffiliation. Often, such figures "declare independence" when pressed, during criminal trials or litigation over taxes or property rights. Others, without any prompting, file documents in traditional government offices announcing their unorthodox legal views, sometimes over and over again.

Bundy has said he "respect[s] the federal government" but also that it "doesn't have its place in the state of Nevada . . . and Clark County, and that's where my ranch is.  The federal government has no power and no ownership of this land." Unless someone sees an open and notorious act of disaffiliation from the federal government, at this point it looks like he is engaged in selective (issue by issue?) rejection of jurisdiction, backed by an account of political structure that is clearly subversive but not fully implemented.

The task of ascertaining one's constitutional theory is further complicated when more mainstream figures start using the language of popular sovereignty.  It can be hard to figure out how much an elected official believes and how much the official is simply catering to attitudes that are perceived to be widely shared by constituents.  See, for example, this candidate for Governor of South Dakota, who favors state nullification of unjust federal laws, admires Bundy, and shares his belief that sheriffs are the highest law enforcement officials in the land.  Lora Hubbel plainly has not disaffiliated from state government, holds radical localist views of government, supports extralegal tactics, and holds the federal government in antipathy (but it's unclear whether she believes she owes allegiance to the U.S. government).

So, the next time you hear a political aspirant, activist, or lawyer deploy arguments about popular sovereignty, ask that person: (1) what is the basis for making such claims; (2) what tactics are justified; and (3) to what government(s), exactly, does he or she owe allegiance?


Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions.