A History of Deploying the US National Guard to Make White People Feel Safe

Since its humble beginnings as a colonial militia, the National Guard has served as slave catchers, civil rights suppressors and a historically anti-Black police force.

(Master Sgt. Matthew Hecht/U.S. Air National Guard)

When England sent John Stone to America, it was not sending its best people.

Stone was described as “a drunkard, a lecher, a braggart, a bully and blasphemer,” and by 1634, the undocumented immigrant’s rap sheet included arrests for theft, blasphemy and sleeping with the wives of settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. After reportedly committing acts of cannibalism in the Caribbean, the English thug came to America and pioneered an early form of carjacking (he plied a ship’s captain with alcohol and stole his boat, which technically was “boatjacking”). When Stone threatened to smite the shite out of the Plymouth colony’s governor, he was “ordered upon pain of death to come here no more.” Instead of self-deporting, he went to Connecticut and kidnapped a few indigenous people, who deported Stone to the afterlife.

Technically, the Pequot natives were America’s first Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Stone was the definition of an “illegal alien,” but he was also white. So, on Dec. 13, 1636, the Massachusetts General Court organized four militia regiments and trained them once a month to protect the Christian colonists from the indigenous “heathens.” By July 1637, Salem militia leader John Endicott—who was “generally considered the most intolerant and least conciliable of the early Massachusetts magistrates and governors”—had mustered 90 militiamen to avenge Stone’s death in what became known as the Pequot Genocide.

To the English, the treaty banning the indigenous tribe from speaking their language, living on their land or calling themselves “Pequot” was a victory. To natives, the first planned ethnic cleansing in the American colonies was committed by trained terrorists. But today, for more than 430,000 Americans, Dec. 13, 1636—the day the slaughter, enslavement and forced deportation of the indigenous began—is a day of celebration.

It’s the birthday of the U.S. National Guard.

Since its humble 17th-century beginnings, the colonial, state and territorial militias have evolved from disparate, loosely organized reserve local militias into a highly trained civilian force that can be deployed at a moment’s notice. They defeated the British Army in the American Revolution, helped victims of natural disasters and served as benchwarmers for the world’s mightiest military.

But Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., along with threats to occupy other American cities, highlights another function of this historic armed force. Whether it’s a group of ragtag colonizers shooting the Pequot into extinction or camouflaged soldiers going thug-hunting in the nation’s capital, using militia forces to enforce law and order has served one historic purpose in America:

Maintaining the racial order.

This is how the National Guard went from slave catchers to a national anti-Black police force.

The Original Watchmen

William Bull didn’t want any smoke.

The rich, well-connected lieutenant governor of South Carolina was out for a leisurely ride on Sept. 9, 1739, when he ran into 81 gangbangers who had burned down six plantations and killed two dozen white people to emancipate themselves. Instead of engaging with the rebels, Bull ran away (presumably screaming, “The YNs are coming!”) and gathered a militia.

The people of South Carolina were so horrified by the Stono Rebellion that they quit human trafficking for 10 years and passed the Negro Act of 1740. The comprehensive slave code banned “all assemblies and congregations of slaves, free negroes, mulattoes and mestizoes assembled or met together.” Like Boston, Charleston had already established a “watch” to protect the city from invaders and natives. But in Charleston, slave owners could avoid militia duty by sending their “trusty slaves” to serve in their stead.

The Negro Act ended all of that. It outlawed all Black people from carrying firearms and created a separate militia with police and military powers. The militia men’s duties included kicking in doors to stop slaves from engaging in illegal activities that gave white people the heebie-jeebies, including writing, praying and meeting “for the purpose of mental instruction.”

Georgia’s 1753 “Act for Establishing and Regulating Patrols,” adopted South Carolina’s template, conscripting white males to work as slave catchers and revolt suppressors. Savannah funded its city watch by splitting the profits from apprehending fugitive slaves with its militiamen. Black “half-free” citizens in New York were obligated to defend the city against attacks by Native Americans and foreign adversaries. But after the 1712 New York Slave Revolt, Africans in the “Land of the Blacks” were relieved of watch duty and white males were conscripted into service.

By the time of the American Revolution, maintaining control over enslaved people was the primary duty of local and state militias. One of the main reasons George Washington wanted a “Continental Army” with Black enlistees was that the white militiamen were ill-prepared for military combat against the more skilled British Army. Even with the home-field advantage, the Patriots could barely beat the away team that was marching in line while wearing red coats on the battlefield like a band at a PWI homecoming! So when the Constitution granted Congress the power to maintain an army, the wealthy slave owners in the Virginia ratification convention had one concern:

Who was gonna protect their slaves?

What if the enslaved people read this Constitution thingy and thought it applied to them? What if states elected anti-slavery congressmen? Who was gonna check them?

“In this State there are 236,000 blacks,” Patrick Henry pleaded during Virginia’s ratification debate. “Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? There is no ambiguous implication, or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point. They have the power in clear unequivocal terms; and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

To assure the wealthy human traffickers that their chattel would be safe, James Madison agreed to a list of 10 revisions, including one that would assure Mr. “Give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death” that his chattel would die having never tasted liberty.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That’s how we got the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment. The Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795 allowed the president to take control of these militias when necessary. But because slavery was now a constitutionally-approved, state-supported enterprise, the “in case of insurrection” clause in the Militia Acts also applied to slave conspiracies. The “free able-bodied white male citizens” saw themselves as homeland defenders—not soldiers who fought wars. That’s why New York’s militia graciously patrolled the city “from dusk to dawn for three months” after rumors of a slave conspiracy, but said, “Nah, we’ll pass,” when they were deployed to fight in an actual military battle.

Fighting in a military conflict was also optional for Mississippi militia members; policing slaves was not. Tennessee Guardsmen had the “additional privilege of administering corporal punishment to free negroes who might be concerned in encouraging disorderliness among slaves.” The Virginia Military Institute was founded as “a training ground for the Virginia Militia” after Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt shook the entire state. City leaders in Charleston founded the historic military college, The Citadel, to create a “competent force as a municipal guard” after city leaders discovered Denmark Vesey’s 1822 conspiracy.

The enslaved men who planned the 1811 revolt on Louisiana’s German Coast made local militia leader Manuel Andry their first target. After sending Andry to Satan’s detention center, the rebels dressed in the militia uniforms, hoping that the New Orleans militia would open the city gates. The German Coast Uprising—the largest revolt in U.S. history—wasn’t successful. However, it inspired lawmakers to require monthly military training for all white males in the Louisiana territory.

In 1812, this “militia became the foundation for the Louisiana National Guard.”

Slave Catcher-to-Confederate Pipeline

When 11 Southern states decided that white supremacy was more important than being American, they didn’t have to worry about building an army. They already had soldiers who were trained to fight for slavery. The Confederate Army was initially composed of state and local militias like the Charleston Light Dragoons and McNeill’s Rangers. Many states used the militia muster rolls to conscript men into the war to serve under graduates from the Ivy League of slave patrols. “West Point in the North graduated military officers for the U.S. Army,” writes Stanley Burns. “The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina and the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington prepared their cadets for leadership in the new Confederate Army.”

The only people excused from serving in the Confederate Army were white men who enslaved more than 20 people. The traitors believed the Twenty-Slave Law was necessary “to ensure the productivity of the senslaved population and to maintain the safety of the white population.” Ultimately, staying home to protect slavery was the only way to be excused from fighting to protect slavery.

These militias didn’t evaporate into thin air after getting beaten like a drum in the war for white supremacy. Following their period of fucking around and finding out, confederate veterans formed paramilitary units like Confederate Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Ku Klux Klan and General Wade Hampton III’s Red Shirts. (Forrest was a notorious slave trader who was responsible for killing 300 Black soldiers during the Fort Pillow Massacre. Hampton’s grandfather, Wade Hampton I, was famous for putting down the German Coast Uprising.)

When Hampton used his militia to steal the 1876 election, the nation’s two major political parties agreed to extract federal peacekeeping troops from the former Confederate states, essentially removing the only opposition to the paramilitary racial terrorist militias in the South. Two years later, the Posse Comitatus Act prevented the president from using the military as a domestic police force. Congress eventually passed a law creating a “National Guard of the States” out of any “organized militia,” begging history to repeat itself.

History would oblige.

In 1898, Illinois Gov. John R. Tanney instructed his state militia to shoot a train carrying Black workers with a state-provided Gatling gun to prevent them from replacing white coal miners, who were on strike. “If any Negroes are brought into Pana while I am in charge, and they refuse to retreat when ordered to do so, I will order my men to fire,” the captain of the Illinois State Guard said. “If I lose every man under my command, no negroes shall land in Pana.”

While many understand that the Tulsa Race Massacre was a “coordinated, military-style attack” by white residents, the Department of Justice describes the event differently:

Violence was initially unorganized and opportunistic. But at daybreak on June 1, a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic. White Tulsans, many of whom had recently drilled together as the “Home Guard,” formed to replace members of the National Guard who had gone overseas during the Great War, became organized and efficient in their destruction. They looted, burned and destroyed 35 city blocks while Greenwood’s residents tried desperately to defend their homes…

Law enforcement officers (both from the Tulsa Police and the National Guard) disarmed Black residents, confiscated their weapons and detained many in makeshift camps under armed guard. In addition, there are credible reports that at least some law enforcement officers did more than arrest and detain Black men; some participated in murder, arson and looting.

Just as the Oklahoma Guardsmen who participated in the Tulsa massacre deemed it a “riot,” the Savannah National Guard unit surrounded the Darien, Ga., courthouse with machine guns and tanks to prevent a negro riot in 1930. But instead of protecting or serving, they “held county officers at bay” while an armed band of white men waltzed into the courthouse and lynched 40-year-old George Grant. Soon, Black Americans realized there was only one way to survive the “protection” of rebranded slave patrollers with the backing of the U.S. government:

Black militias.

Before they were federalized and called into service, the Harlem Hellfighters were a National Guard unit. The Old Illinois 8th also began as a Black militia before making history as the only U.S. Army unit commanded mainly by Black officers in World War I. Robert F. Smith’s Black Armed Guard protected NAACP members, abortion providers, children and the Freedom Riders from gun-toting Klansmen who made up Monroe, N.C.’s National Guard unit. T.R.M. Howard’s volunteer army in Mound Bayou, Miss., is part of the reason we know the truth about Emmett Till’s murder.

While these Black militias were primarily organized for protection, they didn’t have the same power as their white counterparts. They were not imbued with police powers, immunity or the authority to kill on behalf of the government.

That’s who was responsible for the death and turmoil during the 1960s. When Birmingham, Alabama public safety commissioner Bull Connor organized an attack on the Freedom Riders in 1961, the governor declared martial law so the National Guard could police the Freedom Riders. Twenty-three of the 34 deaths during the 1965 Watts riots came at the hands of police officers and National Guard troops. Of the 43 people killed during the 1967 Detroit riots, 19 were shot by police officers and nine by National Guardsmen. That same year, cops and soldiers killed 17 of the 26 victims of the Newark, N.J., riots.

On Feb. 8, 1968, state troopers and National Guardsmen opened fire on students at South Carolina State University, shooting 28 and killing three. Most of the victims of the Orangeburg Massacre were shot in the back. But Gov. Robert McNair did not deploy the National Guard to stop violence. He deployed 360 soldiers because of rumors that Black people were going to destroy all the public utilities. “We know that’s the plan of the Black Power people,” State Law Enforcement Division chief J.P. Strom testified. “[T]o do away with your waterworks, lights, telephone service, so forth, gas, and such things as that.”

Although National Guardsmen were responsible for violence during the Rodney King riots, the George Floyd protests and demonstrations over the death of Breonna Taylor, they are often called up in non-emergency situations to patrol Black people. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968, Delaware Gov. Charles Terry deployed the National Guard to patrol Wilmington’s Black neighborhoods and the local HBCU for nine months, making it the longest military occupation in American history.

These historical events are not cherry-picked historical examples meant to demonize the National Guard. Instead, they highlight something that most media outlets appear to have overlooked while reporting on Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C.:

White people with guns do not make people safe.

But sending soldiers to massacre the Pequot as revenge for a lying, thieving drunkard caused a war that made the Massachusetts Colony less safe. Using soldiers to patrol, abuse and rob enslaved people of their humanity made white people less safe, not negro prayer meetings or reading lessons. The South’s unyielding attachment to the Constitutionally protected, race-based institution of chattel slavery killed more white people than slave revolts and “states’ rights” combined. Civil rights protesters were dedicated to peaceful protests; the soldiers caused the violence. The slave patrollers, militiamen and National Guard killed more people than rioters in the late 1960s. The George Floyd protests were less violent than the civil rights protests of the 1960s, but the troops that patrolled the 2020 demonstrations killed more white people. Kyle Rittenhouse was trying to protect white people when he became a one-man militia, but he shot three white men.

Not only do soldiers make everyone less safe, but deploying a military force against a civilian population requires us to exchange our constitutionally protected rights for the perception of safety. Whether it is a local militia or a government-approved National Guard, their presence alone is the antithesis of “law and order.” In fact, the only difference between a law enforcement officer and a military officer lies in these fundamentally opposing objectives:

One enforces laws passed by the consent of the people; the other enforces orders from an authority figure.

When President Trump, politicians and mousse-haired pundits like Joe Scarborough debate D.C. crime statistics, executive powers or how many people were shot in Chicago since last Thursday, they are ignoring the fact that allowing soldiers to patrol a civilian population requires the president, Congress or a governor to declare an emergency worthy of sacrificing these rights.

The Massachusetts General Court did not grant the Pequot the same rights as their white kidnapper; they sent soldiers. The Negro Act of 1740 codified white supremacy by differentiating between how its militia treated whites and Black South Carolinians. The president had to grant pardons to the Confederate traitors in order for them to regain their constitutional rights. The Compromise of 1877 was the pretext that justified Jim Crow laws. Alabama Gov. John Patterson declared martial law and suspended the rights of all white people in Anniston, Montgomery and Birmingham to use soldiers against the Freedom Riders. So did Illinois’ governor.

To be fair, everyone wants to feel safe. And ceding one’s God-given rights as a sacrifice to personal safety is a personal choice that some people are, understandably, willing to make. However, trading your individual safety for the rights of others is tantamount to theft, no different than kidnapping or piracy. Whether it's silent indifference or vocal support, the willingness to subject others to discrimination and authoritarianism is the first step to fascism.

While pointing out the military’s role in this country’s history of oppression might sound unpatriotic, remembering the truth is the surest way to prevent history from repeating the worst parts of our history. Still, we should not blame the individual members of the National Guard. They are no more responsible for the occupation of the nation’s capital than a Quaker who was legally bound to serve on the slave patrol. In most cases, soldiers are simply “just following orders.” (sound familiar?)

Soldiers are not oppressors; they are tools of the oppressors and tyrants.

Using armed forces to oppress people and suppress resistance is not unique to this country. They are traditions that are older than America itself. But whenever this country faces the choice between protecting the rights of the minority and making the white majority feel safe …

We always send our best people.