In These Times: In his 2011 book , UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King's house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for a concealed carry permit. Local police, loathe to grant such permits to African-Americans, deemed him "unsuitable' and denied his application. Consequently, King would end up leaving the firearms at home.
The lesson from this incident is not, as some NRA members have tried to suggest in recent years, that King should be remembered as a gun-toting Republican....