From: A Reader With A Long Memory [Email him]

Carl Rowan was a black leftist bureaucrat and syndicated columnist. In June 1988 he shot a teen-aged trespasser—with an unregistered gun. The trespasser had gone for a dip in Rowan's pool. I suspect the trespasser was white, though that detail is not provided in the accounts I've read. According to the trespasser, Rowan never warned him but just opened fire and retreated into his house.

Rowan was prosecuted; the jury could not reach a verdict; he was never retried. There was not so much as a hiccup in his career.

No white riots. No journalistic frenzy.

James Fulford writes: I remember this case—I have, as I said in a speech in VDARE.com’s webinar, been following this issue for some time, and it was a notable case of hypocrisy and special privilege. (Rowan had been writing columns advocating jailing unlicensed  gun owners.)

Google remembers it, too. If you start to type “carl rowan” into Google, it suggests “carl rowan shot trespasser.” The young man, who was probably white, was shot in the wrist with a .22, and Rowan said it was a warning shot as the youth was reaching towards him.

He was tried not for shooting the man, but for possession of an unregistered pistol under the District of Columbia’s gun laws, and his defense was that he had been given the gun by his son, an FBI agent, and FBI agents, being Federal, aren’t expected to register their guns. [Trial Opens for Rowan in Shooting of Trespasser, By William K. Stevens, New York Times, September 27, 1988]

Yes, he got away with it, but the point is by 1988 white Americans had gotten over racial grievances, and weren’t going to parade in the streets saying that a black man shooting a white teenager gave them ancestral memories of Reconstruction, or something.

They might have had that reaction in the South in the 1950s, or in DC in the 1920, but they got over it. Blacks apparently haven’t.