Two Civil Rights Men, Different Parties, One Bill of Rights
By Ben Jealous
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August 31, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — When I was a boy two brothers lived on our block and we ran together every weekend. Ball in the street, made-up games, War!
Then one day they were gone. My buddy said their father had lost his job at the tire factory and taken his own life in the basement, with a gun the family already owned.
That was a gun death in America. Quiet street, good schools. In all my years arguing guns, a death like that almost never came up.
Our children are back in school, and September is Suicide Prevention Month.
Guns, children, and despair are one subject. We rarely treat them so.
My friend Lenny McAllister has never made me pick. He is a Black Republican, a voice on Rust Belt radio from WVON in Chicago to KDKA in Pittsburgh. I was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland. We have gone at each other’s parties twenty years and stayed friends.
What people miss is that we are both civil rights men, and civil rights work is Bill of Rights work.
The First Amendment is why we could march. The Fourth is why an officer needs a reason to search you. The Second sits in that same document, and we believe in all of it.
Lenny’s father was shot on a Rust Belt street and spent nearly a year in the hospital. In 2001 a man broke into Lenny’s home and tied him up. He tells it in his new book, “A Venn Diagram of One”, an honest book about refusing to be one thing in a country that insists you choose.
My cousin was shot and killed at a gas station in Columbia, Maryland, at noon. A cousin I called uncle agreed to testify against a Prince George’s County drug dealer, who shot him at his door. He lived. At the hospital they would not let us up to his room, for fear the shooter’s friends would come finish the job.
When Lenny writes that we can respect the Second Amendment and still use common sense about who buys a gun, I hear no man splitting a difference. I hear a man who has waited on word about his father, and lain on his own floor with a gun at his head.
Then he writes this. “There is a right greater than the right to bear arms; it is the right to a liberty-filled life.”
Now let me tell you what I got wrong.
Thirty years ago at Oxford I needed a thesis topic. A headline in the International Herald Tribune stopped me on the sidewalk. Black teen suicides were surging. I was sure I knew why. Handguns were flooding the inner cities.
I was wrong. The children dying were not in the cities. They were in the suburbs.
Black families moved out there in the late sixties and seventies. Twenty years later their children began killing themselves. Children like me, with the big backyard and the shiny bike.
Our mothers gave us what they had been denied in the projects and tenements and row houses they came up in. Without meaning to, they cost us the one thing those places had, a house full of family who would listen no matter what.
One of the strongest predictors of a suicide attempt is isolation. Ask a woman how many people she talks to after her worst day and she names two or three. Ask a man and he names one, or nobody. Her circle grows all her life. His shrinks toward zero.
That headline should have said the Black teen suicide rate was catching up to the White one. Among young Black men it has passed it.
About nine in ten suicide attempts with a gun end in death. With most other methods people live, and most who live never die by suicide.
In 2024 there were 27,593 gun suicides, well over half of all gun deaths.
Money is no shield. A gun in a cul-de-sac is as final as a gun on a corner.
The Bill of Rights is not a menu. You do not get to order the Second and send the rest back to the kitchen. None of it means much to a child who does not live to grow into the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So set partisanship aside. Lock your own guns in a safe at home. Keep them away from people in crisis. And build friendships across party lines that bind this nation back together for all our children.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
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Kierra LeeKIELEESTYLE@GMAIL.COM3465287733
