Actor and progressive political activist Danny Glover informed a group of students at a Texas A&M University-sponsored event that the Second Amendment was created to put down slave rebellions and subjugate Native Americans.

“I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said on Thursday. “The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts and from uprisings by Native Americans.”

“A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is,” he added.

That theory that the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to put down slave rebellions was recently resurrected by bestselling author and radio host Thom Hartmann, who said Virginia wouldn’t ratify the Constitution without a guarantee that it would have some way to keep slaves in check.

Campus Reform, which broke the story, reports that the “Lethal Weapon” and “Predator 2″ star made the controversial statements at the sixth-annual Martin Luther King Breakfast on Texas A&M’s flagship campus in College Station. Other event sponsors include the office of the president and the athletic department.

At another point during the event, the award-winning actor called the United States “a material, a militaristic and, frankly — let’s call a spade a spade — a racist society.”

The San Francisco State University graduate (B.A., 1964) also pontificated professorially about the causes and effects of global warming. Later, he called the Occupy movement a “reimagining of democracy.”

An extensive video of Glover’s statements is available on YouTube.

A spokesperson for Texas A&M said that the administration had no prior knowledge that Glover would make such statements.

“I had no idea. We really didn’t know that topic was coming up,” Luke Altendorf, director of the school’s Memorial Student Center, told Campus Reform. “Someone was asking a question about activism. I think that’s where some of that came from.”

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Altendorf would not discuss Glover’s compensation except to say that no student fees were used. Harry Belafonte and Angela Davis received $25,000 for speeches at past Martin Luther King Breakfast events, Campus Reform notes.

Altendorf championed the school’s decision to bring Glover and other controversial speakers to campus.

“We didn’t feel those speakers you are referring to are bad decisions on these topics because we want to foster discussion,” he told Campus Reform.

Members of a student group called the Texas Aggie Conservatives recorded the event for posterity.

The group has also created an online petition that protests a series of speaker choices that it calls politically biased.

“We expect President Loftin to stand by his commitment to diversity and fully support our efforts to bring in a conservative speaker to provide an alternative to Mr. Glover’s far left message” the group’s chairperson, Erik Schroeder, told Campus Reform.

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