If I moved to Michigan, would I have to register my handguns/other guns?  What does this entail?

You would have to register your handguns at your local police (the data will be sent to the state police for storage).

It is a 'safety inspection' of any pistols, which in Michigan means any pistol, BB gun, or black powder pistol.
The first purpose of the law was to keep black people unarmed, and therefore easier victims of the Black Legion.
What would happen was that the person of color would attempt to have their gun inspected, and it would always fail the safety test.
Many members of the Black Legion were government workers, police and such, so if a black pulled a pistol to defend themselves from a beating or their wives from a rape the members would leave, disrobe, and return in their uniforms to arrest the black for having an unsafe/uninspected pistol.
Now the inspection consists of an officer writing down the serial number and your address for future gun grabbing activities.

I SERIOUSLY doubt that gun registration in Michigan was due to the Black Legion.  First of all, the Black Legion was more or less isolated to the Detroit/SE Michigan region.  Second of all the movement was quite small, so the likelihood of them influencing state politics is a stretch at best.  Thirdly and most importantly, most of the current gun registration laws in the books were enacted long after the Black Legion had been discredited and disbanded.

FWIW, the Black Legion was founded and headquartered in rural Ohio, not Michigan.

Have no idea how the above discredited history lesson from Happyshooter relates to your question, but to add to this...

... you would most likely also need to be fingerprinted.

fingerprints are NOT necessary in MI, unless you get a concealed carry license.

This is not a "registration" , it is merely a "safety inspection". it's for your own good.[;)]

Not always--it depends on where you live. At the county level, they may not, but if your [b]local[/b] law enforcement wants to require fingerprints they can. Then you register with the locals instead of the county. This is the case in some communities in Oakland County.

I said "most likely" because I was fingerprinted to get my first purchase permit. That may not be necessary if you already have the handguns and move here...

BTW - Once your info is in the system: there it stays. I remember taking a walk at about 2 AM to get out of the house while my computer was downloading something off the net (this before cable modems were available). I walked a ways over to a (closed) store I knew that had a coke machine in front of it. An unmarked police car pulled up as I had just entered the store's parking lot. The cop said: "Do you know why I stopped you?" I said that I didn't. He said that an alarm had gone off in the neighborhood (I had heard of this "reason" before as a way to get around things... there are ALWAYS alarms going off). The more likely reason? I was walking around the neighborhood at an hour most people don't!

That was a little disconcerting but what really surprised me was that after standing there for ten minutes while their laptop connected to the state police computer to check that I wasn't on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, the guy looked at the screen for a while, turned and asked me to lift up my untucked loose fitting camp shirt, obviously wanting to know if I was carrying at the time.

Big brother knows! (Or thinks he does...)

I just walked across the hall to the police dept. (I'm at work right now) and asked the Lt.
if he ever heard of fingerprinting for a 'permit to purchase' and he said maybe long ago they required it but not now. As far as I know, it's not required anywhere in the Upper Peninsula. Maybe it's a troll (downstate MI resident) thing.  Hope this helps.

At one point you had to roll a thumb print on the card. I have some from the early 90s like that. It is not done any more.

MCL (Michigan Complied Law) 750.402 Societies parading under arms. [M.S.A. 28.634 ]
Sec. 402. Certain societies parading under arms—Any society whose membership is confined to members of a certain race, which has heretofore adopted a uniform similar to the uniform of the organized militia of this state, may continue to wear the same when appearing in public, but the governor of this state may, by a proper order, in times of public tumult, direct that such societies shall not parade under arms, and if any society disobey such order, the persons so violating said order shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.


History: 1931, Act 328, Eff. Sept. 18, 1931 ;--CL 1948, 750.402 .

Former Law: See section 2 of Act 201 of 1909, being CL 1915, § 999; and CL 1929, § 912.

MCL 28.429 Pistols; safety inspection required; certificate of inspection; exemptions; requirements of pistol presented for inspection; violation as civil infraction; fine. [M.S.A. 28.97 ]
Sec. 9. (1) A person within the state who owns or comes into possession of a pistol shall, if he or she resides in a city, township, or village having an organized police department, present the pistol for safety inspection to the commissioner or chief of police of the city, township, or village police department or to a duly authorized deputy of the commissioner or chief of police. If that person resides in a part of the county not included within a city, township, or village having an organized police department, he or she shall present the pistol for safety inspection to the sheriff of the county or to a duly authorized deputy of the sheriff. If the person presenting the pistol is eligible to possess a pistol under section 2(1), a certificate of inspection shall be issued in triplicate on a form provided by the director of the department of state police, containing the name, age, address, description, and signature of the person presenting the pistol for inspection, together with a full description of the pistol. The original of the certificate shall be delivered to the registrant. The duplicate of the certificate shall be mailed within 48 hours to the director of the department of state police and filed and indexed by the department and kept as a permanent official record. The triplicate of the certificate shall be retained and filed in the office of the sheriff, commissioner, or chief of police. This section does not apply to a wholesale or retail dealer in firearms who regularly engages in the business of selling pistols at retail, or to a person who holds a collection of pistols kept solely for the purpose of display as relics, curios, or antiques, and that are not made for modern ammunition or are permanently deactivated.

(2) A person who presents a pistol for a safety inspection under subsection (1) shall ensure that the pistol is unloaded and that the pistol is equipped with a trigger lock or other disabling mechanism or encased when the pistol is presented for inspection. A person who violates this subsection is responsible for a state civil infraction and may be ordered to pay a civil fine of not more than $50.00.


History: 1927, Act 372, Eff. Sept. 5, 1927 ;--CL 1929, 16758 ;--Am. 1931, Act 333, Imd. Eff. June 16, 1931 ;--CL 1948, 28.429 ;--Am. 1957, Act 259, Eff. Sept. 27, 1957 ;--Am. 1964, Act 216, Eff. Aug. 28, 1964 ;--Am. 1986, Act 262, Imd. Eff. Dec. 9, 1986 ;--Am. 1990, Act 320, Eff. Mar. 28, 1991 ;--Am. 1996, Act 169, Imd. Eff. Apr. 18, 1996 .

Please note the above enactment dates of the two statutes.

This news story claims the KKK, but is dated about the time the Legion claimed a Battlion sized force in Detroit.---

'I have to die a man or live a coward' -- the saga of Dr. Ossian Sweet
By Patricia Zacharias / The Detroit News
      "I have to die a man or live a coward." With these words, a mild-mannered black Detroit physician set in motion forces that would result in a dramatic milestone in America's civil rights movement, extending the notion that a man's home is his castle to blacks.

     It began in the summer of 1925 when Dr. Ossian Sweet decided to move his wife and baby daughter from the crowded lower east side black ghetto into an all-white neighborhood at Garland and Charlevoix.  
Dr. Ossian Sweet


     "He wasn't looking for trouble," Dr. Sweet's brother Otis, a dentist, recalled. "He just wanted to bring up his little girl in good surroundings."

     The surroundings may have been good, but they were dangerous for blacks. Sweet knew the risks. Just a few months earlier, another black physician, Dr. A.L. Turner, had moved into an all-white west side neighborhood on Spokane Street. A mob invaded his home, moved all his furniture into a van and drove him out of the neighborhood.

     "This made a profound impression on my brother," continued Otis. "It was then that he told me he was prepared to die like a man."

     

By 1925, Detroit's black population was nearly 80,000. Blacks had migrated to the Northern industrial cities in search of better jobs. Most were packed into a near east side area called Paradise Valley, or Black Bottom. The area was badly overcrowded -- seven percent of the city's population was squeezed into one percent of its housing. Some residents slept on bar pool tables and lived four families to a flat.

     Dr. Sweet, and his wife, Gladys, wanted something better.  
Gladys Sweet


     Born in a small inland Florida community, Ossian Sweet studied medicine at Howard University, practiced briefly in Detroit, then continued his studies in Vienna and Paris. Upon his return to Detroit in 1924, he accepted a position at Detroit's first black hospital, Dunbar, and began saving for a home. By the spring of 1925 he had saved enough to purchase a home on Garland for $18,500 with a down payment of $3,500 cash.

     Rumblings of trouble began well before Ossian Sweet took occupancy of the house. An organization called the "Water Works Improvement Association" vowed to keep blacks out of the neighborhood.

     The woman who sold Dr. Sweet the house told him that she had been warned by a phone caller that if he moved in, she would be killed along with the doctor and the house would be blown up. Ironically, she and her light-skinned black husband had lived in the house undisturbed, the neighbors apparently unaware of her husband's heritage.

     On Tuesday, Sept. 8, Dr. Sweet arrived at his new home with two small vans of furniture. He also brought along guns and ammunition and had arranged for friends and relatives to stay with him for the first few days. They included brothers Otis and Henry, 21, a student at Wilberforce University, John Latting, and William Davis, a federal narcotics officer who had been an army captain overseas during World War I. All were black.

     Throughout the day tensions rose in the neighborhood. The Detroit Police Department regarded the situation as grave enough to post officers there day and night.

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow headed the defense team.


     On the following day, Dr. Sweet attended to his practice downtown and most of the others in his home also went to their jobs. When he returned that night, Dr. Sweet had recruited more friends to join those in the house, bringing the total to 11 including Mrs. Sweet.

     

     *****The prosecution later produced a series of witnesses who swore that there never were more than 25 or 30 persons in front of the Sweet home.

     About 10 p.m. a series of shots rang out from the Sweet home. Leon Breiner, who lived across the street, fell dead and another man was wounded. Police rushed in and arrested everyone in the Sweet house, charging them all -- including Mrs. Sweet -- charged with murder.

         *****The facts in the case were relatively simple: Someone in Dr. Sweet's house fired a shot that killed Leon Breiner. Another neighborhood resident, Erik Hofberg, received a bullet in the leg.  Judge Frank Murphy presided over the trial and, in his charge to the jury, made it clear that the right to defend one's home applied to blacks as well as whites.


           *****Hays, however, conceded in his account of the trial, "On the face of it, our case was not strong. It seemed clear that Breiner had been killed by a fusillade from the house. Ten men had gathered there with provisions to withstand a possible siege, with guns and ammunition. And there had been police protection."

The defense, as Hays saw it, depended on the attitude of the defendants at the time of the shooting. Did they think they were in danger? Were they actually scared? Not all of the defendants cared to admit they were scared. They had become heroes to the black community.

     The prosecution, meanwhile, had formed its own theory of the case. Lester Moll, chief assistant to Prosecutor Robert M. Toms, recalls "The case had come to the attention of our office 24 hours before the actual shooting. Phone threats to the Sweets had been reported and a police guard had been posted. The following night shots were fired simultaneously from the Sweet home. Mr. Breiner was hit while on the porch of a house across the street. The shooting appeared to follow a pre-arranged signal from within the Sweet home."

     "We interviewed police who were in agreement that the crowd out in front was not numerous and that there was no threat of violence. Based on these conversations we issued a warrant on the theory that the shots were fired without provocation."

     A Detroit News reporter, Philip A. Adler, testified for the defense. He was at the scene of the shooting and told of a "considerable mob" of between "400 and 500," and stones hitting the house "like hail."

     "I heard someone say, 'A Negro family has moved in here and we're going to get them out'," Adler testified. "I asked a policeman what the trouble was and he told me it was none of my business."

     The defense hammered hard at the purpose of the Water Works Improvement Association and its goal to keep blacks out. In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan claimed 100,000 members in Detroit and a cross had recently been burned at the steps of city hall.  Detroit News reporter Philip A. Adler testified he saw a mob of about 400 to 500 outside the Sweet home and that rocks were hitting the house "like hail."*******

The murder that brought down the Black Legion
By Thomas L. Jones

On a dark May night in 1936, Charles Poole was kidnapped by a black-hooded band, transported to a remote corner of southwest Detroit, and gunned down along the side of the road. His offense, according to his murderers? He had allegedly beaten his wife, although Poole, while pleading for his life, explained that she had been hospitalized not because of a beating but because she was having a baby.  Charles Poole, an organizer for the Works Progress Administration, was murdered by the Black Legion after they accused him of beating his wife.
 

     The gang that killed Poole was part of the Black Legion, and the triggerman was Dayton Dean, an employee of the Detroit Public Lighting Department and, by all accounts, a man who simply lived for violence. As such, Dean fit the profile of the Black Legion, whose propensity for violence, as one contemporary observed, made the Ku Klux Klan look like a cream puff.

     The Black Legion was founded in the mid-1920s as the Black Guards, a security force for the officers of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan. A Michigan regiment was established in 1931, with Arthur Lupp of Highland Park as its major general. Organized along military lines, the Michigan Legion had five brigades, 16 regiments, 64 batallions, and 256 companies. Although its members boasted that there were one million legionaires in Michigan, it probably had only between 20,000 and 30,000 members in the state in the 1930s, one third of whom lived in Detroit.

     The legion had various fronts to cover its activities, such as the Wayne County Rifle and Pistol Club, whose members frequented a downtown Detroit sporting goods store with a backroom firing range. It also had a political front as well, the Wolverine Republican Club. The legion's political objectives were broad and, at the same time, narrowly specific. As one of its promotional pieces stated, "we will fight political Romanism [the Catholic Church], Judaism, Communism, and all 'isms' which our forefathers came to this country to avoid."

     Some legionaires, more inclined toward outright violence for the sake of violence, went*****

Note the above dates (both edited stories from the old Detroit paper at www.detnews.com).
You can make the argument that the laws and the Legion were unconnected, and that the KKK was the driving force...but the dates are close.

To get back to the original question, when I moved back to Michigan after a stay on the east coast, I had to register all of the handguns I had purchased while living in another state.  I had to surrender them to the sheriff's office for a couple of days so that they could run them and make sure that they were not stolen, then I had to do the 'safety inspection certificate' thing for them all.  At that time, you had to give them your thumbprint, and one thumbprint went on the 'inspection certificate' that I got for each gun.  Long guns you didn't have to register then, and I'm pretty sure you still don't.