This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”

Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement’s success.

Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Social Justice, American History, Activism

294 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

This in-depth look at the civil rights movement goes to the places where pioneers of the movement marched, sat-in at lunch counters, gathered in churches; where they spoke, taught, and organized; where they were arrested, where they lost their lives, and where they triumphed.

Award-winning journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr., a former organizer and field secretary for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), knows the journey intimately. He guides us through Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, back to the real grassroots of the movement. He pays tribute not only to the men and women etched into our national memory but to local people whose seemingly small contributions made an impact. We go inside the organizations that framed the movement, travel on the "Freedom Rides" of 1961, and hear first-person accounts about the events that inspired Brown vs. Board of Education.

An essential piece of American history, this is also a useful travel guide with maps, photographs, and sidebars of background history, newspaper coverage, and firsthand interviews.

Charles E. Cobb Jr. originated the "Freedom School" proposal that became a crucial part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. A founding member of the Nnational Association of Black Journalists, Cobb has reported for WHUR Radio in Washington, D.C.; NPR; PBS's Frontline; and National Geographic. Cobb is a senior writer for AllAfrica.com."

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on an important and engaging topic. Even though the cover and title of this book emphasize the role of guns, I felt that this book’s main focus was on the conversation between people who believed in non-violent protest and people who didn’t within the larger Black freedom movement in the United States. I liked that Charles E. Cobb Jr. presented the history and analysis with nuance, showing the limitations and disagreements people had with nonviolence as well as why some people were compelled by it. I can see why some folks would be weary of this book given its slight emphasis on guns, however Cobb Jr. makes very clear that he is not condoning how the conservative white right advocates for guns, rather he’s writing about guns from within the perspective of Black liberation. It’s a complex topic and I think Cobb Jr. treats it as such in this book.

While the writing is intelligent and comprehensive, I did feel a little bored just by the writing style at times. Sometimes certain chapters felt like a long listing of facts and events, which I suppose is what history-focused books in general do. Overall though, would recommend to those interested in the topic of the Civil Rights movement, protest, and gun ownership.

[Robert Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially looked at the reviews of the book at amazon before I started reading, and it's pretty clear that the book is being embraced by some in the gun rights movement as a vindication of their political positions. However, this strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of the book. Rather than attempting to intervene in those particular debates, the text is primarily a critique of the dominant image of the civil rights movement, examining it as a top down phenomenon, tied to a small group of spectacular images and charismatic men. Instead, Cobb brings the idea of armed self defense to look at how the civil rights movement could only be understood within the context of the larger Black freedom movement, and the self-organization of tenant farmers, former veterans and other groups and individuals who had no particular investment in the tactic of non-violence. Starting with a history of Black armed self defense from the beginning of U.S. history, Cobb maps out how these older groups were able to cooperate and organize with the newer non-violent civil rights movement to form a powerful social movement that was embedded into the everyday life of their communities. Cobb argues that the civil rights movement could not have succeeded without these organizations, and at the same time, these organizations recognized the importance of the non-violent movements despite their unwillingness to embrace their commitment to non-violence. In addition, despite the immense power of these forms of social organization, Cobb does not present the end of these movements in a triumphant light, capturing the ambiguities and sense of loss with the end of the movement, despite it's immense effect on the social structures it attempted to overthrow. In a certain sense, you could think of the text as operating within the long tradition of the genre of history from below more than anything else. It's very readable, as well. I highly recommend this text.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe how much of this was new information to me. Some bits I marked with post-its:

"Sheriffs and white posses raided black homes to seize 'illegal' guns and declared that such seizures were not an infringement of blacks' Second Amendment right to possess guns as part of a militia. Blacks faced strong disincentives to own their guns legally, however, because applying for a license effectively informed local authorities - usually sheriffs - that the applicant had weapons. Blacks were prudent enough not to do this, so most black-held arms were, therefore, illegal."

"A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give." - Ida B. Wells, 1892

"If we exclude here the more complex Native American resistance to settlers seizing their land, it can easily be argued that today's controversial Stand Your Ground right of self-defense first took root in black communities."

"I wasn't being non-nonviolent; I was just protecting my family." - Hartman Turnbow

"It may be that 'nonviolent' is simply the wrong word for many of the people who participated in the freedom struggle and who were comfortable with both nonviolence and self-defense, assessing what to do primarily on the basis of which seemed the most practical at any given moment."

"Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout black communities. Not a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan." - Robert Williams

"The civil rights movement was about civil rights, not about nonviolence. Nonviolence was a tool in the movement used to create confrontation without hate, without force, without brutality. Yes, all the blood that was shed was ours, [but] we accepted that for the greater good - the mission - and that was not about nonviolence but about change. I didn't go to Mississippi to celebrate nonviolence, I went down there to fight for the right to vote." - Ivanhoe Donaldson

"I would back nonviolence if the whites coming down for the summer would go into the white community and preach nonviolence." - Sam Block

The only part that struck me as a bit off was the afterward, where Cobb finally takes the time to give his personal opinion on this topic and how it relates to the present. Although I acknowledge it's not my place to act with enough authority to critique a black author, I thought it fell flat in the sense that it focused so much on violence committed by the black community instead of the persisting violence of white supremacy, because that's what so much of the book's content reminded me of. After mentioning gun violence in inner-city neighborhoods, Cobb states, "...it can be argued that violence on a scale much larger than Ku Klux Klan terrorism is the greatest problem facing many black communities today." There's probably nothing inherently wrong with this statement, but my fellow white people say the same thing to claim that white supremacy isn't the problem anymore, that "black-on-black crime" is. There is no follow-up statement about institutionalized racism and poverty causing these conditions or about the violence of police brutality in the communities he's referencing. It feels hurried and doesn't fit with the rest of the book, but I would love to hear different interpretations.

[Kbullock · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the positive side, this is an essential contribution to the literature of the Civil Rights movement, by someone who was there. Cobb documents the crucial role that armed self defense played in protecting the "nonviolent" actors from the threatened and actual violence of the Klan. Reliance on armed self defense was not foolproof, as the murder of Medgar Evers proved, but it deterred the Klansmen on enough occasions to create space for some genuine progress.

Now for the other side. Cobb is a skillful writer, but it appears that the book was a project that was written in fits and starts and never properly edited. The structure is frustrating. It is not arranged chronologically, and there are no clearly discernible themes in the chapters either. The repetition is annoying at times. For instance, on three occasions, Cobb mentions the notorious murders of CORE field organizers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964. Each time, he brings up the murders as if he had not discussed them before.

In the second half of the book, Cobb loses his way until the final chapter, where he finally addresses the attitudes of Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael in the debate between non-violence and armed self defense. Oddly, Cobb bemoans the two-dimensional treatment that King and Carmichael receive in today's collective memory, even after neglecting them for most of his book. In the Epilogue and the Afterword (yes, the book features both), Cobb drops fact-free assertions such as this:

"We have also become more warlike as a nation, and as individuals. Regardless of race or social status, we are now more likely than we once were to settle arguments or react to frustration with violence."

I highly recommend the first half of the book, and I wish the author had received the support he needed to complete it properly.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

As author Charlie Cob states early in this book, there is no shortage of books about the Civil Rights movement (or as Cobb seeking to redefine the term calls it, the Freedom movement) during the 1950’s and 60’s. Many of them cover familiar territory, and even more are quick to extol non-violence as the reason for its successes.
While it is difficult to argue against the idea that seeing defenseless black men, women and children being brutalized on tv screens every night was not a major factor in gaining the nation’s sympathy for the struggle, Cobb seeks to take a wider lens to this point of view and ask how people at all levels of the civil rights struggle were able to stay non-violent. For that matter, how is it that so many of its leaders (with prominent exceptions) were not simply shot down when they stepped foot outdoors?
Cobb’s answer and the thesis of this book is quite succinct.
Guns.
He cites numerous fascinating examples of armed, black, quasi-militias (that preceded the Black Panthers) that had no time for non-violence but were heavily invested in making sure that the people who came into their towns that were fighting for them stayed alive.
Groups like “The Deacons for Freedom and Justice” that started in Louisiana but would later expand across the South rarely initiated violence themselves, but would never be far away from a protest, a church, or a rally where there was the potential for violence against people in their community.
There was understandably at first, some tension between civil rights workers and these militias. For many, especially those who arrived from the North, non-violence was a non negotiable way of life that couldn’t accept weapons of any kind, even if the weapons were being wielded by someone else and for their own protection.
Most however with time, particularly after experiencing first hand just how dangerous working in rural backwoods in places like Alabama and Mississippi could be, settled into a kind of uneasy acceptance of their necessity.
Even for those who refused to accept the help of armed militias, the militias would often ignore them and be present with their guns anyway.
What many who came from the North to the South failed to understand was that guns were deeply woven into the fabric of Southern life, for black and white. Whites primarily for hunting, and blacks to protect themselves from whites.
While there were always attempts by white politicians to create new legislation effectively banning blacks from owning guns, they always managed to find their way in regardless (sometimes smuggled over state lines in the back of hearses even!). Even Martin Luther King’s home was once described by a colleague as “an arsenal”.

“Reverend King knew the risks. In fact, after the January 30, 1956, bombing of his home in Montgomery, he himself a man of the South, after all applied at the sheriff’s office for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He was denied the permit, but this did not stop him from having firearms in his house (although it is not clear whether or not he owned them). Journalist William Worthy learned as much on his first visit to the King parsonage in Montgomery. Worthy began to sink into an armchair, almost sitting on two pistols. ‘Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!’ warned the nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin, who had accompanied Worthy to the King home. ‘You don’t want to shoot yourself.’ When Rustin asked about the weapons, King responded, ‘Just for self-defense.’”

What many Northern workers realized upon arrival is that in order to win the badly needed support of skeptical rural black men and women, they would have to make accommodations. One of these was that guns were and would always be present. Taking them away from people whose survival depended on them was not an option.

“As their involvement in the movement and with rural communities deepened, however, they found themselves in situations where they, their colleagues, and the people they were working with could get killed for even trying to exercise the ordinary rights of citizenship. What, then, would they do? This was in part a question of ethics and morality: Could you really kill someone? And at the same time it was also a question of responsibility: What obligations do you have to the people who are supporting you and whose lives are endangered because of it? But at its core, of course, it was also very much a question of practicality: What do you need to do to stay alive?”

One can imagine that more than a few non-violent workers probably appreciated having someone armed and looking out for them in often hostile, strange new terrain.
This is not to denigrate non-violence as an effective tactic. Cobb is very clear (as someone who was on the front lines of many of those battles) that it was. What he seeks to do with this book however is tell a more complete story than the one we usually here about non-violence being the sole force that won many of the freedoms from that era. As Julian Bond once summarized how that era is now viewed:

“Rosa sat down, Martin stood up; and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”

Simplistic maybe, but is it that far from the truth of how we view what happened?
Cobb argues that a lot of that non-violence was backed up by a whole lot of guns protecting them. As SNCC field secretary Worth Long once said:

“Now you can pray with them or pray for ‘em, but if they kill you in the meantime you are not going to be an effective organizer.”

[JRT · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In every decade of this nation’s history, brave and determined black men and women picked up guns to defend themselves and their communities.” This book examines the relationship between “non-violent direct action” as a tactic in the Civil Rights movement, and armed resistance and self defense. Author and former SNCC organizer Charles Cobb contends that this relationship was symbiotic, rather than oppositional as most people tend to assume. In other words, Cobb argues that the effectiveness of non-violence as a tactic to achieve legislative gains in the civil rights arena was dependent on Black folks’ ability to defend themselves against white terror. In short, guns made the Civil Rights Movement possible, and guns have always been integral in the larger Black Liberation Movement, of which the struggle for Civil Rights was but one part of.

This book sheds light on on just how hell-bent the United States power structure has always been on to keeping arms out of the hands of Black people. From the fear of slave rebellions to the fear of revenge and outright revolution, whites have always seen the prospect of armed Black people as a doomsday scenario. However, due to Gun culture in the American South, many whites accepted as a reality the fact that Black folks kept arms. However, it took the return of Black veterans from war theaters abroad to spark both resistance and reactionary events on the party of Black people and their racist white Southern adversaries.

This is not just an account of armed resistance and self-defense, it is essentially the history of the origins of Civil Rights Movement in the South. Cobb situates this history firmly in the hands of Black veterans who returned home from WWI and WWII—equipped with arms and the ability to use them—who were committed to no longer tolerating the status quo in the South. In detailing this history, Cobb does a tremendous job contextualizing the terroristic conditions of the American South before defying the inaccurate notion that Black Southerners were “apathetic” in the face of those conditions. Black Southerners had always walked the line of individual and collective self-defense. Black Southerners knew how to survive, and out-of-town Civil Rights Movement workers had to learn how to navigate this terrain—a terrain that naturally involved guns.

Cobb produced numerous examples of Black folks’ organized and persistent engagement with arms and self-defense, showing how the white power structure was ultimately forced to change its relations with Black communities, as outfight terror through colonial and vigilante violence was no longer viable. Maintaining white supremacy became a more sophisticated and complex endeavor, resulting in material gains for segments of Black communities, and a modicum of self-respect for the masses of Black people. Finally, this book displays the complexities of movement work. Non-violent direct action was not a universal endeavor. Cobb explains that non-violence as a tactic only made sense in certain contexts, and it ultimately relied on the willingness of organizations like the Deacons of Defense and Justice to provide protection. Cobb also repeatedly stresses the differences between non-violence as a tactic and non-violence as a way of life, demonstrating that for the masses of Black Southerners, the later was simply unacceptable. This is a great book that dispels many myths about the Civil Rights Movement’s relationship to communal self-defense.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent historical treatise on the role of guns in the quest for racial equality and the civil rights movement. This book is primarily about African Americans so the "civil rights movement" in the title is really about the African American Civil Rights movement. I'm still marinating but I will say that this book reminded me Ida B. Wells writing in that this was a historical catalog of events in which guns were used. The guns were often used to oppress African Americans and later for African Americans to defend themselves. The book is more of a historical account than an advocation, with an excellent Afterword that discusses the history of violence. Still marinating which may result in a revised review. First blush, a very good read...

4+ Stars

Listened to Audible. Leon Nixon was a very good narrator.

[Josephus FromPlacitas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some notes (not finished yet):

In the introduction, Cobb somewhat undermines the clickbaity subtitle ("How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible," which I wonder if the publishers rather than the author added), saying the book is an exploration of the choices movement activists made under the tensions between nonviolent tactics and armed self-defense. The fact that instances of armed self-defense and resistance resulted in mass destruction of communities (e.g. New Orleans and Memphis in 1866, Colfax, Louisiana in 1873), makes any straightforward NRA-fantasy argument about goodguys with guns stopping badguys with guns impossible. Cobb seems to be too honest a historian-activist to succumb to facile thinking. (He even undermines the narrower phrase "Civil Rights Movement," preferring Freedom Movement: a broader description of not only the fight for legal equality but universal social, economic, and cultural struggle.)

On page 77, Cobb notes the new consciousness, politicization, and will to resist among black veterans of World War I, where the entirety of the command structure was--up through General Pershing and President Wilson--hardcore white supremacist, and many American black troops were forced to fight in French uniform and under French command out of deference to racist political sentiments.

Black soldiers in the war, declared veteran William N. Colson in the July 1919 issue of the Messenger, "were fighting for France and for their race rather than for a flag which had no meaning." The war had exposed more of the terrain of struggle, wrote Du Bois. "There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went--glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy, glad to have a new, clear vision of the real inner vision of the real inner spirit of American prejudice. The day of camouflage is past."

I wonder if the more respectful French treatment of black American soldiers wasn't a significant precursor and cause of the subsequent (or at least I think of them as subsequent, my historical knowledge of pre-WWI emigration to France is nil) expatriate communities of black artists and intellectuals to France.


More notes:
From pages 88-89: "By the summer of 1961, the Kennedy administration was watching sit-ins, and especially Freedom Rides, nervously--and with no small degree of hostility. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy felt that they threatened their administration's domestic and foreign policy agenda by embarrassing the United States and angering powerful Dixiecrats, and so--in what must be one of the great political miscalculations of the 1960s--they pressed student activists to abandon direct-action protests and work instead on voter registration. They thought that such work would be much more acceptable to southern white power than sit-ins seeking desegregation. Therefore, the Kennedys and other high-ranking administration officials concluded, a voter-registration campaign would be met with less white violence that desegregation efforts. In turn, because voter-registration efforts would be far less dramatic--not likely to be seen on television or on the front pages of newspapers--civil rights struggle would be less embarrassing to the United States as it competed with the Soviet Union for influence with newly independent nations in the Third World--nations that, crucially, were mostly Asian, African, and Latin American. Robert Kennedy offered assurance that money from tax-exempt foundations his family controlled or influenced could be made available for voter-registration campaigns." [emphasis mine]

Interesting to note that pressure forces the elites to offer material support, which, with a militant movement pressing against elite liberal interests, can materially reinforce the movement. Cobb goes on to say that many within the movement were suspicious and most rejected the idea of organizing for votes, but others set up a separate, parallel campaign for it. "They also felt that the moral dimension of the movement would be lost to political opportunism. The Kennedys' willingness to help pay for voter-registration campaigns only added to their suspicion, for it seemed like a cynical political ploy, an attempt to use money to divert the movement from the sort of militant, direct-action protest they knew the Kennedys hated. The Kennedy's indifference to enforcing existing civil rights law and their hostility to protests challenging segregationist violations of those laws had already led many in the movement to come to disturbing conclusions: that the administration's own political needs took priority over the enforcement of civil rights law, and that the Kennedys were more than willing to compromise with southern bigots in order to achieve their political goals."

Page 141: "Whether or not they owned guns or had access to guns, activists and organizers knew that nonviolence was generally a much more commonsensical and sustainable tactic--one more likely to succeed--than offensive armed action. But armed self-defense was one thing; armed offense was quite another. Recalled Bob Moses:

Black people had organized enclaves which they were prepared to defend. Their self-defense was pretty much around a house or church, a meeting place. "Self-defense" in the white community is surrounding the courthouse. They were going to degend the courthouse in different ways. I think of us going to the courthouse [with potential registrants] as a nonviolent offensive maneuver. It allowed us to take the offensive and actually attack. You couldn't go to the courthouse with guns and attack.

"

Page 149: "Although the philosophy of nonviolence was far less familiar than the idea of armed self-defense, it was not a completely unfamiliar method of political struggle. And as the Freedom Movement evolved and the practice of nonviolent activism began playing an increasingly important role, it turned out that these two approaches--so dissimilar on the surface--were in fact quite compatible. Understanding the civil rights movement of the 1960s requires understanding this counterintuitive but vital compatibility."

Page 223: "Biographers of King, autobiographies by SCLC leaders such as Abernathy or Andrew Young, and studies of SCLC make no mention of [Mallisham's armed] group, despite the fact that Tuscaloosa's decision to desegregate was a significant victory by an SCLC affiliate. ... One important mission of SCLC's ministers had always been to protect King's public image; if any associates were involved in armed defensive action, the SCLC leadership would not have wanted to broadcast that fact to the world."

On page 236 Cobb describes how an interest in international black art, culture and politics was blossoming in the 1960s: "Political expression and debate seemed to be everywhere, breaking down what had been the biggest barrier blocking meaningful black North-South political discourse: nonviolence.

"The idea of nonviolent struggle had prevented northern and southern activists from truly understanding each other's strategies, tactics, and goals." Here he describes a more vanguard-focused leadership model in northern groups, contrasting that with the grassroots organizing model of the southern struggle.

Page 237: The way forward remained unclear, as it does today. The freedom struggle continues, in ways at once more subtle and more urgent than the activists of the 1960s. And although the questions of nonviolence and armed self-defense may seem to have receded into the past, they endure in our conceptions of both the civil rights movement and the activism that followed Carmichael's call for Black Power. Today gun rights are remembered as an unfortunate addition to the story of black struggle, one that helped radicalize and ultimately defeat the greatest ambitions of of the luminaries who propelled blacks' age-old freedom struggle to new heights at midcentury. Furthermore, the issue of gun rights has largely come to be associated with the conservative white Right, and far too often the concept of 'standing one's ground' is invoked to defend the murder of a black person. But there was a time when people on both sides of America's racial divide embraced their right to self-protection, and when rights were won because of it. We would do well to remember that fact today."

[Rosenita Delva · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book, I now have a better understanding of what nonviolence really was and how important it was. I also see just how one can claim to be nonviolent while defending oneself. Amazing read filled with information and varying viewpoints.

[Kevin Chu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Rosa sat, MLK had a dream, and everybody lived happily ever after," goes the story we were taught in grade school. The story of the African American struggle for freedom remains over-simplified and under-historicized. Charles Cobb provides an compelling retelling that starts well before Rosa Parks.

From the beginnings of chattel slavery to the failure of Reconstruction, between forgotten slave rebellions and the role of Black veterans in the aftermath of conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the Second World War, Cobb puts into sharp relief an ever-present dialectic: unending campaigns of violent repression and terror, and Black efforts to keep themselves safe in response, enabled by armed community self-defense.

Frederick Douglass wrote that the struggle for freedom would require "the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box." Similarly, Ida B. Wells wrote that "A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give." Douglass and Wells were echoing a conclusion that many Black people had come to long before. This long-running practice of armed self-defense, Cobb argues, not only existed in tandem with but enabled the broader nonviolent movement.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed is not just about guns. It offers a nuanced study of the evolution of white supremacy, as well as a reassessment of Reconstruction's failure as not inevitable but brought upon by a deliberate political campaign of sheer violence and federal abandonment. Furthermore, it provides a fresh historical perspective on the Civil Rights Movement.

Cobb's narrative rejects the Great Man approach that canonizes national movement leaders such as Dr. King. Instead, his account emphasizes the agency of Black Southerners, taking a bottoms-up approach built on primary sources from the point of view of on-the-ground field organizers and the rural Southern communities they worked with.

There is no better person to write this book: Cobb was a SNCC field secretary staffed in the most dangerous counties along the Mississippi Delta. He would later become known for setting in motion the Freedom Schools movement in the wake of school closures following Brown vs. Board of Education. Cobb writes with rigorous scholarship and great personal care, interweaving his firsthand organizing experiences in the face of intimidation and violence in the Deep South.

One of the most affecting stories took place during the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins of 1960, which catalyzed the broader sit-in movement and the formation of SNCC. A mob of young whites waving Confederate flags surrounded the Woolworth department store lunch counter, threatening the Black student demonstrators with violence. At that moment, the entire North Carolina A&T football team appeared. "Who do you think you are?" yelled the hecklers. Barreling through the white mob in flying wedge formation, the footballers shouted: "We the Union Army!"

[Marcus M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like an archaeologist brushing dust off of artifacts that tell unknown stories, Cobb restores a side of the history that has been whitewashed -- how nonviolence and armed self-defense have historically collaborated to accomplish the objectives of civil rights and freedom movements in the United States.

This book could easily be used as a call-to-arms for oppressed peoples; however, while Cobb states throughout how nonviolence without armed self-defense could've undermined the movements, he responsibly closes with evidence of how arming without the intention of self-defense or the balancing force of nonviolent movements has left the U.S. and global communities unstable.

Additionally, Cobb's work reveals how historians have managed to whitewash America's civil rights history by focusing on the figureheads or leaders and from a perspective that the movements were built from the top down. This book departs from that approach, instead focusing on the situation from the grassroots and the bottom up, illuminating a neglected angle.

[lucien alexander “sasha” · Rating 5 out of 5]

effectively complicated my understanding of "nonviolence". rich and thoughtful.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

A story Stokely Carmichael liked to tell was of bringing an elderly woman to vote in Lowndes County, Alabama: "She had to be 80 years old and going to vote for the first time in her life...That ol' lady came up to us, went into her bag, and produced this enormous, rusty Civil War-looking old pistol. 'Best you hol' this for me, son. I'ma go cast my vote now.'"

[Af]ter the January 30, 1956, bombing of [Reverend King's] home in Montgomery, he himself—a man of the South, after all—applied at the sheriff's office for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He was denied the permit, but this did not stop him from having firearms in his house [.]

The United States is an expert in promoting self-censorship. Police/21st c. slave catcher record? Censored. Communism/antithetical to the current oligarchy? Censored. Values human life/liberty/pursuit of happiness over property? Censored. As the Trump administration attempts to contest the fact that it's currently harder for me to get a proper passport than to get a gun by explicitly going after 'transgenders' in depriving us of our second amendment rights, this read was more than timely. It's not my first tango with the subject, as Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns blew my stereotypes wide open and left me hankering for an education that would make Mastercard's Hayes Code 2.0 beg for mercy. Between then and now I read a number of works that qualified as such (The Meaning of Freedom, Golden Gulag, and The Counter-Revolution of 1776 being some of the standouts), but it was guns that had been my personal bugaboo back when my eyes were opened, and it was guns that I had heard undercurrents of whispers of complications when it came to MLK, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Panthers. And with his personal experience in the Civil Rights Movement and professional acumen thereon out, Cobb was certainly the right person to take me to the next level.

The presence of civil rights workers stoked a deep-rooted fear among local Afro-Americans [that was o]ften confused with apathy[....] Another component of what could look like apathy was the fact that local people generally did not have the option of leaving; they were held by family, work, even loyalty to place, or sometimes simply debt [...] And finally, through the use of force and violence, fear had been cultivated in black communities for centuries.

[Sam] Block also succinctly summed up an important sentiment held by many of the activists who were skeptical about the effectiveness of nonviolence: "I would back nonviolence if the whites coming down [as volunteers] for the summer would go into the white community and preach nonviolence."

The "essence of the liberal position [..."] was that "black people didn't deserve equal rights, but they did deserve a safe environment in which to work for white people."

These days, if you get involved in the conversation regarding protesting, it's always "Do what I say, lest we all be annihilated (by a government who has always worked to keep this earth a playground for rich people and a workplace/jail for everyone else)". It's the threat that keeps folks hyper-groveling around cops while screaming at cashiers as well as sealioning/vitriolic towards anyone who refuses to give their email address, their face, or their right to self defense to the "peace keepers" hoping to make bank as the next shil for the next election cycle of the oligarchy. Well, newsflash folks, it was all the same during the Civil Rights Movement, from the mass media "radicalization" of younger folks to the backroom deals of status quo folks; there were just a less instantaneous network of solipsizing moderates and a lot more "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." For when someone takes you in as family in a hostile territory, as what happened to Cobb in his Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 60s, they are your knight in shining armor, and woe be upon you if you try to convince them that the ways they have survived the last three centuries of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are wrong.

The [police] chief told the Hickses that the Klan was angry that the CORE workers—both 0f whom were white—were staying in a black home. A Klan mob, he warned, was gathering and intended to attack Hickses' house unless their two guests were immediately escorted out of town by police. [...] The chief left, refusing to provide protection. "We have better things to do than protect people who wanted here." [...] Both CORE activists were pacifists, but the experience left them uncertain about their own convictions. "Up to that point I embraced nonviolence," one of them, Steve Miller, said later. "[But] at the point [that armed protection came] I guess I said, 'Oh, I guess I'm not nonviolent anymore." Concealed in the backseat of a car, the two rode back to the Hicks home protected by an armed convoy.

Where massive police force or state power was exercised, as in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, police violence was not a response to either the use of guns or the practice of nonviolence; rather, it was exercised for the sole purpose of crushing black protest and demands in any shape.

What's especially valuable about this text is how objectively Cobb presents his history. Of course that's how it's always supposed to go, but look at the habitus of the settler state and tell me that every 'nonfiction' piece racketing up the bestseller lists isn't a bunch of white anxiety piddle and cishet fearmongering. In contrast, Cobb presents again and again the facts and figures that are continually whitewashed into liberal oblivion to show, no, these KKK leaders can be college educated professionals. No, shooting back did not wipe this Black community from the face of the earth, or even significantly harm the local causes of desegregation and voting rights. No, these nonviolent individuals did not give up their faith, but neither did they disrespect the knights who took it upon themselves to protect them. Indeed, I am now grateful that I trudged through Le Morte d'Arthur as arduously I did, as what Cobb thoroughly explicates is the true evocation of that code of chivalry in all its misconstrued glory: to allot to those who are willing the martyrdom of peace, to allot those who are willing the agony of violence. For we live in a country where time and time again it is force and collectivism and going out in the street with the evidence that you will be cut down no matter what you do that has won your average US "citizen" any modicum of "peace."

And since they were, after all, asking people to put their lives at risk, they had to earn the right to organize. That could not be accomplished by pretending to be more capable of defending themselves or the people who cooperated with them than they actually were.

Few if any white terrorists were prepared to die for the cause of white supremacy; bullets, after all, do not fall into any racial category and are indiscriminately lethal.

[Dave] Dennis later remembered [George] Raymond telling him, "C. O. Chinn sits outside with his guns. He won't leave. He says he's here to protect his people. Can you talk to him?" So, Dennis recalled, ["]I went outside to talk to him. He's sitting in the back of his truck with a shotgun across his lap and a pistol by his side. I introduced myself; told him about CORE's nonviolence philosophy. He listened. Then, very calmly he told me: "This is my town and these are my people. I'm here to protect my people and even if you don't like this I'm not going anywhere. So maybe you better leave." I could tell he wasn't a guy for any bull and I could tell he was there to do what he said he was going to do. I didn't argue. I said, "Yes, sir," and shook his hand then walked back into the church thinking, he's got his job to do and I've got mine.["]

As I read the latest news out of Minnesota, I think about how the Civil Rights Movement could have easily been shot up, burnt alive, kidnapped, summarily executed, and otherwise strangled not into the Voting Rights of Act of 1964, but a brief trivia question about a reverend named Martin Luther King Jr. who could have very well been someone if segregationists hadn't blown him up in his home in 1956. I also acknowledge the pains Cobb must have taken to get this published in the venue he did, how many retractions and self-censorings and otherwise molly-coddling of white moderates he must have done to not have this consigned to dying on the publishing desk. However, both his preface and his afterword were remarkably judgmental and non-grassroots focused in contrast to the bulk of his narrative, going straight into 'urban rioting is out of control and nothing can be done till black on black violence is curtailed' territory. It made me glad I had read both Golden Gulag and In Defense of Looting before this, as well as seen for myself what capitalism does to marginalized communities time and time again in a settler state that grows the enemies it most deserves. For the media is more rapid than ever and the young have not forgotten the pro-Palestine protests, and if you're not comfortable with joining the defense in a properly trained fashion, you'd best stay out of the way, lest you get yourself or someone else killed.

Significantly, it was most often the relatively conservative adults involved with the movement, rather than the radical young "militants," who organized armed self-defense in southern black communities. But in the latter part of the 1960s, guns were less important to political struggle in the South because for the most part whites had learned that antiblack violence was ineffective and counterproductive in stopping black political momentum.

'Now you can pray with them or pray for 'em, but if they kill you in the meantime you are not going to be an effective organizer.'
-Worth Long, SNCC field secretary

[Tuscaloosa's black defensive group] also protected some whites who had assisted movement efforts, and the group's efforts in this regard were even more covert, because there were limits on how easily and how safely a black man, especially one carrying arms, could move around a white person. Nonetheless, Mallisham's group surreptitiously guarded Alberta Murray, a white attorney, teacher, and founder of the Council for Human Relations, as she moved throughout the county encouraging voter registration. She did not even know about their protection until much later.

Black life in America has always meant struggle to protect and secure black life in America. That struggle has never centered on the question of nonviolence versus violence. Rather, there has always been one fundamental question [...] : What are you going to do?

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Civil Rights Movement in America is often portrayed in basically Christological terms. Martin Luther King Jr. appeared and, with his disciples, began his ministry of racial healing. Though opposed by the authorities, through saintly forebearance and unwavering conviction, he brought healing to the country before dying for our racial sins. History is usually simplified in the popular conception, but in this case it's particularly egregious.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed is about nonviolence, the lack of nonviolence, and how both of them were necessary. The subtitle is a bit inaccurate too, because nonviolence certainly was the tactic that got most of the press, and indeed that's why the movement settled on it. As one comment in the book states, nonviolence wasn't the end, it was the means--the end was registering people to vote. But sometimes that end required the capability of violence to defend it. There are endless examples listed within of black people using guns to defend their lives from white terrorism, from waiting up at night in the homes of those who put up freedom riders to firing at night riders to encourage them to go elsewhere. A complete conviction to nonviolence would have left civil rights activists defenseless against white people who were perfectly willing to use overwhelming violence to maintain their hegemony, and while a violent revolution would have been bloodily suppressed since the local authorities were resolutely racist and most often the federal government was ambivalent, the capability for violence would sometimes be enough.

The book traces the roots of the civil rights movement to violence itself, embodied in the Civil War and the First and Second World Wars. Black veterans returned from those wars empowered by having had to defend their own lives with violence and being unwilling to return to subservience forced on them by the white establishment, and while the brief flowering of freedom ended in Jim Crow when the federal government refused to step in and allowed the slavers to terrorize the black population, the results were different in WWII. Black troops who had fought for freedom in Europe often weren't willing to come home and accept subservience there, and they were used to their lives being threatened and having to defend themselves. Furthermore, guns were an ingrained part of Southern culture. Even if they had been fanatically committed to nonviolence, there was no way that activists from the North could have convinced the people they were living among to give them up. As the book states, locals had to take the lead because otherwise it would have been easy to cast the civil rights movement as a bunch of outside agitators trying to stir up trouble, and the locals certainly weren't going to adopt an extreme version of nonviolence. I especially liked the part about scaring away terrorists by showing up armed and then saying that it had been "nonviolent" because it wasn't like anyone was shot.

Martin Luther King Jr. himself kept guns for self-defense, and though he committed himself more strongly to nonviolence as the years passed, increasing white terrorism legitimated the threat of violence as a tactic. The Deacons for Defense and Justice--which I had never previously heard of--were created in 1964 to protect members of the Congress of Racial Equality from the KKK. And who can blame them? There were repeated assassination attempts, some successful, on black leaders. White terrorism was stepping up, and the media couldn't be everywhere to broadcast violence for the world to see. Nonviolence only works against those who are capable of shame and willing to restrain their only behavior. On the local level, and especially in some parts of the deep South, that simply wasn't the case. But where shame didn't work, sometimes fear would.

Unfortunately, I wasn't a fan of the actual structure of the book. While the first chapter is about the the history of the South from the Civil War leading up to the civil rights movement and the last chapter is about the growing acceptance of the threat of violence as a viable tactic and the groups that formed to utilize it, the chapters in between are unfocused. They jump around in time and in space, telling stories with no real connection other than the presence of guns. The Epilogue delves into the creation of the Black Panther Party and the increasing conviction that in the face of white intransigence, nonviolence is no longer an effective topic, but only briefly. Taken together, much of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed seems unfocused, a series of anecdotes told off the cuff that, while fitting a theme, don't fit together in any concrete way. It's a valuable look at an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement that is often forgotten in popular history, but I wish it had been more focused.

[Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and challenging examination of guns and the nonviolent movement (largely in the South). Insanely well-researched -- and of course some of it is his lived experience.

This is tightly edited, easy to understand, but not easy to stomach. Like any good student of US history, I knew a lot of the major "stories" (the Afterword has a great, brief breakdown of why "stories" are a reductive way of looking at and ultimately co-opting the lived experiences and thoughts of people -- in this case, black slaves and black Americans) and figures and organizations in this era, but Cobb leaves no stone unturned in finding and highlighting the opinions and philosophies of everyday men, women, and children who were part of the grassroots movements of nonviolence and black liberation. Some of these accounts are of extremely harrowing and disgusting crimes committed by white supremacists and white cowards that I likely never would have known had I not read this.

The Notes are packed to the brim with anecdotes and citations that could warrant a full book each.

Not sure if the outlook in the Epilogue is bleak or if that's just my cynicism about the state of our country leeching into my interpretation of his words. I have a nonviolent but ultimately practical and leftist view on guns, and I think I share his concerns that we are both ceding our rights as Americans on guns and also damaging our own cities and communities and fellow humans with our fanatic reliance on guns.

I don't know! I think I need to read this again with a highlighter and pen.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not so much a book analyzing armed struggle as it is of community defense tactics through anecdotal story telling during the 1940s-1960s. I find many are looking for the former and misunderstanding the title a bit.

The author starts off with a thorough analysis of racial construction in the early Americas, and the often ignored violent slave revolts. Later he ties the importance of blacks joining the military as an important tool of armed experience. These veterans were integral to the defense of the community during heightened times of white mob violence. Specifically when organizations like SNCC, SCLC, & CORE began agitating for voting rights and desegregation. The communities who worked alongside these activists also went to great lengths protecting themselves and their work. This protection often required fire power.

Any history of the Civil Rights struggle that leaves out the importance of armed self-defense, its structures, and its ideological impacts on nonviolent orgs is a history left incomplete and/or purposefully revised.

[KA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cobb was not only there, volunteering in the rural South for civil rights; he is also an engaging, nuanced writer. This book should help complicate anyone's view of both the civil rights movement and the tactic of nonviolent resistance. I found the chapter on the Deacons for Defense and Justice especially illuminating, as well as Cobb's depiction of the transition from nonviolence as the predominant tactic for civil rights, to "black power," which was often assumed (by whites and blacks alike) to be "militant."

[Philip Girvan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tremendous read.

Cobb, who was involved in the civil rights movement particularly as it concerned registering voters, gives a compelling account of ways in which the Second Amendment and the southern culture of gun ownership provided the space necessary for nonviolent resistance to work as a strategy.

[Jason Scoggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is excellent work. Greatly showcases the intermingling of the non-violence philosophy and self defense philosophy for a term coined "unviolent." Also displays that fomented belief that the state has a Monopoly on violence...

[Anna Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A readable history that brings the larger Black Power movement in conjunction to the well-known Civil Rights Movement. It will challenge old misunderstandings on the history and bring to light ideas on how this history is still being pieced together live time.

[Daniel Brisbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Mennonite, this book was a mind opener for me for sure. Really well written - I'm so glad I stumbled on it!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book makes an important historiographical intervention. But it’s challenging to read and make sure I’ve gotten the point. He uses the voices of those who participated (of whom he is one) rather than top down evidence of the civil rights movement. The argument seems to be that only a few people were ever fully nonviolent but that that element was vital. He ends the book by saying ultimately we all need to be more committed to ending the violence in our society which plagued those who are the most disadvantaged. But that very few of us can do the soul work to make it happen. However the majority of the book is telling the story of how many Black activists used arms to protect themselves and how effective it was. So the thesis and the majority of the evidence don’t line up. Yet the evidence he’s giving seems to be important and contradicts the larger narrative. I think a stronger editor could have made this a more accessible and unified book. I’m glad it was written.

[Alise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent read and history of lesser discussed aspects of the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Movement. The writing is compelling and there is a lot of specific time and biographical information.

This author recognizes two things at the beginning of the book that did greatly affect my reading experience:
1. It is not in chronological order and so there is some repetition and at some points it feels like backtracking
2. There is lack of documentation of female organizers’ contributions to both movements. It is acknowledged in the preface but there is little to no discussion of the impact of that throughout the narrative and there is no discussion of where the gaps in the history exist.

[Eunice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I specifically sought out this book to expand my worldview. I don't like guns. I never have and I never will. But, I do understand their importance and why black gun ownership specifically is important and a radical act. History has white washed a lot of civil rights work and praised Dr. Martin Luther King for being non-violent, but the truth is the nonviolent movements of the 50s and 60s were only possible bc of black gun ownership and the threat of violence. Nonviolent groups were often threatened with violence and were only diswayed by equal threat of violence. Though I still don't like guns, I understand the importance of them especially during the civil rights movement and before.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should begin by noting that had I known the subtitle -- "How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible" -- I probably would not have purchased this book to begin with. I was looking for a theoretical discussion of the shortcomings of nonviolence, not a chronicle of the compromises made by nonviolent activists in the Civil Rights era. Because of that ignorance, my rating of the book is necessarily lower than it would have otherwise been. However, this is an excellent history for people who are curious about the role of guns in the Civil Rights movement.

Cobb's writing is engaging, and he's clearly an authority on the matter after his service during the formative years of SNCC. The organization of the book was lacking and it was thus difficult for me to discern concrete differences between the chapters. It sort of goes chronologically but also tended to jump geographically as well. It's fine for what it is.

At the end of the day, I wanted -- ahem -- ammunition against people who are wholly devoted to nonviolence. I've been intuiting of late that these advocates are lopsided in their emphasis, and this book did give some concrete examples of the necessity for armed self-defense. Nonviolence advocates love to cite the Greensboro sit-ins, for example, as proof of what nonviolence can accomplish. Yet they tend to omit the violence committed by the NCA&T football team in barreling through the white folks that blocked the door to Woolworth's.

Similarly, a big takeaway from the book is just how often the purportedly nonviolent organizers of SNCC, CORE and even MLK's SCLC simply outsourced their violence to community-organized vigilante groups like the Deacons. They couldn't enter these incredibly racist communities without protection, and because their values did not allow them to protect themselves, they had to rely on their hosts to arm themselves (which they had already done and couldn't be dissuaded from anyway) and keep watch. This doesn't strike me as the ringing endorsement of nonviolence that modern advocates tend to sing.

In the end, this is a solid vignette of an era that commonly gets misreported in hindsight. The Civil Rights narrative today gets twisted into some of the most frustratingly centrist arguments. These brave, sometimes armed souls were radicals, and they were vilified in their day even as they accomplished a helluva lot. We'd do well to remember it in the age of Antifa and Black Bloc. Don't be the white moderate that MLK (and Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, etc.) disdained.

Not Bad Reviews

@pointblaek

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Cobb Jr.'s book is based on an important premise, that if it were not for the ability of black Americans to defend themselves using their Second Amendment rights against violent white Americans exercising their rights, the African-American Civil Rights movement would not have been able to have the historical impact that it did. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, Charles Cobb Jr. demonstrates the various ways in which, for instance, the nonviolent protests when hand-in-hand with defence via firearm, especially in the American South. There was no call to proactive gun use but there was a strong belief in the use of guns as a defensive tactic in the movement.

An interesting anecdote illustrates the way in which Martin Luther King, the most vocal advocate for nonviolence, even believed in moving around with concealed weapons. He believed it fine to own several guns and keep them for protection. The book recounts how another of the Civil Rights' leaders came to visit King in his home, sat down on a cushioned chair, and noticed some discomfort. One of King's partners advised him to lift up the cushion because there were "a couple guns under there." Not only men like King, but ordinary people, needed guns to defend themselves, their homes, and their families during and prior to the Civil Rights era.

Something worth keeping in mind is this. The book works from the premise that the Second Amendment is important to the people of America. It's not making a claim for or against the Second Amendment. That's an issue for another book, another day. But given that the Second Amendment is enshrined in our Constitution, minority groups who are under threat are well within their right to protect themselves. And not only that, minority groups in America have historically done just that, as is evidenced by black Americans use of firearms for protection.

[Lionel Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book challenges the notion that the Civil Rights movements was a completely pacifist movement with all of the modern leaders accepting the nonviolent philosophy of Dr. King. The truth is that the Civil Rights movement was made up of many different organizations and people and all of them approached the work in a different way. This book examines the part of the movement that was not willing to be totally nonviolent and, while they did not advocate violence, they were also not willing to allow themselves to be attacked indiscriminately. The author makes the strong argument that the two sides of the Civil Rights movements the nonviolent and self-defense side were actually two sides of the same coin and that one could not exist without the other. The author also point out the fact that many of the people living in the areas that the civil rights workers were going to help were not just passive recipients of their aid but actively took part in the activities and were more often than not the ones who provided the armed self defense and that the decision to defend oneself was carefully calibrated to fit the particular situation. This is a very good book that focuses more on the grassroots level of the struggle and the practical and philosophical decisions that had to be made on the ground among the many faceless activists and residents in the rural south as they worked to gain their rights as citizens.

[Michael Boyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far from the nonviolence/violence dichotomy (or the good 60's/bad 60's approach) Cobb diligently, and rather beautifully illustrates that southern organizers affiliated with SNCC and CORE were only able to use nonviolent tactics in their struggle, because of the tradition of armed self-defense among southern black folks, and in all kinds of ways armed self-defense was able to defend the Southern freedom struggle from the armed terrorism of the Klan and the state. Cobb also dramatically illustrates how orthodoxy is challenged and mutates through political struggle, how many of the folks who were committed to tactical non-violence would come to embrace more militant liberation politics through the experience of struggling alongside armed sections of the black masses.

If there's a flaw to the book, it's that it tends to be repetitive, particularly in the first chapters. The depth and the personal narratives more than make up for that. Cobb frequently states that the combination of non-violent tactics, and armed self-defense was the key to shattering the white supremacist hold on the south; that more openly militant forms of struggle would have been crushed. Sitting 50 years after these events, as white supremacy has captured the white house, and is re-entrenched in the prisons and police departments across the country, this history is searing, and the question of house to smash white supremacy permanently is more pressing than ever.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly readable book by former SNCC field secretary Charles E Cobb shines a light on a little-known aspect of Civil Rights movement history - the role of armed self-defense by local people in protecting civil rights workers. Cobb outlines the long history of armed self-defense by African Americans in the South, from slave rebellions on, along the way pointing out that the first gun control laws were designed to keep guns out of the hands of Black people.

The book contains good overviews of organizations such as Robert F Williams' NAACP chapter in North Carolina and the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice. Cobb's discussion of the tensions inside SNCC over nonviolence as a tactic or as a way of life, and how to accept the armed protection of local communities, gives an insight into the decisions that were made on the ground, amid the realities of organizing and working against racism in the face of white supremacist violence. He cogently argues that armed self-defense played a pivotal role in protecting the Civil Rights movement by helping to curb white violence. The Klan, for instance, was less keen to continue its night-riding terror when it was confronted by African Americans brandishing guns.

This illuminating book deepened my understanding of the Freedom Movement of the 1950s and '60s, and I strongly recommend it.

[Brandon Harvard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Other reviewers here have dissected this book with skill and I’m not sure I have much to add.

If I was to break down a section that best distills this book, it might be this.

“Worth Long preferred the term “unviolent.” In the thinking of this Durham, North Carolina, native, the notion of “unviolence” offers a way to transcend the fundamentally false distinction between violence and nonviolence that some have tried to impose in their analysis of Freedom Movement work and decision making. “Most people do not see themselves as being ‘nonviolent’ . . . and most people would not consider themselves ‘violent,’” Long noted. “What’s the path for those who would participate in the movement and not be nonviolent? I’m not talking about labeling; I’m talking about their actions.” Such people would never call themselves “violent” or “nonviolent”; they would treat both choices as potentially viable, and at any given time, which they would choose would depend on what they had concluded about their immediate circumstances.”