Luke’s Reviews > This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible > Status Update

Fifty-three people in Yazoo City had signed a petition in favor of school desegregation. The Citizens' Council arranged for the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all fifty-three to be published in the local newspaper as a full-page advertisement.

One delegate, Reverend Jotham W. Horton, stood in the doorway waving a white handkerchief while crying out to police, "I beseech you to stop firing. We are noncombatants. If you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, but we are not prepared to defend ourselves." A policeman shouted back, "We don't want prisoners, you have all got to die." Horton was then shot and killed. (New Orleans, 1886)

There is no Spartacus in the romanticization of U.S. history.

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.'"