Name: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
ISBN: 9780465033102

Charles E. Cobb

A civil rights scholar describes how the people most crucial to the success of the civil rights movement were nonviolent activists who carried weapons and firearms and discusses the role guns played in the Southern Freedom Movement. 15,000 first printing.

How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

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To be sure, in a significant portion of the southern black community, nonviolent resistance tapped deeply into a vein of righteousness that was rooted in Afro-Christian values and provided moral guidance in a political struggle where hate and anger could easily blind and become overwhelming. But an idealized acceptance of the kind of redemptive love and suffering expressed in the New Testament is the closest black people have come to embracing the philosophy of nonviolence en masse. Black Christians, however, have also readily embraced the Old Testament, with all its furies and violence. 

Indeed, gunplay and the “taming of the West” (meaning the conquest of Native Americans through armed force and the seizure of their lands) have long been celebrated in that most influential segment of the U.S. media, Hollywood films. On the other hand, black rebellions—often poorly armed attempts to throw off the bonds of chattel slavery and escape to freedom in some other place—are largely ignored and are sometimes denounced when presented as a legitimate part of the black freedom struggle. There is no Spartacus in the romanticization of U.S. history.

The history of the southern Freedom Movement is rooted in community organizing, an approach to struggle that began long before the mass demonstrations and public protests associated with the 1960s. Enslaved Africans were not marching on auction blocks or conducting sit-ins to secure a seat at the plantation manor dining-room table. Rather, they were organizing surreptitiously, out of sight of white people. They planned sabotage, escapes, rebellions, or, most often, the simple ways and means of survival in a new and hostile land. 

In the Mississippi of those days, the Civil War and the Cold War were often conflated, and except for those in Russia, China, and Cuba, New York City communists were considered the worst kind of communists in the world.

Although in 1641 Massachusetts became the first of England’s colonies to legalize slavery, Virginia, with a far greater number of enslaved Africans, led the way in regulating slavery throughout the southern colonies. Thus, colonial life in Virginia is the most useful starting point for understanding the beginnings of black rebellion and the accompanying fear of weapons in black hands—a fear that led to America’s first gun control laws, which were designed to prevent the possession of weapons by black people.

So not only did laws establish slavery based on the premise of Africans being an inferior race, but “white people” were invented as a collective description of disparate European colonists who had traditionally been defined by their national identities—for instance, Punch’s codefendants Victor (“a dutchman”) and Gregory (“a Scotchman”). For the purpose of social control, the Virginia Colony’s rulers—“Englishmen”—began emphasizing a new, “white” racial identity that encompassed more than those of Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. Even “wild” Irish Catholics were included. Colonial leaders enforced the social and cultural separation of blacks and whites with increasing rigor.

In 1962, for example, Diane Nash—a twenty-three-year-old civil rights activist then six months pregnant with her first child—was on trial in Jackson, Mississippi, for training high school students to engage in nonviolent protests. The judge offered her two choices: pay a fine or be jailed for two years. She chose jail. “[My] child will be a black child born in Mississippi, and thus whether I am in jail or not, he will be born in prison. . . . If I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free,” she told the judge. 

But to say that Reconstruction failed does not adequately describe what actually happened in the South after the Civil War. Reconstruction did not fail; it was destroyed, crushed by more than a decade of savage campaigns of violence carried out both by the local governments that had largely remained intact and by vigilante terrorists. Lynchings and other forms of mob violence were the instruments of Reconstruction’s brutal death. The overwhelming violence against blacks during this period goes a long way toward explaining why, even though guns were common in twentieth-century black southern communities, there were few black paramilitary units and they rarely attacked or fought back with arms against white-supremacist authority, even in areas like the Mississippi Delta, central Alabama, or southwest Georgia, where blacks were an overwhelming majority of the population. ”

But even though black soldiers faced enemies within the U.S. military, it was the experience of travel and combat that truly changed them. Warfare exposed black servicemen to a wider world, gave them the discipline and knowhow to organize and fight, and gave many of them the experience of killing white men. Black soldiers returned home changed and with a new willingness to fight for and defend their rights, with guns if necessary.

“Though the American public had never had a problem with employing black women as domestic servants, the U.S. military had always been reluctant to use black men as soldiers. In World War I especially, the military would rather have used blacks behind the front lines than place them in combat. The old myth of black cowardice undoubtedly still prevailed as well, alongside the old fear of guns in black soldiers’ hands. Accordingly, even as Afro-American troops set about risking and often sacrificing their lives for the United States, they were constantly reminded of their second-class status in it.”

“A new generation of men and women was consciously distancing itself from the thoughts and habits of their parents and grandparents […]”

“Experience taught then and teaches now that blacks should never underestimate the level of violence that could be brought to bear against them by white authority, and that they should never overestimate the prospects for receiving understanding and support from white people.”

“Many found ways to personally resist its strictures, even with force when necessary. Their military experience was a crucial factor in their willingness to use force: for men who had been shooting at Nazis or at Japanese and Italian fascists, to shoot back at attacking Klansmen simply was not a very difficult choice to make, especially because, despite having fought for democracy overseas, they did not encounter much of it when they returned home.”

“As Walter White expressed this change in tone, “The Nazi philosophy crystallizes all and every anti-colored, anti-Jewish, anti-liberal and anti-freedom principle.” A January 1942 editorial in Crisis magazine even more explicitly connected the war abroad and the war at home: “The fight against Hitlerism begins in Washington, D.C., the capital of our nation, where black Americans have a status only slightly above Jews in Berlin.”

“One of the subjects of wide comment within these Mississippi Delta networks was that Moore did not segregate his gas station and café. There were no “white only” or “colored only” signs on his restroom doors, and anyone could sit at any table. Given that his service station was located on State Highway 61, then a highly trafficked route south to New Orleans, Moore’s refusal to toe the segregationist line also attracted angry attention from local white supremacists. They tried to mount a boycott against him, and he was certain that night riders would eventually attack his home. They never did, but Moore did not take any chances. Floodlights washed across his backyard every night, and movement organizers who stayed with him can recall falling asleep secure in the knowledge that Moore was sitting in the bay window of his home, keeping careful watch, his rifle and pistol within easy reach.

“And the United States, which during the war had proclaimed it was fighting for the preservation of freedom and democracy, now found those claims being thrown back in its face from both inside and outside its borders. The plight of black people was being held up as concrete proof that America was not an all-inclusive democracy.”

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, a question posed by the civil rights worker to him- or herself in the 1960s, by the rebellious enslaved black person in colonial or antebellum America, by the freedman and freedwoman after the Civil War, and generally by the black community to itself across time: “What are you going to do?”

By the mid-1960s, a generational exchange of ideas was well underway within the black community. Black art, especially in poetry, music, and drama, blossomed and reflected a more political black consciousness. Political excitement and commitment was being generated not only by the southern Freedom Movement but also by liberation struggles in southern Africa and in Africa’s newly emerging nations. The 1961 protests in the U.N. gallery following the murder of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba is a dramatic early illustration of this. Black political activists in the United States interacted with armed African liberation movements. And quite separate from his religious identity, the political words of Malcolm X, perhaps the most influential voice among young black political activists in the North, resonated in the hearts and minds of young black people. Political expression and debate seemed to be everywhere, breaking down what had been the biggest barrier blocking meaningful black North–South political discourse: nonviolence.

Many of the most prominent black leaders live in upper-class neighborhoods—some black, some white—that are largely free of the pressures found in public housing projects and working-class communities. That these leaders now enjoy the comfort and pleasures their elevated status gains them is normal—welcome progress, in one sense. But if there is any place where voices committed to nonviolence need to be continually raised, surely it is in the poorest black and minority communities, where violence and the values surrounding violence—most disturbingly retaliation—are a routine part of everyday life.

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