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Summary
Summary
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 selfprotection--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 inthe 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.
Author Notes
Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is a former National Geographic magazine staff writer and a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and has also served as a Visiting Professor in Brown University's Department of Africana Studies. A veteran journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and his reporting has won multiple awards. Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this persuasive long-form essay, Cobb, a journalist who served as a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, describes questions of the propriety of gun ownership and self-defense at the grassroots of the civil rights movement as "an intellectual tea party, perhaps momentarily refreshing but only occasionally nourishing." Southern blacks remembered instead the lessons of Reconstruction: with the federal government largely absent and indifferent, "Black people would have to fight for their rights locally, and unless they protected themselves from reprisal, no one would." The movement was deeply imbued with the spirit of nonviolence, but Cobb points out that its organizers and activists were guarded from night riders and state-sponsored terrorism by guns and armed militias, without whom progress in Mississippi and elsewhere would likely have been impossible. Cobb's bracing and engrossing celebration of black armed resistance ties together two of founding principles of the Republic-individual equality and the right to arm oneself against tyranny-and the hypocrisy and ambiguity evident still in their imbalanced application. "If we exclude the more complex Native American resistance," Cobb writes, "it can easily be argued that today's controversial Stand Your Ground right of self-defense first took root in black communities." (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Given the violent resistance to equality for African Americans during the civil rights struggle, many viewed the tactics of nonviolence as either docile or naive or both. Cobb argues that the effectiveness of nonviolence speaks for itself in shining harsh light on the moral outrage of racism and in transforming large swaths of the black population into activists, but he also examines the armed self-defense that undergirded it. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, reviews the long tradition of self-protection among African Americans, who knew they could not rely on local law enforcement for protection. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, after the fire bombing of his home, kept weapons in his house to protect his family. Cobb offers a collection of memories of freedom fighters and a broad historical perspective, from slave resistance to the Deacons of Defense and Justice, as evidence of the human impulse to self-protection that counterbalanced the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Understanding how the use of guns makes this history of the civil rights movement more compelling to readers, Cobb is, nonetheless, focused on the determination of ordinary citizens, women included, to win their rights, even if that meant packing a pistol in a pocket or purse.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms" has been enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution since 1792. In our day, the National Rifle Association and batteries of conservative jurists have fought so successfully to persuade people that the amendment guarantees Americans an individual right of self-defense that in 2008 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional an outright ban on handguns for residents of the District of Columbia. Two years later, the court ruled that Chicago could not ban handguns, either - the right to own handguns applied all over the United States. Well, as Michael Waldman tells us in "The Second Amendment: A Biography," the idea that the amendment was all about self-defense would have been news to the first Congress, which enacted it. "Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected Amendments," Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, a defender of the new Constitution, rose to say after James Madison reluctantly agreed to come forward with ideas for improvements - 20 of them, from promising that troops could not be quartered in people's homes to freedom of the press to trial by jury. Then Ames sarcastically added: "O. I had forgot, the right of the people to bear Arms. . . . Risum teneatis, amici" ("Stifle your laughter, friends"). But, Waldman observes, there was little debate about the right to keep and bear arms, for self-defense or anything else, because that went without saying at the time, at least for all adult white males. Since earliest colonial days, in most places, they had been required to have arms and be ready and able to answer the call to service in local militias, in case of attack; individuals had always had the right to firearms under common law, and without it Americans would not have won the War of Independence. The arms amendment and others had been proposed as a way of allaying opposition to the Constitution. Doubters feared that a strong federal government could veer off into tyranny if it had a standing army at its disposal. The militias of the 13 states would be a deterrent to that, and the states would be assured of a steady supply of militiamen because the citizenry was armed. The text of the Second Amendment in its entirety, as finally approved, implies this: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That prefatory "well-regulated militia" phrase was considered self-explanatory by most state and federal courts for two centuries. Militias and militia duty withered away in the decades before the Civil War. The right to arms lived on, but the courts did not see in the Second Amendment any bar to state or local gun control regulations. Waldman's readable, often chatty, thoroughly documented recounting of the Second Amendment's history shows it changing in character as American society changed. As handguns became more available starting in the early 19 th century, more people saw them as a means of self-defense or self-empowerment. Violence and abuse of the right to arms led to increased regulation, and eventually regulations led to backlash. After the multiple assassinations and turbulence of the 1960s, even the N.R.A. supported federal laws regulating the sale of guns. But rising violent crime led to a gun-rights revolt, and the N.R.A. under a changed leadership came to oppose tighter gun control. Batteries of lawyers and scholars produced articles arguing that the Second Amendment had indeed conferred an individual right to arms for self-defense. "It is hard to convey fully the circular nature of these writings," Waldman sighs. They were, in his view, "one of history's most effective, if misleading, campaigns for constitutional change." But they helped convince legislators and political leaders who ultimately created the conservative Supreme Court majority that handed down the 2008 ruling. Waldman insists the court was wrong, that the Second Amendment did not create an individual right to arms; but in my view he does not adequately consider that it did recognize one, the pre-existing individual right in common law. The Second Amendment itself does not figure much in "This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed," Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s richly detailed memoir of his experiences with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, but gun rights certainly do. Virginia had laws in colonial days forbidding blacks, slave or free, to carry weapons of any kind - one of the first gun control laws, as Cobb, himself a descendant of slaves, puts it. Almost 200,000 Southern black Americans served with the Union armies during the Civil War, and many took their guns back home with them when it was over. After the failure of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and other white racists had plenty of guns, and many Southern rural blacks relied on firearms for self-defense. More black people became familiar with guns in the 20th century after serving in the two world wars. By the 1960s, Cobb says, many, perhaps most, Southern rural blacks took for granted the right to use guns to defend themselves. "This nonviolent stuff ain't no good. It'll get ya killed," Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippi farmer who always traveled armed, prophetically warned Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. King apparently never got a gun, but there were guns in his house nonetheless. And James Farmer and the Congress of Racial Equality stood by nonviolence, but did not refuse armed protection by groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Today, with 270 million legal guns in private hands all over America - and who knows how many illegal guns in the hands of gangs and criminals - gun rights have become more associated with "the conservative white right," Cobb acknowledges. He also says that "violence on a scale much larger than Ku Klux Klan terrorism is the greatest problem facing many black American communities today." Yet he does not endorse gun-control laws that might help reduce inner-city violence. Such measures, Cobb seems to suggest, are not a sufficient solution; the primary perpetrators and primary victims, young black people, would benefit more from social and educational programs to encourage nonviolent ways of addressing grievances and frustrations. With 30,000 Americans a year dying from gunfire (about two-thirds of them suicides), the N.R.A. insists that more guns in the hands of law-abiding people, white and black, not gun control, are the answer. Waldman deplores the way rational debate about guns is too often drowned out by constitutional fundamentalism. Even after Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults in a school in Newtown, Conn., at the end of 2012, the Senate could not muster 60 votes to defeat a filibuster against bills to ban sales of assault rifles and require universal background checks for gun purchases. You can't trust the government to stop at background checks, the N.R.A. keeps insisting; what government really wants to do is seize everybody's guns. Despite any real evidence for this assertion, too many Americans believe it. Waldman hopes "common-sense gun regulation" will someday make a comeback. But it is unlikely to succeed, he believes, unless advocates for new measures spend as much time and effort trying to bring over legislators and judges to their view as the N.R.A. and others did with such success for theirs. CRAIG R. WHITNEY'S books include "Living With Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment."
Choice Review
Lucidly written, this book probes the role of arms in the black freedom struggle. Cobb (journalist and visiting professor, Brown) convincingly demonstrates that "nonviolence and armed resistance" were part of the "same cloth" and that those who juxtapose the two misrepresent the fight for racial equality. Although some activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., believed in nonviolence philosophically, most saw it as a tactic and, in many cases, came to appreciate the wisdom of local people, especially in the rural South, who stood by their right to defend themselves and their families--and movement activists, including King--with guns. These guns, as Cobb contends, "made the civil rights movement possible." Contemporary representations notwithstanding, Cobb makes clear that armed resistance and black violence were not the same. To bolster his argument, the author explores the history of armed resistance in the black community and draws on his own experience as an activist during the 1960s. Cobb's eye for illustrative stories, ability to build on the works of scholars, and clear writing style should make this work attractive to specialists and general readers alike. --Peter B. Levy, York College of Pennsylvania
Kirkus Review
A frank look at the complexities and contradictions of the civil rights movement, particularly with regard to the intertwined issues of nonviolence and self-defense.A former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, veteran journalist Cobb (On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, 2007, etc.) studies the civil rights revolution at the grass-roots level rather than through the leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference officially adopted nonviolent resistance in the form of sit-ins, boycotts and demonstrations, yet these tactics were viewed skeptically by some activists. Violence against black resisters was so prevalent and pernicious, Cobb writes, that retaliatory violence was neither unheard of nor indeed unexpected. The peaceable sit-in at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Feb. 1, 1960, for example, contrasted markedly with a subsequent violent clash between black demonstrators and the white mob that set upon them during a sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida. Self-defense with firearms often went hand in hand with nonviolent resistanceindeed, it "ensured the survivalof the freedom struggle itself." Cobb backs up this rather perplexing statement with a variety of historical material, pointing out that blacks in the rural South had relied on guns to protect their families against white supremacist violence since the time of Reconstruction. The author also characterizes slave insurrections as "the taproot of the modern freedom struggle" and explores the contradiction of African-Americans serving in the U.S. military while being deprived of basic civil rights. Yet while retaliatory violence might have been the norm in some communities, it could not bring the vast, radical change that nonviolence did.Thought-provoking and studded with piercing ironies. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cobb (visiting professor, Africana studies, Brown Univ.) brilliantly situates the civil rights movement in the context of Southern life and gun culture, with a thesis that is unpacked by way of firsthand and personal accounts. The author underscores how the nonviolent political demonstration was always a dangerous enterprise in which Jim Crow laws and marginalization had become a way of life, and on closer examination the reader is shown accounts of the many approaches in which the gun culture of the South and standing up for voting rights and equality went hand in hand. As a departure point from traditional understandings of the time, Cobb follows a number of war veterans' stories from World War I and World War II as being at the vanguard of the intersection of guns and self-defence in Southern civil rights. A comparison text from a slightly different perspective that's worthy of any library is Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie. VERDICT For avid U.S. history buffs.-Jim Hahn, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Prologue: "I Come to Get My Gun" | p. 19 |
| 1 "Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air" | p. 27 |
| 2 "The Day of Camouflage Is Past" | p. 55 |
| 3 "Fighting for What We Didn't Have" | p. 83 |
| 4 "I Wasn't Being Non-Nonviolent" | p. 114 |
| 5 Which Cheek You Gonna Turn? | p. 149 |
| 6 Standing Our Ground | p. 187 |
| Epilogue: "The King of Love Is Dead" | p. 227 |
| Afterword: Understanding History | p. 239 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 251 |
| Notes | p. 253 |
| Index | p. 283 |
