This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
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Last annotated on March 7, 2017
INTRODUCTIONRead more at location 147
Note: in molti decisero di impugnare le pistole x difendere il movimento nn violento attacchi ai nonviol. di mlk: malcom e du bois x molti neri la nn violenza era una strategia nn un credo: x compensare o se nn funzoonava erano semprr pronte le pistole la cultura delle armi nel sud consentì ai neri di armarsi il vero militante nn violento: un elite ristretta della leadership... dietro una massa armata dividere violenza e nn violenza nn è utile nella storia usa la voolenza è stata spesso celebrata... ma nn quella nera tema del libro: chi psrtrcipava alla lotta nnviolenta senza credervi... dilemmi morali: fino a che punto puoi coinvolgere terzi sodali nel rischio che prendi fanon: le virtù liberanti dell imbracciarr un arma INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ alleanze esplicite tra violenti r nn violenti Edit
In retaliation, men, women, and children were surrounded by raging mobs or assaulted by helmeted white policemen wielding batons and fire hoses.Read more at location 151
events shocked the American public and rallied popular support for such historic legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,Read more at location 152
those gains could not have been achieved without the complementary and still underappreciated practice of armed self-defense.Read more at location 155
the idea of nonviolent struggle was newer in the black community,Read more at location 167
Simply put: because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic for effecting change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement.Read more at location 168
Robert P. “Bob” Moses, director of the Mississippi project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating CommitteeRead more at location 184
“It’s not contradictory for a farmer to say he’s nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder’s head off.”Read more at location 185
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.’”Read more at location 186
The 1955–1956 bus boycott in Montgomery,Read more at location 189
challenged the system, and recognizing this refutes the notion that nonviolence was a passive tactic.Read more at location 192
Almost immediately nonviolent resistance was criticized as dangerous foolishnessRead more at location 194
“No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back . . . but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less.”Read more at location 196
“[It] gave our generation—particularly in the South—the means by which to confront an entrenched and violent racism. It offered a way for large numbers of [African Americans] to join the struggle. Nothing passive in that.”Read more at location 209
Our struggle was not just against something, but was trying to bring something into being. Always at the heart of nonviolent struggle was, and still is, a vision of a new society. Nonviolence enabled people to see something in themselves and others of what could be; they had been captured by the possibility of what could be.Read more at location 213
By no means, however, were most in the black community committed to nonviolence as a way of life.Read more at location 218
nonviolent resistance tapped deeply into a vein of righteousness that was rooted in Afro-Christian values and provided moral guidanceRead more at location 219
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.Read more at location 220
Black Christians, however, have also readily embraced the Old Testament, with all its furies and violence.Read more at location 222
If I could I surely would Stand on the rock where Moses stood. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded. Oh Mary don’t you weep.Read more at location 224
a total commitment to nonviolence was and still is alien to U.S. culture—Read more at location 227
Indeed, self-defense was a crucial part of life for many black Americans, especially in the South.Read more at location 229
black people sometimes used the threat of an armed response to survive.Read more at location 230
southern black communities in the 1950s and ’60s. There was always resistance to the idea of nonviolence,Read more at location 231
“Self-defense is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can’t affect it.” Willingness to engage in armed self-defense played an important role in the southern Freedom Movement, for without it, terrorists would have killed far more people in the movement. “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,”Read more at location 234
he always “traveled armed,” said Salter. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.”Read more at location 239
guns would be used to defend his Tougaloo campus, well-known as a launching pad for civil rights protest and thus always a target of terrorists, also helped deter assaults against it, although it could not prevent them completely. In one campus attack, Salter remembers a bullet narrowly missing his daughter.Read more at location 240
says Salter, “we guarded our campus—faculty and students together. . . . We let this be known. The racist attacks slackened considerably. Night-riders are cowardly people—in any time and place—and they take advantage of fear and weakness.”Read more at location 243
claim to a tradition that has safeguarded and sustained generations of black people in the United States.Read more at location 247
this tradition is almost completely absent from the conventional narrative of southern civil rights struggle.Read more at location 247
willing to provide armed protection to nonviolent activists and organizers as well as to black communitiesRead more at location 248
never had a chance of usurping the traditional role of firearms in black rural life; although many rural blacks respected protesters’ use of nonviolence, they also mistrusted it.Read more at location 251
Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippi farmer and community leader,Read more at location 253
Turnbow also “traveled armed.” With tragic foresight, Turnbow bluntly warned Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, “This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed.”Read more at location 254
applied at the sheriff’s office for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.Read more at location 257
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,Read more at location 259
When Rustin asked about the weapons, King responded, “Just for self-defense.”Read more at location 261
Indeed, there were few black leaders who did not seek and receive armed protection from within the black community.Read more at location 270
recalled that after the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on her lawn and fired gunshots into her home, her husband Lucious Christopher “L. C.” Bates began staying up to guard their house with a .45-caliber pistol. Friends also organized an armed volunteer patrol to protect the Bates homeRead more at location 272
Daisy Bates herself sometimes carried a .32-caliber pistol in her handbag.Read more at location 275
he instructed friends and family members to chaperone CORE organizers wherever they went in the rural areas of the county and sometimes even in town. Like Chinn, these chaperones routinely armed themselves.Read more at location 277
Some black leaders were committed to nonviolence as a way of life.Read more at location 280
For most activists, however, nonviolence was simply a useful tactic, one that did not preclude self-defense whenever it was considered necessary and possible.Read more at location 285
acknowledged the legitimacy of self-defense and sometimes blurred the line between nonviolence and self-defense.Read more at location 287
“The first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of ‘self-defense,’” he wrote. “In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one’s home and one’s person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.”Read more at location 287
blacks and whites in the South tended to be in unexpressed general agreement.Read more at location 290
South’s powerful gun culture and weak gun control laws enabled black people to acquire and keep weaponsRead more at location 292
“nonviolent,” “radical,” “left-wing,” “moderate”—Read more at location 296
southern black people had a powerful incentive to arm themselves.Read more at location 303
communities were willing to do what was necessary to protect fellow blacksRead more at location 306
relationship between nonviolence and armed self-defense has been consistently overlookedRead more at location 309
The use of guns for self-defense was not the opposite of nonviolence,Read more at location 311
Hartman Turnbow precisely illustrates what when explaining why, without hesitation, he used his rifle to drive away night riders attacking his home: “I had a wife and I had a daughter and I loved my wife just like the white man loves his’n and a white man will die for his’n and I say I’ll die for mine.”Read more at location 312
conquest of Native Americans through armed force and the seizure of their lands)
