Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self-defense,” King assured him. One of King's advisors remembered the reverend's home as “an arsenal.” Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb, Jr. reveals how nonviolent activists and their allies kept the civil rights movement alive by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these men and women were crucial to the movement's success, as were the weapons they carried. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the Southern Freedom Movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb offers a controversial examination of the vital role guns have played in securing American liberties.

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.”

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