This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” These words spoken by Frederick Douglass more than 150 years ago aptly summarized the relationship of black people in America to the largely white nation that surrounded them. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”

  Douglass’s words describe the basic choice that confronted black people in the 1960s, just as meaningfully as they do the choice that confronted black people in 1857 when he made that speech—or, for that matter, the choice that confronts black people today. 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?

  The real lesson that emerges from the Mississippi experience, and every Freedom Movement experience across the South, centers on that question. It is what blurs the distinction between nonviolence and armed self-defense. When the night riders attacked his home, Hartman Turnbow had to decide what he was going to do. When Hollis Watkins saw his farmer hosts exhausting themselves staying up all night to protect him and their farm, he felt he had some responsibility for their new burden, and he had to decide how he was going to meet that responsibility. What was he going to do?

  Whether the question was one of picking up a gun in response to attack by night riders, or of curling one’s body tightly and protectively while being assaulted by a mob during a lunch-counter sit-in, or of shielding an elderly person under attack for trying to register to vote, the decision of what to do centered not on the choice between nonviolence and violence but on the question of what response was best in each situation. Most often, moreover, there was very little time to decide. Sometimes heads of households chose to defend home and family with guns; sometimes it was best to step on the accelerator and speed away or flee on foot. Sometimes ambush eliminated any possibility of choice. What was always at play was the common sense of survival. And flight when necessary was not cowardice, just as shooting it out hopelessly in the name of “manhood” was not always courage.

  Black southerners frequently had to make split-second decisions about how best to protect themselves from attack—whether to stand their ground or seek shelter. Although they had a shotgun in their home, Joe and Rebecca McDonald jumped into their iron bathtub when gunfire suddenly struck their home. In Greenwood, Mississippi, when a white mob with guns and chains broke down the door and headed for their upstairs office, SNCC workers Sam Block, Lawrence Guyot, and Luvaugn Brown climbed out the back window, scrambled across the roof of the building next door, slid down a television antenna, and ran into a warren of houses across the street, vanishing into the larger black community. On the other hand, Laura McGhee stayed put and sent the sheriff away.

  These choices do not negate each other or diminish each other’s value. The decision made by the SNCC workers in their Greenwood office does not conflict with Mrs. McGhee’s judgment about how best to deal with the terrorism confronting her and her community. Understanding what shaped Mrs. McGhee’s decision, and all decisions about whether or not to respond to attack with gunfire or the threat of gunfire, is only possible by comprehending the complexities of choice, the decision making of life and death. It is not something to be taken lightly, and it is never abstract. Medgar Evers’s reasoning and decision not to organize Mau Mau–like retaliation does not define him as nonviolent. The shotguns in Fannie Lou Hamer’s bedroom do not make her an armed black militant.

  Nor is the sudden expression of anger—a normal human reaction in many instances—an articulation of policy. In 1961, for example, Brenda Travis, a sixteen-year-old McComb high school student, was arrested after leading a protest and sent seventy miles away from home to Oakley reform school in Raymond, Mississippi. One evening, while looking out a window in her room, Travis saw police turn back a bus. It was filled with family and schoolmates who had come to visit her, but she did not know that at the time. She asked the matron about the bus, and soon the reform school superintendent had her brought to his house. He told her whom the bus had been carrying and explained that, because the group had not asked permission to visit her, it had been turned away.

  At this point Brenda had been imprisoned for weeks. She had had no trial, had seen no judge. Even more than fifty years later, she almost teared up remembering how angry she had become at hearing that she would not be seeing her friends and family. “I ripped into him,” she recalled. “I don’t know what all I didn’t say to him. He said if I didn’t stop talking to him like that he was going to slap my face. I told him that if he did, there was going to be a war right then and there. Forget about nonviolence! I didn’t care if I lived or died that night.”

  More famously, in 1965 fifty-four-year-old Annie Cooper slugged a sheriff. She had been standing in line for hours outside the Dallas County courthouse in Selma, Alabama, waiting to register to vote. When Sherriff Jim Clark—Selma’s notoriously abusive and bigoted lawman—ordered her to go home, giving her a hard poke in the back of the neck with either a billy club or a cattle prod, Cooper spun around angrily and delivered a right hook to the sheriff’s jaw, knocking him to the ground. That night at a mass meeting at Brown’s Chapel in Selma, Martin Luther King explained,

  Mrs. Cooper wouldn’t have turned around and hit Sheriff Clark just to be hitting. And of course, as you know, we teach a philosophy of not retaliating and not hitting back, but the truth of the situation is that Mrs. Cooper, if she did anything, was provoked by Sheriff Clark. At that moment he was engaging in some very ugly business-as-usual action. This is what brought about that scene there.

  Cooper’s decision to slug the sheriff and Travis’s anger toward her reform school superintendent were emotional reactions lodged in the real-world experiences of ordinary people. Any theoretical or philosophical arguments about their value—at least, any arguments made by people in pulpits and classrooms who do not have to face the human consequences of their thoughts or of the actions they propose—is in the end an intellectual tea party, perhaps momentarily refreshing but only occasionally nourishing.

  It may be that “nonviolent” is simply the wrong word for many of the people who participated in the freedom struggle and who were comfortable with both nonviolence and self-defense, assessing what to do primarily on the basis of which seemed the most practical at any given moment. SNCC field secretary Worth Long preferred the term “unviolent.” In the thinking of this Durham, North Carolina, native, the notion of “unviolence” offers a way to transcend the fundamentally false distinction between violence and nonviolence that some have tried to impose in their analysis of Freedom Movement work and decision making. “Most people do not see themselves as being ‘nonviolent’ … and most people would not consider themselves ‘violent,’” Long noted. “What’s the path for those who would participate in the movement and not be nonviolent? I’m not talking about labeling; I’m talking about their actions.” Such people would never call themselves “violent” or “nonviolent”; they would treat both choices as potentially viable, and at any given time, which they would choose would depend on what they had concluded about their immediate circumstances.

  Whatever one’s personal beliefs, grassroots work like organizing for voter registration, mounting a boycott, participating in a cooperative, or building a political party often did not involve any discussion of nonviolence as tactic, strategy, or philosophy. Rather, the day-to-day realities of these organizing efforts always kept discussion centered on a much more basic question: W
hat was best to do?

  A Civil War–era card depicting a rebelling slave. Open resistance to slavery was rarely, if ever, nonviolent. (Library of Congress)

  African American troops fighting for the Union in Dutch Gap, Virginia, during the Civil War. The U.S. Army reluctantly organized the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) in 1863. Its members saw action in every major theater of the war; twenty-five were awarded a Medal of Honor. (Library of Congress)

  An illustration of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, an all-black regiment, charging Confederate fortifications near Charleston, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863. Memorialized in the film Glory, this and other acts of valor demonstrated to a skeptical nation that blacks were fully capable of effective, organized armed struggle. (Library of Congress)

  An illustration from an issue of Harper’s Weekly published shortly after the Civil War showing a man representing the Freedmen’s Bureau standing between armed groups of white and black Americans. Reconstruction saw confrontation between budding black power and white power that sought to remain entrenched. At issue: What kind of South would replace the one destroyed by the Civil War? (Library of Congress)

  An African American unit of U.S. Army Infantry troops marching northwest of Verdun, France, in World War I. Military service provided a new generation of Afro-Americans with training and self-confidence that would irrevocably change their attitudes—and responses—to white-supremacist power back in the United States. (Library of Congress)

  Members of an all-black artillery unit during World War II. Their experience fighting fascism abroad would lead men like these to take an active stand against white supremacy at home in the years following the war, thereby laying the foundation for the freedom struggle of the 1960s. (Library of Congress)

  A heavily armed white trooper menacing a protest march through Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1965. Faced with the prospect of overwhelming violence from state and federal authorities, Afro-Americans had to carefully weigh the prerogative of armed self-defense against the brutality that their resistance might elicit. (© 2014 Matt Herron)

  Guards in front of Birmingham, Alabama’s Gaston Motel, which served as the headquarters for Martin Luther King Jr. during his spring 1963 campaign in the city. Confronted with the perennial threat of white-supremacist terrorism, blacks organized self-defense in a variety of ways. (© 2014 Matt Herron)

  An elderly resident of Lowndes County, Alabama, with a shotgun. Such weapons were typical of those found in black households of the rural South and were used by both men and women for self-defense. (© 1973, Douglas R. Gilbert, for LOOK magazine)

  A young man guarding a Black Panther billboard in Lowndes County, Alabama, during the 1966 election for county offices. The year before, only one black person was registered to vote in this majority-black county. Now black registered voters outnumbered white registered voters and had formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party whose symbol was a black panther. Both the panther and the young man guarding this sign reflect blacks’ willingness to protect both their right to vote and their right to campaign for office. (SNCC Photo: Doug Harris)

  Charles Sims, president of Bogalusa’s Deacons for Defense and Justice, holding Ku Klux Klan clothing at a demonstration. (Corbis)

  Two unidentified men keeping a “fire-bomb watch” at a Freedom School’s community library in Holmes County, Mississippi, during the 1964 Freedom Summer. (© 2014 Matt Herron)

  5

  Which Cheek You Gonna Turn?

  These are young people armed with a dream.

  —Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, Nashville, Tennessee, 1960

  Wal, in this county, if you turn the other cheek … these here peckerwoods’ll hand you back half of what you sitting on.

  —R. L. Strickland to Stokely Carmichael, Lowndes County, Alabama, 1965

  After World War II, as black veterans in Monroe and elsewhere began asserting themselves politically, a relatively new idea began to reshape southern civil rights struggle: nonviolence. Although the philosophy of nonviolence was far less familiar than the idea of armed self-defense, it was not a completely unfamiliar method of political struggle. And as the Freedom Movement evolved and the practice of nonviolent activism began playing an increasingly important role, it turned out that these two approaches—so dissimilar on the surface—were in fact quite compatible. Understanding the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s requires understanding this counterintuitive but vital compatibility.

  Even before the war, Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British colonialism in India had been attracting attention in black America. Especially important to nonviolent activism’s spread into the U.S. civil rights struggle was theologian Howard Thurman, who in 1936 went on a “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to India with his wife, Sue Baily Thurman, Methodist minister Edward Carroll, and his wife Phenola Valentine Carroll. At the end of Thurman’s visit, Gandhi told him, “It may be through Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” In 1953 Thurman became dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel (making him the first tenured black dean at any predominately white university), holding the position until 1965. When Thurman became dean, Martin Luther King Jr. was in the last year of his residence at the university for the doctorate he was awarded June 5, 1955, and Thurman was an important influence on him, although the two men seem not to have been very close personally. Thurman had also been a classmate of King’s father at Morehouse College in Atlanta and was a family friend. From 1931 to 1944 Thurman had been dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel. James Farmer, the founder of CORE, had been one of his students there, and it was Thurman who introduced Farmer to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international, interfaith, interracial organization dedicated since World War I to working for peace and to training activists for nonviolent struggle. FOR would have a formative influence on some of the important figures in the generation of nonviolent activist leaders who preceded the civil rights movement of the 1960s—figures such as Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; Reverend James Lawson, who mentored the Nashville student movement; and Farmer, who found in FOR “a cadre of black and white pacifists primed to act on the race question and examining with close interest the progress of nonviolent direct action in India.”

  From time to time well before the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins of the 1960s, acts of nonviolent protest had taken place in the United States, often initiated by prominent or rising black intellectuals. In 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston, then dean of Howard University’s law school, took a ferry from Norfolk, Virginia, to Washington, D.C. He refused to eat supper behind a screen in the ferry’s dining room, so he ordered food to be brought to his cabin. Then he refused to pay the additional service charge that almost doubled what the same meal would have cost him in the dining room. In the same year, Howard University student Kenneth Clark—a budding psychologist and editor of the school newspaper, who years later would convince the Supreme Court of the damaging psychological effects of school segregation on black children—was arrested for picketing the U.S. Capitol to protest the segregation of its restaurants. In 1940, Pauli Murray, an FOR member who would become the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from Yale Law School and the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia’s segregation laws by sitting in the whites-only section of a bus. In 1943, Murray, then a law student at Howard University, led female students in a sit-in at a nearby cafeteria that refused to serve blacks.

  CORE, founded in March 1942 by James Farmer, was the first organization specifically concerned with the application of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement. Its members conducted a few sit-ins in Chicago and St. Louis. In 1947 CORE’s “Journey of Reconciliation” through part of the upper South, testing compliance with Supreme Court–ordered desegregation of interstate travel, inspired the Freedom Rides of 1961. Although CORE remained a tiny, mostly northern, a
nd mostly white group until the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the 1960s, its members actively protested the considerable racial discrimination above the Mason–Dixon Line. When, for example, CORE established a chapter in Columbus, Ohio, its membership was drawn from the 1,500-member interracial and nonviolent Vanguard League, which for several years had been protesting job discrimination.

  These examples notwithstanding, for the most part black veterans and other leaders of the black community hardly thought about nonviolence. The 1950s did begin, however, with a widely shared hopeful sense that change was coming. Things are going to open up for you was a refrain many young black people heard from their elders, and a spirit of resistance infused these years with purpose on a deeper level as well. Postwar allegiance to ideals of freedom and an accompanying commitment to struggle against white supremacy were the tissue connecting men and women who—apart from their shared Afro-American identity—were very different from one another; people like Robert Williams, the advocate of self-defense, and Martin Luther King Jr., who championed nonviolence. This shared sense that a time for change was at hand explains why the gentle Rosa Parks admired Robert Williams and could give the eulogy at his 1996 funeral, praising “his courage and his commitment to freedom.”

  Resistance is the touchstone for understanding what drove nonviolent and non-nonviolent or unviolent approaches to the expanding civil rights movement. In Monroe, North Carolina, for example, black citizens first made the decision to resist the Ku Klux Klan’s attempt to seize Bennie Montgomery’s body; weapons were simply the means of implementing that decision. A similar decision to resist terrorism a decade later resulted in the use of guns to protect Dr. Albert Perry’s home from Klan attack. Likewise, what was fundamental to the nonviolent character of the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott had nothing to do with an embrace of nonviolence as either tactic or philosophy; rather, it reflected a decision, indeed, a determination, to fight city bus segregation—that is, to resist.