This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

by Charles E. Cobb

  From the beginning, the line between armed self-defense and the nonviolent assertion of civil rights was blurred. The idea of nonviolence as a way of life in the black freedom struggle only became prominent in the early 1960s, and even then it was embraced mostly by the small group of ministers surrounding Reverend King within SCLC—and, significantly, not even by all of them. Moreover, those who did not subscribe to nonviolence philosophically, along the lines formulated by King, cannot be described as advocates of violence.

  To be sure, some of the men and women who did not consider themselves nonviolent sometimes espoused retaliatory violence, as Williams did in that particularly angry moment after the 1959 acquittal of the white man accused of assaulting a pregnant black woman:

  We cannot rely on the law. We can get no justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is done, we must then and there on the spot be prepared to inflict punishment on these people. Since the federal government will not bring a halt to lynching and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally, if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method. We must meet violence with violence.

  Although Williams’s outrage was understandable, after his outburst any suggestion that the freedom struggle might devolve into acts of retaliatory violence was quickly and forcefully rejected by the civil rights establishment.

  Following Williams’s statement, a fierce telephone argument between NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins and the Monroe leader brought to a head the long-simmering antagonism between the two men. Differences of class and personality as well as organizational priorities framed much of what kept the two men apart. Williams’s local NAACP branch and the NAACP’s national office had long clashed over the North Carolina unit’s confrontational tactics and rhetoric; this was the last straw. Wilkins was alarmed by the media attention that Williams’s outburst had attracted. “N.A.A.C.P. Leader Urges Violence” blared a May 7, 1959, headline in the New York Times. Wilkins phoned Williams asking that he not talk to the press.

  Williams stood by his statement and told Wilkins that he would continue delivering the same message to television, radio, and newspapers. Wilkins asked Williams to consider the larger goals and needs of the NAACP. In response Williams told him, “That’s what I said and that’s what I am going to tell them… . I am just about sick of this racial injustice down here.” Wilkins reiterated that “meeting lynching with lynching” was not NAACP policy—a distinction that, he noted, the news media seemed unable or unwilling to make. But Williams was having none of it. He accused Wilkins of not being interested in ordinary people, of caring for only “a few Negroes, not the masses of Negroes.” He added, perhaps in a last-minute effort to mitigate Wilkins’s obvious anger and concerns, that he knew his remarks to the media did not represent the views of the NAACP and were his own opinions, and he assured Wilkins that he would try to make that distinction clear in the future. The exchange ended there. Before the day was over, Williams was suspended from the organization.

  Williams’s anger was certainly legitimate; even Wilkins, who agreed with the right of self-defense, understood that. The regular abuse of black women by white men had been stoking anger in black communities for centuries and was an important part of what fueled Williams’s rage. Still, Williams never expressed any belief that his call for retaliatory violence—or, for that matter, for urban rebellion and guerrilla warfare against white supremacists, both of which he would later promote from exile—implied hostility to nonviolent activism. In fact, before his exile, he had sent young Monroe activists to workshops on nonviolence, although he tellingly noted that such workshops only seemed to be for black people: “Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout black communities. Not a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  His frequently angry and strident rhetoric notwithstanding, Williams stopped short of calling for an armed insurrection aimed at overthrowing either local or national government. And when he finally returned to the United States in 1969, so-called black militants were extremely disappointed by his lack of interest in leading any revolution. Rather than being labeled “violent,” men like Williams and the veterans in his NAACP branch are better described by Hartman Turnbow’s term, “non-nonviolent,” or Worth Long’s word, “unviolent.” Violence was always an option for these men, and they sometimes used it, although it was never their first choice.

  Even though the traditions of armed self-defense and nonviolence coexisted, the southern civil rights movement has come to be defined as a nonviolent movement. This is due in large part to the student sit-ins and protests that were launched from the campuses of historically black colleges and universities—events that captured the imagination of the nation, and young people especially, as soon as they began in 1960. Even large demonstrations such as those in Birmingham and Selma in Alabama and St. Augustine in Florida—protests often identified with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and such adult associates as Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Reverend Andrew Young, or Reverend Ralph Abernathy—were driven by student energy. But “nonviolent” incompletely describes these student activists. Indeed, because of their evolution from sit-in protesters to community organizers, armed self-defense and nonviolent activism came to be intertwined in unprecedented ways during the 1960s.

  The sit-in movement began quietly and unexpectedly. On February 1, 1960, four students from historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T) walked into the F. W. Woolworth department store in downtown Greensboro, bought a few school supplies, and then walked over to the store’s lunch counter. They sat down and tried to order something to eat. They were refused service but remained seated until the store closed. The next day, twenty-seven students—twenty-three from A&T and four from Bennett College, the historically black women’s college just a few blocks away from A&T—went back to the department store and sat in until it closed. And on the next day, sixty-three students returned and sat in, occupying every seat at the lunch counter. On February 6, a date now known as Black Saturday, hundreds of students, including the entire A&T football team, sat in or protested. Crowds of young whites, some waving Confederate flags, heckled the protesters and threatened them with violence. A&T’s football team formed a flying wedge, however, aiming to protect protesters and to enter the department store; they charged through the white mob. “Who do you think you are?” one of the whites yelled angrily. “We the Union Army!” a footballer shouted back.

  By the end of March, sit-ins had spread from Greensboro to scores of southern cities. Only the 1961 Freedom Rides and the Montgomery bus boycott that thrust Martin Luther King into national prominence in the mid-1950s are as strongly identified with nonviolence as these protests. But nonviolence is of limited use for understanding these student actions. At the time, the protests were less about that new philosophy of action than about addressing a question that had long animated black challenges to white supremacy in America: What is the best way to resist it?

  When the four Greensboro students decided to sit in, they were not consciously launching a nonviolent protest; they were simply resisting segregation. One of the four, Ezell Blair (who in 1968 converted to Islam and took the name Jibreel Khazan), recalled that his roommate Joseph McNeil, who also participated in the February 1 sit-in, had been denied service at a Greyhound bus station on his way back to school after Christmas break. Because of this experience, McNeil had proposed the sit-in during a dorm-room conversation about Greensboro segregation. “McNeil said, ‘Well, we ought to have something like a boycott,’” Khazan recalled. “And I said a boycott? And he said, ‘Yes, we should go in and sit down at the lunch counter,’ and he named Woolworth. ‘And if they refuse us, then we continue to sit there, and if we’re thrown in jail, we go to jail. And then, we ask the people not to buy in the place.’”

  The original four protestors did not have to decide how to respond to violence, becau
se neither they nor the students who joined them were met with violence. That was not true in every city. In Jacksonville, Florida, during a Saturday sit-in, high school students were assaulted by a mob, some of whom were wielding ax handles that had been handed to them by men in a downtown park wearing Confederate Army uniforms. The police were nowhere to be seen and protection was nonexistent, but as word of the assaults spread, a group of young black people known as “the Boomerangs” poured into the street from the nearby Joseph Blodgett public housing project. They began beating back the mob with their fists, and some even snatched ax handles from members of the mob to use as weapons themselves. At that point, recalls Rodney Hurst, who was president of the NAACP youth council and a protest leader, “police came from everywhere, blocking off downtown and making arrests.”

  The mob’s attack on the sit-in led to one of the first instances of angry black retaliation anywhere in the South. The same day, now remembered as “ax-handle Saturday,” whites—milkmen, postmen, and others—doing business in the black community were threatened and sometimes attacked. Cars driven by whites using the entrance to the expressway in the black community were stoned. Later that night a rumor spread that the Ku Klux Klan was planning to bomb St. Paul’s AME Church—a movement center of planning and support. Armed men guarded the church and shot at the one truck of Klansmen that dared appear on the scene, driving them away.

  Events were very different in Nashville, Tennessee. The protesting students had been well trained in nonviolence by Reverend James M. Lawson, who had been imprisoned for fourteen months as a conscientious objector to the Korean War and had studied nonviolence in India as a Methodist missionary. The Nashville protesters were heckled and assaulted, and the home of their attorney was bombed. The students refused to respond with violence, however, and the tactic appeared to work; on April 19, 1960, Nashville mayor Benjamin West agreed that the city’s downtown should be desegregated.

  The widely televised success in Nashville helped give the sit-in movement an indelible identity as nonviolent, and so did other highly visible student protests in Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Orangeburg, South Carolina. The quiet dignity of well-dressed students who sat in or picketed, not retaliating even while being attacked, won sympathy for the civil rights movement and inspired other student activists to follow their lead. Thus, the founding document of SNCC—a direct outgrowth of the 1960 sit-in movement—opens with affirmation of “the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.”

  Very few delegates attending SNCC’s 1960 founding conference, which was held on Easter weekend at Shaw College (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, actually believed this first sentence. Despite deliberately designating itself a nonviolent organization, SNCC would eventually find itself at the nexus of its nonviolent idealism and armed self-defense, and indeed many in the group were skeptical of nonviolence from the very beginning. All the conference’s attendees were engaged in nonviolent direct action, and most greatly admired the Nashville students, who were the largest delegation at the conference. It was also the only delegation philosophically committed to nonviolence. They stood out because of their tangible inner strength, camaraderie, and trust in one another. They carried themselves with unusual confidence, which seemed to forecast how they had achieved a victory in Nashville so quickly, just after the Shaw conference ended.

  The students wanted to do more than assemble at one conference or meet occasionally for discussions. They shared a commitment to sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent direct action—even if not to the core philosophy underlying them—but their main goal in the conference was to build connections with other students and coordinate campus activism going forward. “We knew we wanted to be students and we knew we wanted to be coordinating,” recalled Lonnie C. King, who at the time of the Raleigh conference was chairman of Atlanta’s student movement, the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR).

  According to Charles “Chuck” McDew, another of the conference’s attendees and a future chairman of SNCC, throughout the conference, the question of nonviolence had hovered over formal and informal conversations, but “there really wasn’t that much debate about it.” The name initially selected in Raleigh for what became SNCC was Student Coordinating Committee, he says. “We said we should be able to continue with the movement without having to accept nonviolence as a way of life.” The students had already proven themselves pragmatic in their use of nonviolence; they had immediately recognized it as an effective tool for challenging segregation and were of one mind about continuing to use it. As COAHR’s Lonnie King explained years later, “In Atlanta we accepted [nonviolence] as a tactic and were using it that way… . I didn’t believe we could have won with violent confrontation; you would have civil war all over the South.”

  A key moment in this discussion—and in the birth of SNCC more generally—came when Martin Luther King, who had given the conference’s opening keynote address, asked to speak to the attendees a second time. He told the group that he would like them to become a student arm of his organization, SCLC. However, he went on, they would have to commit to nonviolence as a way of life. This all-or-nothing approach held little appeal for the students, who turned down the proposal. “Acceptance of nonviolence as a way of life was not something we could commit to, and I think Dr. King made a mistake asking us to do it,” says Chuck McDew. “We probably would have joined SCLC if not for that.” However, emphasizes McDew, the students’ rejection of King’s offer “wasn’t an aggressive or belligerent rejection of nonviolence. Speaking against [nonviolence] is like speaking against your mother; it’s God and apple pie. How could you disagree with the ideal? But if some redneck cracker tries to shoot me I’m justified trying to defend myself if I can. I’m not going to let him kill me.”

  Most of the students gathered in Raleigh were unfamiliar with guns; lethal weapons were virtually nonexistent on their college campuses. Lonnie King was chairman of the student movement in Atlanta, a city that boasted it was “too busy to hate.” But even so, he and other activists knew that as their activism increased, and with it their visibility, the potential for racist attack was present anywhere and at any time. “When they arrested us they published our addresses; they even published my apartment number,” Lonnie King mused. “What do you think they’re trying to say with that?” He did not feel the need to have a bodyguard, however, and he did not own a gun, but on one occasion, at least, armed protection may have kept him alive. “Charles Johnson, a Korean War veteran, told me this later,” said King:

  at the height of the 1960 protests four white men were waiting in their car in the parking lot of my Gordon Road apartment building. I believe they wanted to ambush and shoot me when I got home later that night. As it happened, though, I was in Cleveland, Ohio. Charles told me that after spotting the four men he contacted three guys he knew who were also Korean War veterans. All of them were living in the same apartment complex as me. They had guns and they formed what might be called a vigilante group. When these white men showed up a second time they approached their car from four different directions. When they reached the car, Charles asked them why they were sitting there. “Oh, we’re just waiting for someone upstairs,” they told him. Charles clicked his shotgun and told them to wait somewhere else and those guys jetted out of there; they never came back. These war veterans were not talking about “nonviolence.” They were saying, “Let’s protect this kid from white people who want to ambush him.”

  Stories of this kind pepper movement history and serve as important reminders that the civil rights movement was driven by individual black communities and actions as well as by national organizations, their leaders, and their policies. And communities, unlike national organizations, did not subscribe to particular schools of philosophy or tactics when they chose how to respond to danger. It is an obvious but often overlooked fact, moreover, that the communit
ies in which the student activists of the 1960s grew up shaped much of their thinking. In the political evolution of Charles Sherrod, for example, it is easy to see how important influences in his and other’s background helped process a new idea like nonviolence. Sherrod would become a legendary figure in SNCC and was closely identified with acceptance of nonviolence as a way of life. But although he had been leading nonviolent protests in Richmond, Virginia, he did not label himself nonviolent until the conference at Shaw College. Before then, nonviolence had just been a word to him. “I’d only heard about it because I read about [Martin Luther King] in newspapers,” Sherrod recalled later. Before the conference, he had had almost no philosophical concept of what nonviolence might mean as a way of life, but at Shaw he recognized a part of himself that had always been committed to nonviolence “because I was a Christian,” he explained, and nonviolence was “Christ in action. [With sit-ins and protest] I’m overcoming evil as the scripture says; scripture I’ve been nourished with all of my life.” The gathering at Shaw brought Sherrod into contact with the idea of nonviolence as a principle for day-to-day living as well as a tactic for social change.

  Few in SNCC became more committed to nonviolence as a way of life than Sherrod. Yet even for Sherrod, living it could be challenging. In 1961, as a SNCC field secretary, Sherrod moved to Southwest Georgia, one of the most dangerously antiblack regions of the South, and he found himself accommodating his belief in nonviolence to precautions he felt necessary for his family’s safety. “The only thing that ever caused me to question my nonviolence was when I got married,” he admitted, “especially when I became a father. What I did was get a dog—actually four big dogs, and I kept a dog until my children were grown.”