The LCFO had another significant effect: its success in Lowndes County, combined with the MFDP’s experience in Atlantic City, triggered Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power in Mississippi. Although the idea of black empowerment had underlain SNCC’s organizing work throughout the South, the LCFO was crucial in making this political goal explicit.
Not since Martin Luther King had a leader as charismatic as Stokely Carmichael emerged from the southern freedom struggle and exerted such a powerful influence on black people above the Mason–Dixon Line. But it was the times themselves, as much as Carmichael’s personal dynamism, that determined his impact.
Before Carmichael called for Black Power, many young blacks in the North had been almost disdainful of the southern movement because of its identification with nonviolence. Stokely himself had been largely unknown outside the places where he worked as an organizer. But his call suggested that a shift was underway in SNCC, that after years of so-called passive resistance, the organization was now open to what they considered more militant and revolutionary struggle.
This new perception of SNCC—as an organization calling for revolutionary change and as one open to armed struggle—resonated in urban inner cities especially, attracting a range of angry young black people. The northern-based Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which defined itself as a revolutionary Black Nationalist organization, placed operatives inside SNCC in order to convince the organization of the necessity of armed struggle. Although RAM’s idea of a “liberation army” was greeted skeptically within SNCC, RAM operatives’ emphasis on black leadership and black consciousness struck a chord with field staff, many of whom had opposed the 1964 summer project that had brought hundreds of white volunteers to Mississippi. Other new forces acting on SNCC included the Black Panther Party, which had just been formed in Oakland, California, and which had borrowed the black panther symbol of the LCFO. There was a brief formal alliance between the two organizations. More broadly, the cultural and political currents of black consciousness washed over SNCC and CORE.
These new forces within and around SNCC had the effect of complicating the group’s own internal discussions about its direction and identity. And Stokely’s charisma meant that outside the South, for the first time SNCC became defined by what its chairman said instead of by its organizing program. One consequence of this shift was also that SNCC did less organizing.
By the mid-1960s, a generational exchange of ideas was well underway within the black community. Black art, especially in poetry, music, and drama, blossomed and reflected a more political black consciousness. Political excitement and commitment was being generated not only by the southern Freedom Movement but also by liberation struggles in southern Africa and in Africa’s newly emerging nations. The 1961 protests in the U.N. gallery following the murder of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba is a dramatic early illustration of this. Black political activists in the United States interacted with armed African liberation movements. And quite separate from his religious identity, the political words of Malcolm X, perhaps the most influential voice among young black political activists in the North, resonated in the hearts and minds of young black people. Political expression and debate seemed to be everywhere, breaking down what had been the biggest barrier blocking meaningful black North–South political discourse: nonviolence.
The idea of nonviolent struggle had prevented northern and southern activists from truly understanding each other’s strategies, tactics, and goals. By 1966, many above the Mason–Dixon Line saw southern struggle as finished and—insofar as it had been defined by gaining voting rights and desegregation—won. “Mrs. Hamer is no longer relevant,” is the way one northern activist described the direction of Freedom Movement activism. This statement was not so much a dismissal of southern struggle as a sign of a shift away from grassroots organizing in favor of ideological top-down leadership. Northern activists never fully grasped the nature of southern struggle, so they did not feel it contained many useful lessons. Desegregation was viewed as being the same as integration, nonviolence was considered “passive,” and the future was seen as lying in the urban North. Consequently, although northern activists admired the courage of southern activists, actual political conversation between them was limited, and this limitation—and the misconceptions about southern efforts from which it sprung—stunted the development of organized national struggle. In the late 1960s and into the ’70s, the Black Panther Party and a handful of small black organizations notwithstanding, national black leadership mainly appealed for money from white people holding various positions of power and organized loud “black” conferences and caucuses that seemed more boast than commitment.
Carmichael bridged these differences for a short while, then left the United States for a political life in Africa. “We were all tired, exhausted [and] I fought with him over going to Africa,” says Cleveland Sellers, who was not in disagreement with Stokely’s interest in pan-Africanism. “But SNCC was dying, the FBI was tracking him everywhere, and we had all gone through 10 years with no break and though nobody likes to admit it, you had to take your behind somewhere just to think.” SNCC’s charismatic leader effectively disappeared from the American political scene, and the vibrant movement Carmichael had helped foster seemed to have arrived at an impasse.
The way forward remained unclear, as it does today. The freedom struggle continues, in ways at once more subtle and more urgent than the efforts of activists in the 1960s. And although the questions of nonviolence and armed self-defense may seem to have receded into the past, they endure in our conceptions of both the civil rights movement and the activism that followed Carmichael’s call for Black Power. Today, gun rights are remembered as an unfortunate addition to the story of black struggle, one that helped radicalize and ultimately defeat the greatest ambitions of the luminaries who propelled blacks’ age-old freedom struggle to new heights at midcentury. Furthermore, today the issue of gun rights has largely come to be associated with the conservative white Right, and far too often the concept of “standing one’s ground” is invoked to defend the murder of a black person. But there was a time when people on both sides of America’s racial divide embraced their right to self-protection, and when rights were won because of it. We would do well to remember that fact today.
AFTERWORD
Understanding History
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
—Ella Baker
I have never subscribed to nonviolence as a way of life, simply because I have never felt strong enough or courageous enough, even though as a young activist and organizer in the South I was committed to the tactic. “I tried to aim my gun, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man,” Walter White wrote of his father’s instruction to shoot and “don’t … miss” if a white mob set foot on their property. If I had been in a similar situation in 1960s Mississippi, I would have wrestled with the same doubts that weighed on the young White. But in the final analysis, whatever ethical or moral difficulty I might have had would not have made me unwilling or unable to fire a weapon if necessary. I would have been able to live with the burden of having killed a man to save my own life or those of my friends and coworkers.
It has been a challenge to reconcile this fact with nonviolence, the chosen tactic of the southern civil rights movement of which I was a part. Yet in some circumstances, as seen in the pages of this book, guns proved their usefulness in nonviolent struggle. That’s life, which is always about living within its contradictions.
More than ever, an exploration of this contradiction is needed. The subjects of guns and of armed self-defense have never been more politicized or more hotly debated than they are today. Although it may seem peculiar for a book largely about armed self-defense, I hope these pages have pushed forward discussion of both the philosophy and the practicalities of nonviolence, particularly as it pertains to black history and struggle. The larger point, of course, is that nonviolence and armed resist
ance are part of the same cloth; both are thoroughly woven into the fabric of black life and struggle. And that struggle no more ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 than it began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., and the student sit-ins.
In some respects, black struggle took on a new character, as with legislative victory over segregation and new law protecting voting rights the main battleground shifted from the South to the politically more complicated North. SCLC’s efforts in Chicago failed. SNCC dropped “Nonviolent” from its name, called for “full retaliation from the black community across America,” and then faded into increasing irrelevancy. The Black Panther Party became dramatically visible on the steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento, where they suddenly appeared strapped in bandoliers, wearing black leather, and carrying weapons. In a manner reminiscent of the 1960 student sit-ins, chapters and some groups just calling themselves “black panthers” spread rapidly across the United States. Before the end of the decade, CORE officially declared itself a Black Nationalist organization, and across the country a dubious black political spontaneity mainly took the form of urban rioting.
Southern struggle had become romanticized—rugged, ragged SNCC and CORE shock troops bravely confronting white supremacy, especially police and mad-dog sheriffs. After the Selma-to-Montgomery march and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many thought that southern struggle was over, its mission accomplished, civil rights gained. Even that story, however, has barely been told; many of the southern Freedom Movement’s dimensions remain unexplored. That is one reason this book has focused on armed self-defense and its place within a nonviolent movement. My aim has been to force a reappraisal of the movement and to open the door to new ways of understanding what happened in the South in the 1950s and ’60s.
One oft-repeated assertion about weapons in the 1960s was that their organized use increased the chances of massive retaliation by local, state, and even federal authority. That just did not happen, not even in Louisiana where the Deacons for Defense and Justice came closest to armed confrontation with police. There was no meaningful difference between white responses to armed resistance by blacks and white responses to nonviolent resistance by blacks. Where massive police force or state power was exercised, as in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, or in Jackson, Mississippi, police violence was not a response to either the use of guns or the practice of nonviolence; rather, it was exercised for the sole purpose of crushing black protest and demands in any shape. The Freedom Rider bus in Anniston, Alabama, for instance, was not firebombed because anyone thought it was smuggling weapons; hate and fear alone drove that attack, as they did the police-backed mob attacks against Freedom Riders in Birmingham and Montgomery.
Almost nowhere in the postwar South was there any significant confrontation between armed black groups and police, especially in the 1960s. Incidents like the one in Columbia, Tennessee, in 1946 were the exception, not the rule. But even there, despite the price paid for the veteran-led armed self-defense, most in the black community thought the decision to take up arms in the face of potential mob violence helped the community rather than hurt it.
Moreover, remarkably few shootouts of any kind involved organized groups, and those that did take place did not last long. Fear explains this fact. Few if any white terrorists were prepared to die for the cause of white supremacy; bullets, after all, do not fall into any racial category and are indiscriminately lethal. Wisely, I think, black defenders who could have opened up with killing gunfire usually refrained. In place after place, a few rounds fired into the air were enough to cause terrorists to flee.
Black defenders also knew when and where to abstain from using their guns. The key distinction made was between police violence and civilian violence. Violent police mobs, like the one that rioted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, found it easier—or at least less risky—to target unprotected, nonviolent protesters. Protests like that on Bloody Sunday in Selma and the Selma-to-Montgomery march that followed were always tactically nonviolent. The very practical and disciplined black self-defense groups did not interfere with the violent, hate-fueled actions of uniformed authority in these instances. And although defensive groups were sometimes present at the scenes of such protests, as with the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi, they did not violate the commitment to nonviolence of such leaders as Martin Luther King (although in many communities young people reacted to white violence during nonviolent protests by hurling rocks and bottles).
It is indisputable that nonviolent direct action in the mid-twentieth century brought thousands into the southern civil rights struggle. And it is incontestable that this eruption of protest was a huge factor in securing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Because nonviolence so often worked as a tactic, it is somewhat surprising that so few participants in the Freedom Movement embraced it as a way of life. But nonviolence has always been much more demanding and difficult than violence—and although it is a beautiful idea, perhaps in the end, it is not one that can be realistically expected to be widely embraced. Yet the notion of nonviolence is certainly relevant in an increasingly coarse society that today is spiraling into violence to such a degree that carrying concealed weapons, including guns, has become acceptable in many parts of the country, as has the right to kill an unarmed person deemed “threatening” in manner or clothing. Furthermore, although the country more or less celebrates the nonviolent southern civil rights movement—whether according to Mohandas Gandhi’s strict tenets or in Martin Luther King Jr.’s somewhat less stringent manner—nonviolence itself has yet to find a path into U.S. culture in any significant way; for the most part it has had no impact on the current conversation about what America should be.
What amounts to abandonment or walking away from nonviolence’s demonstrable history of success is especially noticeable in the many beleaguered inner-city neighborhoods blighted by unprecedented levels of violence—especially gun violence. Although nonviolence was crucial to black struggle in the twentieth century, it can be argued that violence on a scale much larger than Ku Klux Klan terrorism is the greatest problem facing many black American communities today.
Part of this problem is the relative silence and inaction of black leadership when it comes to addressing the nightmare of violence in so many black and minority communities. Many of the most prominent black leaders live in upper-class neighborhoods—some black, some white—that are largely free of the pressures found in public housing projects and working-class communities. That these leaders now enjoy the comfort and pleasures their elevated status gains them is normal—welcome progress, in one sense. But if there is any place where voices committed to nonviolence need to be continually raised, surely it is in the poorest black and minority communities, where violence and the values surrounding violence—most disturbingly retaliation—are a routine part of everyday life.
In a February 2012 New York University Law Review article, James Forman Jr. (son of SNCC leader Jim Forman) has drawn our attention to one important way violence in these communities wreaks long-term havoc and needs attention. “The same low-income young people of color who disproportionately enter prisons are disproportionately victimized by crime. And the two phenomena are mutually reinforcing.” Mandatory sentencing and the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans and Latinos for low-level drug crimes is outrageous and is rightly protested. But what needs much more focus is the fact that in state prisons especially, many are jailed for violent crimes—people of color killing or trying to kill people of color.
We have also become more warlike as a nation, and as individuals. Regardless of race or social status, we are now more likely than we once were to settle arguments or react to frustration with violence. Yet despite the sobering and alarming implications of this growth in violence, public discourse about nonviolence, and thus discourse about effectively confronting violence, has lessened since the 1960s. Despite the very good work of groups like t
he Cure Violence partnerships, which treat violence like a disease, we do not see much nonviolent grassroots effort in America’s most violence-wracked communities.
To be fair, there is more under way than is recognized. Notes Maria Varela, who was part of SNCC’s field staff in the 1960s and whose later work organizing in rural communities in New Mexico and the Southwest gained her a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant, “There are many inner-city communities where individuals work to keep the peace on the block. There is work going on in rural communities and within Native Nations to defuse violence and suicide. But these people and these organizations aren’t considered ‘newsworthy.’”
Over the years, former SNCC field secretary Ivanhoe Donaldson, like most of us who were deeply involved in the southern struggles, has given a great deal of thought to violence and nonviolence:
We are a very violent culture. In fact, human beings are violent by nature—they are born into violence and they live in violence all their lives, either running from it, hiding from it, or participating in it… . The reality though, is that violence never changes anything. It does cause realignments of power and authority. [And] it’s always unclear as to how [violence will] shape the future. Here in America we have all of these nuclear weapons, and in China they have all of these nuclear weapons. So do other nations. We all have the capacity to blow each other to kingdom come. One day somebody is going to do just that. It’s the nature of the beast.
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