Reddit reviews This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Any student of history would know that gun control is rooted in racism. For a great read on the racist roots of gun control, and the ties between gun rights and the fight for civil rights, I would strongly recommend This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/0465033105

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”

Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement’s success.

Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

Yes, but the way they're often depicted is as nonviolent, noble, "deserving" victims. You never here of people like rob williams, or rowdy, armed protestors who stoop up to the police http://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/0465033105

FBI & Memphis Police Have Admitted Their Role in the Assassination of Dr. King Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/fbi-memphis-polices-admitted-involvement-assassination-mlk/#TjOr66ZkwV5kB165.99

This is a huge split here. Liberals and Leftists are divided. I'm going to say now I expect what follows from here in my post to be fully ignored or diminished. The reason why is simple: most people prefer to craft an image of history in their likeness than to observe it as it is. I'm going to be blunt about this. Liberals approach politics from an individual perspective that privileges personal thought and feeling over concrete material analysis preferred by the Left, especially Marxists.

This is the crucial thing to grasp here. Violence is necessary to the continuation and maintenance of white supremacy and patriarchy because these things are foundational to capitalism itself.

Dr King was killed for saying this.

This isn't debatable, it's historical fact. Any and all challenges to these things that would deal them any serious blow will be met with violence.

And that violence will win. You will be stopped. It happened to the civil rights movement. It happened to the women's movement. You can be as pacifist and liberal and dutiful to your state as you please and the state will unleash hell on you anyway.

The fact is history has been whitewashed. Violence has always played a pivotal role in social justice: in attacking it and defending it.

Shuttering a planned parenthood or factory or school is violence. It's genetic to class society.

America is not now nor has ever been a peaceful, just society. Its reliance on violence is evident throughout history, and this compels violence in response. The focus on nonviolent movements is dishonest and transparently self serving to both state interests and liberals' individualistic preference.

I came into politics as a pacifist libertarian, then a liberal. I couldn't in good conscience remain a pacifist anti gun liberal after honest historical investigation

But violence doesn't have to win.

Again, I fully expert everything i say to be rejected not because it's historically wrong, but because it won't console liberal pseudopacifism.

The only time the state and its defenders will relax violence on you is when you stop being a threat to them--when you feminism and equality movement no longer is capable of achieving its goals and is happy with token legislation with no power.

So what are we to do?

Organize in a new way. Understand that by taking the smallest reformist position you're putting a target on your back, so we may as well go whole hog and realize we need a new constitution for a society not inherently predicated on patriarchy and white supremacy.

Negroes with Guns by Robert F Williams.

First published in 1962, "Negroes with Guns" is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The single most important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, "Negroes with Guns" is a classic story of a man who risked his life for democracy and freedom.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, reviews the long tradition of self-protection among African Americans, who knew they could not rely on local law enforcement for protection. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, after the fire bombing of his home, kept weapons in his house to protect his family. Cobb offers a collection of memories of freedom fighters and a broad historical perspective, from slave resistance to the Deacons of Defense and Justice, as evidence of the human impulse to self-protection that counterbalanced the tactics of nonviolent resistance.

Drop a bomb on a residential area? I never in my life heard of that. It's like Vietnam.

On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just 21 years old.

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people, including miners' wives and children, were killed.

Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of gas and explosive bombs left over from World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair.

Ah, that's a new one on me. I base my knowledge of King's guns on this book. It's basically a memoir from Mr. Cobb, who was very involved in the nonviolent side of the civil rights movement in the deep south. I highly recommend it, it's a very informative read!

I think the SNCC still has a few chapters, and the NAACP certainly has a widespread presence in rural areas.

That doesn’t work. And it didn’t work during the Black Freedom Struggle either, definitely not in the Deep South.

Armed, violent resistance was necessary.

It looks like you're Christian, so I will recommend that you read this article

I also suggest getting this book

Agreed - but I'm old enough to remember the exact same behaviors from people protesting segregation and the vietnam war, no one called them terrorists.

And there were a LOT of armed civil rights protesters, history books tend to focus on MLK and gloss over their importance to desegregation: Black Panthers.

Honestly, I've been surprised that the black lives matter movement hasn't pushed self-defense more; defense against the Klan was an important motivator of blacks arming themselves in the 60s.

Heck, even MLK was packing heat. See This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed.

Has anyone else read this, or excerpts at least?
http://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/0465033105
I remember reading Hunter Thompson's Hells Angels book and reading about armed blacks following cops around. When a black motorist got pulled over several armed (open carry) black men would get out and observe, as is their right.

>"Would MLK have been as well received without Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam..."

Charles E. Cobb Jr. a journalist that was also an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the southern U.S. during the fight for civil rights wrote a book entitled ["This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible"] (http://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/0465033105), in which he remind that guns for self-defense was an integral part of this movement and how it complemented MLK non-violence strategy.

So is not Malcolm X leading or advocationg armed opposition against the system (I don't know if Malcolm actually did this) but men like [Robert F. Williams] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Williams), who led the NAACP branch in North Carolina that advocated for armed self-defense (and actually engaged in shooting battles with the KKK) or Clarence Chinn, Jr. President of Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana who actually complemented those using non-violent methods.

Mr. Cobb wrote excerpts of his books in a series of blog post in the Washington Post which I list below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/29/standing-our-ground/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/30/strong-men-keep-a-comin-on/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/31/which-cheek-you-gonna-turn/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/08/01/guns-and-freedom/

There have been plenty of reasons for people to arm themselves. Usually it's for protection against the police. If that's how people choose to defend themselves from genuine existing armed threats (like the police) then we need to respect that out of solidarity.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed makes a really good case for this. It wasn't just the Black Panthers, there were armed guards taking shifts outside MLK's home.