This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed

how guns made the civil rights movement possible

294 pages

English language

Published March 20, 2014 by Basic Books.

ISBN:
978-0-465-03310-2
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OCLC Number:
853310550

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4 stars (1 review)

"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 …

1 edition

Review of "This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed" on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

The unwritten history of the fight for civil rights, which refuses to shy away from the armed defense of the nonviolent protest movement. Contains a lot of lessons for activists, and some thoroughly interesting (at times terrifying and horrible) stories of the struggle. There's some levity, too; Cobb is insistent on what he calls in the Afterword, "guerilla history" and quotes many big personalities who wouldn't normally find their way into a history of the civil rights battles prior to 1960. It's chock full of those accounts, and that makes the reading slow, here and there, but I highly recommend this book.

Subjects

  • Nineteen sixties
  • Civil rights
  • Law and legislation
  • Self-defense
  • Civil rights movements
  • Firearms
  • African Americans
  • Gun control
  • History

Places

  • United States

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