The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 8 155 and meandering. Sikora appears to have referenced court records, trial testimony, and newspapers, but he makes no mention of his sources whatsoever. One is left with an informative and entertaining book that certainly strengthens the magnetism of an exceptional man and highly influential judge, but those seeking a more scholarly biographical approach will assuredly wish to consult Tinsley Yarbrough’s Judge Frank Johnson and Human Rights in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1981) or Jack Bass’s Taming the Storm (New York, 1993). JOSEPH BAGLEY Auburn University The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. By Simon Wendt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xi, 279 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-3018-0. Herald a new addition to the growing historiography of civil rights activism with Simon Wendts’ monograph on African Americans and armed resistance in their struggle for first class citizenship. The Sprit and the Shotgun argues that African Americans did not passively accept the racial terrorism that pervaded their communities in the 1950s and 1960s. They armed themselves and fought back. Wendt explores the evolution of armed, southern, black resistance and its coexistence with ChristianGandhian principles of nonviolent protest. For the black men and women who lived with the reality of racial violence in the South, simply accepting nonviolence as a tactic was largely rhetorical. Arming themselves in the face of the Ku Klux Klan and other night-riding marauders was necessary for survival. Although armed resistance was often spurned by such organizations as the Congress for Racial Equility (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)— which were, at least outwardly, committed to the Gandhian principle of nonviolence—black and white activists quickly realized that much of their work would not have been possible without the protection of armed organizations such as the Deacons of Defense and Justice. Public alliances with militant groups, however, threatened the support of white liberals. Wendt focuses on black armed resistance in cities such as Montgomery and Tuscaloosa. In doing so, he juxtaposes the courageous stance of Rosa Parks, who peacefully resisted bus segregation in 1955, with her memory T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 156 of her grandfather and the gun he possessed to protect his family. Such a pairing buttresses Wendt’s argument that nonviolent resistance was balanced by armed resistance among many African Americans. Indeed, many blacks in Montgomery and throughout the South questioned nonviolent protest. The idea and the reality of arming oneself in southern states was for many African Americans a “practical imperative” (p. 2). Wendt also finds a symbiosis between self-defense and manhood. He argues that black men, many of whom were World War II veterans, viewed armed resistance as a means of reclaiming their roles as family patriarchs and defenders of their families and property. Armed resistance then was the vehicle by which black men were able to protect themselves and reassert patriarchal authority. Wendt also argues that armed self-defense posed drawbacks for local civil rights initiatives. Despite the impracticality of nonviolent tactics in most southern—and, for that matter, northern—locales, black leaders recognized that overt support of African Americans in arms meant decreased financial contributions from liberal white supporters and surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wendt reveals that while the Deacons of Defense and CORE worked together, CORE officials publicly asserted their commitment to Gandhian principles. Ironically, by the time CORE and SNCC publicly accepted the principle of armed self-defense, that principle had lost its relevance to the civil rights movement . Although the federal government began to protect civil rights activists in the late 1960s, a new generation of black leaders adopted armed resistance as the only alternative to nonviolent protest. Yet Wendt argues that armed resistance meant something altogether different to these younger men. He highlights the “psychological rather than physical imperatives” (p. 6) that armed resistance represented. It stood as a means of reordering understandings of black manhood and gender identity. Wendt explains that black nationalist leaders such as Malcolm X, Ron Karenga, and...