Freedom and Firepower

In June 1966, a white college student from Wisconsin stepped off a Greyhound bus in Clarke County, Mississippi. He and hundreds of fellow participants in the recent Meredith March had fanned out across the state to register voters and organize direct action campaigns. What one historian characterized as “the last great march of the civil rights years” had actually inspired a new wave of protests.¹ In rural Clarke County, the young Wisconsinite and his allies utilized nonviolent strategies—voter registration, sit-ins, boycotts, and marches—that even the most casual students of civil rights history would recognize. But this commitment to tactical nonviolence, as the young summer volunteer quickly discovered, coexisted alongside a willingness—to borrow from Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s evocative title—to shoot back. “During the last few days,” he wrote, “I have begun to realize what the West must have been like. Everybody is carrying a gun or has a gun loaded back home.” Frequently, nights of sentry duty followed days of canvassing voters and organizing demonstrations. “The other night when we were guarding Mrs. Jones house,” the volunteer continued, “we had about 10 loaded guns and about three guards up all night.”²

This dispatch from rural Mississippi should surprise no serious scholar of the civil rights era. Certainly, neither movement veterans nor their white supremacist adversaries would be shocked to hear of such a scene. Yet despite the everyday reality of armed self-defense in a tactically nonviolent mass movement, scholars have been slow to fully incorporate this aspect of the struggle into the broader narrative of the civil rights era. This task is vitally important, but also, as historian Emilye Crosby has recently cautioned, full of pitfalls. Surveying the field of “self-defense” scholarship in her recent edited collection, Civil Rights from the Ground Up (2011), Crosby notes a tendency to oversimplify, valorize, and exaggerate the impact of armed resistance within the Freedom Movement in the South. Borrowing her essay’s title from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veteran Charlie Cobb’s claim that the South “wasn’t the Wild West,” Crosby cautions against rough-and-tumble narratives of guns, guards, and shootouts. Yet the very fact that Cobb’s compatriots frequently made these “Wild West” analogies, often in their descriptions of rural communities seemingly off the beaten path of the Civil Rights Movement, underscores both the necessity and prevalence of armed self-defense across the South. Furthermore, as Crosby points out, Southern African Americans’ widespread acceptance and practice of self-defense demands that scholars move beyond “top-down” biographical and organizational studies to examine how this phenomenon shaped local freedom movements.

More than any previous work, Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back answers Crosby’s call. While he credits groundbreaking scholarship— particularly Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie (1999) and Lance Hill’s Deacons for Defense (2004)—with restoring armed self-defense and its most outspoken champions to their rightful place in civil rights historiography, Umoja emphasizes “virtually unknown activists from local movements” across Mississippi. Their advocacy of armed resistance, Umoja claims, was not only “persistent and pervasive” but also effective in ensuring “the survival and success of that Movement” (p. 4). By stressing the primacy of armed self-defense to everyday activists and local struggles, Umoja does more than simply broaden the cast of characters and list of locales in the civil rights narrative. Emphasizing continuity, he places the interaction between armed resistance and black activism at the heart of his study. This self-defense ethos tempered brutal Jim Crow repression, coexisted alongside the nonviolent civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, shaped the emergence of Black Power later in the decade, and under-girded local protest campaigns well into the 1970s. We Will Shoot Back will force scholars and general readers to reexamine what is arguably America’s most studied—and most bloodied—civil rights battleground.

We Will Shoot Back is a model of careful, serious, and compelling scholarship...