Guns, Death, and Better Tomorrows: New Work on Black Militancy

Studies of black militancy hold a curious status as chronicles of such a prominent theme in African American history. Standard work in this area documents in exhaustive, colorful detail a long record of aggressive rhetoric and radical deeds that have typified many black efforts to defend kith and kin across time and space, an essential step in realizing fuller freedom. We periodically cycle through specific debates about the roles of violence and nonviolence within social protest movements. This may reveal less about certain unresolved historiographical particulars than about how accommodating our national memories of those movements can become, especially where those memories reference a potent mix of race, violence, and sometimes sex. The scholarship under review here presents an array of characteristics and experiences that should make more obsolete than ever the reductive, tenacious trope of the black militant as a singularly irrational and destructive political actor whose sole platform consisted of a series of “anti-” propositions: antiwhite, antiwoman, antigay, antiauthority, anticolonial, antiwar, and, more generally, antitradition. These works depict complex, often contradictory aspects of black militancy during and after the classical civil rights movement years, adding to our understanding of black militants as self-realized institution builders and bold defenders of their lives and futures, even with their many shortcomings.¹

Of course, the notion of black militancy hardly belongs exclusively to an academic discussion about the US civil rights years. In Negroes and the Gun, the law professor Nicholas Johnson traces a “black tradition of arms” dating back to the antebellum period. Johnson blames our ignorance of this tradition on “the dominant narrative of nonviolence” in stories about the civil rights movement (13). The overpowering, moralizing influence of the discourse of nonviolence makes it difficult to appreciate how the black tradition of arms operated during other historical periods. An important aspect of this tradition has been an explicit distinction between “self-defense against imminent threats and organized political violence seeking group advancement” (58). The exception to this distinction is slavery, which Johnson refers to as “a state of war” (58). Here Johnson invokes the colorful words and actions of Frederick Douglass, whom he concludes was the first black of his stature to openly ponder the place of violence in the black fight for freedom. In subsequent chapters, Johnson argues persuasively that other prominent African Americans of various generations—Henry Highland Garnet, W. E. B. Du Bois, T. Thomas Fortune, and Ida B. Wells—remained faithful to the black tradition of arms.

Of course, one cannot write about a black tradition of arms without describing the widespread racial violence (or constant threat of such) at the hands of white supremacists, a fact of life for much of African American history. In dramatic fashion, Johnson details the cruel, unpredictable dangers that blacks faced, especially during slavery and the worst periods of lynching and race riots. Equally significant was the lack of state protection for blacks. Nevertheless, it is important to note that, as Negroes with Guns narrates, not every racially charged armed encounter ended with the white antagonist winning and the black...