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Civil Rights and Self-Defense: the Fiction of Nonviolence, 1955-1968

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Civil Rights and Self-Defense: the Fiction of Nonviolence, 1955-1968 CCVII. RIGHTS & SELF-DEFENSE: THE FICTION OF NONVIOLENCE, 1955-1968 by CHRISTOPHER BARRY STRAIN B.A., University of Virginia, 1993 M.A., University of Georgia, 1995 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the n:quirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the GRADUATE DMSION of the UNIVERSITY OF CAL~ORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Leon F. Litwack, Chair Professor Waldo Martin Professor Ronald Takaki Spring 2000 UMI Number. 987tt823 UMI Microtorm~7t1823 Copyright 2000 by Bell 3 Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edkion is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell 3 Howell Infomnation and Learning Company 300 NoRh Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1348 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1348 Civil Rights and Self-Defense: The Fiction of Nonviolence, 1955-1968 m 2000 by Christopher Banry Strain H we must die-"let it not be like hops Hunted and penned in an ingloriow spot, While round u: bark IM mad and hungry dogs, Making (heir mode at our accused lot. H we must die""oh, Ist us noblydie, So that our pnedow blood may not be shed In win; then ewn the monsters we defy S~ be constrained b horar us Ihouph deed! Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us slaw us brave, Md fa Iheir Ihouand blows deal one deeth"Dbw! What though betas us Nes the open grave? Like men we'N lace the munieroue, cowardly pads, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! --"H We Must Dfe" by Claude McKay,1922 For much of its history, the southern United States was a terrible and terrifying place for black people to live. In the antebellum period, slavery relegated Africans in America to a life under the lash. In the 1880's, white racists engineered and fine-tuned the mechanisms of racial separation and applied them enthusiastically to black folk in order to institutionalize inequality; they also systematized a program of racial violence, including assaults and lynchings, to insure their place above black people in the region's social hierarchy. Implicit and extreme violence held the mechanisms of segregation in place through the 1960's. As one scholar has recently observed, "Negroes were so far outside the human family that the most inhuman actions could be visited upon them . Black life could be snuffed out on whim, you could be killed because some ignorant white man didn't like the color of your shirt or the way you drove a wagon."~ Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Li~h_t of Freedom: The Or¢an^izing Tradt_ion_ and the Mississippi Freedom Swaale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 15. It was not until the 1950's and 1960's that cracks began to appear in the South's rxial hegemony, and black activists used nonviolent tactics to widen these cracks into full-blown civil rights reform. During this period, nonviolent activists challenged Jim Crow segregation in the United States by nullifying the stultifying violence that had come to define the region. Leading the nation to a new understanding of responsible citizenship and biracial unity, these activists offered black and white Americans alike a new way of living their lives: not only as citizens of a multicultural nation-state but also as members of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a "beloved community" in which diverse peoples could come together and live in harmony. They also helped to mask the dcep scars left on the South by the region's "peculiar institution": slavery. Nonviolence, as both a protest txtic and a way of life, provided the means to a better wayof human interaction. But most Americans, including many civil rights xtivists, were slow to embrace what nonviolence required. Wary of such a self-sxrii'icing concept, they shied away Another historian has noted: Perhaps the most important charxteristic of American rxe relations in the early 1950's was the degree to which terror reigned in the blxk community and in the black mind. Black Southerners lived in a police state, a plxe where violence- officially sanctioned violence-could be visited upon them in a moment, and for no reason at all . And the oppressors could do anything they wanted and get away with it. Fred Powledge, Free at Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 33. iv from the implications of a nonviolent way of Iife.Z Nonviolence seemed "un-American" on some level to many and, indad, it was a foreign idea, imported in its most recent form from the Indian subcontinent .3 Many white Americans, perplexed by the rapidity of social change in the 1960's, saw nonviolence as communist-inspired and deviant; some black activists did not trust it to connect the accumulated evils of four hundred years of racial discrimination and prejudice. To many black people, striving for freedom and equality in the southern United States, it scemed much more in keeping with traditional American ideals to strike back at those who kept swinging at them. Accordingly, the question of whetheror not to defend oneself became a critical question for the students, ministers, and others-mostly black, some white-engaged in civil rights protests. Scholars have written extensively about the theory of nonviolence in the civil ZIf nonviolence seemed strange, odd, irrational, disturbing, exotic, unexpected, and unlikely to many Americans, then these perceptions helped nonviolence to be a successful method of social protest in the American South. As many of its practitioners have pointed out, the violence elicited by nonviolent protest helped to create a public spatacle that dramatized the plight of Afro-Americans, and ultimately brought about reform. 3Staughton and Alice Lynd have detailed a continuous tradition of nonviolence in American culture andsociety since the nation's beginnings in Nonviolence in America: A pocumentary H~ rev. ed. (Mary Knoll, New York: Orbis, 1995); however, I tend to agree with Inge Powell Bell in emphasizing the newness of nonviolence as related to civil rights reform. She has written : '"fhe philosophy of nonviolence brought a new and essentially alien viewpoint into American politics. In attempting such an innovation, the movement wasdiverging markedly from the pragmatic, nonideological character of most American social movements." See Bell, CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence (New York: Random House, 1968), 32. The Lynds concede the originality of the civil rights movement when they write: "With the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 and still more with the student sit-ins of 1960, nonviolence became a more significant social force than at any earlier period in the history of the United States:' See Lynd & Lynd, xxi. rights movement, including: redemptive suffering; ~ (a Hindu concept meaning, roughly, "truth-strength" or "love-power")4; peaceful resistance; the influence of Gandhian philosophy as adopted by Martin Luther King; and civil disobedience through nonviolent protest, as exemplified by the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. They also have written widely on the growing militarism among activists after 1965, the rising tide of black nationalism of the period, the introduction of Black Power, and the injection of violent rhetoric into the latter stages of the movement. Most scholars tend to frame any discussion of the civil rights movement in terms of a dichotomy between "violence" and "nonviolence": descriptive categories for antithetical modes of protest, with nonviolence being normative. The prevailing and generally accepted consensus maintains that nonviolence shaped and directed the movement up until roughly 1965, when the movement-thrown off course by frustration, impatience, disillusionment, and combativeness=`turned" violent. Hinging on Stokely Carmichael's famous "Black Power" speech during the 1966 march in Grcenwood, Mississippi as a marker of discontinuity, a clear dichotomy seems to exist between the pre-1965, nonviolent movement and the post-1965, violent movements 4For more on the concept of ~, see Gandhi's autobiography: Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Story of Mv,-E.xxriments with Truth 2d. ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1940). s'I'he term "violent" here refers to the behavior of activists, not counter-protestors . Clearly, violence was a well-worn implement in the toolbox of segregationists long before 1965. A typical example of the dichotomy in question may be found in August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and John eracey's definitive Black Protest in the Sixties 2d ed. Certain findings have led me to question the authenticity of this dichotomy. My research suggests that this apparent transformation from nonviolence to violence was neither quick nor clean nor ordered; in fact, it was hardly a transformation at all. Incongruities exist which do not fit this otherwise serviceable view of the civil rights movement, namely: Robert F. Williams, who organized armed resistance in 1957 against the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe, North Carolina, and wrote Ne~oes with Guns (1962), an affirmation of armed self-defense by blacks; and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed guard unit in Bogalusa, Louisiana, which also combated the Klan and provided protection for civil rights activists pledged to nonviolence. Historians have treated Williams and the Deacons-if they have treated them at all-as irnegularities: aberrations in the wider context of the movement, or as harbingers of groups like the Black Panther Party, which used the gun as both a rhetorical tool and a weapon to bring about revolution . Consequently, the myth of the nonviolent movement has persisted to this day. Suggestions that something other than a nonviolent consensus existed have gone (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc., 1991). They write: Disillusionment with the national administration and with white liberals, the fragmentation of the Negro protest movement, the enormous difficulties that stood in the way of overcoming the problems of the black masses, and the riots that erupted spontaneously in 1964 and 1965 as a consequence of the anger and frustration of the urban slum dwellers-all set the stage for the dramatic appearance of the black power slogan in the summer of 1966 .
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