HISTORY $27.99 US / $31.00 CAN COBB ALLISON Advance Praise for THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET YOU KILLED “Powerfully and with great depth, Charles Cobb examines the organizing tradition of the southern PDF KM 1/17 THIS NO THIS THIS isiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the PE Freedom Movement, drawing on both his own experiences as a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) working in the rural Black-Belt South and contemporary Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William 1/17 V PDF CG AUTHOR conversations with his former coworkers. While Cobb challenges the orthodox narrative of Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self- 3/12 the ‘nonviolent’ movement, this is much more than a book about guns. It is essential reading.” defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King —JULIAN BOND, NAACP Chairman Emeritus Possible Movement Rights Civil the Made Guns How kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the AC reverend’s home as “an arsenal.” “When night riders attacked his home, twentieth-century Mississippi civil rights leader Hartman N Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights CH Turnbow ‘stood his ground’ and lit up the night to protect his family. Charles Cobb’s ‘stand VIOLE NONVIOLENT activists embraced their constitutional right to self- your ground’ book, timely, controversial, and well documented, contravenes a history as old as protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American George Washington and Andrew Jackson and as new as George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn. NC Don’t miss it.” —BOB MOSES, former director of SNCC’s Mississippi voter registration program freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In and founder and president of the Algebra Project This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar CG NT Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed is a powerful mixture of history and memoir, a scholarly self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black LH and emotionally engaging account of a dark time in our recent history. This is one of those books communities in America during the southern Freedom that is going to have people from across the political spectrum buying it for different reasons. One ST Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often © John Abromowski for Brown University STUFF’LL can hope that those on both left and right can learn from this book.”—CLAYTON E. CRAMER, author TJK safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white CHARLES E. COBB JR. of Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie GE UFF’LL is a former National supremacist violence by bearing—and, when necessary, Geographic magazine staff writer and a former field secretary “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed jostles us outside the ho-hum frame of ‘pick up a gun’ using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, AL for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and vs. ‘turn the other cheek.’ Charles Cobb’s graceful prose and electrifying history throw down nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support has also served as a Visiting Professor in Brown University’s a gauntlet: can we understand any part of the freedom struggle apart from America’s unique from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. 6.25” x 9.5” Department of Africana Studies. A veteran journalist, he is romanticization of violence and gun culture? This absorbing investigation shows how guns are Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their S: 1-1/16” often necessary, but not sufficient, to live out political democracy.”—WESLEY HOGAN, Director, an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and B: 7/8” Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University GET YOU Hall of Fame, and his reporting has won multiple awards. women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the T BASIC Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida. movement’s success. “Blending compelling experience with first-rate scholarship, Charles Cobb traces the way that KILLED YOU HC armed self-defense and nonviolent direct action worked sometimes in tension but mostly in tandem Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural in the African American freedom struggle. Crafted with powerful clarity and engaging prose, activists, volunteer security guards, and members of self- 4/C Cobb’s book deploys the intellectual insights of both everyday people and excellent historians to defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and FINISH: make the case that it wasn’t necessarily ‘non-nonviolent’ to pack a pistol or tote a shotgun in the liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare Gritty over pgs civil rights-era South—but grassroots activists often found it necessary. This is easily the best, the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil mylar w/ pgs most accessible, and most comprehensive book on the subject.”—TIMOTHY B. TYSON, author of Radio KILLED mylar showing rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power and Blood Done Sign My Name on the title, his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement $27.99 US / $31.00 CAN author name, ISBN 978-0-465-03310-2 How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a and guns on 5 2 7 9 9 cover A Member of the Perseus Books Group controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms Jacket design by Allison Chi www.basicbooks.com CHARLES E. COBB JR. in the fight for American freedom. 9 7 8 0 4 6 5 0 3 3 1 0 2 9780465033102-text_CobbDesign 3/16/14 10:33 PM Page a More Advance Praise for This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed “What most of us think we know about the central role of nonviolence in the long freedom struggle in the South is not so much wrong as blinkered. Or so Charles Cobb says in this passionate, intellectually disciplined reordering of the conven- tional narrative to include armed self-defense as a central component of the black movement’s success. Read it and be reminded that history is not a record etched in stone by journalists and academics, but a living stream, fed and redirected by the bottom-up witness of its participants.”—Hodding Carter III, Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Popular culture washes the complexity out of so many things. Charles Cobb works mightily against that torrent. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed shows that the simplistic popular understanding of the black Freedom Movement obscures a far richer story. Cobb defies the popular narrative with accounts of the grit and courage of armed stalwarts of the modern movement who invoked the ancient right of self- defense under circumstances where we should expect nothing less. This book is an important contribution to a story that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.”—Nicholas Johnson, Professor of Law, Fordham Law School, and author of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed is the most important movement book in many years. Charles Cobb uses long-standing confusion over the distinction between violence and nonviolence as an entrée to rethinking many fundamental misconceptions about what the civil rights movement was and why it was so pow- erful. This level of nuance requires a disciplined observer, an engaged participant, and a lyrical writer. Cobb is all these.”—Charles M. Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle “Any book that has as its central thesis that armed self-defense was essential both to the existence and the success of the civil rights movement is bound to stir up controversy. But Charles Cobb, combining the rigor of a scholar with the experience (and passion) of a community organizer, has made his case. This book is a major contribution to the historiography of the black freedom struggle. More than that, it adds a new chapter to the story of the local people who, often armed, protected the organizers and their communities during the turbulent civil rights years.” —John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi 9780465033102-text_CobbDesign 3/16/14 10:33 PM Page b “Charles Cobb’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed is a marvelous contribution to our understanding of the modern black freedom struggle. With wonderful storytelling skills and drawing on his unparalleled access to movement partici- pants, he situates armed self-defense in the context of a complex movement and in conversation with both nonviolence and community organizing. Cobb writes from personal experience on the frontlines of SNCC’s voter registration work while also using the skills of a journalist, historian, and teacher. The result is a compelling and wonderfully nuanced book that will appeal to specialists and, more importantly, anyone interested in human rights and the freedom struggle.” —Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and editor of Civil Rights History from the Ground Up “This long overdue book revises the image of black people in the South as docile and frightened. It tells our story, demonstrating that black people have always been willing to stand their ground and do whatever was necessary to free themselves from bondage and to defend their families and communities.