Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Simon Wendt, ‘“They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men”: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era’ Gender & History, Vol.19 No.3 November 2007, pp. 543–564.
‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era Simon Wendt
The non-violent demonstrations against racial segregation that took place in Birm- ingham, Alabama, in 1963 represent one of the major events in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. Organised by Revd Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Birmingham campaign exposed the viciousness of southern racism. Pictures of peaceful black teenagers be- ing felled by high-powered streams of water and of demonstrators being bitten by snarling police dogs shocked the United States and the world. However, although SCLC was genuinely committed to philosophical non-violence, the reminiscences of Andrew Young, the right-hand man of Martin Luther King during the 1960s, call at- tention to the ambivalent attitudes that the movement’s non-violent protest strategy evoked among some male activists. Recalling the Birmingham demonstrations in his memoirs, Young expressed his concerns about two female student activists, Dorothy Cotton and Diane Bevel, who participated in peaceful protest marches. ‘I had been brought up to respect women, and part of that respect was taking care for their safety’, Young wrote. ‘On the occasions that Dorothy and Diane did march, I stayed as far away from them as possible. I didn’t trust myself not to defend them if they were attacked’.1 Andrew Young’s memories hint at the intricate relationship between violence, non-violence and manhood in the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Young’s understanding of what it meant to be a man challenged the movement’s non-violent orthodoxy and implied an obligation to defend black women against racist attacks. Probing this gendered dimension of violence and non-violence in the civil rights movement can help us better understand the opposition that activists frequently encountered when organising in the Deep South. Concentrating on what sociologist Robert Connell has called ‘marginalized’ masculinities also sheds light on the meanings of defensive violence for those African Americans who complemented demonstrations and voter registration drives with armed self-defence.2 Finally, a focus on gender allows us to comprehend some of the differences between the role of violence in the southern civil rights struggle and the Black Power movement.