Civil rights and the self-defense tradition

from the Party for Socialism & Liberation:



Civil rights and the self-defense tradition
Armed Black groups protected nonviolent activists, kept Klan at bay

By Eugene Puryear
February 1, 2012


The civil rights movement will rightfully be the subject of much discussion this Black History Month. However, one element of this history that tends to receive very little attention was the interplay in the movement between nonviolent tactics and self-defense.

While some civil rights leaders, such as Dr. King and James Lawson, embraced and preached nonviolence from a moral and philosophical perspective, this was not true for many activists, who accepted it instead as a tactic. Recognizing this, even Dr. King often stressed the strategic and practical reasons for using nonviolence, rather than its philosophical merits.

Since the turn of the century, Black activists like Ida B. Wells, Henry McNeal Turner and others had advocated for armed responses to Jim Crow terrorism. In fact, in the long history of the Black freedom struggle—in all its phases—the concept of self-defense on an individual and community level had been understood as a basic right.

This did not disappear during the era of the civil rights Movement. In fact, on many occasions, Black southerners continued to exercise self-defense to protect their struggle in the face of white power terrorists. This happened not in opposition to, but in conjunction with, nonviolent protest. It was often armed defense, or at least the threat of force, that saved civil rights workers from attacks from white supremacists. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/civil-rights-and-the.html