

### Gospel Singers and Gunslingers; Riots and Radicals

Steven M. McCrossan

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Steven M. McCrossan

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Table of Contents

Gospel Singers and Gunslingers; Riots and Radicals

GOSPEL SINGERS

RIOTS

Symbiosis in Birmingham

The Fires Spread

Who Rioted and Why?

GUNSLINGERS

RADICALS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

# Gospel Singers and Gunslingers; Riots and Radicals

"For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end"

President Barack Obama's Cairo Speech, June 4, 2009

The above remarks are both representative of, and the result of, over fifty years of misconceptions, distortions and outright lies that have created a popular myth of the American Civil Rights movement as nonviolent. Not only has violence, or the threat of it, been an integral part of numerous struggles for "equal rights," it was also of crucial importance to the Civil Rights movement. Obama's speech, like so many history books, further enforces the comforting myth that moral suasion alone won African-Americans their equal rights. It further implies that through African-Americans peaceful struggle, America's morality and political system were redeemed. In _Deacons for Defense_ , Lance Hill describes it as a,

"Reassuring myth of American moral redemption-a myth that assuaged white guilt by suggesting that racism was not intractable and deeply imbedded in American life. That racial segregation and discrimination were handily overcome by orderly, polite protest and a generous American conscience, and that the pluralistic system for resolving conflicts between competing interests had prevailed. The system had worked and the nation was redeemed."

While the myth is comforting, it is also "vacant fiction." The myth glosses over the fierceness of white racist violence, the complicity of the federal government, and the hypocrisy of many white liberals. It confuses "rights" with power, and ignores the persistence of poverty and the endurance of entrenched racism. It further ignores the hundreds of riots where masses of blacks took to the streets and torched buildings, looted, and fought with the police and National Guard. It also overlooks the role of armed self defense on behalf of the black community against white terrorists in the Deep South. It is with this in mind that I seek to clarify the role that black violence (or the threat of it), and armed self-defense played in the civil rights movement.

I am not seeking to argue that nonviolence was not effective in certain instances, but rather, that its effectiveness reached its pinnacle when violence, or the threat of it, emerged in the black struggle for civil rights. Furthermore, it was often because of armed self defense that nonviolence was allowed to survive in the Deep South, rather than being wiped out by racist terror. It must be understood that the victories of the American civil rights struggle where a result of a wide spectrum of symbiotic tactics and peoples, not a few "leaders" and national organizations using one tactic. Indeed, "the more closely one looks at history, the less comfortable one becomes with reducing the tens of thousands of people...who participated in local movements, to faceless masses, singing, praying and marching" in the background.

Both, then and now, the symbiosis of tactics has been co-opted, dismissed and erased by pacifists, progressives, and politicians, to fit their own ends. Even Martin Luther King's more radical messages have been sanitized or erased. Gone are his condemnations and criticisms of war, imperialism, capitalism and white America. His legacy has been reduced to comforting little quips like "I have a Dream." Can many Americans quote anything else? As Gelderloos puts it, "King's more disturbing (to whites) criticisms of racism are avoided and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are repeated ad nauseum."

To treat each topic effectively, I have broken them up as Gospel Singers, Gunslingers, Riots, and Radicals. It should be understood that these are titles are used for organizational clarity and that certain actors or incidents do not fit neatly into one heading. Each topic will move chronologically within its own section and will allude to other sections, but will remain focused on its particular topic(s). The first section, Gospel Singers, will serve as a timeline of the civil rights movement and its progressions and changes. In this sense, it will act as a primer to the American civil rights movement, and lay the groundwork for the other sections. In the Gospel Singers section I will allude to all the other major topics, but will treat them in depth separately to effectively highlight the tactics, people, successes and failures within them. The second section, Gun slingers, will focus on the role that armed self-defense played in protecting black communities and the victories these actions won on behalf of the civil rights movement. The third Section **,** Riots, will focus on the role riots played in both shocking white America and compelling the federal government to act. It will also dispel the myth of why the riots occurred and who took part in them. Lastly, the Radicals section will analyze the bargaining power and funding given to moderate civil rights organizations by the presence of so called "radicals."

All of the sections will also analyze the role of the media, white liberals, the federal government, and moderate civil rights organizations in shaping the movement, as well as their creation of a false polarity between nonviolence and self defense.

# GOSPEL SINGERS

"America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked 'insufficient' funds...So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The struggle that has become known as the American Civil Rights Movement was ignited by countless sparks, spanning decades. The movement and the ideals born within it are too prolific to have begun with one person, place or date. For the sake of this book, I will focus on post-World War Two America as the "beginning" of the Civil Rights Movement.

Post-War America found itself entering an era of unprecedented wealth and affluence. Its infrastructure was intact and the middle class, the suburbs, and the economy were all swelling. Defense expenditures were high and technological innovation seemed to be all-encompassing. These prosperous years led to a baby boom, which would prove to be a key factor in the overwhelming prevalence of youth in all of the 1960's movements. These factors, combined with the success of American style capitalism led many to dub it the "American Century."

It might have been better described as the "White American Century." Black soldiers were returning home from fighting against racist dictatorships in Europe and Japan only to be greeted with Jim Crow in the South and pervasive poverty and discrimination in the North. Even while fighting for freedom and democracy half way around the world, they were forced into segregated units. The Red Cross even segregated their blood supply. This is not to say that blacks didn't benefit in some ways from the post war boom, though. They did, immensely. This boom was, in effect, an incubator for the civil rights movement.

World War II "initiated and accelerated structural changes that provided critical groundwork for future activism." The post war boom years provided jobs for thousands of blacks and, as a result, strengthened African American communities. With increased resources came stronger and larger churches, colleges, newspapers and political organizations.

The civil rights movement and its successes must also be viewed through the lens of the Cold War. The hypocrisy of American race relations in contrast to its democratic rhetoric provided a constant source of embarrassment, both at home, and abroad. In the context of the Cold War, the 1946 Truman Commission called segregation, "an international embarrassment and propaganda tool." This notion was echoed in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka. Reversing its earlier decision in Plessy v Ferguson, the Court ruled that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional and that separation of children "generates a feeling of inferiority ...that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be done."

Dudziak points out that the Brown case was not necessarily the beginning of the American justice system catching up with its rhetoric, but rather, it was a Cold War weapon. The U.S. Justice Department had filed an amicus brief stating that racial segregation was "a constant source of embarrassment," "harmed U.S. foreign relations," furnished "the grist for the communist propaganda mills" and called into question "our devotion to the democratic faith." Dudziak further contends that "the history of the civil rights struggle is not a straightforward struggle for justice, but a complex story that includes self-interest and limited commitments." In the context of post-war America and in a Cold War world, a perfect storm of conditions was brewing to hurl in a drastic change.

Founded in 1909, the NAACP sought to use litigation to win rights for black Americans. Brown was a 10-year-struggle for the NAACP and a culmination of several different court cases. It is widely considered to be the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. The Brown case however was a pyrrhic victory for black America. Brown not only failed to integrate southern schools but it also triggered a wave of "massive white resistance." Several states outlawed the NAACP, White Citizens Councils were formed and NAACP offices became the target of terroristic attacks. The organization was labeled "radical," red baited and put under surveillance by the FBI. Southern states took advantage of the Supreme Court's ambiguous deadline of "all deliberate speed" to avoid desegregation. Ten years after Brown, seventy-five percent of all southern schools in the South were still segregated.

The next spark came in Montgomery, Alabama in late 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man. Parks' action has often been interpreted as the actions of a tired old woman rather than those of a strong and determined activist. She had actually been ejected from buses several times for refusing to give up her seat. She had also been the first Secretary of the Alabama NAACP. The story of Rosa Parks is representative of a history that has neglected, downplayed, or ignored the role of women. How many women's names can Americans cite from the civil rights struggle besides Parks and Coretta Scott King?

In response to Park's arrest, local leaders called a mass meeting, voted for a boycott of the city's bus lines, and called for an end to segregation on them. The local Woman's Political Council printed 35,000 flyers, urging the black community to stay off the buses. Car pools were organized to transport 17,000 people to work each day with an astounding ninety-five percent of local blacks participating in the boycott for over a year. Various local groups coalesced under an umbrella organization known as the "Montgomery Improvement Association." They selected the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. as their president.

King skillfully fused Gandhian nonviolence with Christian theology and called for nonviolent direct action. The participation of King and other Clergy members effectively anchored the movement within the church, the heart of the black community. Local churches already had effective fundraising capabilities and tight networks with other churches throughout the South. Morgan writes, "The black church embodied the affective, moral, and spiritual ties of the community. Powerful spiritual exhortation, direct personal testimony, uplifting music, and strong interpersonal relationships fused together a determined community." This fusion gave the movement a strong grassroots appeal, a distinct difference from the NAACP's patient litigation strategy. Rather than paying dues to a far off national organization, blacks could now actively participate in the struggle, albeit under rigid leadership and tactics.

Montgomery would mark the first of many radical shifts that developed and evolved during the civil rights movement. These tactics often evolved and escalated in the face of defiant segregationists, racist terror, white apathy, a complacent federal government and increased black expectations. While the boycott may not seem radical now, it was certainly considered so then. Previous to King and the SCLC, the NAACP had been considered militant, radical and communist. The Justice Department went as far as to label them, "seditious and enemy, inspired." Haines further added that "When white resistance (to Brown) prevented the kinds of sweeping changes that many blacks expected the Supreme Court ruling to produce, the movement changed. So did the characteristics of what was called militancy."

The city of Montgomery responded to the boycott by arresting black leaders, and segregationists responded with shootings and the bombing of several churches and homes, including Kings. Despite this, the boycott continued. King urged people to "walk with god" and called for a commitment to love and nonviolence. He further added,

"If we arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate."

In this regard, King hoped to appeal to the conscious of his oppressor.

By November 1956, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on municipal bus lines and the city of Montgomery capitulated. The black community was beginning to see its own power represented in the new tactics of direct action and collective economic boycotts. It is in Montgomery that we see the first evolution of tactics in the modern civil rights movement, from litigation to community mobilization involving mass participation and nonviolent direct action. This model led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) the following year. It cannot be overestimated how effective King's and the SCLC's rhetoric of nonviolence and love were to building sympathy amongst blacks, whites, and the media.

By 1960, "little tangible change had occurred in the system of southern segregation" but that was about to change with the emergence of black youth in the struggle. On February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the Woolworth's "whites only" lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. They were refused service but returned for several more days with hundreds of other students taking each other's place when arrested. With the help of the media and the SCLC, the effect of the sit-in was "immediate and electric." By the end of March, the sit-ins had spread to seventy southern cities. In the face of hatred and violence, the students courageously persisted. The sit-ins continued to grow over the next twelve months, with more than fifty thousand people demonstrating against segregation in some form or another in over a hundred cities. By the end of 1960, blacks could sit at lunch counters in Greensboro and elsewhere, but they had mostly failed in the Deep South.

The sit-ins infused the civil rights movement with youthful exuberance and impatience. With the addition of students, the movement became more "aggressive and spontaneous." The students were impatient with the pace of change and were demanding more immediate results. As Ritchie writes,

"The Negro protest movement would never be the same again. The southern college students shook the power structure of the Negro community, made direct action pre-eminent as a civil rights tactic, speeded up the process of social change in race relations and ultimately turned the Negro protest organizations towards a deep concern with the economic and social problems of the masses."

In this regard, the students were focusing on mass action and the power inherent in it to address economic and social issues, rather than focusing narrowly on legalistic notions. Wanting to capitalize on the success of the student movement, King and the SCLC called for a conference of student leaders to be led by Ella Baker, in April of 1960. Baker was a member of SCLC's executive staff, and had formally been involved with the NAACP. She and her ideas had often been ignored or not taken seriously by those organizations' male and hierarchical leadership style. Baker was not a philosophical advocate of nonviolence either, but saw it as an effective tactic.

Baker preferred to build organizations that focused on developing strong and sustainable indigenous leadership at the local level. She had openly criticized the NAACP for relying too directly on the professional class that left all others reduced to "cheerleading." She also criticized them for being too concerned with white recognition which led to over-cautiousness and a lack of confrontation. She further contended they were too focused on the middle class while ignoring the economic plight of the poor black masses.

Baker also took on King and the SCLC by writing a letter to King, urging him not to lead all the marches but rather to "develop leaders who could lead their own marches." Baker recalled that King read the letter aloud to his staff.

"It just tickled them; they just laughed. I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means that the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also a danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that... they don't do the work of actually organizing people."

Under Baker's guidance, the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) elected to become an independent organization rather than being absorbed by the SCLC or NAACP. This caused a "spirited rivalry" between SNCC and other organizations like CORE, NAACP and the SCLC with each embracing student tactics to one degree or another. Even the NAACP decided to make direct action a part of its strategy by reactivating youth and college chapters in the South.

With the student movement exploding, The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) burst into the movement with the Freedom Rides. Although relatively unknown to the public, CORE had been around since its inception in 1942. Until the early 1960's it was a mostly a predominantly white middle class organization dedicated to the principle of satyagraha-Gandhi's notion of nonviolence and redemptive love for the enemy. Under its first black director, James Farmer, the Freedom Rides were developed to test compliance with a Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on interstate trains and buses. The Freedom Rides were also explicitly designed to provoke a violent reaction by southern segregationists and thus garner attention from the North, as well as the federal government.

On May 4, 1961, two buses of integrated CORE members left Washington D.C. for New Orleans, Louisiana. They never got there. Before departing, Farmer had mailed a letter to President John F. Kennedy, to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and to the director of the F.B.I, J. Edgar Hoover, informing them of their intentions. None of the authorities acknowledged the letters.

The upper south offered little resistance to the CORE Riders. They were, however, greeted in South Carolina with beatings but pressed on through Georgia and into Alabama. When one of the buses pulled into Anniston, Alabama, they were greeted by a mob with pipes, clubs and bricks. The bus sped away but not until its tires were slashed. They were followed out of town by an army of fifty vehicles. The mob, now two hundred strong, caught up to them and firebombed the bus. The mob had forced the door shut hoping to burn the riders alive. They were only let out when another passenger pulled a pistol and aimed it at the crowd. As the riders exited the bus they were beaten with pipes and baseball bats. Before the Riders could be lynched, Alabama State Troopers fired shots in the air and dispersed the mob without making any arrests.

Later that day, the other bus entered Birmingham, Alabama. CBS radio reported that "...toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists. One passenger was knocked down at my feet by twelve of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp." That passenger was Jim Peck; he sustained permanent brain damage and was left paralyzed for the rest of his life. The mayhem went on for fifteen minutes without police involvement. It was later proved that police in Birmingham and Anniston had collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan, promising to give them enough time to attack the riders without interference. The FBI watched and did nothing but take notes.

The images of the Riders' bus burning made front page news throughout the world and embarrassed the Kennedy administration. Zinn accuses Kennedy of being too cautious because he was "concerned about the support of southern white leaders in the Democratic Party." Within this context, SNCC also launched a Freedom Ride of its own. Before heading form Nashville, Tennessee to Birmingham, Alabama, SNCC phoned the Justice Department and asked for protection. They were denied.

The SNCC riders were arrested in Birmingham and beaten in Montgomery but managed to make their way to Jackson, Mississippi, were they were promptly arrested. Attorney general, Robert Kennedy, agreed to have the riders arrested in return for State Police protection against mob violence. Rather than insist on, and protect their right to ride an integrated bus together, the Attorney General had them arrested. Robert Kennedy biographer Victor Navasky wrote, Robert Kennedy "didn't hesitate to trade the freedom riders constitutional right to interstate travel for Senator Eastland's guarantee of their right to live." Time and again, the Kennedys refused to intervene and protect the lives of American citizens engaging in legal activity. When they weren't ignoring calls for help or protection, they called for "cooling off periods," hoping to stall or diffuse situations rather than deal with them head on. This cooling off was usually reserved for activists; not the Klan, racist police departments or state governors.

With the Freedom Rides nonviolent tactics were becoming more "aggressive" and confrontational-seeking immediate results. This is unquestionably a result of the infusion of youth who were demanding quicker and more immediate changes than their parents could have even dreamed of. The radical paradigm had once again been redefined. King would take these confrontational tactics to Birmingham.

In early 1963, King and the SCLC went to Birmingham with the goal of "full integration of downtown lunch counters, public facilities, parks and playgrounds; establishment of fair hiring procedures in retail stores; and the creation of a biracial commission and timetable for integrating city schools." The SCLC instituted a brilliant three-tiered strategy designed to inflict economic damage and elicit federal support. Phase one involved boycotts, sit-ins and picketing, phase two consisted of mass marches, and phase three called for massive numbers of elementary, high school and college students to go to jail.

The images from this protest are forever burned in the American history. Eugene "Bull" Connor's police department unleashed dogs, tear gas, fire hoses and billy clubs on nonviolent men, women and children alike. These images garnered support for the movement all around the world and again embarrassed the Kennedy administration. The media attention given to Birmingham "raised the national consciousness of intransigent racism in the Deep South and stimulated a wave of local movements throughout the region." After King's headquarters was bombed, Kennedy called in the National Guard. In the wake of Birmingham, President Kennedy went on national television and announced his plans to send to Congress "the most sweeping civil rights bill in the nation's history." Despite the intense violence that activists encountered in Birmingham, it is considered one of the highpoints of nonviolent direct action in the civil rights struggle. It also ended the nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement.

Before moving forward in the civil rights timeline, let us to stop and concentrate on SNCC and CORE's decision to take the movement into the Deep South. Their experiences and the resulting ideology were emblematic of what the rest of the movement was facing, often behind closed doors. SNCC and CORE would go into the South armed with only nonviolence and youthful exuberance; they would emerge bitter, and armed with guns, and what was considered radical would shift again.

In August 1961, SNCC headed into rural Mississippi to launch a voter registration drive. No other organization had dared to do so, due to the state's reputation as the most racist and terroristic state in the union. Andy Young of SCLC tried to warn SNCC, "we were all southerners and we knew the depravity of southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi." SNCC first went into Pike County, where only two hundred out of eighty thousand blacks were registered to vote. Almost immediately, a black man who tried to register was shot and killed. SNCC volunteer, Robert Moses, was arrested for attempting to register blacks and was later beaten by several white men. A little over a month after SNCC's arrival, NAACP field worker, Herbert Lee, was murdered in front of several witnesses. His killer, a white state representative, was absolved of all charges and set free. In contrast, by September, most of SNCC's volunteers were in jail for their voter registration efforts.

CORE, on the other hand, chose to go into Louisiana in 1962 to launch a voter registration drive. It was a disaster. They were routinely brutalized by local segregationists, the Klan and the police. Without the national media they remained invisible and open to assault. Despite repeated requests for protection from the government, they were ignored. The Kennedy administration was still dragging its feet; hiding behind Federalism and states' rights as the reason they could not intervene to protect activists and poor black's basic rights. Time and again, the FBI and Justice Department stood by and took notes while people were beaten, arrested and terrorized by segregationists and the police.

Both SNCC and CORE adopted vary different organizational models than the older mainstream organizations. Both focused on community organizing and fostering grassroots local participation. Their strategy was to integrate into local communities, empower local people, encourage their involvement and leadership, and learn from and respect local opinions. This would radicalize them in ways they never could have imagined.

While local blacks were hesitant to work with them at first, the bravery and resolve of SNCC and CORE activists deeply impressed them: "Stories of courageous confrontations with white violence spread, infecting the poor blacks with a growing spirit of determination." Soon locals began to work with SNCC and CORE, despite the dangers. The infusion of locals, within the community organizing model, would lead to a debate on the role of armed self defense and radically change both organizations.

Much to SNCC and CORE's dismay, local blacks began shadowing them, armed with guns. While the locals respected the activists, they thought them naïve and unprepared for the particularly virulent southern strain of racism that they knew all too well. Both organizations were quickly besieged by the level of violence that whites would go to in order to uphold their caste system.

For CORE's national director, James Farmer, "Nonviolence ended on a balmy night, September 1, 1963, in a sleepy town on the Mississippi, when a uniformed mob screamed for my blood." Farmer was rescued from that mob by a group of black ex-marines, who would later form the Deacons for Defense—an armed and very public self defense group. Together, they would dismantle segregation in Louisiana (Discussed in further detail in the Gunslingers section).

Wendt asserts that prior to the civil rights movement, nonviolence was, "virtually unheard of," and that guns and armed self defense had a long tradition in the black community. One of Martin Luther King's aides confirmed this when he conceded, "nonviolence as a way of life was just as foreign to blacks as flying a space capsule would be to a roach." To Deep South blacks, self-defense was a practical imperative, especially at night, and did not necessarily run counter to nonviolence. CORE's James Farmer would add, "Self defense is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America, that we as small group can't effect it. [sic] It's not contradictory for a farmer to say he's nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder's head off."

In the absence of protections of any kind, SNCC and CORE conceded to the need for armed protection from locals. Within a short time, many of them would be carrying guns and calling for black civil rights by "any means necessary." The radical shifts of these organizations are directly related to three factors. First, in the face of extreme racial terrorism, armed self defense became a practical imperative. In the face of this terror, Payne concludes, "without some minimal protection for the lives of potential activists, no real opposition to the system of white supremacy was possible." Secondly, both CORE and SNCC repeatedly begged and pleaded with the various institutions of the federal government, to intervene. Many of these complaints went into what Zinn calls, "the bottomless, bucketless well of the Justice Department." In essence, the federal government forced them to take up arms. Lastly, CORE and SNCC's radicalization runs corollary to their closeness with the community and their insistence on respecting the local's views. In this sense, CORE and SNCC stirred the locals to act, while the locals (and Klan terror) "radicalized" and convinced them that armed self defense was necessary for survival. Wendt confirms this by noting that "Nonviolent organizer's focus on indigenous activism made it difficult to condemn militant armed resistance by local blacks." Embracing armed self defense is also a sign of both organizations' tactical flexibility that the national organizations lacked.

As early as 1962, both CORE and SNCC were being guarded by indigenous militias. One CORE worker wrote to the national office that if any hostile whites approached the CORE building, "they would be met with 15-20 high powered, long range shotguns before they got within 50 yards of the building." He also added that the local's announcement that they would, "shoot any strange face on their property," resulted in considerable reduction in racist harassment.

Back on the national scene, President Kennedy, faced with resistance from southern Democrats, began showing signs of backing off from his promise of a civil rights bill. In order to up the ante and to highlight the nation's failures to effectively deal with racism and segregation, civil rights activists called for a march on Washington in the summer of 1963. Kennedy immediately called all the major civil rights leaders to the White House. Kennedy tried to get them to cancel the march, proclaiming that it would harm the passage of a federal civil rights bill and "create an atmosphere of intimidation." Kennedy further added, "We want success in Congress not just a big show at the capitol." In the wake of the Birmingham riots, a King Biographer wrote that the administration "feared that Negroes might sack the Capital like Moors and Visigoths reincarnate."

A. Phillip Randolph told Kennedy, "The Negroes are already in the streets. It is very likely impossible to get them off." While Kennedy could not convince them to call off the March, he did, however, convince the leaders not to "lay siege to Capitol Hill" and "moved to incorporate the Negro revolution into the democratic revolution."

The Birmingham riots, along with the growing rhetoric of armed self defense in the South, were clearly having an effect on the Kennedy administration. Hill asserts that these two factors,

"...fundamentally changed the meaning of nonviolence and the role of King and moderate leaders; it provided them with a negotiating power they had never enjoyed before. It was the threat of black violence, not redemptive suffering and moral suasion, that was now making the political establishment take notice of nonviolent protest."

The proposed march was aggravating the tensions between the various civil rights organizations. The NAACP, SCLC, and Urban League were concerned the march would get out of hand, while SNCC and CORE complained it was too tame and was basically under control of the Kennedy administration. Their experiences in the Deep South had led them to see the Kennedy administration having a, "callous and cynical preference for political expediency over law and common decency." The administration, in turn, considered them troublemakers. Despite this, all the major organizations joined the march. It was in D.C. on August, 28, 1963 that King delivered his now famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

As SNCC had suspected, the older organizations were now under the influence of the Kennedy administration. John Lewis, of SNCC (and future U.S. Congressman), had his speech, "Which Side is the Government On," censored by march leaders, and James Baldwin was not allowed to read his speech. Lewis' speech certainly had a much more militant tone than King's. King's dream in Washington was a nightmare for many in the South. Years of beatings, murders, and jail time, with no federal response was taking its toll on many activists, black and white. Lewis' speech reflected the growing militancy within SNCC and the movement at large. The following is an excerpt of Lewis' censored speech: "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We will pursue our own 'scorched' earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground-nonviolently." While Lewis would maintain his nonviolent ethics, the SNCC of 1965 would almost certainly eliminate one word from the previous excerpt—"nonviolently."

For many, what was supposed to be a grassroots march to effectively shut down D.C. and force a federal response, had been hijacked by moderates and co-opted by the Kennedy administration. Malcolm X summed up the growing anger that many felt towards the march, the government, and the moderate civil rights organizations, when he said, (quoted at length for its poignancy)

"The Negroes were out there in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington. . . That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution.

It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in . . . these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, 'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look you all are letting this thing go too far.' And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'm telling you what they said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it.' They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're running ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'

As soon as they got the setup organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin to project these Big Six as the leaders of the march. Originally, they weren't even in the march. But the white man put the Big Six [at the] head of it; made them the march. They became the march. They took it over.

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it'll put you to sleep. This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn't integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.

No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. They controlled it so tight—they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make; and then told them to get out town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown."

Zinn asserts that the federal government "was trying-without making fundamental changes-to control an explosive situation, to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box, the polite petition, the officially endorsed quiet gathering." Both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were too slow and cautious in implementing meaningful change and thus failed to stem the years of discord that were ahead. 1963 ended the nonviolent phase of civil rights; while it would certainly continue as a tactic, it was no longer the dominant ideology of the movement.

In 1964, SNCC created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Its goal was to organize an insurgent party that would mount a challenge against Mississippi's segregationist Democratic Party for seat at the national convention. That summer was spent organizing and registering voters in what became known as the Freedom Summer. John Lewis, of SNCC, would later write, "That was a long hot summer...so hopeful in the beginning and so heart breaking by the end." Before the Freedom Summer could even start, three SNCC volunteers were brutally murdered with police complicity.

Part of SNCC's strategy for the Freedom Summer was to bring in waves of white northerners to bolster their efforts. But with this influx came much internal debate and strife, including pressures for increased organizational effectiveness over SNCC's historic decentralized vision. In addition, the role of whites was bitterly contested. SNCC's commitment to the beloved interracial community began to crumble. Many black staffers resented the baggage that came with northern whites. To begin with, the media had ignored the dangerous work SNCC's black workers had been doing for years, only to caste a limelight on it when white northerners became involved. Poor blacks also felt intimidated by the more aggressive and articulate whites from affluent backgrounds. White students could also return to their safe homes, unlike local blacks who had to live locally and with the consequences. In the end, precisely because Mississippi was so dangerous, whites were allowed to participate. The thinking went, "If white America wouldn't respond to the deaths of our people...maybe they would react to the death of their own children."

When the MDFP reached the Democratic convention, hopes were high, despite the summer's strife and brutality. But President Johnson feared a party split on national television and organized a backroom coup. The MFDP was offered a compromise whereby they could participate but not vote on the convention floor. They unanimously rejected it, and returned home bitter and devastated. To this, James Forman observed,

"[The convention] was a powerful lesson, not only for black people of Mississippi but for all of SNCC and many other people as well. No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the federal government would change the situation in the Deep South...Five years of struggle had radically changed the thought processes of many people, changed them from idealistic reformers to full-time revolutionaries. And that change had come through direct experience."

Lewis would call this, "the turning point in the civil rights movement." Activists had begged and pleaded for protection and were ignored. They tried to work through the system and they were denied. They had been sold out by liberalism, ignored by white America, and had endured years of brutality at the hands of racists. The spiritual heart of the movement was broken, and as a result satayagraha would fade to self defense.

The march in D.C. and the Freedom Summer caused a considerable rift between SNCC and CORE, and the moderate civil rights organizations and the white establishment at large. It also brought about a debate on the moderate organizations' effectiveness. What is remembered most about the civil rights movement, are the large, and relatively short lived, community mobilization protests. This was essentially the spirit of Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma and D.C. These types of protests were coming under attack for being ineffective in producing affective change. While they would certainly help attain federal legislation, they came at the "expense of challenging economic inequality and changing the attitudes, practices, customs and institutional systems that sustained inequality." In fact, in 1966 King would admit that legislative and judicial victories, "did very little to improve the lots of millions of Negroes," further adding that these victories, "were at best surface change, they were not really substantive changes."

In addition, the moderate organizations were taking pains to cast the movement as nonviolent and to direct tactics towards their own ends. Weighing their loyalty to local freedom struggles against the need to convince a national audience of the movement's unwavering nonviolent commitment, black moderates, aided by the mass media, jointly elevated King's philosophy to the movement's official creed. As a result, Gandhian ideas of ascetic self-suffering and Christian tenets of brotherly love and forgiveness became major points of reference for journalists and white liberal supporters. Conversely, any deviation from this abstract ideal was branded illegitimate and dangerous by the media, the federal government, and white America. This forms the historical basis for the nonviolent myth I seek to dispel.

Despite what the moderate organizations were saying publicly, the debate over the necessity and tactical effectiveness of armed self defense was raging. While the SCLC and NAACP were skillfully manipulating the media for liberal support, the nonviolent picture they painted, "bore only superficial relations to the day-to-day reality of civil rights activism." The debate over nonviolence and self defense was also raging within CORE and SNCC. Both these organizations financial well being depended on the contributions of white liberals, which led their national offices to downplay and hide armed self defense. To this end, the national CORE office issued a memo urging its field staff to "be very careful in advocating self defense in the community; urge people not to carry guns." They also advised that the "Deacons [for Defense, an armed black group] should be kept in the background." To the field staff, this was an injunction to suicide and in complete deference of the on the ground realities. It also spoke volumes about the level of commitment that white liberals had to democracy and equal rights, and how easily they would abandon those notions if blacks dared to defend themselves against racist terror. Some of the CORE staff replied, "To hell with CORE, we're with the people." After the events of 1965, both SNCC and CORE would openly embrace armed self defense and revolutionary rhetoric.

While attacking SNCC and CORE publicly, national moderate organizations failed to realize that they gained immense power from them. The presence of far left organizations within the civil rights milieu made centrist organizations like the NAACP and SCLC more acceptable to political and business leaders. Due to white terror and the absence of federal protection, radicalism had again evolved, and left moderate organizations in a much improved bargaining position. In essence, moderates had gained power because the spectrum of tactics and rhetoric had been expanded.

Despite the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that summer, a palpable sense of frustration and bitter discontent was emerging within the civil rights movement. The movement's early rhetoric of hope and nonviolent idealism was quickly fading in the face of racist terror and a complacent federal government. For years, the movement had patiently endured the constant indignity of beatings, murders and arrests; their patience and hope was running out. From the grave, President Kennedy's words echoed, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

For many, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights act is considered a watershed moment or a landmark piece of legislation. This way of thinking fits perfectly into the nonviolent myth and the supposed redemption of America's pluralistic democracy. The fact is, laws had been passed, and court rulings had been handed down before, most of which were ignored in the South or not enforced by the federal government. Legislation is often deceivingly optimistic and pacifying, in that it assumes the "right" to do something is the same as having the "power," or ability to do so. On this, Payne writes,

"Legislation serves our need to render history understandable by giving us convenient benchmarks, and we may therefore be tempted to exaggerate its significance. The bill is taken to be a great watershed. The bill in itself, though, may have been less important than the willingness of people... to insist that it be enforced. That insistence, I would argue, is the crucial break with the past, not the legislation itself. There is nothing about the record of the postwar federal government, the Kennedy administration not excepted, to suggest that Washington was going to enforce any more black rights than it had to enforce."

Furthermore, the bill did little to advance black voter registration or offer protection for those engaging it from beatings, terror, and arrest.

In the Deep South, SNCC and CORE were all too familiar with the federal government's empty rhetoric, and tendency towards co-option and promises, rather than concrete action. For SNCC and CORE, who were "living day by day in situations that amounted to moral combat with an unprincipled enemy, the assurance that federal authorities would take action _later_ represented the equivalent of the U.S. government siding _now_ with the brutality being meted out by white racists." The government's appalling decision to not protect its own citizens from terror, citing some abstract guise of states' rights, would directly lead to the later emergence of "violent" tactics and fiery rhetoric.

On the heels of Birmingham and 1964 Civil Rights Act, James Bevel and Martin Luther King began formulating a plan to take the civil rights campaign to Selma, Alabama, where Jim Crow was alive and well, despite federal legislation. In Selma, King hoped to further pressure the government with another morality play. Just like Birmingham, King chose a city whose Sheriff, James Clark, had a reputation for a violent temper when dealing with blacks. King's Birmingham experience had proven to him that "the use of white violence to expedite effective legislation" was a sound and proven tactic. The campaign would gain steam when state police shot and killed Jimmy Jackson, who was coming to the aid of his mother, who was being beaten by police during a peaceful protest.

In the wake of Jackson's murder, Bevel called for a march from Selma to Montgomery to confront Alabama's notoriously racist governor, George Wallace. King was supposed to lead the march but later attempted to post-pone it so he could preach at his church in Atlanta. To many, especially within SNCC, this was considered a copout. However, the people were already gathered and ready to march, so it was decided there would be no delay and that the march would go on, "leaderless."

As the 600 marchers approached the Edmund Pettus Bridge they noticed a "small posse of armed white men" gathered near the bridge. As they reached the crest of the bridge they encountered "dozens of battle-ready lawmen," and behind them, were Sheriff Clark's posse, "carrying clubs the size of baseball bats." SNCC chairmen, John Lewis, encouraged the crowd to kneel and pray rather than walk into the belly of the beast. Before they could kneel, the troopers and posse advanced on the nonviolent activists. The white crowed cheered "Get 'em. Get the Niggers," as the protestors were savagely beaten with clubs, trampled by horses, and tear gassed. The white mob joined in the mayhem, attacking reporters and beating an FBI agent they assumed was with the media. The nonviolent marchers were chased and beaten all the way back to the black section of town. "Bloody Sunday" was televised all around the world. In the United States, ABC interrupted the film "Judgment at Nuremburg," to broadcast the images to a horrified American public. In the background Sherriff Clark could be heard screaming, "Get those goddamned niggers. And get those goddamned white niggers."

In response to the images, reinforcements and encouragement poured in from all over the country. Congressional liberals condemned the violence and black youths took to throwing bottles and bricks at police in Selma's Carver projects. Lewis wondered aloud to a crowd at Brown's Chapel why "President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam...and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama. Next time we march...we may have to keep going to Washington." After Lewis' words appeared on the front page of the New York Times the following day, the Justice Department announced it was sending the FBI to investigate whether "unnecessary force was used by law officers and others."

SNCC activists were enraged by the violence and wanted to launch another march immediately. One SNCC worker commented,

"We were angry, and we wanted to show Governor Wallace, the Alabama Highway Patrol, Sherriff Clark, Selma's whites, the federal government and poor southern blacks in other Selmas that we didn't intend to take any more shit. We would ram the march down the throat of anyone who tried to stop us."

Two days later King led a second attempt at the march. When he reached the bridge, again guarded by a police barricade, King turned around and led the marchers back to Selma. The marchers were shocked and confused, but followed their leader back to the church. Without informing anyone, King had struck a deal with federal officials to march to the bridge as a symbolic gesture, and then return home. After the march, three white ministers, who participated in the march, were beaten by an angry white mob. One minister, James Reeb, died of his injuries.

SNCC was furious with King's "trickery" and James Bevel announced that SNCC would no longer work with the SCLC and that they were through waiting. He would later remark from the pulpit, "I said it today, and I will say it again. If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off." Despite SNCC's anger, the American public and the Johnson administration were calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act. The brutal images of police wielding clubs on nonviolent men, women and children, coupled with the murder of a white minister, had finally shaken the country into action.

After a federal injunction had restrained Governor Wallace and the state police from interfering in the march, it finally went ahead as planned. The marchers made it to Montgomery with protection from the National Guard and 50,000 people gathered to celebrate. Kings familiar cadence greeted the crowd,

"How long will it take?  
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.  
How long? Not long, because what you reap is what you sow.  
How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  
How Long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the faithful lighting of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on. Glory hallelujah."

A little over four months later, On August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. With this the mainstream civil rights movement had achieved its primary objectives, an end to segregation, full voting rights, and protection for them. Kings tactical nonviolent strategy in Selma had proven to be effective, but it came at great expense to the movement. Many in SNCC concluded that appealing to the conscience of white America required unacceptable and unnecessary levels of suffering. Furthermore, the federal government, with King's help, had lured the very people SNCC and CORE had organized, back into a faithful reliance on the same two-party system that had ignored them until it became politically expedient to do otherwise. John Lewis summed it up well, "It was certainly the last act for the movement as I knew it. Something was born in Selma during the course of that year, but something died there, too. The road of nonviolence had essentially run out. Selma was the last act."

Six days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded into violence.

# RIOTS

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

In 1961 Martin Luther King Jr. echoed Langston Hughes' prophetic poem in a speech entitled "The American Dream." King warned America that the "price America must pay for the continued exploitation of the Negro and other minority groups is the price of its own destruction." By 1963, frustration and anger had begun to replace the hope and love that was the bedrock of the early American civil rights movement. In the South, they had been besieged by state repression and assaulted by Klan terror. Hope and love were washed away by high-powered fire hoses, shocked by cattle prods, beaten bloody by fists and billy clubs, dynamited and shot at.

Outside the South, blacks suffered from structural violence more often than lynching and beatings. The economic violence they endured was just as destructive and corrosive as the kind their Southern counterparts endured, albeit a different type. America's cold indifference to the deplorable conditions of black ghettos led to a transformation of the ghetto residents' despair and hopelessness into rage and action. Black America's expectations were multiplying exponentially, while white America continued to stall reform and retard progress. The fires first began to burn in the South.

# Symbiosis in Birmingham

"What these white people do not realize is that Negroes who riot have given up on America. When nothing is done to alleviate their plight, this merely confirms the Negroes conviction that America is a hopelessly decadent society"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King and the SCLC went to Birmingham to launch a massive direct action campaign against the city's rampant discrimination. King's brilliant strategy was to use economic boycotts, sit-ins, marches and nonviolent direct action to "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." King managed to stage an enormously effective "morality play," whereby nonviolent protestors were brutally attacked by Sheriff Bull Connor's police department. The media broadcasted horrific scenes of young, nonviolent blacks being beaten, attacked by police dogs and pelted with high powered water hoses. Southern segregationists and the federal government were embarrassed in the eyes of a world that could not deny the legitimacy of the protestor's demands.

In the eyes of history and pacifists, Birmingham goes down as a great triumph of non-violence. While Birmingham was certainly a triumph, it was not a completely non-violent triumph. SCLC staffer Andrew Young said Birmingham, "was not a nonviolent city...it was probably the most violent city in America, and every black family had an arsenal." It was not uncommon for SCLC's staff to collect garbage cans full of weapons before non-violent marches while encouraging participants to remain peaceful. SCLC staff also had to routinely run people home to return their guns. What has been deleted from the myth of nonviolence is the role that violent riots and armed self-defense played in hurling the city into crisis and forcing concessions.

The first riot exploded in Birmingham on May 3, 1963. Protestors hurled bricks and bottles at police in direct response for the use of fire hoses on nonviolent protestors. The following day, three thousand blacks again took to the streets and engaged in violent clashes with the police. On May 11th, King's hotel room and his brother's house were bombed by the Klan. In what the New York Times called "without a doubt one of the worst racial explosions seen in the South in years," thousands of angry blacks again took to the streets, attacking police and burning a car. Several months later, on September 15th, a woman's Sunday school class at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was discussing the topic of "The love that forgives." The discussion was ended by a Klan bomb attack that left four little girls dead. Again, outraged residents took to the streets and rioted. In the aftermath, two black teens were left dead, one by the hand of a segregationist, and the other shot by a police officer. Birmingham's Jim Crow laws were shattering under barrages of bottles and bricks as well as pickets and marches.

Lance Hill has called these riots, "the first time in the history of the civil rights movement,[that] working class blacks took to the streets in violent protest against police brutality and Klan terror." In addition to the riots, black residents responded to bomb attacks by posting armed guards on "Dynamite Hill"- a favorite Klan bombing target. In addition, residents set up observation posts and armed patrols that guarded and searched churches for explosives. As elsewhere in the South, armed self-defense became "a largely invisible means of support for the local movement." These tactics of armed self-defense and rioting have been correctly labeled as "defensive violence" by Hill, whereby they were "collective acts intended to protect the black community from police or white terrorist violence."

Not only were these tactics justified in the face of state and Klan terror but they were wildly effective when paired with economic boycotts and massive direct action. Birmingham marked the end of philosophical nonviolence and the beginning of a successful tactical symbiosis, of both, violent and nonviolent tactics, that would sweep the South (albeit a symbiosis that was denied and hidden by major non-violent civil rights actors). After Birmingham, black violence broke out throughout the South in places like Charleston, Savannah, Cambridge, Lexington, McComb, and St Augustine. As a result of the riots in these cities, desegregation settlements were quickly reached. From Birmingham on, racists, local municipalities, and the federal government were always aware of the specter of black defensive violence.

Essentially, a credible threat of violence on behalf of the black community led to a deterrence of violence on the part of the local municipalities—it also terrified the federal government. While riots did not necessarily stop Klan terror, local police were more apt to control the Klan rather than let their terror spark further unrest. As Malcolm X put it, "The lesson of Birmingham is that the Negroes have lost their fear of the white man's reprisals and will react with violence if provoked."

After being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, King penned _Letter from a Birmingham Jail._ From his jail cell in Birmingham, King successfully manipulated white America's increasing fears of black violence. King warned America that those who refused to "support our nonviolent efforts" will "force millions of Negros" into "black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare." He further warned that if nonviolence is ignored there would be "ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat," King warned, "It is a fact of history."

After the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, King again used the threat of violence to gain leverage, when he warned the Kennedy administration that, "I will sincerely plead with my people to remain nonviolent.... I am convinced that unless some steps are taken by the federal government to restore a sense of confidence in the protection of life, limb and property my pleas shall fall on deaf ears and we shall see the worst _racial holocaust_ this nation has ever seen." By advocating nonviolence while invoking the threat of black violence, King was able to gain immense bargaining power for the SCLC. He was also able to paint himself as the moderate and sensible of the two choices America faced—love and Christian forbearance or Molotov cocktails and race war.

In an ironic twist, King needed outbreaks of violence in order to be brought to the bargaining table. No longer branded as the radical agitator, many began to see him as the safest option. King also relied heavily on violence by southern police departments. In fact, Bull Connor's unrepentant use of violence was a tactical mistake against nonviolent direct action, which played right into King's morality play. Had Connor been a student of history he would have emulated Sheriff Laurie Pritchet's strategy against King a year before Birmingham. Pritchet countered King's strategy in Albany, Georgia with nonviolence of his own. Pritchet defeated the movement with mass arrests made by officers acting with restraint. His restraint, "earned him praise by whites and frustrated SCLC's efforts to dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow in the media." King was also able to calm down violence when it broke out and even called for a moratorium on protests to let the situation diffuse. The lack of state violence combined with a pacified populace led King to leave Albany without any serious concessions—no crisis packed situation was created without the presence of violence.

Despite the rioting in Birmingham and elsewhere, the civil rights movement was able to maintain its nonviolent image, although it would become increasingly harder to do so in the future. Wendt credits the movement's ability to appear nonviolent to several factors, including, civil rights leader's rhetorical strategies and denials and the media's tendency to "neglect certain incidents of black violence." Citing Jenny Walker's research, Wendt claims that both liberal and conservative pundits tended to downplay black violence. White liberal journalists tended to downplay black violence out of fear that it would hurt the effectiveness of the nonviolent movement, while conservative pundits avoided reporting about black violence out of concern that nonviolent protest had already brought too much negative attention to the South's racist traditions. In addition, black newspapers remained silent because they faced economic reprisals and threats of violence if they reported on incidents of black violence.

Despite civil rights leaders, as well as media attempts to downplay the violence, the word was out—frustrated blacks where turning to violence to achieve rights they should have had at least a hundred years earlier. With this violence, a palpable sense of fear and anxiety emerged in white America's consciousness. President Kennedy's public statements acknowledged this threat of violence and he cited those threats in an address to the nation on civil rights in June 1963. In the aftermath of the Birmingham riots, Kennedy warned America in a televised address that there was a "rising tide of discontent that threatens public safety," further adding that "the fires of discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand, redress in sought in the streets." A week later in his address to Congress calling for Civil Rights legislation, Kennedy again conjured apocalyptic images, telling Congress that the "fires of frustration and discord" were burning "hotter than ever" and that the nation was wracked by "rancor, violence, disunity and national shame."

It is doubtful that the images Kennedy's speeches conjured up in America's collective imagination where of peaceful protestors singing We Shall Overcome. In fact, by the Time King went to Selma in 1965, "many white Americans feared that behind every gospel-singing nonviolent protestor stood a menacing street thug ready to hurl a firebomb." Nonviolence was fading away in the face of continued terror and a borderline non-existent government response. The fact was, that if the federal government did not act, more violence could be expected. In this context, it seems undeniable that defensive violence led to victories at the local level and to the passage of federal civil rights legislation. The following, year under President Johnson, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, effectively outlawing discrimination in public accommodation and ending segregation, at least on paper. A year later, Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which Hill contends was aided by the "force and coercion" of rioting as well as nonviolent direct action. It seems clear that the federal government was more responsive to the civil rights movement once it actually became threatening.

# The Fires Spread

"You'll get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom; then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it. When you get this kind of attitude, they'll label you as a 'crazy Negro,' or they'll call you a 'crazy nigger' Or they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom"

Malcolm X

The courage and subsequent brutality that Southern blacks endured had no doubt awakened Northern blacks to their own inequalities. They, however, faced a more latent and insidious racism that was not as easily recognizable as it was in the Jim Crow South. Northern blacks lived free of "legalized" segregation but were victims of pervasive de facto segregation in housing and employment. They were crowded into deteriorating slums that were overrun with poverty, unemployment and violence. They were victims of deplorable schools and police violence. In the northern slums, there were no media morality plays being televised, just daily tragedy. On this, Zinn comments:

"It seemed clear by now that nonviolence of the southern movement, perhaps tactically necessary in the southern atmosphere, and effective because it could be used to appeal to national opinion against the segregationist South, was not enough to deal with the entrenched problems of poverty in the black ghetto."

While all eyes were on the South, northern blacks were becoming increasingly frustrated, hostile, and impatient towards white America and black moderates. There was an obvious gap between America's promises and its actions. "A revolution in expectations," particularly among the youth, was underway. This revolution was, in part, inspired by federal legislation, but blacks were demanding more than the limited results those bills could produce. Throughout the ghettos, apathy, powerlessness and submission to the "system," were being replaced by racial pride, self esteem and action.

Throughout 1964, more riots broke out across the country, including northern cities such as Harlem, Rochester, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia—in which 2,843 rioters were arrested and more than 1,000 stores destroyed. By the summer of the next year, America would endure the "most violent urban outbreak since World War Two," in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California. Following a police incident and in the midst of a heat wave, Watts erupted into violence, rioting, firebombing and looting. The National Guard was called in and over 4,000 people were arrested. 34 people, mostly blacks, were killed, hundreds were injured, and $35 million in property damage was reported. One journalist wrote of the Watts riots, that "the Negro was going on record that he would no longer turn the other cheek. That, frustrated and goaded, he would strike back, whether the response of violence was an appropriate one or no." There was no doubt that a pattern of violence was emerging in America's ghettos.

After another summer of rioting in 1965, President Johnson appointed a task force to "make recommendations on organization and programs" for the recently established Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It was clear that the Johnson administration had to do something to pacify the ghettos and prevent further violence. Johnson was publicly careful not to appear to be rewarding rioters with federal programs, but one internal administration memo called for "Rapid action to avoid repetition of the Watts riots" in other cities. Gale further describes the White House as "ever more fearful" and "traumatized" by urban riots.

Again, we can see that violence in the form of rioting, or the potential for it, directly coerced the federal government into action. This has become known as the "danger-of-violence rationale," whereby the government is forced into action on behalf of poor and urban communities, or face the possibility that further violence would "tear apart the social fabric that was holding the cities together." Out of this rationale, the centerpiece of the task force's recommendations—the Demonstration Cities Program (also known as Model Cities) would be born.

The Model Cities program would provide federal funding for selected cities to devise their own programs with the goal of bringing about "physical rehabilitation of slum areas" and "social rehabilitation of the people in them." The program would encourage local involvement of residents and businesses, and would focus on high need neighborhoods that were plagued by poverty. Many other task force recommendations would act as a kind of road map for future presidencies in dealing with poverty and blight in America's inner cities. Attesting to the role violence, or the threat of violence played in establishing this, one HUD secretary commented that, "Model Cities would have never come out of the congress if it were not for the riots."

Consistent with the myth of nonviolence at the heart of the civil rights movement, and as if the taskforce had been created in a vacuum, their report and recommendations conspicuously left out any mention of the violence that was plaguing America's ghettos. Again, this omission was politically motivated to avoid legitimizing violence and lawlessness as a tactic in the eyes of the administrations critics and possibly the rioters. According to Gale, however, "there is no doubt that the task force report was intended in part as a response to mob violence." The program would take several years to be enacted and its remedies would come too late to avoid the riots of 1966 and 1967.

1966 saw 43 disorders and riots occur across America. They were again characterized by rock throwing, firebombing, looting and "wild shooting" by the National Guard and Police. In Chicago, three blacks were killed by the National Guard, one was a thirteen-year-old boy, and another was a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl. In Cleveland, four blacks were shot to death, two by State Troopers and two by white civilians.

It would be the summer of 1967 that America's ghettos would explode into the "greatest urban riots of American history." That summer saw "disturbances" in over 150 cities, including eight major and sustained uprisings, 33 "serious but not major" outbreaks, and 123 "minor" disorders. The worst of the violence came in July when large scale riots broke out in Detroit and Newark, and then spread like a chain reaction. In the end 83 people were dead by gunfire. The "overwhelming majority of those persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians."

In direct response to the riots, President Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on July 29, 1967. It would become known as the Kerner Commission, after its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. In a televised address announcing the commission's formation, Johnson declared, "we have endured a week such as no nation should live through; a time of violence and tragedy." He then called for legislation to "improve the life in our cities," but was careful to repeatedly point out that there would be no "bonus or reward" for rioters. He further pledged to punish any lawlessness and to "continue to search for evidence of conspiracy."

At the end of 1967, Martin Luther King asserted, "the vast majority of Negroes feel that nonviolence is the best strategy, the best tactic to use in this moment of social transition." Based on everything that happened that year, however, this may have represented hope rather than a description of reality.

# Who Rioted and Why?

"This society knows...that if human beings are confined in ghetto compounds of our cities, and are subjected to criminally inferior education and pervasive economic and job discrimination, committed to houses unfit for human habitation, subjected to unspeakable conditions of municipal services, such as sanitation, that such human beings are not likely to be responsive to appeals to be lawful, to be respectful, to be concerned with the property of others"

Dr. Kenneth Clark (Before the Kerner Commission)

Time and again, rioters were dismissed by government officials and pundits as "outside agitators," "communist inspired," "criminals," "bands of rowdies and hoodlums" and "extremists." California Governor, Ronald Reagan labeled the rioters as "lawbreakers and mad dogs." President Johnson repeated the claim of outside agitators and conspiracy ad nauseam. He even compared rioters to the Klan, claiming that both Klansmen and rioters were "lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of free America." Johnson seemed to have missed the very point of the riots—that blacks didn't live in the same "free America" as he and other whites did. Furthermore, surveys taken in 1968 showed that "almost one-half of whites believed that outside agitators or communists" were at least partly responsible for the riots. It was beyond white America to conceive of themselves as the outside agitators. As the Kerner Commission put it, "What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

The outside agitator/conspiracy claim is strikingly similar to the slave master or racist southern sheriff's claim that "our Negros are happy," whereby any resistance is the work of outsiders who are stirring up the otherwise content or aloof locals. Closely related to this is the "riffraff theory."

Through the lens of this theory, the obvious racial overtones and underlying causes for rioting are subverted by calling the riots "criminal insurrections" and their participants "criminals." By no means could the riots participants be representatives of the black community who were acting out of justifiable rage; rather, they had to be criminals and outside agitators. Secondly, the theory implies than only an "infinitesimal" fraction of the black community took part in the riots. Lastly, it implies that the "overwhelming majority of the black population—the law abiding and respectable 98 or 99 percent who did not join the rioting—unequivocally opposed the riots."

The massive outbreaks of violence perplexed many white Americans who considered the issue of civil rights settled since the passage of federal legislation in1964 and 1965. In this context, the riffraff theory was comforting and reassuring to white Americans. If only a few outsiders had participated in the riots, then the threat posed by them appeared less ominous, and the possible causes behind them were not worth delving deeper into. Furthermore, to stop the riots, all that was needed was to round up some agitators rather than to seriously examine race, racism, and poverty. The riffraff theory allowed some segments of America to avoid "radically changing the American metropolis, thoroughly overhauling its basic institutions, or seriously inconveniencing its white majority."

The riffraff theory could not have been more incorrect. According to the Kerner Commission the typical rioter:

"Was not a hoodlum, habitual criminal, or riffraff; nor was he a recent migrant, a member of an uneducated underclass, or a person lacking broad social and political concerns. Instead, he was teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout-but somewhat better educated than his Negro neighbor. And almost inevitably he had a menial job or was underemployed...He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes, and, though informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system and of political leaders."

Fogelson cites several studies done by various universities and government agencies that concluded that ten to twenty percent of ghetto residents took part in the riots, depending on the city. Those same studies also found that a sizable minority, or sometimes a majority of nonparticipants sympathized with the rioters. These studies also found that "rioters were fairly representative of ghetto residents." The Kerner Commission also found, in a nationwide survey, that 86% of black men and 84% of black women "viewed the riots as protests." To a large proportion of blacks, the riots were seen as "legitimate protest against the actions of whites, and the outcomes were expected to produce an improvement in the lot of Negroes and their relations with whites."

Lastly, the commission found that the riots "were not caused by, nor where they the consequence of, any organized plan or 'conspiracy'" but added that militants "helped create an atmosphere that contributed to an outbreak of disorder."

Not surprisingly, the black counter-rioter, who encouraged blacks not to riot, was "better educated and had a higher income than either the rioter or the noninvolved." The difference between counter-rioter and rioter is certainly representative of a rift between middle and lower class blacks. It is likely that some middle class blacks felt that aggressive action on the part of the poor blacks would harm their own token status in the black middle class-whereas the lower class had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The fear of losing one's one status in society is often a precursor to demanding pacifism on the part of those who are not as privileged.

This rift was also representative of the broader struggle for civil rights, where time and again, national, middle-class dominated, hierarchical organizations like the NAACP or SCLC would arrive in a community and demand its residents remain nonviolent—regardless of local conditions or the community's own desires. Where riots (or any type of "violent" black resistance) did occur, they were usually followed by at least token negotiations with only moderates being invited to the bargaining table. This was done at the expense of the "radicals" who _forced_ the process to occur in the first place and who bore the daily brunt of ghetto oppression and therefore deserved the first seat at the table. Moderates and pacifists may have disagreed with violence but they often benefitted from its aftermath.

So why did so many American cities explode into violence? While most riots were precipitated by police action-either routine or abusive, these incidents were typically just a spark that ignited a long simmering powder keg under a city of shared grievances. The moderate and bipartisan Kerner Commission asserted that, "white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since World War Two." Within the phrase "white racism", one can find a corrosive and degrading blend of social, economic, political, psychological and physical violence at the heart of the fire. Again, these conditions were often created and maintained by white institutions and condoned or ignored by white society.

The commission further blamed "pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing and...growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs." Specifically they identified three tiers of ghetto grievances and ranked them by intensity. The first Level issues (the most intense) were: police brutality, unemployment and underemployment and inadequate housing. The second level was characterized by: inadequate education, poor recreation facilities and programs, and the ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms. The third level consisted of: disrespectful white attitudes, discriminatory administration of justice, inadequacy of federal programs, inadequacy of municipal services, and discriminatory consumer and credit practices.

The above indictment of ghetto life could have been prevented from exploding if American ghettos had not suffered from years of politically ineffective moderate leadership that sought to please all sides rather than taking one, resulting in slow and often token reform. More importantly, it is legitimate to assume that he riots could have been prevented if ghetto residents had effective grievance mechanisms with local and national power structures—the bedrock of a pluralistic democracy. Lang and Lang assert that, "The probability that violence will emerge is directly related to the existence of meaningful institutional channels." Where ghetto residents had no mechanism for redress, they were essentially forced to choose "collective bargaining by riot." As Martin Luther King said, "A riot is the language of the unheard."

In addition to the lack of meaningful institutional channels, "a climate that approves and encourages violence as a form of protest [had] been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest." Time and again, the Federal government had turned its back while nonviolent blacks were being beaten and murdered with impunity in the South. Inaction by the federal government to stop the racist violence, protect nonviolent civil rights workers, or demand the enforcement of state and federal laws in the South, led many to believe violence and self defense were the only way to gain civil rights.

Many had viewed the 1960's riots as attempts to "subvert the social order of the United States" and as a direct attack on white America. The commission found that most participants had "seemed to be demanding fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the vast majority of American citizens." The age of television had flaunted the windfall of post World War II American affluence in front of the poor. As one economist testified, "Negroes have made gains...important gains. But... the masses of Negroes have been virtually untouched by those gains." This highlights the downside of the major civil rights organizations' concentration on pursuing only legalistic rather than structural change, community empowerment, and local leadership development. What did it mean if you could vote but not read policy? Or that you could now walk into any lunch counter but could not afford to eat there? For many, the issue was turning to gaining control over their own communities and the institutions that ran them.

This is evident in the targets of the riots. While America tended to view the riots as almost carnival-like with senseless acts of rage and destruction, the facts tell us otherwise. Lang and Lang report that "the evidence suggests that Negro rioters, far from being on a binge, were in fact highly discriminating with regard to targets, venting their destructiveness primarily on stores of white property owners, while Negro stores went largely unscathed." The Kerner commission affirmed this, stating the 1960's riots were, racial in character but not interracial, further adding that most actions were against symbols of white America not white persons themselves. These symbols were often exploitive white owned businesses and the police-the representatives of white society in the 1960's ghetto.

Fogelson summed it well when he wrote:

"The 1960's riots were articulate protests against genuine grievances in the black ghettos. The riots were protest because they were attempts to call attention of white society to blacks' widespread dissatisfaction with racial subordination and discrimination. The riots were also articulate because they were restrained, selective, and, no less important, directed at the source of blacks' most immediate and profound grievances. What is more, the grievances are genuine because by the standards of the greater society the conditions of black life, physically, economically, educationally, socially, and otherwise, are deplorable. "

Six weeks after the Kerner Report was released in 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down, and again America's cities were plunged into chaos: 106 cities had experienced 155 violent episodes of varying intensity where 21,700 people were arrested and 75 had been killed. Gale contends that the murder of King and subsequent riots "played a part in convincing members of Congress to take a decisive step to combat racism." Within one week, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which sought to eliminate discrimination in housing. Only a few weeks before the King riots, an attempt to filibuster, and thus kill the act, failed by only one vote.

Then and now, the rioters have been ousted from the movement as if the movement was a monolithic entity made up of a few figureheads and major organizations rather than the result of tens of thousands of people fighting at the local level against injustice and for their freedom, through any avenue available to them. It is here that we see the danger in doctrinaire nonviolence. Its followers not only seek to eliminate the spectrum of tactics, but they demand that all others abandon them as well in favor of a dogmatic devotion to a philosophical notion that is both alien and dangerous to the majority of society. While nonviolence is certainly an effective tactic, it is often more effective in the presence of other "violent" tactics. Time and again throughout the 1960's, the nonviolent civil rights figureheads had the audacity to tell poor blacks (for the benefit of white liberal dollars) that if they did not remain nonviolent, they were "not going to be a part of the movement." That legacy has continued into the 21st century where the riot's effectiveness, in both helping to enact federal legislation, and calling attention to the plight of ghetto life, have been excluded from the myth or alluded to as an unfortunate side effect of the struggle, rather than an integral and justifiable element of it.

Regardless of how one feels about the efficacy or justification for the riots, it cannot be denied that rioters were no less a part of the movement than any nonviolent actor. They were certainly no less brave, courageous, or hungry for their freedom than anyone else. We must be reminded that blacks sought nonviolent change for decades, if not hundreds of years, only to be greeted with relative indifference from white America. Because they chose a tactic, a successful one at that, that is outside the norms and acceptance of privileged white America and the black middle class, their efforts and motives have been erased from popular history. It is also important to note that the riots were successful _because_ of this previous nonviolent activity. The riots were a tactical escalation that sent a warning to white America—frustration is boiling over, and you better act soon, or else...

A dream deferred will explode.

# GUNSLINGERS

"Very little attention has been paid to the possibility that the success of the movement in the rural south owes something to the attitude of local people towards self-defense"

Charles Payne

When I speak of gunslingers I am explicitly referring to "ordinary" blacks who practiced armed self-defense in the Deep South. These gunslingers did not use the revolutionary rhetoric that became popular amongst black nationalists in the later part of the decade, although they certainly laid the groundwork for them. To many southern blacks, the human right to self-defense was a pragmatic tactic, grounded in the constitution, and enormously effective in repelling and deterring racist violence in the absence of police or federal protection. These gunslingers protected marches, guarded homes and churches in black community, and provided armed escort to nonviolent activists. In the process, they lifted community moral, provided a form of psychological liberation, and allowed the nonviolent movement to operate. Essentially, the southern civil rights success "depended on both the spirit and the shotgun."

More often than not, these gunslingers offered protection for civil rights workers from the shadows and the sidelines. Often they were demonized and forced into the shadows by movement "leaders" who sought to dictate their tactics in order to gain white liberal support. Other times they defied conventions and supposed movement ideology by operating openly.

From the earliest days of the modern civil rights movement, armed self-defense was in the background playing a quiet and effective role. When Martin Luther King's home was firebombed during the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, his home was transformed into a "virtual garrison" by members of his church. Armed sentries were posted and King's house was littered with pistols, rifles and shotguns. An armed crowd had gathered that night at his home demanding retribution. King convinced them otherwise, saying, "I want you to meet your enemies with love." The next morning he filed for a pistol permit but was denied. King would later turn the armed guards away, as it was not consistent with his rhetoric and interpretation of nonviolence.

In 1957, during the Little Rock, Arkansas school segregation crisis, the local NAACP came under constant threat by racists. The local leader, Daisy Bates became a prime target of intimidation and violence. Her house was set on fire, crosses were burned on her lawn, and her windows were smashed. Although the National Guard had been called in, both they, and the local police refused to protect Bates. Left "defenseless before those who constantly threaten our lives," Bates' friends and neighbors formed a "volunteer guard committee." In what would characterize federal involvement for the next decade, Bates appealed to President Eisenhower for help, but was ignored. Therefore, armed with pistols and shotguns, the committee guarded the house around the clock until the situation diffused.

That same year, in "Bombingham", Alabama, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth narrowly survived a bomb attack that destroyed his parsonage. Although committed to nonviolence, Shuttlesworth consented to the formation of a "Civil Rights Guard" to protect the church and his home. Shuttlesworth was careful to stress the defensive nature of the armed guards and encouraged restraint. The guards remained in place over the next four years, preventing further attacks.

It was precisely around this time that the notion of using nonviolent protest across the South was being born in the SCLC and reared by Martin Luther King. The leaders contended that, not only could nonviolence be effective, but it elicited crucial support and dollars from the white community. To many of movement leaders, nonviolence was not a tactic but a philosophical and religious imperative. Within the context of religious dogma and the need for financial support, movement leaders sought to publicly eliminate all other tactics from the movement.

The debate over self defense first became public in Monroe, North Carolina in 1959. The local head of the NAACP, Robert F. Williams, had been using nonviolent tactics for years to desegregate the city, to no avail. His nonviolent campaign actually led to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1957. The Klan responded to pickets and sit-ins with a concerted campaign of terror, harassment and intimidation. The local police chief had even led a procession of cars filled with Klansmen through black neighborhoods, firing pistols in the air and throwing rocks and bottles. Within this context, Williams formed a self-defense squad to protect blacks against Klan attack.

One of the Klan's favorite targets in Monroe was the home of a local black physician whose home was repeatedly put under attack by shotguns. Williams and the community dug trenches around the house and guarded it with machine guns, pistols and dynamite. When the Klan returned for another night of unprovoked terror, they were met with a barrage of bullets that sent them fleeing. This shootout "marked the end of Klan harassment in Monroe."

After several white men were acquitted of raping a black girl, Williams became furious. Monroe had endured murders, Klan terror, a racist police department and an unresponsive justice system. Time and again, the state and federal authorities had refused to protect the black community's most fundamental rights. After the acquittal, Williams told the media that, in the absence of meaningful protection and the "double standard of justice," blacks had to "meet violence with violence" and must "be willing to kill if necessary." He later added that "blacks should defend themselves on the spot whenever they are attacked by whites."

The following morning, Williams' words were on the front page of newspapers across the country. Within hours, he was suspended by NAACP president, Roy Wilkens. The NAACP concluded that it could not afford to lose "credibility, political influence, and financial contributions from white sympathizers." Martin Luther King and the white media praised the suspension of a "dangerous agitator." King stated, "To privately or publicly call for retaliatory violence as a strategy...would be the gravest tragedy that could befall us." He added that, not only would "violence" cost the movement its white support but it would invoke further violence.

In light of the on the ground reality in the South, King's notion that defensive violence would lead to further violence is misguided at best, and dangerous at its worst. It is also hypocritical. Time and again, King and the SCLC led protesters and the media into cities that they knew would explode into violence at the hands of local police and segregationists. This was, presumably, their goal, and was at the very heart of their success. On the other hand, it can be argued that defensive violence does not seek to provoke violence; it seeks to deter or repel it. Furthermore, "the philosophy of self-defense prepares one to evaluate realistically a potentially violent world and respond with a minimum degree of violence necessary to cope with it," and thus not be brutally murdered because of the color of your skin.

It is also important to recognize that armed defense also saved the lives of countless "ordinary" people who did not have the benefit of media coverage, a relationship with the government, or celebrity status. King's nonviolent strategy made sense in the cities with the presence of the cameras, but it was suicidal in the rural areas. To insist that people who live in the midst of constant unprovoked violence, day in and out, not defend themselves for fear of provoking further violence, is outright dangerous, immoral, and violent in and of itself: "The right of defense, by self or allies of the intended victim, is therefore a general human right, not to be sacrificed to any metaphysical or religious vision entertained by anyone else."

It is within Monroe, NC that we can find the birth of many issues that would face the civil rights movement in the coming years, and eventually tear it apart. The case of Williams served as a predecessor and "symbol of the growing frustration that poor and working class African-Americans felt toward the Civil Rights Movement." Most of these frustrations stemmed from the insistence of hierarchical, national organizations to demand conformity to their standards, tactics and goals, which often ran counter to local realities and desires. Connected to this are class issues, whereby Marcus Garvey once called the NAACP, the "National Association of Certain People." The NAACP's litigation strategy and SCLC's short lived mass mobilizations did little to help poor blacks in the rural South who were focused on more immediate issues, and whom lacked the benefit of sympathetic media attention. Lastly, was the rabid and suicidal insistence by these organizations that blacks shouldn't defend themselves, which was both physically, and psychologically detrimental.

To demand that people who are faced with daily unrepentant terror, not protect themselves, for whatever reason, seems insane and over idealistic. Choosing nonviolence in the front of cameras is vastly different from the daily life and death situations that poor, rural blacks faced in post World War II America. To this, Williams said, "Nonviolent campaigns that draw no national media attention would compel no one to protect the movement against white oppression." Further adding that he believed in a diversity of tactics, including nonviolent direct action, Williams said, "the movement shouldn't take the attitude that one method alone is the way for liberation."

Hill contends that nonviolence also furthered southern stereotypes of blacks as passive and submissive. He writes, "In the minds of southern whites, the ritual of nonviolent protest, centering on the interplay of domination and submission, only reinforced the stereotype of black men as passive, timorous and childlike." In the North, nonviolence reinforced a different set of stereotypes. Hill again writes, "nonviolence implicitly conceded the white stereotype of African Americans as violent, impulsive, and lacking self-restraint: they were either beast or child." It was without a doubt, psychologically harmful for blacks to have to conform to hypocritical white expectations of passivity in order to receive support. Furthermore, it suggests that their cause was only valid if they maintained passivity. To this Williams said,

"This money is sent into the South to convert us to nonviolence, to make us pacifists. But you see, the thing is that we've always been submissive. We've served in slavery, we were submissive then. We've gone through a period of lynching, of all types of brutal exploitation. And our children have been denied the right to grow up, to develop as total human beings. Our women have been raped and our men deprived of the right to sand up as men...Nobody spends money to go into the South and ask the racists to be martyrs or pacifists. But they always come to the downtrodden Negro, who's already too submissive, and then ask him not to fight back."

By embracing philosophical nonviolence as a "strategy to legitimize black demands and to secure support from liberal white America," King and others created a "precarious dichotomy between nonviolence and armed resistance." King's rhetoric also implied that the movement was monolithic in strategy, beliefs and tactics, when, in fact, this was far from the truth. When blacks dared to defy nonviolent expectations by defending themselves, they were labeled as violent "thugs," "radicals," and "agitators," by both black moderates and the white establishment. The fundamental difference between defending oneself and deterring further violence was thus equated, literally, to the terroristic violence of the Klan. In this context, the human and constitutional right to self-defense was subjugated by white fear and guilt, at the expense of black dignity, racial pride, and tragically, in many cases, black lives.

This false dichotomy also implied that nonviolent moral suasion alone was the force that would end segregation, when in fact it was force that achieved it. Wendt writes,

"This dichotomy was problematic because it falsely implied that nonviolence was based primarily based on moral suasion-the idea that appeals to the conscious of white America would bring about racial change-while in reality it constituted a pragmatic strategy that frequently depended on tactical coercion."

Again, the myth implies that the federal government, racists and white America at large, conceded to a well presented moral argument and thus segregation was ended. In fact, segregation was ended, in King's words, by creating a "crisis packed" situation. In nonviolent terms, this meant mass arrests, televised beatings and economic boycotts. In "violent" terms it meant riots and armed self defense. Segregationists (and the police) also contributed to the crisis by attacking or murdering civil rights activists and thus creating more mayhem. In any given city, when these elements came together, segregation was destroyed. In essence, segregation was ended by forcing various localities into a state of chaos which caused nationwide fear of the violence spreading. The combination of the above elements usually led local, state, or federal authorities to intervene and offer concessions.

For the next several years, the controversy surrounding armed self-defense and violence remained in the background. This was due to armed resistors choosing to operate covertly and the national organization's skillful media manipulation. That began to change in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, when King and the SCLC came to Birmingham to end segregation by "create[ing] a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." It was in Birmingham where King adapted his strategy from appealing to the conscious of the oppressor, to using tactical coercion and force.

The reality was that "activists were learning that the myth of nonviolence rested on a perilous underestimation of racism and a misplaced confidence in the American conscience and democratic institutions." By Birmingham, all of the nonviolent organizations (SNCC, CORE, SCLC) had "fallen victims to state repression and terrorism" and had failed to secure federal legislation, voting reform or southern wide desegregation. King's new strategy was to create situations so "crisis-packed" that the federal government had no choice but to intervene. As history has shown us, singing, praying, marching and enduring brutal violence, was not enough to compel the federal government to act. They had to be forced.

In Birmingham, it was the fusion of several tactics that eventually forced the city to capitulate and forced the federal government to react with the 1964 Civil Rights act. By forcing southern racists to react, the subsequent televised images of nonviolent blacks being beaten, tear gassed, and attacked with hoses and by vicious dogs, the movement gained sympathy from the North. While this is usually where the myth stops, there is in fact, more to it.

In King's Birmingham tactics, a small but crucial point must be made. King _wanted_ to provoke violence by southern segregationists in order to force federal intervention. If there was no "morality play," there would be no cause for federal intervention or northern outrage. The failed Albany campaign had proved this. Had both, black activists and white terrorists refrained from using violence, it is likely that segregation would have endured much longer.

In Birmingham massive riots broke out continuously. These riots prompted white America to nervously wonder if blacks were going to leave nonviolence behind and resort to violence in mass. This also terrified the federal government and stoked fears of a race war in white America. In addition to the riots, black residents responded to Klan bomb attacks by posting armed guards on "Dynamite Hill"- a favorite Klan bombing target. In addition, residents set up observation posts and armed patrols that guarded and searched churches for explosives. These armed actions helped the nonviolent movement stay alive, both, literally and figuratively. In sum, it was a perfect symbiosis of nonviolent force, riots and armed self-defense that won the day in Birmingham.

After Birmingham, America was effectively given the choice to decide which of the two paths, nonviolence or violence, black America would move towards. While white America clearly wanted nonviolence, the pace they took in rewarding it was often too little, too late, as the discussion of Birmingham in the "Riots" section demonstrates.

Despite what the moderate national organizations were telling the media, there was increasing debate over the necessity and legitimacy of armed self defense. This was particularly true of SNCC and CORE, who had dared to take their campaigns to the rural Deep South and paid dearly for it. In addition to this, SNCC and CORE were more democratic and were characterized by collective decision making bodies. Within this context, tactics could be more openly discussed. The NAACP and SCLC, on the other hand, were hierarchical organizations with authoritarian style leadership and thus more able to squash dissent.

Both CORE and SNCC focused on the long term community organizing model versus the other major organization's focus on relatively short, mass community mobilization model. In this regard, SNCC and CORE hoped to create "a people movement without dominating it." Their focus was to build a grassroots movement whereby activists attempted to develop local leadership and respect local opinions and tactical choices in the process. SCLC and the NAACP, on the other hand, often subverted local desires for their own national agenda, federal legislation.

CORE and SNCC's style led both of those organizations to later disavow nonviolence. This was a direct result of their experiences in the Deep South, with both, the scope of violence, and the "home grown militancy of locals." When SNCC decided to go into the Deep South, Andy Young of the SCLC commented, "We tried to warn SNCC. We were all southerners and we knew the depth of depravity of Southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi." It was often the black middle class and northern whites that tended to be more concerned with the issue of armed resistance than their rural southern counterparts, who thought of it as a practical imperative. It wasn't long before the SNCC and CORE were being guarded by "indigenous militias." These militias were operating throughout the Deep South. (CORE and SNCC will be addressed further in the radicals section).

Time and again, these "militias" were organized by World War Two veterans. These veterans had endured bombs and bullets throughout the world for a democracy they weren't fully apart of. They certainly were not going to endure it at home. This was the case in Monroe, NC, where Robert Williams was an ex-marine, and in Tuscaloosa, Alabama as well. Tuscaloosa had a brutal and long history of KKK activity. In 1964, one of King's understudies, T.Y. Rogers was appointed as the minister for the city's largest and oldest Baptist church. Wendt asserts that the arrival of Rogers "marked the beginning of rejuvenated nonviolent freedom movement, which would force white authorities to integrate the city by spring of 1965."

While recognizing the revival of the nonviolent movement in Tuscaloosa, it is important to acknowledge another factor as well. Of crucial importance to the survival of this "nonviolent freedom movement" was the presence of, "a sophisticated defense group" that was "secretive, well organized, and followed the orders of combat-experienced army veteran." Due to its secrecy, the group never even took on a name. They formed in direct response to police brutality and Klan terror. In June of 1964, Rogers defied a ban on marching and led 500 peaceful protestors out of church. They were swiftly beaten back into the church with fire hoses, cattle prods, fists and billy clubs. Once inside the church, they were tear gassed. When nonviolent men, women and children fled the church, they were greeted again by police who savagely beat and arrested them. By attacking the church, a black sanctuary, the police had enraged the community. That night, scores of angry armed black men took to the streets looking for revenge. A local labor organizer and Korean War Veteran, Joseph Mallisham commented that he had, "never seen so many folks walking down the street with shotguns on their shoulders." Mallisham convinced them to avoid confrontation and to come to a meeting that night. "If we're going to do it, let's do it right," he told them.

By the group's second meeting, there were over three hundred men in attendance, including a large contingent of war veterans, teachers, laborers and even youth gang leaders. Mallisham became the group's leader and the organization "clearly reflected its leader's army training" and its structure "mirrored that of a military combat unit." Mallisham quickly established a "rigid code of morality" and members had to take an oath to die defending black lives if need be. In addition, members also had to be married war veterans with combat service and pass a background check. To avoid tension and remain secret, the group never took on a name.

The armed group quickly took on the role of protecting the Rogers. Although an advocate of nonviolence in the spirit of his mentor, Rogers welcomed the group. The group also protected other activists, both white and black, as well as churches, demonstrations and marches. The group even protected NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall with machine guns when he came to Tuscaloosa to litigate a case. They also saved lives in Tuscaloosa.

In July of 1964, they rescued a group of black teenagers who had just integrated a local movie theater. When the teens exited the theater, they were greeted by a hostile mob of whites. Two carloads of armed black men arrived, scooped up the teens and sped off. They were ambushed by the Klan but quickly returned fire, sending the racists running. This confrontation ended KKK harassment in Tuscaloosa.

Wendt further attacks the nonviolent myth by asserting, "Tuscaloosa's indigenous freedom movement, while largely ignored by civil rights scholars, thus provides another example of how direct action and armed resistance worked side by side in southern civil rights campaigns."

In the Tuscaloosa group, we can see a recurring theme that was prevalent in armed self-defense groups throughout the South: preventing or deterring violence rather than provoking or engaging in it. This stands in stark contrast to the tactics of so-called nonviolent leaders, who explicitly sought to provoke violence against their followers, to further their organization's own goals. This is one of the central ironies of the false dichotomy created by King and others.

Another group largely ignored by scholars and the resulting myth, was the Deacons for Defense. The Deacons emerged in Jonesboro, Louisiana which was in the heart of what was known as "Klan Nation." They formed in response to a "well-organized racist militia-the Ku Klux Klan—and the federal government's appalling failure to enforce the Civil Rights Act and uphold basic constitutional rights and liberties in the South." Unlike other groups, the Deacons were explicitly public and more confrontational.

The Klan in Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi was highly organized, and between 1964 and 1965 they had, "conducted a highly sophisticated campaign of terror, mobilizing thousands of men into a paramilitary militia. It combined terror with boycotts, mass demonstrations, and lobbying...The Klan seized control of local governments and carved out a territory where civil rights activity was virtually impossible." As one FBI agent put it, "They owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan."

The specific impetus for the Deacon's formation was a brazen act by local police and the KKK, often one and the same. After cutting electricity to the black neighborhood, the assistant police chief of Jonesboro, Louisiana, in his patrol car, led a caravan of fifty Klan vehicles into the heart of the black area. Their intention was to scare the locals into ignoring the recent influx of civil rights workers into the area, hoping to test the Civil Rights Act. While some blacks were scared, others became enraged. Little did the Klan realize that their actions would, "in a matter of weeks, give rise to a well-organized and public black militia dedicated to ending Klan terror" and confronting racist police.

In the face of police harassment, Klan terror, and a complacent federal government hiding behind federalism and states' rights, the community had no other choice than to arm themselves in collective self-defense. After several months of meetings, the Deacons for Defense and Justice was formed. Like other groups, they adopted recruiting standards. Members had to be U.S. citizens, over the age of twenty-one, of good moral character and preferably registered to vote. As with all southern self-defense groups, many Deacons were ex-military. The Deacons also elected officers, set up a command structure, and collected dues. With that money, they bought guns, grenades, gasoline, and communication equipment.

With the Deacons presence would come a new spirit in the local movement. One CORE worker wrote to the regional office that with the birth of the Deacons came an immediate increase in "community morale, programming and fundraising," further adding that Jonesboro had become the most "organized Negro community in Louisiana." While the Deacons engaged in the same tactics that the other self-defense groups had (armed escort, shootouts, etc.), they were explicitly more confrontational and focused on psychological liberation and black consciousness. Their presence in Jonesboro would "quickly put an end to white violent harassment" and while police harassment continued, "white attacks against black homes and Civil Rights workers ceased almost completely."

To the Deacons, fear, respect, and honor would be the weapons that they would use to gain equal rights. While they did not disavow other nonviolent tactics, many of their members saw their rights as natural and inalienable, not as something to be handed out by whites in return for good behavior. Hill writes, the Deacons, "were not only unshackling black men from the chains of fear and passivity, they were also vanquishing a submissive stereotype that fostered white supremacist attitudes and violence."

On March 12, 1965, just days after "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, where protestors where violently beaten by police, the Deacons began to confront racism and terror in their own distinct way. In response to a nonviolent march that was underway by students from a local high school, local police and Klansmen blockaded the black section of Jonesboro and cordoned off the student march. Inside the cordon, "the police and posse were acting with impunity." Armed Deacons tried time and again to enter the area and protect the children. They were beaten and arrested. One Deacon had a gun put to his nose by a local deputy: "Smell out of this, you black son-of-bitch. You better not move or I'll have hair flying everywhere."

According to Hill, by confronting the police, the Deacons "averted bloodshed...and deterred police officers and vigilantes from attacking defenseless students." This was just the beginning and would mark the group's confrontational style. Several days later, as the children picketed again, the local police called in the fire hoses. Before the hoses could be turned against the kids, a carload of Deacons arrived and began loading their shotguns in plain view of the police and firemen. A Deacon delivered an ultimatum, "If you turn that hose on those kids, there's going to be some blood out here today." In doing so, they had declared that Jonesboro was not Selma.

This action set the Deacons aside from most other self-defense groups. Previously, the Deacons, and other groups, had only asserted their right to defend themselves against Klan terror. Now they had claimed their right to defend themselves against state violence as well. In Selma, the protestors prayed for federal protection. In Jonesboro, the Deacons provided it.

By this time, the Deacons had gone public and had been featured in the New York Times. Their open and flamboyant style shocked and scared many whites, both in Jonesboro and across America. In addition, the Klan murdered a white woman and mother of five, Viola Liuzzo, as she shuttled marchers to Selma. The murder of a white person, specifically a white woman, was an enormous tactical mistake by the Klan. The country was outraged, and the next day, President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover declared war on the Klan. Blacks certainly took notice of the value that was placed on white life in deference to decades of Klan terror against blacks.

Between the Deacons' activities in Jonesboro and elsewhere, a CORE media campaign, and the student marchers, and within the context of Selma, Louisiana Governor, John McKeithen decided to travel to Jonesboro. Fearing a disaster in the making, McKeithen opened negations with the protestors and eventually conceded to virtually all of their demands. Hill asserts, "The Deacons had made history: Their willingness to use public armed force had brought a segregationist governor to his knees, compelling him to negotiate with African Americans as equal citizens." With this, the Deacons began to spread.

In Bogalusa, Loiusiana, CORE was facing vicious Klan terror, and once again the federal government refused to intervene in the enforcement of civil rights. Jim Crow was alive and well in Bogalusa where eight out of ten black families lived in poverty. Sewage flowed in the streets of black neighborhoods and virtually all public accommodations were segregated. The city worked openly with the army of an estimated 800 Klan members in the Bogalusa area, known as Klantown USA. Indeed, Klan headquarters was across the street from City Hall.

After a white mob attempted to kill two nonviolent CORE activists, locals called on the Deacons to help them establish a chapter in early 1965. Nonviolent protestors were routinely beaten and arrested in Bogalusa and black homes were under constant threat by night riders. When children tried to integrate a local playground, a white mob attacked them with clubs. The local police joined in with clubs of their own and let their dogs loose on the children. The next day, 500 whites guarded the park and dared the black community to try again—no one dared. That would change with the emergence of a local Deacons chapter.

The previously nonviolent CORE was beginning to realize their beliefs were more often than not "influenced by geography and circumstance rather than moral principle." In the presence of armed locals, and in accordance with their organizing model, CORE began to accept, and would eventually advocate, for armed self defense. One CORE volunteer said,

"We never crossed the streets without a Deacon. We never drove our car without a Deacon present. Most of our cars were escorted by two carloads of Deacons, one in the front and on in the back. The homes we stayed were guarded day and night by Deacons, and our canvassing was protected by Deacons. Our lives were literally in their hands."

CORE and the Deacons were the perfect synthesis of nonviolent direct action operating in the presence of armed men. The crisis they were causing was raising national attention. In the national white media, the Deacons were labeled the "Negro KKK," but they were revered in black publications like Jet and Ebony for their ability to inspire pride, community feeling, and nourishing the black identity. On July 8, 1965 the Deacons would gain media notoriety. The Deacons were guarding a nonviolent march led by the local Voters League. A crowd of angry whites had gathered to disrupt the march. A brick was thrown and struck a young black girl. The white mob surrounded her and began to beat her and tear at her clothes. A Deacon rushed to her rescue but was pinned down by the mob. Another Deacon, Henry Austin, pulled his gun and fired a warning shot but the mob continued. Austin then took aim and fired three shots into the chest of a white attacker, Alton Crowe. The white mob was shocked and enraged at the audacity of a black man fighting back: "They killed a white man. Kill the niggers," one woman yelled. Hill notes that "The Alton Crowe shooting marked an unheralded but significant turning point in the black freedom movement. It was the first time in the modern civil rights struggle that a black organization had used lethal force to protect civil rights marchers." It took the blood of one white man to change the course of history and force the federal government to intervene.

Civil rights leader Roy Innis later commented that, "The Deacons forced the Klan to re-evaluate their actions and often change their undergarments." In much of the black community, the Deacons were heroes; they inspired a completely different feeling in white America. Again the white media attacked the Deacons, calling them vigilantes or militants. The Wall Street Journal wondered if "Non Violence [was] Coming to End." In Jet, they were described as, "a determined band of heavily armed Negroes who have vowed to defend themselves from marauding whites who have terrorized black communities in the South." In the wake of the media coverage, the Deacons spread throughout the South.

A fear of a civil war in Bogalusa was spreading. For the first time, the bloodshed was running both ways. Jet summed up the situation well, "With deadly guns and bullets, and the nonviolent philosophy living side by side in tense Bogalusa, whites in that area-perhaps for the first time in any Deep South civil rights drive-have a clear choice of alternatives." Bogalusa now had two armed groups to deal with and the federal government could no longer ignore the situation.

The Johnson administration immediately dispatched the Justice Department's John Doar to Bogalusa. Doar launched a two-prong attack on segregation: he would force local authorities to uphold civil rights and destroy the Klan. Doar filed several lawsuits against the Klan, local businesses and local authorities. He also threatened local police with jail time if they did not enforce the law. In filing a suit against the Klan, the Justice Department had, for the first time, "purposely used a federal suit to destroy the Klan." It was extremely effective.

Negotiations with the Voters League began immediately. The police chief and local paper called for an end to violence and threatened arrest against segregationists. Prosecutions began against the Klan and local businesses and public accommodations were quickly desegregated. The police department was integrated as well. Hill writes,

"The effect of the federal offensive was swift and dramatic. Overnight, Washington had crushed the white supremacist coup in Bogalusa and forced local authorities to uphold the law-something the Justice Department had never before attempted in the modern civil rights movement. In retrospect, what is remarkable was how _little_ was required to destroy the Klan and force local authorities to protect citizens rights and liberties."

The Deacons eventually spread to 21 communities, including four in the North. In the South, the Deacons had, "convincingly demonstrated that armed self-defense and nonviolent direct action frequently worked hand in hand, playing an indispensable role in the survival of the local civil rights projects."

By operating in the open, the Deacons had effectively taken the movement's "family secret" and thrust it into the limelight. By doing so, they forced the federal government to enforce black rights and destroy the Klan, and in the process, helped build pride and respect in black communities. They were able to do this, largely due to the fact that they were independent of the black middle class and white support. In fact, they were the only southern wide organization created and controlled by working class blacks. In addition, they were tactically flexible; using and or supporting all means to gain liberation. SNCC, CORE and the SCLC had all gained significant attention and certainly helped gain federal legislation but, "produced few changes in the Deep South...By contrast, the Deacons activities frequently resulted in substantial and unprecedented victories at the local level, producing real power and self sustaining organizations."

The preceding examples are but a few of the numerous examples of armed self-defense in the Civil Rights struggle. It seems clear that "armed resistance served as a significant auxiliary to nonviolent protest in the southern civil rights struggles of the 1950's and 1960's." In the absence of other protection, armed blacks across the South defended other activists, their marches, and churches, and thus allowed the nonviolent movement, to not only survive, but thrive. Armed defenders bolstered moral, instilled pride in black communities, and struck fear into others.

Unfortunately, and perhaps purposely, the Deacons, and other acts of self defense have been forgotten-lost to the myth. Perhaps it is because they stood as an, "embarrassing testimonial to the level of force that was necessary to bring African Americans into full citizenship." In the few instances that history does record armed self-defense, it is often portrayed in very different terms than the mainstream civil rights movement—illegitimate and legitimate. But the fact is, the struggle for Civil Rights took many forms. It "grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicament, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom."

# RADICALS

"Now it is all over. America has had chance after chance to show that it really meant 'that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights'...Now it is over. The days of singing songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with love...Love is fragile and gentle and seeks a like response. They used to sing 'I Love Everybody' as they ducked bricks and bottles. Now they sing:

Too much love,

Too much love,

Nothing kills a nigger like

Too much love."

Julius Lester

As discussed throughout this book, the notion of what was considered radical was constantly evolving during the 1960's. With the introduction of every new tactic or organization the movement was sped up, its goals widened and its "successes" more carefully critiqued. As tactics and rhetoric evolved, moderates gained access to power and respectability in corollary. As Killian writes, radicals affect the psychology of perception by "extending the anchorage points near the end of a scale change[ing] the value of the objects nearer the center."

When Martin Luther King and the economic boycotts emerged in Montgomery, the NAACP ceased to be considered "radical." When the student movement emerged, especially with SNCC and CORE, King ceased to be a radical agitator and became a movement celebrity. In essence, the development of a left wing within the civil rights movement made the more centrist organizations, like the NAACP and SCLC, more acceptable. Payne asserts that,

"In 1962 or 1963, King was considered too radical for many of the powers-that-be. Given a choice between the relatively reasonable ministers of the SCLC or the sometimes brash, frequently uncompromising young people of SNCC, business and political leaders were likely to choose the SCLC."

The fact is, that throughout the civil rights movement, the nonviolent actors got most of their power and status from the specter of black violence (riots, armed self defense), and later armed revolutionaries. Faced with two distinct alternatives, "the white power structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists." Furthermore, "without the specter, real or perceived, of a violent black revolution at large...King's nonviolent strategy was basically impotent in concrete terms," and thus he was anointed the "responsible black leader."

When local or national political leaders conceded to negotiations, the so-called radicals were often left out of the ensuing debate. Moderates, however, were invited to the table en mass and were praised for their reason and pragmatism. Killian asserts that "the term moderate appears almost to be an invention of a sophisticated white resistance which bestows it upon certain black leaders in an attempt to co-opt them." By wearing the moderate label, one's access and acceptability to white authorities and funding is thus increased. In this context, it is reasonable to assume, that in many instances, gains in acceptability came with proportional losses in actual effectiveness.

Prior to 1965, even the most militant rhetoric and tactics used by the movement, including the riots, sought inclusion in the system not the destruction or separation from it. Despite this, white America was still terrified by the potential for black violence and thus King was elevated to the head of the movement with the help of the media and the federal government. Dyson asserts that

"At first, he [King] was viewed in many quarters of white America as a trouble making, glory seeking, self-promoting preacher whose racial opportunism was a plague on black-white relations... but with the rise of black militancy...King's challenging beliefs were transmuted into terms that white America fully exploited" and thus "King was made the poster boy for safe Negro leadership...By embracing King, many whites believed that the threat of black insurrection could be contained, perhaps even shrewdly diverted."

King's celebrity status and acceptability further increased with the rise of revolutionary black militancy. By 1965, the rhetoric of the left wing of the movement began to embrace violence and armed self defense as a tactic, racial separatism, the destruction of capitalism, and black power. They also began to connect their own struggle with the world wide anti-colonial revolutions. Consider the following criticism of Gandhi and its potential for being applied to King within the above context,

"Gandhi made it easier for the British to rule because he used his influence to make sure that no action was taken that would make a real difference. They treated him well in prison and let him live. Had he of died he could have been replaced by someone who did not believe in 'soulforce.' While they despised him for raising the masses they needed him to keep the masses in control."

This criticism of Gandhi and its similarity to King is borne out in various FBI memos. One such memo stresses the need for "preventing the rise of a black messiah" who could "unify and electrify" the black movement. Three names have been blacked out on the memo, but it continues that one of them "could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed 'obedience' to 'white, liberal doctrines' (nonviolence)" [their parenthesis]. In the post-1965 years, King began to step out of his previous roll and sharply criticized white America's deeply entrenched racism, capitalism, and the Vietnam War. He also began to call for structural change to achieve equality for blacks. These structural changes were much more threatening to white America and thus King began to fall out of vogue with the white establishment. Dyson writes,

"As long as King waxed eloquent about how Southern segregation could be overcome with nonviolence, ne was the darling of (Northern) white liberals. When he preached that blacks must sacrifice their blood and bodies to redeem whites, many liberals lauded his nobility. When he insisted that black love whites, even hateful violent racists, King was crowned an epic moral figure by many liberals...The more King suffered and the more he encouraged black people to suffer, the more liberals praised King as a man who should be emulated by all blacks. But when King began to say that racism was deeply rooted in our society and that only a structural change would remove it, he alienated key segments of the liberal establishment."

As long as King maintained his allegiance to white liberal doctrines of nonviolence and legislative change, he was praised and heralded. This is the King that is romanticized today while the post-1965 King has been sanitized and white washed.

Now let us move into 1965 America to further analyze how and why the movement and King changed, as well as the effects of the radicals with regard to the more moderate civil rights actors and their access to the white establishment. As John Lewis had pointed out after the Selma march, "the road of nonviolence had essentially run out. Selma was the last act." It might be more appropriate to say that the ability to hide the movements "family secret" had run out and that the specter of black violence had turned into a reality, as seen in the Watts riots just 6 days after the singing of the Voting Rights Act. In 1964, Lewis himself conceded the inevitability of black violence:

"I could understand people not wanting to get beaten anymore. The body gets tired. You put so much energy and you saw such little gain. Black capacity to believe white would really open his heart, open his life to nonviolent appeal, was running out." He further added, "The lack of concern on the part of the American public and the lack of concern and courage of the federal government breed bitterness and frustration. Where lack of jobs, intolerable housing, police brutality, and other frustrating conditions exist, it is possible that violence and massive street demonstrations may develop."

In the wake of federal legislation, attacking the structural inequality of social, political and economic power became the focus of the movement. This presented a much more complex problem in that these issues are not as easily identifiable as a separate water fountain or a whites only sign. De Jure segregation and lack of voting rights were comparatively easy to legislate away, while racism and political inequality are not. More importantly, white America was more vested in these inequalities.

The frustration and subsequent transformation of the civil rights movement is evident in the internal strife that CORE and SNCC were facing in 1965 and 1966. Both organizations were dealing with the same three problems: frustration with the pace or with perceived token qualities of it, the influx and role of whites and the middle class in the movement, and the legitimacy of violence and self defense as a tactic.

By 1966, both SNCC and CORE are professing the need for the movement to be led by and dominated by blacks. For many the perceived dependency on whites only served to feed the negative stereotype of black dependency on whites. They were also worried that the presence of whites would have a "poor effect on the moral and indigenous leadership development," and that the privileged backgrounds and prejudices of whites were often being replicated within the organizations. SNCC's John Lewis declared that "if the movement and SNCC are going to be successful in liberating the black masses, then the civil rights movement must be black controlled, dominated and led." While many favored racial separatism in regards to leadership and participation in CORE and SNCC, they did, however, support white support within its own framework. In addition to racial tensions, the influx of the white middle class often led to tactical arguments, with blacks favoring more radical action than their privileged counterparts.

SNCC had previously been predominately middle class and a somewhat interracial mix of college kids, but by 1965 their executive committee was predominantly black southerners with a high school education. CORE too had been previously dominated by white middle class activists, but by 1964 they were predominantly all black. Perhaps because of this, both organizations began to openly call for armed self defense. By 1966, CORE's leadership had changed from the nonviolent James Farmer to Floyd McKissick, who declared that "the right to self defense is a constitutional right and you can't expect black people to surrender this right while white people maintain it." CORE also drafted a report noting that "nonviolence has been unsuccessful in solving any of the problems which confront the Negro population." In SNCC, the nonviolent John Lewis was replaced by Stokely Carmichael, who would assert that SNCC would use "all means necessary" to gain equality. These changes in both organizations are directly related to the removal of liberal, middle class ideology and control being removed from the organizations. The decreasing role of whites and liberals was further reduced by their perceived notion that legislation had effectively solved the issue of equality.

In June of 1966, James Meredith began his March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. His goal was to encourage black voter registration and increase awareness of the "all-pervasive and overriding fear that dominates the day-to-day life" of Southern blacks. On the second day of the march a white man emerged from the bushes and took three shots at Meredith. He survived the attack but the shooting triggered a national reaction amongst all of the civil right groups. The SCLC, CORE and SNCC announced they would finish Meredith's march. Meredith told the media that before the march he debated whether to bring a bible or a gun and that he regrettably chose the bible: "I was embarrassed because I could have knocked the intended killer off with one shot if I had been prepared. I will return to the march...and I will be armed...but if whites continue to kill the Negro in the South, I will have no choice but to urge them [Negroes] to go out and defend themselves."

SNCC and CORE enraged the SCLC by demanding the Deacons for Defense guard the march, and that whites be excluded. Furthermore, they argued that the focus of the march would be "an indictment of President Johnson over the fact that existing laws were nor being enforced." Earnest Thomas, from the Deacons for Defense, told King that they would keep a low profile but "we're gonna be up and down the highways and byways. And if somebody gets shot again, they are going to have somebody to give account for that." Remarkably, King conceded to the radical's demands, perhaps because Mississippi was SNCC territory and he could not afford to alienate them. The march succeeded in reaching its destiny without violence but there were several very public arguments between the radical organizations and the SCLC.

Shortly after the march, Stokely Carmichael spoke at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi: "We've been saying freedom for six years now and we ain't got nothin'. What we gotta start saying now is 'Black Power!" The crowd of several thousand cheered and responded with chant of "Black Power, Black Power!" In the context of the riots that were sweeping the country, white America was terrified and envisioned armed rebellion and guerilla warfare by blacks. To this Carmichael would respond, "Whites get nervous when we don't keep talking about brotherly love." In reality, the black power slogan was meant to convey the need for blacks to gain political power and thus gain control over the institutions that reinforced racism and black poverty. In also was meant to be used as a psychological tool that reinforced black cultural pride, self-empowerment and self-esteem. Dyson writes, "To black youth in particular, Black Power represented a promise of control after forever being controlled, of power after being powerless, of embracing the beauty of blackness after being told for so long that black is ugly." In this regard, black radicals were identifying unresolved issues and defining new ones within the black struggle for equality that might of otherwise have been relaxed by the appearance of change.

The following "black power" years would be characterized by fiery, and often revolutionary rhetoric, as well as the open carrying of weapons by the Black Panther Party. In addition to this, rioting in the black ghettos appeared to be endemic. While this period is often condemned as divisive or destructive, its positive effects on the mainstream civil rights organizations are irrefutable. Bowen writes,

"Division within the Negro leadership is probably not only inevitable but also politically desirable...If there is indeed to be substantive rather than merely symbolic change in public policy, it would seem that this would be facilitated by a very aggressive and militant leadership among Negroes, who in effect can be denied recognition by the 'white power structure' which turns instead to a more acceptable Negro leadership."

The militant effect can be traced as far back as Birmingham, where after rioting broke out, Attorney General Robert Kennedy worried that blacks were going to "start following the ideas of the black Muslims and not go along with the white people."

As this book attests to, the moderate leaders and organizations gained immense bargaining power and support throughout the civil rights movement via riots, militant rhetoric and armed self defense, and their criticism of these tactics. In examining the changes in funding for the major civil rights groups, Herbert Haines concluded,

"The activities of relatively radical black organizations, along with urban riots, stimulated increased financial support by white groups of more moderate black organizations, especially during the late 1960's. This finding partially contradicts the widely-held belief that black militants only brought a white 'backlash.' On the contrary, the task of fundraising by moderate civil rights organizations was apparently made easier, not more difficult, by the racial turmoil of the 1960's."

Haines asserts that the radicals of the 1960's, in all of their forms, had a "positive flank effect," whereby the "bargaining position of moderates is strengthened by the presence of more radical groups." He further adds, that while reaction to radicals was diverse, the data suggests that "radicalization of segments of the black community had the net effect of improving the resource base of the more moderate civil rights organizations by stimulating previously uninvolved parties to contribute an ever increasing amount of support." Within the radical flank effect, radicals "redefined and normalized" the demands of the more moderate organizations by making their demands seem more reasonable. Radicals also created crises which were often resolved to the moderate's advantage.

While the moral commitment and the goals of the mainstream civil rights organizations are admirable, these organizations had to rely on resources from white outsiders in order to wage large scale collective action. In this regard, the radical flank provided them with the most effective fundraising model, a choice to fund the rise of the militants or the moderates. After SNCC and CORE openly embraced armed self defense, their funding plummeted while over all movement income increased. This suggests that funding was not just shifting but was actually growing, with the moderate organizations reaping the windfall of donations.

In addition, Haines' data suggests that in second half of the decade, "elite contributors became vastly more important money sources for moderate black organizations." These elite contributors were corporations, foundations and the federal government, all of whom launched their own anti-poverty programs or "black capitalism" enterprises. Haines writes,

"The increasing importance of corporations, foundations, and the federal government, moreover, suggests that a portion of the nation's corporate elite recognized that it had a crucial interest in pacifying the black population, particularly in the volatile cities, and in accommodating certain manageable black demands. It also suggests that many previously uninvolved groups were 'enlightened' by the glow of burning cities, after years of indifference to nonviolent cajoling."

In this regard, the federal government, foundations and the corporate elite co-opt the potentially unemployed, disaffected and potentially dangerous activists by employing or funding them, and encouraging "pragmatism." By doing so, they control the course of social change by offering token benefits to head off disruptive behavior, while delaying systemic change and deflecting anger away from the elite. By controlling the funding to these outlets, they thereby control the form, content and direction they take. In this sense the potential trouble makers are lured into the system and subsequently "cooled out" and thus more radical and structural change is delayed.

While various anti-poverty programs undoubtedly helped some communities, Zinn asserts "there was a small amount of change and a lot of publicity. There were more black faces in the newspapers, creating an impression of change-and siphoning off a small but significant number of black leaders" into the system. None of this, however, stopped "the destruction of the black lower class—the deterioration of the ghetto, the rising crime, drug addiction, and violence.

King himself began to realize the effects of stepping out of character—at least the one he had been written into. By 1965, King began to criticize the Vietnam War as an imperialist venture: "We are criminals in that war...we have committed more war crimes than any other nation in the world...and I'm going to continue to say it." As a result, King enraged the Johnson administration, and stoked fierce criticism from the media and other civil rights organizations. After King called America "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," President Johnson called King, "that goddamned nigger preacher." The FBI went drastically further by declaring, "We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation...it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before congressional committees." In order to effectively attack King, Black Nationalists, and other dissidents, the FBI encouraged coordination with local police departments and "established media contacts" and other "sources available to the seat of government" to "disrupt, neutralize...ridicule and discredit" dissidents.

King was subsequently bombarded with criticism in both the black and white press. The Washington Post claimed he had done a "grave injury" to the civil rights movement, adding that he had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people." Life magazine ran the headline, "Dr. King's disservice to his cause," while Newsweek attacked his "demagoguery" and "reckless distortion of fact." A black writer for Reader's Digest wrote that King had "alienated many of the Negro's friends and armed the Negro's foes, in both parties, by creating the impression that the Negro is disloyal." Within the context of the Vietnam War, blacks found themselves in the peculiar situation of having to express patriotism for a country that still treated them as second class citizens, or face being further ostracizing as un-American.

King was also widening his criticism of black poverty into a more inclusive and class based critique of capitalism's economic exploitation of poor people of all colors. In response to his widening critique of America, the SCLC issued a statement "disassociating the organization from its leader's comments." In 1967, for the first time in a decade, King was left off of the Gallop Poll of the ten most admired Americans. The FBI took notice of Kings' comments and labeled him "the most dangerous Negro in America" while North Carolina's Jessie Helms labeled him "an action-oriented Marxist." As King's rhetoric became increasingly threatening to the status quo, he was subsequently demonized as a dangerous agitator by the media, the government and other civil rights organizations. Dyson writes, "King paid dearly for his inevitable betrayal of Southern white interests, capitalist ideology, and black bourgeois beliefs.

Throughout 1967 and 1968, King's rhetoric became increasingly threatening to the status quo, although he remained dedicated to nonviolent struggle. In 1967, King declared that, the "fact is there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans...to genuine equality for Negroes." He later added, "I am sorry to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racists, either consciously or unconsciously." King also dared to attack the efficacy of federal legislation and called for "militant, massive nonviolence."

In 1968, King called for a Poor People's March on Washington, DC, demanding economic justice for all poor people. This time it was not going to be under the paternalistic guise of the federal government. King sought to build a coalition of Puerto Ricans, Mexican American's, Native Americans, blacks and whites to bring the invisible poor to the seat of the nation's power. In Washington, he called for "aggressive nonviolence" and "nonviolent sabotage," with the goal of shutting down the city. He also called for concurrent nationwide strikes and boycotts to bolster the effect of the march.

In Washington, King had promised to "go for broke" with all of the SCLC's moral and financial resources. "They aren't going to run me out of Washington" this time, King said. He later commented that, "In a sense, you could say we are engaged in a class struggle." Dyson asserts, "Clearly this is a new King, a King waging warfare against the elite in the nation's capitol on behalf of the beleaguered and forgotten poor." Before he could launch the campaign on Washington, King was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Again, riots exploded across America. In becoming a radical again, King, like other radicals, chartered new waters in the struggle for freedom and suffered the consequences that often befalls those with so-called "dangerous" ideas. At King's funeral, CORE's Floyd McKissick declared, "nonviolence is a dead philosophy and it was not black people that killed it."

From the evidence presented in the previous pages, it can be reasonably concluded that black civil rights in America were not achieved solely through nonviolent means. While the courage and integrity of many nonviolent activists cannot be called into question, the efficacy of their tactics can be. Only after the introduction of armed self defense, riots and militant rhetoric was the nonviolent civil rights movement able to affect change and achieve its main goals of desegregation and voting rights. In effect, the nonviolent myth exists today to hide the shame and embarrassment of our racial history, and to falsely persuade others that polite petition and peaceful marches will lead the powers-that-be to concede—when in fact, power is often conceded through force.

Time and again, white America and the federal government delayed black civil rights and effective structural change until the specter of black violence emerged, and then exploded. In retrospect, the civil rights movement is an indictment of shame against white America, not a redemption of it. The civil rights movement will forever stand as an embarrassing testimonial to the appalling complacency of the white America in regards to the amount of force, violence, and blood it took to gain blacks their basic rights.

It is clear that a symbiosis of tactics achieved black civil rights, not nonviolence alone. Time and again, armed self defense protected black communities, saved lives, and deterred Klan violence. In this sense, armed self defense not only allowed the movement to survive, but allowed it to thrive, especially in the Deep South.

The evidence also makes it clear that rioting, while dismissed as counterproductive, actually pressured the federal government to enact legislation and brought several segregationist cities to the negotiating table. Rioting also led to several federal programs being initiated to battle inner city blight and poverty. We can also see the positive flank effect that radicals had on the more moderate organizations access to negotiations, power and funding. Within this spectrum of tactics, nonviolence acted as the moral anchor of the movement and thus offered America a safe choice over the riots, radicals and gunslingers. Without the anchoring presence of the nonviolent movement, it is likely that the other tactics would have been swiftly crushed and condemned—even more so than they actually were. It the end, it took Gospel Singers, Gun Slingers, Riots and Radicals to achieve black civil rights.

The previous pages must also serve as a lesson in the efficacy of instituting a wide spectrum of tactics in struggles for justice. In the end, black civil rights were achieved by a symbiosis of nonviolent direct action, riots, armed self defense, economic boycotts, legislative change, force, and militant rhetoric. This book should also serve as a lesson to the modern moderate, who often does the state's work for them by condemning and alienating the more radical elements of various movements, while failing to see the how radicals change the psychology of perception, and force actual change.

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