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This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
Charles E. Cobb
How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Basic Books
June 2014
On Sale: June 3, 2014
322 pages ISBN: 0465033105 EAN: 9780465033102 Kindle: B00IHGVQNY Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the
Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy
almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King
assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a
purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s
Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”
Like King,
many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced
their constitutional right to selfprotection—yet this
crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has
been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll
Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr.
describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in
the survival and liberation of black communities in America
during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the
Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their
loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing—and,
when necessary, using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb
shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical
support from black gun owners in the regions where they
worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning
their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous
men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to
the movement’s success.
Giving voice to the World War
II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and
self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives
and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You
Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between
the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second
Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil
rights movement and interviews with fellow participants,
Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial
place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.
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