# This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Charles E. Cobb Jr.]] - Full Title:: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed - Category: #books ## Highlights > Writing in 1957 about the Montgomery bus boycott, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed great skepticism about nonviolence: “No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back . . . but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=195)) > Six years later Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, showed greater hostility and less restraint than Du Bois: he denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a modern Uncle Tom subsidized by whites “to teach the Negroes to be defenseless. ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=197)) > Acts of nonviolent resistance contributed mightily to ending the mental paralysis that had long kept many black people trapped in fear and subservient to white supremacy, reluctant to even try to take control over their own lives despite the fact that slavery had ended roughly a century earlier. The principled, militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=201)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “[It] gave our generation—particularly in the South—the means by which to confront an entrenched and violent racism. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=209)) - Note: Stokley Carmichael on non-violence > “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” recalled activist John R. “Hunter Bear” Salter in 1994. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=236)) > With tragic foresight, Turnbow bluntly warned Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, “This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=255)) - Note: Hartman turnbow > There is no Spartacus in the romanticization of U.S. history. ([Location 323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=323)) > Slaveholders have no rights more than any other thief or pirate. They have forfeited even the right to live, and if the slave should put every one of them to the sword tomorrow, who dare pronounce the penalty disproportionate to the crime? —Frederick Douglass, February 9, 1849 ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=561)) > During a 1961 symposium—135 years after Jefferson’s death in 1826—author James Baldwin could still pronounce, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=693)) > “I have nothing more to offer than what General [George] Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause. ([Location 723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=723)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Gabriel prossor revolt richmond, va. Unnamed defendent. > “[My] child will be a black child born in Mississippi, and thus whether I am in jail or not, he will be born in prison. . . . If I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free,” she told the judge. ([Location 730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=730)) - Note: Preg diane nash 1962 training nonviolent resistance > A black man, Crispus Attucks, was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=735)) > Historian Herbert Aptheker has estimated that between 1619 and 1865 more than 250 rebellions by slaves and indentured servants occurred in the United States. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=752)) > “Father” Moses Dickson, a Prince Hall Mason ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=787)) > Dickson’s Manual of the Knights of Tabor and Daughters of the Tabernacle, ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=796)) > Years later, W. E. B. Du Bois dryly noted, “The slave pleaded; he was humble . . . and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold he was a man! ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=812)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=816)) > “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, quoting his erstwhile owner, who had quarreled with his wife because she was teaching Douglass to read and write. ([Location 827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=827)) > Unsurprisingly, the South resisted the amendment, and the only state of the old Confederacy to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment was Tennessee. ([Location 900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=900)) > Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, the Red Shirts, the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Pale Face Brotherhood, ([Location 902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=902)) > Confederate chief justice of Texas, Oran Roberts, who in 1868 warned of a pending race war: “Nothing short of the disenfranchisement of the negro race can stop it. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=926)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Years later, reflecting on this reign of terror from the ruins of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wrote that gaining genuine freedom in the South would require “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box. ([Location 927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=927)) > antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote in 1892, “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=929)) > Republican Powell Clayton, a Union general from Pennsylvania who had settled in Arkansas after the Civil War, was elected governor in November. He declared martial law in ten counties he viewed as being in a state of insurrection. “The bullets of the assassin, threats, and every species of intimidation were made use of to prevent the execution of the law, and to rob citizens of the rights and privileges of citizenship,” he said in a November 24 address to the state’s General Assembly. “A reign of terror was being inaugurated in our State which threatened to obliterate all the old landmarks of justice and freedom, and to bear us onward to anarchy and destruction.” Clayton raised a militia of Union sympathizers and former slaves and began an active ([Location 966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=966)) > “Practically, so-called Reconstruction in Louisiana was a continuation of the Civil War,” Du Bois would later observe. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1059)) > Such violence was not random; rather, it was deliberate and political, “an essential component in the counterrevolution that rolled back the tide of Radical Reconstruction and restored command of Southern political institutions to white supremacy.” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote with pain in 1935, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. ([Location 1062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1062)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches. . . . It disenfranchises its own citizens. . . . It encourages ignorance. . . . It steals from us. . . . It insults us. . . . We return. We return from fighting. . . . We return fighting. . . . Make way for democracy! —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919 ([Location 1075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1075)) > Julius Blair, never known for bellicosity, declared, “We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1122)) > Denouncing black troops from the Senate floor in 1945, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland declared, “There will be no social equality; there will be no such un-American measures when the [black] soldier returns. ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1210)) > During the same riots, W. E. B. Du Bois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, bought a double-barreled shotgun and sat on his front porch, determined to protect his wife and daughter. “If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived,” he wrote later, “I would without hesitation have spread their guts over the grass. ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1351)) > Red Summer of 1919, ([Location 1478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1478)) > Du Bois. “There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went—glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy, glad to have a new, clear vision of the real inner spirit of American prejudice. The day of camouflage is past. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1487)) > “If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property,” Harrison wrote in 1917. “This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre. ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1497)) > An editorial in the Messenger magazine noted these dangers and spoke for many when it declared, “Negroes can stop lynching in the South with shot and shell and fire. . . . A mob of a thousand men knows it can beat down fifty Negroes, but when those fifty Negroes rain fire and shot and shell over the thousand, the whole group of cowards will be put to flight. ([Location 1504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1504)) > “The function of the Negro soldier, who is mentally free, is to act as an imperishable leaven on the mass of those who are still in mental bondage. ([Location 1513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1513)) - Note: William colson in the messenger magazine > It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward a foreign enemy, and on the other hand a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home. —Judge William H. Hastie to U.S. War Department, 1941 ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1589)) > “Medgar and I had always wanted to vote,” wrote Charles Evers in his autobiography. “As soldiers we’d worked like dogs, risked our lives fighting for freedom, democracy, and all the principles this country was founded on. But we couldn’t vote. The law said we could, but the whites of Mississippi made sure we couldn ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1600)) > Moses, “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1683)) - Note: Bob moses > On July 6, 1944, Army Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson—who would become a baseball legend when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers following the war—refused to move to the back of an army bus at a training camp at Fort Hood, Texas, when the white driver ordered him to. Although buses on military bases had officially been ordered to desegregate, Robinson was arrested by the military police and court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted, transferred to another military base, and honorably discharged four months later. ([Location 1744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1744)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Generally black veterans took greater political risks than nonveterans; their military experience gave them a confidence most nonveterans lacked, but pinning down exactly what caused them to emerge as Freedom Movement leaders is difficult. “The only thing you can say is that probabilistically, on average, these guys [veterans] are more likely than guys who never served to be [leaders],” thinks Christopher Parker, who has studied their attitudes and experiences. “After all, they had survived serving in a racist military in which they were often forced to wage two wars: one in the battlefield, the other on base. ([Location 1760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1760)) > looking at a white woman in the “wrong” way—what whites sometimes called “reckless eyeballing ([Location 1773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1773)) > Decatur, Charles Evers wrote of his father, “He didn’t smell like fear, he smelled like danger. White folks can be pretty dumb, but most of them leave danger alone. They couldn’t make daddy crawl, so they called him a ‘crazy nigger’ and let it go. ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1829)) > Medgar Evers was ambushed and killed in the driveway of his Jackson home in 1963. In 1955, voting-rights activist Lamar Smith, like Evers a World War II veteran, was shot to death on the lawn of the county courthouse in Brookhaven, and Reverend George W. Lee, an NAACP leader, suffered a similar fate in Belzoni: gunfire from a carload of whites blew away the left side of his face. In 1961, NAACP leader Herbert Lee was gunned down by a state legislator, Eugene Hurst, in broad daylight at the cotton gin in Liberty, the county seat of Amite County; Louis Allen, a black witness willing to testify about the shooting, was shot and killed in front of his house after more than a year of harassment that included beatings and jailing. Five years later, on January 11, 1966, the NAACP leader and successful farmer Vernon Dahmer was killed when his farmhouse outside Hattiesburg was firebombed. Thirteen months after that, on February 27, 1967, Natchez NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson, a Korean War veteran, was killed when a bomb planted in his truck exploded. This hardly finishes the roll call of the many murdered across the South in the 1950s and ’60s because of their civil rights activities. ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1838)) > 1957 Civil Rights Act, which established a Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice that, for all its shortcomings, helped create what Bob Moses has called “a little piece of legal crawlspace” in which blacks’ legal defenders could ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1849)) > Richard Wright’s Native Son, ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1892)) > The Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an escalating struggle for advantage. And the United States, which during the war had proclaimed it was fighting for the preservation of freedom and democracy, now found those claims being thrown back in its face from both inside and outside its borders. The plight of black people was being held up as concrete proof that America was not an all-inclusive democracy. ([Location 1916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1916)) > Following World War II a political rhetoric emerged that muted explicitly white-supremacist calls and began instead to incorporate phrases like “states’ rights” and “protecting our American way of life” into the white-supremacist lexicon. ([Location 1950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1950)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > A singing group, the Confederates, became the Barbershop Harmony Society’s 1956 International Quartet Champion with the song “Save Your Confederate Money, Boys; the South Shall Rise Again. ([Location 1957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1957)) > According to the Army Research Laboratory, 61 percent of black soldiers believed their military training would help them find a better job than they had before the war. Only 39 percent of white GIs shared this optimism. ([Location 2017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2017)) - Note: Wwii > “That was one of the first incidents,” said Williams years later, “that really started us to understanding that we had to resist, and that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns. ([Location 2077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2077)) > The Monroe chapter of the NAACP would prove itself unique in another way, as well. After becoming NAACP branch president, Williams took the unusual step of establishing a National Rifle Association chapter—the Monroe Rifle Club, also called “the Black Guard”—whose ranks soon filled with black members. Williams also secured “better rifles” via mail order and secondhand purchases. ([Location 2102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2102)) > Williams’s militant self-defensive tactics quickly attracted the attention of the national civil rights establishment. Arguing for the necessity of organized self-defense in a September 1959 article in Liberation magazine, Williams praised Martin Luther King Jr. as “a great and successful leader of our race,” but he also insisted that black southerners often had to face “the necessity of confronting savage violence” with violence of their own. “I wish to make it clear that I do not advocate violence for its own sake, or for the sake of reprisals against whites,” he wrote. “Nor am I against the passive resistance advocated by Reverend Martin Luther King and others. My only difference with Dr. King is that I believe in flexibility in the freedom struggle. ([Location 2125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2125)) > Every what the Mississippi white man pose with, he got to be met with. I said, “Meet him with ever what he pose with. If he pose with a smile, meet him with a smile, and if he pose with a gun, meet him with a gun.” —Hartman Turnbow, Mississippi farmer ([Location 2159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2159)) > Now you can pray with them or pray for ’em, but if they kill you in the meantime you are not going to be an effective organizer. —Worth Long, SNCC field secretary ([Location 2162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2162)) > Yet risk was already a fact of life for many black people in the South, and although they could not eliminate it, southern black communities had learned how to minimize risk long before the existence of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and even the NAACP. ([Location 2217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2217)) > Indeed, Mississippi’s gun culture proved so powerful that in 1954, when state legislator Edwin White expressed alarm that too many blacks were buying firearms and introduced a bill requiring gun registration “[to protect] us from those likely to cause us trouble,” the bill never even made it out of committee. ([Location 2362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2362)) > The Citizens’ Council—a new tool for white supremacy—was born in Indianola, Mississippi, on July 11, 1954, called together by former para-trooper and plantation manager Robert “Tut” Patterson just two months after the Brown decision. The council began “pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary,” urging “concerned and patriotic citizens to stand together forever firm against communism and mongrelization. ([Location 2518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2518)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” These words spoken by Frederick Douglass more than 150 years ago aptly summarized the relationship of black people in America to the largely white nation that surrounded them. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. ([Location 2719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2719)) > These are young people armed with a dream. —Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, Nashville, Tennessee, 1960 ([Location 2831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2831)) > Wal, in this county, if you turn the other cheek . . . these here peckerwoods’ll hand you back half of what you sitting on. —R. L. Strickland to Stokely Carmichael, Lowndes County, Alabama, 1965 ([Location 2833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2833)) > “Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout black communities. Not a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. ([Location 2916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2916)) > prediction made by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth. It is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the masses away from the contamination and death of the Worst in their own and other races. ([Location 3093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=3093)) > We decided since we didn’t have protection from the law, by the law, we should organize a group to protect our peoples in the neighborhood. . . . And we took up the job of self-defense. . . . We never attacked anyone, but we would defend ourself against anybody at any time, anywhere, regardless of the price. —Charles Sims, president of Deacons for Defense and Justice, to Howell Raines, Bogalusa, Louisiana ([Location 3515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=3515)) > question Thomas Jefferson had asked in the country’s earliest years: “Are our [Negroes] to be presented with freedom and a dagger? ([Location 4282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=4282)) > A. C. Searles, editor of the Southwest Georgian, a weekly black newspaper, put it in 1970: “What did we win? We won our self-respect. It changed my attitudes. This movement made me demand a semblance of first-class citizenship. ([Location 4607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=4607)) # This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Charles E. Cobb Jr.]] - Full Title:: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed - Category: #books ## Highlights > Writing in 1957 about the Montgomery bus boycott, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed great skepticism about nonviolence: “No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back . . . but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=195)) > Six years later Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, showed greater hostility and less restraint than Du Bois: he denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a modern Uncle Tom subsidized by whites “to teach the Negroes to be defenseless. ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=197)) > Acts of nonviolent resistance contributed mightily to ending the mental paralysis that had long kept many black people trapped in fear and subservient to white supremacy, reluctant to even try to take control over their own lives despite the fact that slavery had ended roughly a century earlier. The principled, militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=201)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “[It] gave our generation—particularly in the South—the means by which to confront an entrenched and violent racism. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=209)) - Note: Stokley Carmichael on non-violence > “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” recalled activist John R. “Hunter Bear” Salter in 1994. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=236)) > With tragic foresight, Turnbow bluntly warned Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, “This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=255)) - Note: Hartman turnbow > There is no Spartacus in the romanticization of U.S. history. ([Location 323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=323)) > Slaveholders have no rights more than any other thief or pirate. They have forfeited even the right to live, and if the slave should put every one of them to the sword tomorrow, who dare pronounce the penalty disproportionate to the crime? —Frederick Douglass, February 9, 1849 ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=561)) > During a 1961 symposium—135 years after Jefferson’s death in 1826—author James Baldwin could still pronounce, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=693)) > “I have nothing more to offer than what General [George] Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause. ([Location 723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=723)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Gabriel prossor revolt richmond, va. Unnamed defendent. > “[My] child will be a black child born in Mississippi, and thus whether I am in jail or not, he will be born in prison. . . . If I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free,” she told the judge. ([Location 730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=730)) - Note: Preg diane nash 1962 training nonviolent resistance > A black man, Crispus Attucks, was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=735)) > Historian Herbert Aptheker has estimated that between 1619 and 1865 more than 250 rebellions by slaves and indentured servants occurred in the United States. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=752)) > “Father” Moses Dickson, a Prince Hall Mason ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=787)) > Dickson’s Manual of the Knights of Tabor and Daughters of the Tabernacle, ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=796)) > Years later, W. E. B. Du Bois dryly noted, “The slave pleaded; he was humble . . . and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold he was a man! ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=812)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=816)) > “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, quoting his erstwhile owner, who had quarreled with his wife because she was teaching Douglass to read and write. ([Location 827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=827)) > Unsurprisingly, the South resisted the amendment, and the only state of the old Confederacy to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment was Tennessee. ([Location 900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=900)) > Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, the Red Shirts, the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Pale Face Brotherhood, ([Location 902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=902)) > Confederate chief justice of Texas, Oran Roberts, who in 1868 warned of a pending race war: “Nothing short of the disenfranchisement of the negro race can stop it. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=926)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Years later, reflecting on this reign of terror from the ruins of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wrote that gaining genuine freedom in the South would require “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box. ([Location 927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=927)) > antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote in 1892, “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=929)) > Republican Powell Clayton, a Union general from Pennsylvania who had settled in Arkansas after the Civil War, was elected governor in November. He declared martial law in ten counties he viewed as being in a state of insurrection. “The bullets of the assassin, threats, and every species of intimidation were made use of to prevent the execution of the law, and to rob citizens of the rights and privileges of citizenship,” he said in a November 24 address to the state’s General Assembly. “A reign of terror was being inaugurated in our State which threatened to obliterate all the old landmarks of justice and freedom, and to bear us onward to anarchy and destruction.” Clayton raised a militia of Union sympathizers and former slaves and began an active ([Location 966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=966)) > “Practically, so-called Reconstruction in Louisiana was a continuation of the Civil War,” Du Bois would later observe. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1059)) > Such violence was not random; rather, it was deliberate and political, “an essential component in the counterrevolution that rolled back the tide of Radical Reconstruction and restored command of Southern political institutions to white supremacy.” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote with pain in 1935, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. ([Location 1062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1062)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches. . . . It disenfranchises its own citizens. . . . It encourages ignorance. . . . It steals from us. . . . It insults us. . . . We return. We return from fighting. . . . We return fighting. . . . Make way for democracy! —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919 ([Location 1075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1075)) > Julius Blair, never known for bellicosity, declared, “We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1122)) > Denouncing black troops from the Senate floor in 1945, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland declared, “There will be no social equality; there will be no such un-American measures when the [black] soldier returns. ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1210)) > During the same riots, W. E. B. Du Bois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, bought a double-barreled shotgun and sat on his front porch, determined to protect his wife and daughter. “If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived,” he wrote later, “I would without hesitation have spread their guts over the grass. ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1351)) > Red Summer of 1919, ([Location 1478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1478)) > Du Bois. “There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went—glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy, glad to have a new, clear vision of the real inner spirit of American prejudice. The day of camouflage is past. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1487)) > “If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property,” Harrison wrote in 1917. “This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre. ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1497)) > An editorial in the Messenger magazine noted these dangers and spoke for many when it declared, “Negroes can stop lynching in the South with shot and shell and fire. . . . A mob of a thousand men knows it can beat down fifty Negroes, but when those fifty Negroes rain fire and shot and shell over the thousand, the whole group of cowards will be put to flight. ([Location 1504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1504)) > “The function of the Negro soldier, who is mentally free, is to act as an imperishable leaven on the mass of those who are still in mental bondage. ([Location 1513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1513)) - Note: William colson in the messenger magazine > It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward a foreign enemy, and on the other hand a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home. —Judge William H. Hastie to U.S. War Department, 1941 ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1589)) > “Medgar and I had always wanted to vote,” wrote Charles Evers in his autobiography. “As soldiers we’d worked like dogs, risked our lives fighting for freedom, democracy, and all the principles this country was founded on. But we couldn’t vote. The law said we could, but the whites of Mississippi made sure we couldn ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1600)) > Moses, “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1683)) - Note: Bob moses > On July 6, 1944, Army Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson—who would become a baseball legend when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers following the war—refused to move to the back of an army bus at a training camp at Fort Hood, Texas, when the white driver ordered him to. Although buses on military bases had officially been ordered to desegregate, Robinson was arrested by the military police and court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted, transferred to another military base, and honorably discharged four months later. ([Location 1744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1744)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Generally black veterans took greater political risks than nonveterans; their military experience gave them a confidence most nonveterans lacked, but pinning down exactly what caused them to emerge as Freedom Movement leaders is difficult. “The only thing you can say is that probabilistically, on average, these guys [veterans] are more likely than guys who never served to be [leaders],” thinks Christopher Parker, who has studied their attitudes and experiences. “After all, they had survived serving in a racist military in which they were often forced to wage two wars: one in the battlefield, the other on base. ([Location 1760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1760)) > looking at a white woman in the “wrong” way—what whites sometimes called “reckless eyeballing ([Location 1773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1773)) > Decatur, Charles Evers wrote of his father, “He didn’t smell like fear, he smelled like danger. White folks can be pretty dumb, but most of them leave danger alone. They couldn’t make daddy crawl, so they called him a ‘crazy nigger’ and let it go. ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1829)) > Medgar Evers was ambushed and killed in the driveway of his Jackson home in 1963. In 1955, voting-rights activist Lamar Smith, like Evers a World War II veteran, was shot to death on the lawn of the county courthouse in Brookhaven, and Reverend George W. Lee, an NAACP leader, suffered a similar fate in Belzoni: gunfire from a carload of whites blew away the left side of his face. In 1961, NAACP leader Herbert Lee was gunned down by a state legislator, Eugene Hurst, in broad daylight at the cotton gin in Liberty, the county seat of Amite County; Louis Allen, a black witness willing to testify about the shooting, was shot and killed in front of his house after more than a year of harassment that included beatings and jailing. Five years later, on January 11, 1966, the NAACP leader and successful farmer Vernon Dahmer was killed when his farmhouse outside Hattiesburg was firebombed. Thirteen months after that, on February 27, 1967, Natchez NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson, a Korean War veteran, was killed when a bomb planted in his truck exploded. This hardly finishes the roll call of the many murdered across the South in the 1950s and ’60s because of their civil rights activities. ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1838)) > 1957 Civil Rights Act, which established a Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice that, for all its shortcomings, helped create what Bob Moses has called “a little piece of legal crawlspace” in which blacks’ legal defenders could ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1849)) > Richard Wright’s Native Son, ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1892)) > The Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an escalating struggle for advantage. And the United States, which during the war had proclaimed it was fighting for the preservation of freedom and democracy, now found those claims being thrown back in its face from both inside and outside its borders. The plight of black people was being held up as concrete proof that America was not an all-inclusive democracy. ([Location 1916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1916)) > Following World War II a political rhetoric emerged that muted explicitly white-supremacist calls and began instead to incorporate phrases like “states’ rights” and “protecting our American way of life” into the white-supremacist lexicon. ([Location 1950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1950)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > A singing group, the Confederates, became the Barbershop Harmony Society’s 1956 International Quartet Champion with the song “Save Your Confederate Money, Boys; the South Shall Rise Again. ([Location 1957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=1957)) > According to the Army Research Laboratory, 61 percent of black soldiers believed their military training would help them find a better job than they had before the war. Only 39 percent of white GIs shared this optimism. ([Location 2017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2017)) - Note: Wwii > “That was one of the first incidents,” said Williams years later, “that really started us to understanding that we had to resist, and that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns. ([Location 2077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2077)) > The Monroe chapter of the NAACP would prove itself unique in another way, as well. After becoming NAACP branch president, Williams took the unusual step of establishing a National Rifle Association chapter—the Monroe Rifle Club, also called “the Black Guard”—whose ranks soon filled with black members. Williams also secured “better rifles” via mail order and secondhand purchases. ([Location 2102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2102)) > Williams’s militant self-defensive tactics quickly attracted the attention of the national civil rights establishment. Arguing for the necessity of organized self-defense in a September 1959 article in Liberation magazine, Williams praised Martin Luther King Jr. as “a great and successful leader of our race,” but he also insisted that black southerners often had to face “the necessity of confronting savage violence” with violence of their own. “I wish to make it clear that I do not advocate violence for its own sake, or for the sake of reprisals against whites,” he wrote. “Nor am I against the passive resistance advocated by Reverend Martin Luther King and others. My only difference with Dr. King is that I believe in flexibility in the freedom struggle. ([Location 2125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2125)) > Every what the Mississippi white man pose with, he got to be met with. I said, “Meet him with ever what he pose with. If he pose with a smile, meet him with a smile, and if he pose with a gun, meet him with a gun.” —Hartman Turnbow, Mississippi farmer ([Location 2159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2159)) > Now you can pray with them or pray for ’em, but if they kill you in the meantime you are not going to be an effective organizer. —Worth Long, SNCC field secretary ([Location 2162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2162)) > Yet risk was already a fact of life for many black people in the South, and although they could not eliminate it, southern black communities had learned how to minimize risk long before the existence of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and even the NAACP. ([Location 2217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2217)) > Indeed, Mississippi’s gun culture proved so powerful that in 1954, when state legislator Edwin White expressed alarm that too many blacks were buying firearms and introduced a bill requiring gun registration “[to protect] us from those likely to cause us trouble,” the bill never even made it out of committee. ([Location 2362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2362)) > The Citizens’ Council—a new tool for white supremacy—was born in Indianola, Mississippi, on July 11, 1954, called together by former para-trooper and plantation manager Robert “Tut” Patterson just two months after the Brown decision. The council began “pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary,” urging “concerned and patriotic citizens to stand together forever firm against communism and mongrelization. ([Location 2518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2518)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” These words spoken by Frederick Douglass more than 150 years ago aptly summarized the relationship of black people in America to the largely white nation that surrounded them. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. ([Location 2719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2719)) > These are young people armed with a dream. —Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, Nashville, Tennessee, 1960 ([Location 2831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2831)) > Wal, in this county, if you turn the other cheek . . . these here peckerwoods’ll hand you back half of what you sitting on. —R. L. Strickland to Stokely Carmichael, Lowndes County, Alabama, 1965 ([Location 2833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2833)) > “Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout black communities. Not a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. ([Location 2916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=2916)) > prediction made by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth. It is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the masses away from the contamination and death of the Worst in their own and other races. ([Location 3093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=3093)) > We decided since we didn’t have protection from the law, by the law, we should organize a group to protect our peoples in the neighborhood. . . . And we took up the job of self-defense. . . . We never attacked anyone, but we would defend ourself against anybody at any time, anywhere, regardless of the price. —Charles Sims, president of Deacons for Defense and Justice, to Howell Raines, Bogalusa, Louisiana ([Location 3515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=3515)) > question Thomas Jefferson had asked in the country’s earliest years: “Are our [Negroes] to be presented with freedom and a dagger? ([Location 4282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=4282)) > A. C. Searles, editor of the Southwest Georgian, a weekly black newspaper, put it in 1970: “What did we win? We won our self-respect. It changed my attitudes. This movement made me demand a semblance of first-class citizenship. ([Location 4607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IHGVQNY&location=4607))