Negroes with Guns

Negroes with Guns PDF Author: Robert Franklin Williams
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814327142
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
A southern black community's struggle to defend itself against racist groups.

Negroes with Guns

Negroes with Guns PDF Author: Robert Franklin Williams
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814327142
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
A southern black community's struggle to defend itself against racist groups.

Negroes and the Gun

Negroes and the Gun PDF Author: Nicholas Johnson
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616148403
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book

Book Description
Chronicling the underappreciated black tradition of bearing arms for self-defense, this book presents an array of examples reaching back to the pre—Civil War era that demonstrate a willingness of African American men and women to use firearms when necessary to defend their families and communities. From Frederick Douglass’s advice to keep “a good revolver” handy as defense against slave catchers to the armed self-protection of Monroe, North Carolina, blacks against the KKK chronicled in Robert Williams’s Negroes with Guns, it is clear that owning firearms was commonplace in the black community. Nicholas Johnson points out that this story has been submerged because it is hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence during the civil rights era. His book, however, resolves that tension by showing how the black tradition of arms maintained and demanded a critical distinction between private self-defense and political violence. Johnson also addresses the unavoidable issue of young black men with guns and the toll that gun violence takes on many in the inner city. He shows how complicated this issue is by highlighting the surprising diversity of views on gun ownership in the black community. In fact, recent Supreme Court affirmations of the right to bear arms resulted from cases led by black plaintiffs. Surprising and informative, this well-researched book strips away many stock assumptions of conventional wisdom on the issue of guns and the black freedom struggle.

We Will Shoot Back

We Will Shoot Back PDF Author: Akinyele Omowale Umoja
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814725244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book

Book Description
"Ranging from Reconstruction to the Black Power period, this thoroughly and creatively researched book effectively challenges long-held beliefs about the Black Freedom Struggle. It should make it abundantly clear that the violence/nonviolence dichotomy is too simple to capture the thinking of Black Southerners about the forms of effective resistance."—Charles M. Payne, University of Chicago The notion that the civil rights movement in the southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme of civil rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement. In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians. This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. Akinyele Omowale Umoja is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and other social movements.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed PDF Author: Charles E. Cobb
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465080952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self-defense,” King assured him. One of King's advisors remembered the reverend's home as “an arsenal.” Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb, Jr. reveals how nonviolent activists and their allies kept the civil rights movement alive by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these men and women were crucial to the movement's success, as were the weapons they carried. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the Southern Freedom Movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb offers a controversial examination of the vital role guns have played in securing American liberties.

Gun Guys

Gun Guys PDF Author: Dan Baum
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
ISBN: 0307595412
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book

Book Description
"A funny, raucous, eye-opening, wholly non-partisan trip in search of Americans who love their guns"--

Up Against the Wall

Up Against the Wall PDF Author: Curtis J. Austin
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610754441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book

Book Description
Curtis J. Austin’s Up Against the Wall chronicles how violence brought about the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, dominated its policies, and finally destroyed the party as one member after another—Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Alex Rackley—left the party, was killed, or was imprisoned. Austin shows how the party’s early emphasis in the 1960s on self-defense, though sorely needed in black communities at the time, left it open to mischaracterization, infiltration, and devastation by local, state, and federal police forces and government agencies. Austin carefully highlights the internal tension between advocates of a more radical position than the Panthers took, who insisted on military confrontation with the state, and those such as Newton and David Hilliard, who believed in community organizing and alliance building as first priorities. Austin interviewed a number of party members who had heretofore remained silent. With the help of these stories, Austin is able to put the violent history of the party in perspective and show that the “survival” programs, such as the Free Breakfast for Children program and Free Health Clinics, helped the black communities they served to recognize their own bases of power and ability to save themselves.

Dying of Whiteness

Dying of Whiteness PDF Author: Jonathan M. Metzl
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541644964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book

Book Description
A physician's "provocative" (Boston Globe) and "timely" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times Book Review) account of how right-wing backlash policies have deadly consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help. In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

Guns and Violence

Guns and Violence PDF Author: Joyce Lee Malcolm
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674040472
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book

Book Description
Behind the passionate debate over gun control and armed crime lurk assumptions about the link between guns and violence. Indeed, the belief that more guns in private hands means higher rates of armed crime underlies most modern gun control legislation. But are these assumptions valid? Investigating the complex and controversial issue of the real relationship between guns and violence, Joyce Lee Malcolm presents an incisive, thoroughly researched historical study of England, whose strict gun laws and low rates of violent crime are often cited as proof that gun control works. To place the private ownership of guns in context, Malcolm offers a wide-ranging examination of English society from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, analyzing changing attitudes toward crime and punishment, the impact of war, economic shifts, and contrasting legal codes on violence. She looks at the level of armed crime in England before its modern restrictive gun legislation, the limitations that gun laws have imposed, and whether those measures have succeeded in reducing the rate of armed crime. Malcolm also offers a revealing comparison of the experience in England experience with that in the modern United States. Today Americans own some 200 million guns and have seen eight consecutive years of declining violence, while the English--prohibited from carrying weapons and limited in their right to self-defense have suffered a dramatic increase in rates of violent crime. This timely and thought-provoking book takes a crucial step in illuminating the actual relationship between guns and violence in modern society.

Black Crusader

Black Crusader PDF Author: Robert C Cohen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780988412224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book

Book Description
Black Crusader is the story of how a young man from a small North Carolina town who dreamed of becoming a poet was transformed into an archenemy of the US power structure. At school and in college, in the Army and Marines and in his home town in the 1950s, Robert Franklin Williams witnessed the scourge of segregation, exploitation, beatings and even murder. He decided to apply his combat training, intelligence, organizational skills and fearlessness to take a stand against race hatred, becoming the first black liberation militant to advocate armed self-defense. But in 1961 an explosion of government-supported racist violence - and a trumped-up kidnapping charge - forced him to flee and seek refuge among America's Cold War adversaries, in Cuba, the People's Republic of China and later in newly independent Tanzania. This biography details the first 44 years of Williams' life, as told in his own words, the story of an enigmatic and charismatic leader who was pursued in vain for almost a decade by the FBI and CIA. His talent for leadership extended to book writing, newspaper editing and managing Radio Free Dixie from exile. Though his message was suppressed by the US media, he was a friend of revolutionary leaders, inspired a generation of civil rights activists, and was admired by millions around the world. The book concludes with the bizarre circumstances of Williams' return to the US in 1969, after which all state and federal charges were quietly dropped. Then mainstream publishers mysteriously withdrew the first two versions of this book, now republished in full in this new illustrated edition.

Radio Free Dixie

Radio Free Dixie PDF Author: Timothy B. Tyson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807899011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Get Book

Book Description
This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.