This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

• Author: Kopel, David B.
• Position: Book review

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Charles E. Cobb Jr.

New York: Basic Books, 2014, 293 pp.

Charles Cobb's excellent book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible teaches two important lessons that will make some people uncomfortable. The first lesson is summarized in the subtitle: the exercise of Second Amendment rights was a sine qua non for the survival and success of the Civil Rights Movement in the South during the 1960s. The second uncomfortable lesson, for some people, is that community organizing is vital to democracy. This Nonviolent Stuff is not the first book about armed self-defense in the Civil Rights Movement, but it does make a vital and unique contribution.

Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Prometheus, 2014) surveyed the long history of self-defense by black people in America--from Frederick Douglass advising how to resist slave-catchers, to Otis McDonald winning his Supreme Court case in 2010. This survey includes a long chapter about the Civil Rights Movement, and it is the best introduction to the subject. As a law professor, Johnson pays careful attention to the national leaders of the civil rights organizations and their formally expressed views.

The other major, prior book on the subject is The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement by Lance Hill (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). This overlooked gem tells the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed community defense organization founded in southeastern Louisiana in 1965. Especially in the Louisiana panhandle and in southwestern

Mississippi, the Deacons were immensely successful at suppressing Klan violence and promoting the repeal of segregation. The Johnson and Cobb books both include careful analysis of the Deacons, but of course not in the detail provided by Hill.

What makes This Nonviolent Stuff so powerful is that it provides the perspective of the community organizers themselves and explains why they overcame their aversion to forceful self-defense. In contrast to conventional histories of the Civil Rights Movement, which concentrate on famous leaders, This Non violent Stuff is history from the ground up.

Cobb was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, working in the rural Deep South. In conformity with SNCC's name, Cobb began his organizing...