This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
An interview with Charlie Cobb, a veteran activist of the Civil Rights Movement
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The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is lauded for its commitment to nonviolence.
You can picture protesters peacefully marching only to be confronted by police batons, fire hoses, and dogs. Even in the midst of such violence, these disciplined resisters refused to retaliate.
But the historical record shows that Black people were divided about the philosophy of nonviolence. Even as they acknowledged a place for nonviolence, many thought the best way to deter anti-Black racist violence was to have guns of your own and to be willing to fight back if provoked.
Charlie Cobb is a journalist and professor who is also a veteran activist of the Civil Rights movement. He was active with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and served as a young man in a place many other activists feared to go, the Mississippi Delta.
He was with Fannie Lou Hamer the first time she tried to register to vote at the courthouse in Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1962. In other words, he was there during some of the most dangerous and precarious moments of the Civil Rights movement.
He embraced the right of Black people to engage in armed self-defense in the face of white supremacist violence and terrorism.
Years later, he wrote a book called This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. In it he describes “the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities.”
Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.
Cobb also tells the story of how he chose his provocative book title.
A Black farmer, Hartman Turnbow, met Martin Luther King, Jr. in Mississippi and said, “This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get you killed.”
I had the singular privilege of interviewing Charlie Cobb for the Footnotes podcast. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the founding of SNCC, the conditions of Jim Crow Mississippi, and the role of guns and armed self-defense in the movement.
You’ll love the way Cobb tells his stories with sharp detail, liveliness, and humor. Conversations like this are why Footnotes exists. Listen below and be sure to subscribe to the podcast!
Sometimes it seems as if the life I lived back in the 1960s is repeating itself. There was the build-up of urgency to see change in our nation, the push towards opening up liberty for all people, the enormous pressure to make something happen, the release of government action, policies, and laws with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--and then the angry resistance and fury that attempted for the next 40 years to tear every accomplishment down to revert to America's "normal" place of naked white supremacy.
The cycle happened again in 2008 after Obama's election, followed a decade later by a sharp uptick after George Floyd's murder in public. There was pressure and hope and demands for change--and some changes were implemented.
But resistance was furious and near-immediate, and the gains have been pushed back by angry people who demand to put things back to "normal."
I'm not one for violence because I'm committed to following the ways of Jesus as we know them from the New Testament texts of his life.
And yet I can understand how violence can be a response to the cruelty and destruction attempting to tear down all that is done when we put the ways of Jesus first.
It's complex. I don't know the right answers.
But I'm grateful for the conversations as people sharing their own lives and experiences help me find a place of peace.