A Short Review of Charles E. Cobb Jr's This Nonviolence Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

I initially looked at the reviews of the book at the Amazon website before I started reading Charles E. Cobb Jr's This Nonviolence Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, and it's pretty clear that the book is being embraced by some in the gun rights movement as a vindication of their political positions. The title also provocatively invites this interpretation, but this reading strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of the book. Rather than attempting to intervene in those particular debates, the text is primarily a critique of the dominant image of the civil rights movement, an image that presents the movement as a top down phenomenon, tied to a small group of spectacular images and charismatic men. Instead, Cobb brings the idea of armed self defense to look at how the civil rights movement could only be understood within the context of the larger Black freedom movement, and the self-organization of tenant farmers, former veterans and other groups and individuals who had no particular investment in the tactic of non-violence.  The movement was also deeply shaped by the cultural formations of the African-American communities that were mobilizing themselves to challenge the apartheid structures of the United States, the everyday use of guns only playing one aspect of that formation. 

Starting with a history of Black armed self defense from the beginning of U.S. history, Cobb shows that the forms of self-defense advocated by the Black Panthers and others were a far more traditional response by the Black freedom movement.  Within this context, the non-violence advocated by the mainstream of the civil rights movement was a novel approach to protest, and an approach frequently misunderstood by older activists and intellectuals, such as W.E.B. Du Bois.  At the same time, Cobb maps out how these older groups were able to cooperate and organize with the newer non-violent civil rights movement to form a powerful social movement that was embedded into the everyday life of their communities. Cobb argues that the civil rights movement could not have succeeded without these organizations, and at the same time, these organizations recognized the importance of the non-violent movements despite their unwillingness to embrace their commitment to non-violence.  Within this context, non-violence becomes a series of tactical and strategic approaches that could be combined with armed self-defense.  The same group of protesters who sat in at the restaurants and other institutions were often defended from vigilante violence by armed former soldiers while they slept. In addition, despite the immense power of these forms of social organization, Cobb does not present the end of these movements in a triumphant light, capturing the ambiguities and sense of loss with the end of the movement, despite it's immense effect on the social structures it attempted to overthrow. 

In a certain sense, you could think of the text as operating within the long tradition of the genre of history from below more than anything else. It's very readable, as well. I highly recommend this text.