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Reviews
| The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. By Simon Wendt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xi + 279 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth).
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Within the recent historiography of the postwar black freedom struggle, an important question concerns how we should understand the evolution of nonviolence and armed self-defense and their relative roles. Simon Wendt joins Lance Hill (Deacons for Defense [Chapel Hill, NC, 2004]) and Christopher Strain (Pure Fire [Athens, GA, 2005]) in tackling this major historical question. Wendt also challenges assumptions that nonviolence was the movement's singular strategy and ideological linchpin. He departs from the earlier works, however, by emphasizing the complementary character of nonviolence and self-defense. His central argument is that nonviolent direct action and armed resistance worked side by side in the southern civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. |
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Wendt begins by distinguishing between tactical and philosophical nonviolence. This difference is not novel in civil rights historiography, but Wendt clarifies how the two strains of nonviolence evolved from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. He finds that even as the philosophy of nonviolence—largely associated with Martin Luther King Jr.—became "the movement's official credo" (p. 33) during the late 1950s and early 1960s, black southern communities pragmatically saw no contradiction in employing self-defense to augment nonviolent direct action. In many local struggles, black citizens formed defense organizations so that "armed protection became a largely invisible means of support for the nonviolent movement" (p. 39). |
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