| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. By Christopher B. Strain. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. x, 254 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2686-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2687-9.)

Christopher B. Strain's Pure Fire is an ambitious analysis of the development of self-defense in the black revolt. It joins Lance Hill's important The Deacons for Defense (2004). Beginning with an examination of the ideas of individual self-protection rooted in American law, Pure Fire is chiefly an intellectual history, surveying the vast subject of African American thinking about self-defense and violence. The howling contradiction to natural rights doctrine was American slavery, which denied the right of self-defense against the planter's slave-whipping barbarism. Above all, this book grounds its arguments in the legal and ethical justifications for self-preservation, and its major persuasive proposition is that personal self-defense was an integral component of emancipation and civil rights for African Americans.

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