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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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Wendt builds his analysis primarily around three case studies. Two—the Deacons for Defense and Justice (DDJ) in Louisiana and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi—cover relatively familiar ground. Wendt does not offer much new information, but some of his interpretations have interesting historiographical implications. For example, he challenges Lance Hill's portrayal of the DDJ and refutes some of Akinyele Umoja's interpretations of armed resistance in the Mississippi movement. The third case study explores a relatively unknown struggle in Alabama, where the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC) launched a nonviolent direct action campaign in April 1964. Just three months later, the movement produced "a highly sophisticated defense group" (p. 43) led by World War II and Korean War veterans. The group guarded the homes of its leaders, protected protestors, including the few white allies of the movement, and served as an effective counter to Ku Klux Klan violence. |
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The book's last two chapters extend into the black power era. To assess the evolving meaning and use of self-defense, Wendt examines the ideologies of selected black power formations to conclude that the concept of self-defense "underwent a process of radical reinterpretation" (p. 7) during the second half of the 1960s. Whereas self-defense groups had produced tangible and visible benefits in earlier southern struggles, he finds that armed resistance played a largely symbolic and ultimately self-defeating role in the Black Power Movement. |
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This is an interesting argument but is not fully developed and suffers from interpretive problems. For example, Wendt offers little evidence to support the claim that black power activists' advocacy of armed resistance was self-defeating. Similarly, his rendering of black power thinkers and groups—including somewhat flat and questionable assessments of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party—tends to collapse ideological and political variations between them. Likewise, one wishes for more engagement with the influence of Frantz Fanon or the significance of urban rebellions to further illuminate the context and contours of black power concepts of self-defense. In contrast to his nuanced approach to the civil rights movement, Wendt offers a limited conceptualization of the Black Power Movement. |
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These shortcomings aside, this book makes valuable contributions, and scholars of the civil rights era will find much to discuss in Wendt's analysis. Moreover, this will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses, as it is one of the few works that effectively historicizes nonviolence and self-defense as ideological and strategic components of the Civil Rights Movement.
Stephen M. Ward
University of Michigan
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