Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence

By Charles E. Cobb Jr.
The best way to understand this Mississippi movement episode is…as a story of organizers and the communities they were embedding themselves in during the Freedom Movement of the 1960s. Within this organizing experience, guns in the hands of supporters sometimes existed in tension with the nonviolence usually used to define movement philosophy and practice, but that more often existed in tandem with nonviolence. In other words, something more complex was at play.