title: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
author: Charles E. Cobb
description: *Starred Review* Given the violent resistance to equality for African Americans during the civil rights struggle, many viewed the tactics of nonviolence as either docile or naive or both. Cobb argues that the effectiveness of nonviolence speaks for itself in shining harsh light on the moral outrage of racism and in transforming large swaths of the black population into activists, but he also examines the armed self-defense that undergirded it. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, reviews the long tradition of self-protection among African Americans, who knew they could not rely on local law enforcement for protection. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, after the fire bombing of his home, kept weapons in his house to protect his family. Cobb offers a collection of memories of freedom fighters and a broad historical perspective, from slave resistance to the Deacons of Defense and Justice, as evidence of the human impulse to self-protection that counterbalanced the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Understanding how the use of guns makes this history of the civil rights movement more compelling to readers, Cobb is, nonetheless, focused on the determination of ordinary citizens, women included, to win their rights, even if that meant packing a pistol in a pocket or purse. --Vanessa Bush
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  **More Advance Praise for _This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed_**
  
  
  “What most of us think we know about the central role of nonviolence in the
  long freedom struggle in the South is not so much wrong as blinkered. Or so
  Charles Cobb says in this passionate, intellectually disciplined reordering of
  the conventional narrative to include armed self-defense as a central
  component of the black movement’s success. Read it and be reminded that
  history is not a record etched in stone by journalists and academics, but a
  living stream, fed and redirected by the bottom-up witness of its
  participants.”—Hodding Carter III, Professor of Public Policy, University of
  North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  
  
  “Popular culture washes the complexity out of so many things. Charles Cobb
  works mightily against that torrent. _This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed_
  shows that the simplistic popular understanding of the black Freedom Movement
  obscures a far richer sto