"The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the student sit-in movement that began in 1960, and the Freedom Rides of 1961, all persuasively demonstrated that nonviolent resistance was an effective way of fighting for civil rights ... Writing in 1957 about the Montgomery bus boycott, W. E. B. DuBois expressed great skepticism about nonviolence: 'No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back... but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less.' Six years later Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, showed greater hostility and less restraint than DuBois: he renounced Martin Luther King, Jr. as a modern Uncle Tom subsidized by whites 'to teach the Negroes to be defenseless.'
"Their reactions suggest that neither Dr. DuBois nor Malcolm X could grasp the fact that nonviolence--although risky, as any challenge to oppression always is--was not passive, that it provided an effective means of directly challenging white supremacy with more than just rhetoric . Acts of nonviolent resistance contributed mightily to ending the mental paralysis that had long kept many black people trapped in fear and subservient to white supremacy, reluctant to even try to take control over their own lives despite the fact that slavery had ended roughly a century earlier. The principled militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people."
P.4, "Introduction ," THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF'LL GET YOU KILLED: HOW GUNS MADE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT POSSIBLE, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr., (2014)
Friday, March 17, 2017
THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF
"The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the student sit-in movement that began in 1960, and the Freedom Rides of 1961, all persuasively demonstrated that nonviolent resistance was an effective way of fighting for civil rights ... Writing in 1957 about the Montgomery bus boycott, W. E. B. DuBois expressed great skepticism about nonviolence: 'No normal human being of trained intelligence is going to fight the man who will not fight back... but suppose they are wild beasts or wild men? To yield to the rush of the tiger is death, nothing less.' Six years later Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, showed greater hostility and less restraint than DuBois: he renounced Martin Luther King, Jr. as a modern Uncle Tom subsidized by whites 'to teach the Negroes to be defenseless.'
"Their reactions suggest that neither Dr. DuBois nor Malcolm X could grasp the fact that nonviolence--although risky, as any challenge to oppression always is--was not passive, that it provided an effective means of directly challenging white supremacy with more than just rhetoric . Acts of nonviolent resistance contributed mightily to ending the mental paralysis that had long kept many black people trapped in fear and subservient to white supremacy, reluctant to even try to take control over their own lives despite the fact that slavery had ended roughly a century earlier. The principled militant dignity of nonviolent resistance also won nationwide sympathy for the idea of extending civil rights to black people."
P.4, "Introduction ," THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF'LL GET YOU KILLED: HOW GUNS MADE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT POSSIBLE, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr., (2014)
