Check out Charlie Cobb’s upcoming book, This Nonviolent Stuu‘ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books; June 3, 2014).
In this book, Cobb overturns the misconception that the nonviolent civil rights movement of the first half of the 20th century was actually “nonviolent.” Instead, as Cobb shows, a good deal of those apparently “peaceful” activists very readily embraced their constitutional right to self-protect, and in doing so he reveals one of the central paradoxes of the movement: that nonviolence only succeeded because it was underpinned by the threat of lethal force. Cobb has the perfect background to make this argument; an award-winning civil rights scholar, he is also a veteran of the movement. He served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from 1962 and 1967, primarily in rural Mississippi. A veteran journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and his reporting has won multiple awards.
With commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer beginning in June 2014 and Cobb’s controversial argument, this book should definitely be a timely one.
Get a copy for $ 20.41
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