Political Nonviolence, Private Self-Defense

Nicholas Johnson, a professor at Fordham Law School and the
author of the new book
Negroes and the Gun, has written a series of guest
posts for The Volokh Conspiracy this week. His topic
is the relationship between the black freedom movement and armed
self-defense, and his first
post draws a distinction that many people miss:

The black tradition of arms has been submerged
because it seems hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of
nonviolence in the modern civil-rights movement. But that
superficial tension is resolved by the long-standing distinction
that was vividly evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer.
Hamer’s approach to segregationists who dominated Mississippi
politics was, “Baby you just got to love ’em. Hating just makes you
sick and weak.” But, asked how she survived the threats from
midnight terrorists, Hamer responded, “I’ll tell you why. I keep a
shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even
look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write
his mama again.”

Like Hartman Turnbow, Fannie Lou Hamer embraced private
self-defense and political nonviolence without any sense of
contradiction. In this she channeled a more-than-century-old
practice and philosophy that evolved through every generation,
sharpened by icons like Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois and Daisy
Bates, pressed by the burgeoning NAACP, and crystalized by Martin
Luther King Jr.

You can read the rest of that post
here, and you can read the other installments in the series

here,
here,
here, and
here.