DRAFT (7.7.

07)

The Tension among Pacifism, Tactical Nonviolence and Armed Self-Defense:

From Ida B. Wells to the Black Panthers
(citations and references, provided upon demand)

One might want to begin an exploration of the tensions among pacifism, tactical nonviolence and
armed self-defense from 1870-1990 with Ida B. Wells. Her personal story as well as her
professional life illustrates the nature of the violence and intimidation African Americans have
faced since emancipation.

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862 in Mississippi. The Civil War ended in 1865, the same
year that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery. In 1878, her parents died of
yellow fever and Wells decided, at the age of 16, to get a teaching certificate so she could support
and, therefore, keep the rest of her family together. In 1881, they moved to Memphis, Tennessee.
Wells continued to teach in Mississippi, commuting by train every day. After having been
forcefully removed one day for refusing to leave the first class car for which she had paid a ticket,
Wells sued the Railroad company, eventually losing on appeal. Wells was then fired from her
teaching job because she wrote about her experiences for a black owned newspaper. She went to
work full time for the paper and her articles about her court case were reprinted in black newspapers
around the country.

By 1890, lynching dramatically increased. Wells decided to launch a one woman campaign to
prove that the lynching of innocent blacks were intended to reverse any gains blacks had made since
the end of slavery. In A Red Record (1895), Wells directly challenged the white man’s justification
of lynching:

“. . . With the Southern white man, any mesalliance existing between a white woman and a
colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape. The Southern white man says
that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored
man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force. In numerous instances where
colored men have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of
lynching and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained
between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law
could even that charge of assault have been successfully maintained. . . . To justify their own
barbarism [white men] assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects
all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million
mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very
chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the
womanhood which circumstances placed in his power. . . . Virtue knows no color line, and
the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no
honest respect . . . [N]o other civilized nation stands condemned before the world with a
series of crimes so peculiarly national. It becomes a painful duty of the Negro to reproduce
a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone
murder and defy the contempt of civilization.”

Lynching peaked in the United States in the 1890s as a means to enforce the creation of a Jim Crow
society, eliminating the gains that blacks had made after the Civil War. “Race riots” both in the
South and North also erupted when blacks attempted to resist lynchings and other tactics intended to

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keep blacks on the bottom rung of the country’s social, political and economic pyramid.

The NAACP was created in 1911 in response to the Springfield, Illinois race riots. Ida B. Wells
joined the NAACP’s campaign against lynching. The campaign used a number of nonviolent
tactics such as a silent march. Philosophical nonviolence, however, did not enter into the struggle
until after Gandhi showed how successful it was in ridding India of British rule in 1947. Under the
tutelage of A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin and through the experiences of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, Martin Luther King became a strong adherent to nonviolent direct action as a tactic and
perhaps as a philosophy. To begin to spread the movement, King sent Lawson to Nashville to train
college students in nonviolence.

Diane Nash was a young college student in segregated Nashville when she decided to attend
nonviolent workshops given by James Lawson in 1959:

“. . . .I recall talking to a number of people in the dormitories at school and on campus, and
asking them if they knew any people who were trying . . . to bring about some type of
change. . . . At first, I couldn't find anyone, and many of the students were saying, why are
you concerned about that? . . . And then, I did talk to Paul Lefred, who told me about the
non-violent workshops that Jim Lawson was conducting . . . . And the reason that I said
earlier that I thought the other students were apathetic was that after the movement got
started, and there was something that they could do, i.e., sit at a lunch counter, march, take
part, many of those same students, who were right there, going to jail, taking part in
marches, and sit-ins, and what have you, it was that they didn't have a concept of what they
really could do, so when they got one, they were on fire. They wanted to [create]
change . . . . We felt we were right. We felt we were right, and rational. We took a position
that segregation was wrong, and we really tried to be open and honest and loving with our
opposition. A person who is being truthful and honest, actually is, is standing in a much
more powerful position than a person who's lying, . . . One of the things that we were able to
do in the movement, which was one of the things that . . . we learned . . . from Gandhi's
movement, was to turn the energy of violence, that was perpetrated against us, into
advantage. And so if Attorney Lubey's house was burned, that was used as a catalyst to draw
many thousands of people to express their opposition to segregation . . . . There were many
things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put into practice at the
time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my [life], in
shaping the kind of person I've become . . . . The movement had a way of reaching inside me
and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It
was a real experience, to be among a group of people who would put their bodies between
you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough that you would put yours
between them and danger . . . . I think it's really important that young people today
understand that the movement of the sixties was really a people's movement. The media and
history seems to record it as Martin Luther King's movement, but if young people realized
that it was people just like them, their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually
developed the movement, that when they look around now, and see things that need to be
changed, that they, instead of saying, I wish we had a leader like Martin Luther King today,
they would say, what can I do, what can my roommate and I do to effect that change.”

As successful as the Sit-Ins were in the upper South, attempts at nonviolent action and voter
registration in the deep South were stopped in their tracks by violent reprisals. Robert Williams,
head of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP chapter articulated sentiments and promoted tactics

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that resonated with many blacks in the South. Williams wrote in 1959:

“Laws serve to deter crime and protect the weak from the strong in civilized society. . . Only
highly civilized and moral individuals respect the rights of others. The Southern brute
respects only force. Nonviolence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilized,
but nonviolence is no repellent for a sadist. . . . In 1957, the Klan moved into Monroe and
Union County (NC). Their numbers steadily increased to the point wherein the local press
reported 7500 at one rally. They became so brazen that mile-long motorcades started
invading the Negro community. These hooded thugs fired pistols from car windows. . . .
[and] tried to run Negroes down. . . . Instead of cowing, we organized an armed guard. On
one occasion, we had to exchange gunfire with the Klan. . . . I believe Negores must be
willing to defend themselves, their women, their children and their homes. They must be
willing to die and to kill in repelling their assailants. Negroes must protect themselves, it is
obvious that the federal government will not put an end to lynching; therefore it becomes
necessary for us to stop lynching with violence. . . .Nowhere in the annals of history does the
record show a people delivered from bondage by patience alone.”

King responded to this with the following argument:

. . . . [T]here are three different views on the subject of violence. One is the approach of pure
nonviolence, which cannot readily or easily attract large masses, for it requires extraordinary
discipline and courage. The second is violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies,
from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The
principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been
condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence.
(6) The third is the advocacy of violence as a tool of advancement, organized as in warfare,
deliberately and consciously . . . . There are incalculable perils in this approach . . . . The
greatest danger is that it will fail to attract Negroes to a real collective struggle, and will
confuse the large uncommitted middle group, which as yet has not supported either side.
Further, it will mislead Negroes into the belief that this is the only path and place them as a
minority in a position where they confront a far larger adversary than it is possible to defeat
in this form of combat. When the Negro uses force in self-defense he does not forfeit
support--he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects. When he seeks to
initiate violence he provokes questions about the necessity for it, and inevitably is blamed
for its consequences. . . . Mr. Robert Williams would have us believe that there is no
effective and practical alternative [to organized violent resistance]. He argues that we must
be cringing and submissive or take up arms. To so place the issue distorts the whole
problem. There are other meaningful alternatives.
The Negro people can organize socially to initiate many forms of struggle, which can
drive their enemies back without resort to futile and harmful violence. In the history of the
movement for racial advancement, many creative forms have been developed--the mass
boycott, sit-down protests and strikes, sit-ins,--refusal to pay fines and bail for unjust
arrests--mass marches--mass meetings-- prayer pilgrimages, etc. Indeed, in Mr. Williams'
own community of Monroe, North Carolina, a striking example of collective community
action won a significant victory without use of arms or threats of violence. When the police
incarcerated a Negro doctor unjustly, the aroused people of Monroe marched to the police
station, crowded into its halls and corridors, and refused to leave until their colleague was
released. Unable to arrest everyone, the authorities released the doctor and neither side
attempted to unleash violence. . . . All history teaches us that like a turbulent ocean beating
great cliffs into fragments of rock, the determined movement of people incessantly

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demanding their rights always disintegrates the old order.”

Tactical nonviolence continued to dominate the strategic thinking of members of SNCC, CORE and
the SCLC. During the summer of 1964, thousands of northern college students joined thousands of
Mississippians in the creation of an alternative political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP). In the Party’s creation, thousands of black men and women were empowered and
Mississippi changed in fundamental ways. But, in the failure of the national Democratic Party to
recognize the legitimacy of the MFDP that fall, nonviolence suffered a serious blow to its image as
a tactic. At the same time that nonviolence fell visibly short of a fundamental goal, nationalist
movements in Africa and Asia were successfully overthrowing their colonial masters through the
use of violence. Malcolm X predicted the failure of white liberals to support the goals of
Mississippi Freedom Summer in a speech he gave in Detroit, called The Ballot or the Bullet, on
April 12, 1964. He told his black audience that

This is part of what’s wrong with you -- you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop
singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some
freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight
champion of the world; swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion. This
government has failed us; the government itself has failed us, and the white liberals who
have been posing as our friends have failed us.

And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop
turning to them and turn to ourselves. We need a self help program, …. a-do-it-yourself
philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, a it’s-already-too-late philosophy . . . .

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your
thought pattern, you change your -- your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes
your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down
philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-
down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action. They’ll have you sitting in
everywhere. It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a "sit-in." That right there
castrates you. . . . Think of the image of someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man
can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting
long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to
back that up.

When we look like -- at other parts of this earth upon which we live, we find that black,
brown, red, and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their independence. They’re not
getting it by singing “We Shall Overcome.” No, they’re getting it through nationalism . . .
Just as it took nationalism to move -- to remove colonialism from Asia and Africa, it’ll take
black nationalism today to remove colonialism from the backs and the minds of 22 million
Afro-Americans here in this country.

…. They haven’t never had a blood-less revolution, or a non-violent revolution. That don’t
happen even in Hollywood. You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and
you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate
you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.”

From 1940 to 1953, A.J. Muste was the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (an

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alliance of religious nonviolent organizations), during which time he became an advisor to Martin
Luther King Jr. Unlike most of those who practiced nonviolence as a tactic, Muste was a true
pacifist. In 1964, Muste saw how nonviolence was losing its appeal and responded to arguments
like Malcolm X’s with the essay, Rifle Squads or the Beloved Community:

I have more than once heard it said by Negroes . . . that “nonviolence” may not be enough,
that if in a couple of a few cases Negroes were to use force, or even threaten it seriously, this
would cool down the . . . white hoodlums [and] convince the wielders of power . . . that it
was no longer possible to keep Negroes down or to delay integration. . . . One basic question
that exponents of this trend have not, in my opinion, seriously faced is whether Negroes
basically and eventually want to be part of American society. . . .

If . . . Negroes do want to be eventually a genuine part of the American community, then

they will have to live in a community to which whites also belong. To create or think lightly
of deepened rifts between the races, of psychological wounds which may take long to heal in
numerous cities and towns, of polarized enmities, seems clearly dangerous and may be
laying the ground work for eventual elimination of that multi-racial or truly integrated
society which is the object of the civil-rights movement and the goal of the Negro
community. The race problem is psychological and social, not merely one of economic or
political structure. It is necessary that the reality and shame, the deep roots, of the present rift
be exposed and not slurred over. . . .

In the meantime, regardless of whether or not one embraces nonviolence either as

revolutionary strategy or as a way of life, all the available evidence points to the conclusion
that nonviolence as basic strategy should not be abandoned by the civil-rights movement.
Rather, mistakes should be corrected and new possibilities of developing nonviolent action
should be diligently explored and experimented with. . . . Very large sections of the nation
are capable of experiencing deep moral revulsion against racism and segregation, especially
when Negro nonviolent demonstrators are brutally treated, as was shown in relation, e.g., to
the Birmingham struggle. In my view, that moral revulsion may have been the main factor in
at last impelling Kennedy to submit a civil-rights bill and the House actually to adopt a
stronger one than Kennedy’s. . . .

From the side of white men a bridge of understanding, repentance, reconciliation and love
might be thrown across the chasm. If this is not done, a bridge of pent-up frustration,
vengeance, and hate may be thrown across it by the majority of the human race. … this
would not be building the beloved community …. It would be opening another familiar cycle
of domination and eventual corruption. This might prove suicidal for all in the nuclear age.”

Such arguments carried little weight with those immediately threatened with mutilation and murder
at the hands of white racists. In 1965, Charles Simms, President of the Bogalusa, LA, chapter of
Deacons for Defense argued for the need to take up arms to protect themselves and civil rights
workers from violent reprisals:

“The reason why we had to organize the Deacons in the city of Bogalusa was the Negro
people and civil rights workers didn’t have no adequate police protection. . . when the white
power structure found out that [the Deacons] had mens, Negro mens that had made up their
minds to stand up for their people and to give no ground, would not tolerate with no more
police brutality, it had a tendency to keep the knight riders out of the neighborhood. . . . I
believe if the Deacons had been organized in 1964, the three civil rights workers that was

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murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi mig ht have been living today because we’d have been
around to stop it. . . . . [The Civil Rights workers] are most glad we have the Deacons
organized. Two months ago, a white civil rights worker or even a coloured civil rights
worker couldn’t come into Bogalusa unless we brought him in . . . the nonviolent act is a
good act—providing the policemens do their job. But in the Southern states, not just
Louisiana, but in the Southern states, the polic have never done their job when the white and
the Negro are involved—unless the Negro’s getting the best of the white man. . .
nonviolence is the only way [to get political and economic advances but the Deacons are
necessary to protect the rights of this nonviolent movement].”

While King was moving towards “Phase II” of the nonviolent struggle—from political goals to
economic issues—many young veterans of Freedom Summer and other nonviolent struggles began
to move towards the Black nationalism as espoused by Malcolm X. The failure of the national
Democratic Party to substitute the all white Mississippi Democratic Party representatives with the
interracial Freedom Democrats in August of 1964 led some SNCC organizers and local residents in
Lowndes County, Alabama, to explore the creation of a third party at the county level. In Alabama
in 1966, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization adopted the black panther as its logo. Stokely
Carmichael, one of the SNCC organizers in Lowndes, explained that the black panther “symbolizes
the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into
the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.” John
Hulett, the first chairman of this black panther party, explained it’s appeal.

“Negroes in Lowndes County have been pushed back through the years. We have been
deprived of our rights to speak, to move, and to do whatever we want to do at all times. And
now we are going to start moving. . . .[In the next election], we plan to take over the
courthouse in Hayneville. And whatever it takes to do it, we’re going to do it. We’ve
decided to stop begging. We’ve decided to stop asking for integration. Once we control the
courthouse, once we control the board of education, we can build our school system where
our boys and girls can get an education in Lowndes, County. There are 89 prominent
families in this county who own 90 percent of the land. These people will be taxed. And we
will collect these taxes. And if they don’t pay them, we’ll take their property and sell it to
whoever wants to buy it” (Grant, p. 407).

As the organizational and electoral successes increased for the Lowndes County Freedom Party, so
did the violence and intimidation by the white power structure. Hulett explained why most of the
black farmers owned weapons and were prepared to use them.

“Those of us who carried guns carried them for our own protection, in case we were attacked
by other peoples. That’s what the purpose of that idea was. White peoples carried guns in
this county, and the law didn’t do anything to them about it, so we started carrying our guns
too. I think they felt that we was ready for war, but we wasn’t violent. We wasn’t violent
people. But we were just some people who was going to protect ourselves in case we were
attached by individuals” (Hampton and Fayer, p. 277).

Carmichael agreed with Hulett and the Deacons for Defense and echoed Malcolm X’s arguments.

“Negroes must protect themselves, it is obvious that the federal government will not put an
end to lynching; therefore it becomes necessary for us to stop lynching with violence. Some
Negro leaders have cautioned me that if Negroes fight back, the racist will have cause to

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exterminate the race. This government is in no position to allow mass violence to erupt,
let alone allow twenty million Negroes to be exterminated. It is instilled at an early age that
men who violently and swiftly rise to oppose tyranny are virtuous examples to emulate. I
have been taught by my government to fight. Nowhere in the annals of history does the
record show a people delivered from bondage by patience alone” (Carson, p. 112).

During that same year, the first Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in Oakland by
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. In their Ten Point Program they established their goals and plan
for action.

“We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine
our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions
which exist in our communities. . . .We believe that the federal government is responsible
and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. . . . . Forty acres
and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder
of Black people. . . . [T]he people in our communities, with government aid, can build and
make decent housing. . . . We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a
knowledge of self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society
and the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else. . . .We believe that the
government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities. . . . We believe that
the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies
to carry out its program of oppression against Black people, other people of color and poor
people inside the United States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves
against such armed forces, and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self-
defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces. . . .We believe that
when persons are brought to trial that they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries
of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting
trials. . . .

Taking a page out of the American Revolution, the Panthers quoted from the Declaration of
Independence:

[G]overnments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed; . . . whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its
foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem
most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

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