3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

andied about by the press, became bastardized and used as something of a catchall
description for any kind of interpersonal violence, whether visited upon activists or espoused
by them ; the tenor also encompassed the employment of self-defense by activists . In many
media accounts, the word "violence" often referred ominously to some vague notion of
revolution .' Accordingly, "violence;' like nonviolence, seemed to mean different things to
different people .
A kind of moralization also came into play . Because of white fear of any sort of
violence on the part of blacks-and because most white people were willing to attribute the
successes of the movement to the peaceable methods of nonviolence, not the spirited tradition
of Afro-American resistance-nonviolence was "good," and violence in any form was "bad."
Nonviolence worked, whereas violence did not . The dichotomy proved helpful-
particularly to everyone struggling to understand the far-flung changes along the nation's
color line-but deceptively simplistic . In particular, it left no room for the role ofjustifiable
self-defense in combating aggressive white supremacists .
The custom of conceptualizing the tactical strategy of the civil rights movement in
shoot and maim and brutaliu people at your will . So we're not violent . We're
opposed to violence, opposed to war. But we are fQ! self-defense.
But the distinction is lost on the press . Say the same thing over a hundred times
and they come back with the predictable question once more : Arc you violent?
David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobioaranhv of David Hilliard and
the Story of the Black Panther Parry (Boston : Back Bay Books, 1993), 162.
'For example, see R. Moley, "Pattern of Revolution," w w 68 (August 8, 1966) :
84 ; and R . Sackett, "Plotting a War on Whitey : Extremists Set For Violence,"~ 60 (June
10, 1966): 100-100H+.