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

nonviolence . It is not a complete treatment of the civil disturbances (or uprisings, or
urban rebellions, or riots, as they have been incongruously labeled) in America's
metropolitan areas during this time, nor is it a full discussion of revolution in the 1960's .
It is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the civil rights movement ; rather, it is
intended to fill in what I see as gaps in the existing historiography, particularly with
regard to the question of self-defense . Discussions of these other topics arc limited to the
extent that they relate to self-defense. In many ways, this study picks up where Harold
Cruse's Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) leaves off. My intent is to supplement,
not replace .
A few definitions may also prove helpful here. Self-defense "is about repelling
'See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William
Morrow & Co., 1967), 347-401 . In this epochal work on black thought in the 1960's,
Cruse includes a chapter entitled "'The Intellectuals and Force and Violence," which
briefly discusses the phenomenon of armed self-defense. `"The issue of armed selfdefense,"
he writes, "as projected by [Robert] Williams in 1959, presaged the emergence
of other factors deeply hidden within the Negro movement," namely latent revolutionary
nationalism . Cruse at one point mischaracterizes self-defense as "retaliatory," but
shrewdly points out that, as essentially a "holding action," it cannot be revolutionary by
itself. He also includes a chapter entitled "From Monroe to Watts," in which he asserts
(without explanation) that the "Watts uprising carried the concept of armed self-defense
to its logical and ultimate extreme ." Cruse calls for a scholarly treatment of the subject.
"The faulty analysis of the meaning of armed self-defense has encouraged an extreme
form of one-sided activism that leads to blind alleys and dead ends ." He suggests that a
failure to understand the implications of self-defense contributed to the undoing of the
civil rights movement itself. "Faulty analysis of self-defense as a tactic has served to
block a serious consideration of the necessity to cultivate strategies on the political,
economic, and cultural fronts," he writes. "It has inspired such premature organizations
as revolutionary action movements and black liberation fronts, which come into being
with naively one-sided, limited programs, all proving to be abortive and shoR-lived."