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

have, he wondered, to stop the local people from doing whatever they wanted to do?x "You
should decide," Frank Smith countered brusquely, "that if you go to Mississippi, you're going
to get your ass whipped, go to jail, and get shot. You'll be functionally useless if you can't
decide this. If you get hung up on your own personal safety, we're not going to get anything
done ." 3s Courtland Cox agreed . `"The question of arming ourselves is larger than
Mississippi," he stated. `"To the extent that we think about self-defense, we arc
immobilized."~ Such rationale allowed SNCC volunteers to function in the hostile climes of
Mississippi .
The debate raged on . Various members asked if it were appropriate for local people
to defend organizers with guns. The group could not reach a consensus as individuals came
to grips with the possibility of dying . Bob Moses weighed in . "Self-defense is so deeply
ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can't affect it," he explained.
"It's not contradictory for a farmer to say he's nonviolent and also to pledge to shoot a
marauder's head off. The difference "is that we on staff have committed ourselves not to
cony guns ." 37 Ella Baker concluded with an apparent endorsement of self-defense when she
noted that an individual "would not be operating outside of SNCC" if he opted to "pick up
the gun." 3a
3e~. Civil rights scholars have noted that almost every SNCC worker in the Deep
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