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

"when a Negc+o woman is attacked ." He felt certain that white aggressors "have little
respect for the nonviolent ."s ~
Austan also offered a different view of violence itself by comparing the civil
rights movement to the war in Vietnam:
If violence is right in Vietnam, then surely violence is right in Mississippi . If
violence can be a righteous tool for the white man then surely it can be just as
righteous for the black man . If violence can be used to murder defenseless
women and children in Vietnam, then certainly it can be used in Louisiana to
defend Negroes' lives and property .s2
By comparing the morally compromised killing fields of Vietnam to the embattled South,
he sought to show the righteousness of the Deacons' position : if the government could
use violence in an arguably unjust cause, why could southern Afro-Americans not use it
in a just one? By questioning the notion that violence is by nature problematic, he sought
to legitimate the Deacon's "violent" solution to the aggression they encountered in
Bogalusa. Most people living in the United States in the 1960's shared a certain,
common-sensical understanding that violence was somehow "bad" ; however, Austan
tried to show that force, in the guise of self-defense, could be a tempting solution to
individual and group predicaments . For him, it was a means of suppressing even greater
violence and a method of righting great wrongs . This notion of suppressing violence
through the use of force held more and more appeal to activists as the list of egregious
acts piled up against them.s3
s3Austan's notion that violence must at times be restrained by force has grounding in
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