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

could be argued that King's middle-class sensibilities might have made him more
receptive to the requirements of nonviolence, whereas Malcolm's rough-and-tumble life
as a pimp and street hustler left him predisposed to the necessities of self-defense. But,
apart from these observations, the analogy atonviolence : middle-class : : self-defense :
working-class> proves weak. Nonviolence, which straddled class lines as a unifying civil
rights philosophy, defies classification as a bourgeois concept ; similarly, too many upper-
and middle-class bl~ks, particularly among the intelligentsia, embraced self-defense for
it to be labeled "working-class ."
With regard to gender, self-defense represented a man's responsibility and duty : a
male prerogative. Being a man required resorting to force, ifcircumstances required it .
Women were not expected to engage in any sort of violent behavior, even in self-defense .
Men were supposed to be ready and available to defend women if the need arose .
Southern males, black and white alike, accepted a certain vision of womanhood that
celebrated women as vessels of virtue, but also denied them agency . Women needed men
to defend them and men-in order to be men-needed to defend the women who
depended upon them . But many black women, out of necessity, rebelled against these
restrictive expectations . Women such as Mabel Williams, Rebecca Wilson, Angela
Davis, and Elaine Brown rejected their expected gender roles to take up arms in defense
of their families, their bodies, and their homes .
While I have maximized considerations of race, class, and gender in this study, I
have tried to submerge them in the text : to make them implicit rather than explicit . I have
(L.anham, Maryland : University Press of America, 1984), 20.
xviii