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

people customarily initiated it .
Finally, in offering a tentatively favorable assessment of the use of armed self-
defense by certain activists in the civil rights movement, I am aware that such a position
accommodates some pretty strange bedfellows, including militiamen, survivalists,
patriotic ualots, pro-gun extremists, and various other right-wing polemicists and
reactionaries . It seems important to emphasiu, lest this analysis become politicized and
used for purposes other than those intended, that the historical situation in which armed
self-defense arose has changed considerably . The need for black people to defend
themselves during the civil rights movement arose from a set of specific historical
circumstances. These circumstances have changed radically in the past thirty years, and
the South, with the rost of the nation, has changed . No longer do any of us live in a
society in which side arms play a necessary function . In 2000, the need to address the
issue of gun violence, which has reached epidemic proportions in this country, has
superceded most all other considerations . The right to fear arms now substantially
outweighs the right to bear arms .
I would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this project:
Leon Litwack, Waldo Martin, Ronald Takaki, Jim Kettner, Clayborne Carson, Tim
Tyson, Bob Pratt, Bill McFeely, the members of my dissertation group, and the staffs at
the following archives : the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, the
8ancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the Manuscripts, Archives & Rave Books Division of
the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the
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