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

through protest . Here again, the distinction between revolutionary violence and self-
defense assumes crucial importance . As one writer has observed :
Sustained, massive social injustice produces revolutionists . This is a truism made
luminous by men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine . Butjust proclaiming
himself a revolutionary doesn't win a man immunity from the consequences of
violent nonsense. 2
Accordingly, civil rights scholars must inquire, from a moral standpoint, as to the
willingness of activists such as the Deacons or Black Panthers to exhaust every peaceful
alternative open to them before taking up arms . Similarly, if one considers violence to be
wrong or evil in any manifestation, then two "wrongs" (that is, oppression and violent
response) cannot make a "right" (that is, liberation) .
After 1964, self-defense became more and more of a communal concern, rather
than an individual one, and armed groups raised certain complications that armed
individuals did not . In 1965, there was no such legal concept as collective self-defense,
but it did exist in reality, as the Deacons demonstrated ; that is, collective self-defense, in
the guise of citizens' patrols, represented a de facto expression of black self-
determination . The very act of defending themselves and protecting their interests
transformed ordinary men like Charles Sims, Robert Hicks, and Henry Austan into
activists, as self-defense was becoming a vehicle for civil rights reform. Defending the
black community in Bogalusa seemed to be the only recourse for the Deacons, confronted
James C . Dick, a philosopher, has fully explored the moral complications of violence
by the oppressed ; see Dick, Violence and Oonression (Athens : University of Georgia
Press, 1979), 7 .
ZNorman Cousins, in Lincoln, Is Any¢~y Listening to Black America? (New York:
Seabury Press, 1968), 230.
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