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

evolutionary war in tenors of self-defense by treating violence as inclusive of every sort
of social evil ; that is, if poverty and malnutrition and unemployment and judicial inequity
were "violent," then these things, by the revolutionaries' logic, could be reciprocally
fought with violence . As one militant argued, "We have been assaulted by our
environment:' Such a position neutralized any counter-arguments that held that violence
was unjustifiable . Under these criteria, it was impossible for black militants to act
aggressively : liberation "by any means necessary" was merely a defensive recourse . The
history of the struggle for black equality put contemporary appeals for self-defense in
their proper context . "You see, we've been backed into a corner for the last four hundred
years," one Panther explained, "so anything we do now is defensive ."~
This expanding conception of violence preordained the violent response of law
enforcement personnel, desirous of order, who in turn expanded their own definition of
violence to include the violence of rhetoric . In this way, merely talking about violence
could get a black person killed ; again, the Panthers are a demonstrative example . The
vast majority of white Americans, and the police who served them, neither identified with
nor sympathized with violent posturing . It was this trend, in fact-the move from self-
defense toward a position of more aggressive violence-that contributed to the
devolution of the movement in the late 1960's . With the introduction of violent rhetoric,
whites could no longer support the movement, and black activists could not seem to
articulate the distinctions between self-defense and violent revolution. The civil rights
6Skolnick, The Politics of Protest, 116 .
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