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

can be an analog of self-reliance . ~ ~ Within the black struggle for equality, it baame an
expression of self-determination . Whether armed black Southerners were safer than those
who did not arm themselves seemed to matter less than whether they~wfer . Security
was, more often than not, a state of mind, but self-defense was effective in a way violent
political protest never could be, because the latter was all-too-successfully repressed.
Violent expressions were simply illegal, beyond the pale of law and order, but self-
defense, within the social and political matrices of American life, was both legal and
justifiable, and it lent a sense of self-empowernxnt to those who employed it.
When whites subjected blacks to harsh, physical punishment, it often stemmed
fmm some transgression in the region's unwritten code ofetiquette : failing to yield the
sidewalk, not averting one's eyes quickly enough or, in the case of Emmett Till, admiring
a white woman . To be black and southern in the mid-twentieth century meant having to
live in a state of constant watchfulness, if not fear. It meant being in constant awareness
of racially defined prescriptions of behavior; however, the practice of self-defense in the
1950's and 1960's brought a new sensibility to these mobs .
The true utility of self-defense reached beyond the mere need to pooled one's
person . Adopting a mindset of self-defense reflected an individual ultimatum, a kind of
personal Maginot line, drawn in the sands of white southern contempt and hostility . It
~ B As Preston K . Covey, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics
at Carnegie Mellon University, has observed: "The actuarial success of armed selfdefense
is one matter; the residual moral value of having the personal responsibility and
prerogative of armed self-defense is quite another." Covey, quoted in Clayton E. Cramer,
For t_E!e Defence of Themselves and ~h_e State " The AriainA~ rnrenr And l .d . .AI
Intemrctation of the Ri,~tt to Bear Arms (Rlestport, Connaticut : Praeger, 1994), viii .