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

enevolence of whites ."~ 2 It was a time when even blacks, who so ~+ecently had been
"coloreds" or "Negroes," were themselves barely getting used to being called black. W .
E . B . Du Bois once illustrated this component of the black from struggle when he
explained what made slavery so onerous. "It was in part psychological," he wrote,
the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the
standing with the hat in hand . It was the helplessness . It was the defenselessness
of family life . It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of
individual .~~
Du Bois aptly captured the pain of deference to the white man's (and woman's) will, and
his words spoke to the subservience that outlasted slavery and lived into the modem era .
If the need for self-defense grew out of the reality of being attacked-a danger
that increased as the civil rights movement intensified-then the mentality of self-defense
infused more than the immediate ability to defend oneself. As one observer described the
fceling in Robert Williams' hometown in 1961, after Williams had promised to "mat
violence with violence":
The morale of the Negroes in Union County is high . They carry themselves with
a dignity I have seen in no other southern community . Largely vanished arc the
slouching posture, the scratching head, and the indirect, mumbled speah that
used to characteriu the Negro male in the presence of whites. It is as if, in facing
up to their enemies, they have finally confronted a terrible reality and found it not
so teRible after all . ~4
Self-defense influenced multiple aspects of Afro-American culture. It affected how
~ 2Frank Millspaugh, "Black Power," Commonwea1 84 n 18 (August S, 1966), 502.
W . E . 8 . Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell & Russell,
1962), 8-9.
~4Julian Mayfield, "Challenge to Negro Leadership: The Case of Robert Williams,"
Commentary 31 (April 1961) : 297-305.