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

There can be an exaggerated distaste for violence, it seems to me, which is as
unwholesome in its own way as bloodlust. The pacifist merits our respat, but the
coward does not. One says fighting is immoral (a defensible position, although
we may disagree) ; the other say fighting is scary, or nasty, and nothing is worth
fighting for, anyway . Whatever Southerners' faults in the matter (and they've
usually been obvious), our people, black and white, have witnessed with some
consistency and often at great cost to the belief that there are enemies who cannot
or should not be appeased, conflicts that cannot or should not be negotiated,
affronts that should not be ignored--in short, that there~things worth fighting
for. We may disagree about what those things arc, but I think we can use the
reminder that they exist .~6
By denying that violence is one way out of an unfavorable situation, rationalists fail to
provide constructive channels for minimizing its effects .~~ As a white southerner attuned
to what C . Vann Woodward has called "the burden of southern history," Reed would
seemingly agree that civil rights fall into the category of "things worth fighting for."
They represent safeguards of political power and social equality .
In the well-armed South, with its frontier heritage of self-reliance and extralegal
conflict resolution, self-defense for blacks in effect meant carrying a gun : a practice
representing a naturally reflexive response to the white gun culture. Perhaps Hartman
Turnbow, a black sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta, explained the philosophy of self-
defense best when he explained his cautious dealings with the white man . "Mat him
with ever what he pose with," he told an interviewer . "If he pose with a smile, meet him
with a smile, and if he pose with a gun, mat him with a gun ." is Tumbow recognized the
~6John Shelton Rad, One South : An Ethnic AQprosch to Regjonal_ Culture (Baton
Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 153 .
"Bruno Bettelheim, "Violence : A Neglated Mode of Behavior," in Shalom
Endleman, ed., Violence in the Streets (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1%8), 42.
~ s'furnbow, quoted in Howell Raines, My Sarl is Rested : The Story of the Civil
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