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

the lynchers," she recalled in her autobiography. She felt that she had better "die fighting
against injustice" than to "die like a dog or a rat in a trap :' She had already determined "to
sell my life as dearly as possible" if attacked . She felt it would "even up the score a bit" if
she could take one lyncher with her. "'The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and
begs," she maintained, "the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, and
lynched ."°
King disregarded this tradition with great effect . Nonviolence, for him, made self-
defense obsolescent . But if he quickly became convinced of the virtues of nonviolence,
others needed more convincing. Even the most committed leaders in Montgomery seemed
reluctant to put all of their eggs into a nonviolent basket . in his autobiography Ralph
Abernathy would later quote King as saying: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will
only end up in a blind generation and a toothless people" ; however, he too was slow to warm
to nonviolence. . °e Abernathy recalled when things "turned ugly" in Montgomery.
We began to get threatening phone calls, many of them obscene . Virtually every one
of MIA [the Montgomery Improvement Association)'s known leaders received such
calls ; and no matter how often you told your wife that anyone making anonymous
threats would be too cowardly to carry them out, you never quite convinced her or
yourself. You knew that in the past blacks had been gunned down from cover of
darlrness or else dragged to obscure wooded areas by masked men and then lynched.
So violence was always a very real possibility, even when your demands were modest
and expressed in the most moderate of terms ~9
"Aflrcda M . Duster, ed., Cnrsade for Justice: The Autobio~pby of Ida B . Wells
(Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 62 .
Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling wn (New York : Harper&
Row, 1989), 162 .
160 .
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