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

paratroopers from the 101" Airborne Division into Little Rock and federalized the
Arkansas National Guard to insure desegregation . For the first time since Reconswction,
federal troops were sent into the South to protect the civil rights of black Americans.°
In the wake of the Little Rock crisis, the floor seemed open for debate within the
pantheon of civil rights leadership with regard to how to deal with rabid segregationists.
Some national t gurcs such as W.E.B. Du Bois openly challenged the nonviolent ideal .
Indeed, Du Bois held many reservations about the viability of nonviolence in the South .
He felt that the rehabilitation of white Southerners with regard to racial prejudice was
largely impossible . As he pointed out, from the end of Reconstruction until the 1950's,
the nation had widely refused to regard the killing of a black person in the South as
murder, or the violation of a black girl as rape . Airing these views, Du Bois criticized
Martin Luther King in a review of Lawrence Reddick's Crusader Without Violence
(1959), an early biography of King. The review, published in the National Guardian in
1959, described Reddick's portrayal of King as "interesting and appealing but a little
disturbing ."
His [King's] application of this philosophy in the Montgomery strike is wellknown
and deserves wide praise, but leaves me a little in doubt . I was sorry to see
King lauded for his opposition to the young colored man in North Carolina who
declared that in order to stop lynching and mob violence, Negroes must fight
back.
°For more on Little Rock, see Wilson and Jane Cassels Record, eds ., Little Rock U .
S . A. : Materials for Ana~y~s (San Francisco : Chandler Publishing Co., Inc ., 1960).
~ ~W. E. B . Du Bois, "Martin Luther King's Life : Crusader without Violence,"
National Guardian l2 n 4 (November 9, 1959) : 8 .
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