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

Certain findings have led me to question the authenticity of this dichotomy. My
research suggests that this apparent transformation from nonviolence to violence was
neither quick nor clean nor ordered; in fact, it was hardly a transformation at all .
Incongruities exist which do not fit this otherwise serviceable view of the civil rights
movement, namely : Robert F. Williams, who organized armed resistance in 1957 against
the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe, North Carolina, and wrote Ne~oes with Guns (1962), an
affirmation of armed self-defense by blacks ; and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an
armed guard unit in Bogalusa, Louisiana, which also combated the Klan and provided
protection for civil rights activists pledged to nonviolence. Historians have treated
Williams and the Deacons-if they have treated them at all-as irnegularities : aberrations
in the wider context of the movement, or as harbingers of groups like the Black Panther
Party, which used the gun as both a rhetorical tool and a weapon to bring about
revolution .
Consequently, the myth of the nonviolent movement has persisted to this day .
Suggestions that something other than a nonviolent consensus existed have gone
(New York : Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc ., 1991) . They write :
Disillusionment with the national administration and with white liberals, the
fragmentation of the Negro protest movement, the enormous difficulties that stood
in the way of overcoming the problems of the black masses, and the riots that
erupted spontaneously in 1964 and 1965 as a consequence of the anger and
frustration of the urban slum dwellers-all set the stage for the dramatic
appearance of the black power slogan in the summer of 1966 . . . If the spirit of
redemptive love seemed to characteriu black protest during the first half of the
decade, a spirit of rage seemed to be the hallmark of the second .
See Meier, Rudwick and Bracey, 17, 127 .