Akinyele Omowale Umoja. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

It seems poetic justice that Akinyele Omowale Umoja might have the last word on armed resistance in and around the civil rights movement. His research on black southerners who used guns to protect themselves against violent racists bent on “keeping them in their place” inspired a minor avalanche of scholarship on self-defense by civil rights activists and those who supported their cause in the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, Umoja's “Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement” (the 1996 Emory Ph.D. dissertation from which this book grew) was the first in a series of academic inquiries by scholars such as Tim Tyson, Emilye Crosby, Lance Hill, Hasan Jeffries, and Simon Wendt, among others. Due to Umoja's pioneering work, the presumption that peaceful, nonviolent resistance alone carried the day in the struggle for black equality has fallen away. White supremacists were repelled—beaten back with force—in countless backwaters where intrepid reformers could rely on neither police protection nor the unblinking eye of television cameras sent to cover marches and demonstrations. In many places, armed self-defense by African Americans worked in tandem with nonviolent direct action to advance change.

“The central argument of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” writes Umoja, “is that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement” (p. 2). The sheer volume of examples presented by the author cements this claim, burying the illusion of the primacy of nonviolence in Mississippi. “Local people” across the Magnolia State routinely resorted to arms to protect their property, their voting rights, and their lives from Reconstruction through the civil rights era. The book focuses on the post–World War II period through the “classic” civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, with close attention also paid to the black power era; but, the book frames this discussion with a broader contextualization and periodization. It opens with the 1875 political assassination of Charles Caldwell, a freedman and Republican delegate to the 1868 state constitutional convention who later became a state senator (Caldwell had captained a militia unit in the wake of terrorist attacks that disrupted election debates), and continues through the late 1970s, when the United League of Mississippi organized successful boycotts that employed the practice and rhetoric of self-defense.

The first chapter describes resistance by black Mississippians to efforts to keep them as a servile labor force in the pre–civil rights era. The second chapter treats the development and role of the Regional Council for Negro Leadership (RCNL) and its main spokesperson, Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who hired bodyguards and traveled state highways with a cocked pistol in his lap. In the third chapter, Umoja describes the sometimes tense collaborations between national civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), both rooted in nonviolent strategies, and local activists who relied upon self-defense. The fourth chapter examines Freedom Summer, the historic voting rights campaign in 1964 in which armed individuals, working with volunteers from outside the state, regularly and informally met resistance with resistance. The fifth chapter introduces what Umoja calls the “Natchez model”: the open advocacy of armed resistance by activists. What happened in Natchez in 1965 during a campaign led by state and local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapters marked a transition from informal self-defense groups to formal paramilitary organizations such as Deacons for Defense and Justice. The sixth and seventh chapters discuss how self-defense easily melded with the new consciousness of black power in places like Belzoni, Yazoo City, Aberdeen, and West Point in the mid- to late 1960s and 1970s.

The book is meticulously researched and easily accessible. Part of a wider trend toward understanding social movements through targeted community studies and oral histories, Umoja's scholarship has contributed to a deeper, richer, and ultimately more accurate understanding of the civil rights/black power movement(s). The stereotype of cowering black sharecroppers, awaiting the intervention of well-meaning white do-gooders to rescue them from virulent Klansmen, cannot withstand the withering fire of We Will Shoot Back.