Protection or Path Toward Revolution?: Black Power and Self-Defense

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the ideology and practice of armed self-defense in the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Comparing self-defense tactics in the southern civil rights movement with armed militancy in the Black Power movement, the article argues that there were both continuities and discontinuities between these two phases of the Black freedom struggle. The fact that African-American activists relied on armed protection long before the advent of Black Power clearly contradicts the long-held notion that 1966 marks a sudden renunciation of Martin Luther King's nonviolent philosophy. Compared with the pragmatic necessity to protect Black communities against racist terrorists in the South, however, the self-defense efforts of Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party tended to play a more symbolic role and served primarily as a means of affirming black manhood, gaining publicity, and recruiting new members.