‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non-violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post-1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter-relationship between self-defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by-product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self-defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.