We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Akinyele OmowaleUmoja. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Abstract

We Will Shoot Back: Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Akinyele Omowale Umoja. New York: New York University Press, 2013.In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University and a participant in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenges the traditional interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement as committed to nonviolence. Concentrating his study upon oral histories of the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, Umoja emphasizes a tradition of self-defense among blacks in Mississippi in resistance to the efforts of the white power structure to foster fear and intimidation in the post-Civil War South. Umoja argues that armed resistance drew upon the image of the Bad Negro who was outspoken and aggressive in opposition to white intimidation. Thus, he concludes, Armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement (2).Following the murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1954, Umoja describes how Medgar Evers assumed the leadership of black resistance in Mississippi. As a public representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Evers denounced violence. Umoja, however, insists that Evers was actually a Bad Negro, who posed as a trickster, for in reality Evers advocated self-defense and traveled the state with armed security. In fact, Umoja maintains that Evers was a secret admirer of the radical Mau Mau faction in Kenya. Nevertheless, being armed did not protect Evers from an assassin's bullet.According to Umoja, the Black experience of self-defense in Mississippi often clashed with the nonviolent tactics advocated by such national civil rights organizations as the NAACP, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Thus, when SNCC embraced the strategy of encouraging college students to come to Mississippi to register black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964, the national organization agreed that organizers would remain unarmed. This strategy, however, was compromised when whites unleashed a campaign of violence against the SNCC volunteers, who soon became dependent upon local armed Blacks to protect them. With the Federal government failing to provide protection, SNCC workers were increasingly reliant upon the black Mississippi tradition of armed resistance. And as the civil rights struggle embraced Black Power in the late 1960s, Umoja argues, Activists generally believed that the Movement and Black people in general would have to rely upon themselves and their own resources for their own protection (120).Beginning in 1965 into the 1970s, the so-called Natchez model became the example for social change in Mississippi. To provide leverage for demands regarding black employment and police brutality, blacks in Natchez, Mississippi commenced a boycott of white businesses to undermine the white power structure. …