Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

Review of the Literature
The Literature of the Civil Rights Movement gives several examples of
acts of armed resistance in the struggle for human rights in the American South .
Most works however only present passing references to Black armed resistance .
Only a few works attribute any prominent role for Black armed resistance in the
Civil Rights Movement . The failure of the literature to include, in a significant
way, the role of armed resistance presents a distorted picture of the reality of the
Movement.
Aldon Morris' Origin of the Civil Rights Movement : Black Communities
Organizing for Change as insightful as it is on the Movement's local roots, could
have benefited from a broader of discussion of armed self-defense . In defining the
Civil Rights Movement, Morris does not include armed self-defense . While
Morris ignores the role of armed resistance in his definition of the Civil Rights
Movement, he provides an important example of armed defense in the first move-
ment campaign he describes . Recounting the 1953 campaign to desegregate the
public transportation system in Baton Rogue, Louisiana, Morris speaks of the
creation of an armed defense force, the "movement's police department ." The
"movement's police department" was an armed defense group created by the
Baton Rogue movement to protect the local movement leadership, its participants
and the Black community in general . In limiting the definition of the Civil Rights
Movement, Morris ignores his own story and misrepresents the various methods
which had to be employed to maintain the Civil Rights Movement in the segrega-
tionist and white supremacist South.
Other attempts to reconstruct the history of the Civil Rights Movement do