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

the Movement. Each of these authors tell stories of how local Blacks provided
activists with protection from the violence of white supremacists .
The participants and observers of the Movement, in autobiographies and
oral histories, provide us with a more diverse picture of the Movement than do its
interpreters of the Movement. Although recent contributions to the historiography
of the field tend to focus more on studies of local activists and campaigns, much
of the traditional literature of the Movement narrowly focuses on the activities of
national leaders ad organizations . This traditional historiography does not reflect
the perspectives and stories of local people . The majority of the national organiza-
tions active in the South in the early 1960's (the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Non-violent Coordi-
nating Committee) were philosophically and strategically committed to non-
violence . Local activists tended to utilize a variety of tactics, from non-violence to
armed resistance, depending upon what they judged was necessary at a particular
time. The evidence shows that there was broad support in local communities for
armed self-defense as a means of individual and collective survival. By not
including the varied contributions of all the methods utilized by freedom fighters
in the struggle against racism and white supremacy, with the exception of recent
scholarship, the literature of the Civil Rights Movement has generally painted a
narrow and elitist picture .
The level of quantity and quality of descriptions of instances of armed
resistance from oral histories and autobiographies confirmed for me the impor-
tance of oral testimony as an essential primary source. Given the treatment of
armed resistance in the secondary literature, only through the stories of actual