Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement: Charles E. Cobb and Danielle L. McGuire on Forgotten History

The American Prospect

On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said.

In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive.

Manufacturing Consent: Estelle B. Freedman's "Redefining Rape"

Annie Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books

IN SEPTEMBER 2011, the FBI released its 82nd annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Up to this point, the agency had only counted one very specific type of rape in the UCR: rapes of females by vaginal intercourse committed by males through the use of force. It did not count rape of men or boys. It did not count rapes of transgender people. It did not count assaults involving forced anal or oral sex. Frequently, it did not count rapes in which victims were unconscious or unable to consent because of physical or mental disabilities, or assaults in which drugs or alcohol were used to inhibit the victim’s capacity to resist.

Robin Kelley: "The Long Rise and Short Decline of American Democracy"

A People's History Of The United States

1. Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

2. Drawing the Color Line

3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

4. Tyranny is Tyranny

5. A Kind of Revolution

6. The Intimately Oppressed

7. As Long As Grass Grows Or Water Runs

8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

10. The Other Civil War

11. Robber Barons And Rebels

12. The Empire and the People

13. The Socialist Challenge

14. War Is the Health of the State

15. Self-help in Hard Times

16. A People's War?