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.
