What Julian Bond Taught Me

Freedom movements don’t just happen, they are made—and not by charismatic leaders, but by everyday people possessing great courage.

By Jeanne Theoharis AUGUST 17, 2015, The Nation

His lecture on the Montgomery bus boycott spanned three class periods. Professor Julian Bond traced the origins and development of the boycott, in the hours and days after Rosa Parks’ arrest. Character by character, he detailed the various people who came together to turn Parks’ bus stand into a movement in Montgomery and how they sustained that effort for 382 days.

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.