Simon Wendt

Introduction: Lynching from an International Perspective

In 1905, the sociologist James E. Cutler began his book Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States with the following introduction: It has been said that our country’s national crime is lynching … The practice whereby mobs capture individuals suspected of crime … and execute them without any process of law … is to be found in no other country of a high degree of civilization. Riots and mob executions take place in other countries, but there is no such frequent administration of what may be termed popular justice which can properly be compared with lynch-law procedures in the United States.1

Introduction: Masculinities and the Nation

At the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe made the oft-quoted observation that nationalist ideologies tend to stem “from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.”1 Focusing on male nationalists in colonial Algeria, Enloe sought to convey how Algerian anticolonial nationalists used women as passive symbols to affirm their masculine national identity while denying them an active role in the country’s process of nation-building. Her perceptive analysis is part of an ongoing effort to better understand the intricate interrelationship between gender and the nation. Scholars from various disciplines have studied this interrelationship for more than three decades. Feminist scholars in particular have demonstrated how male nationalists incorporated women as symbolic, cultural, and biological reproducers of the nation into their “imagined communities.” Yet most studies on the subject tend to focus solely on the tensions between women’s inclusion in nationalist discourse and their exclusion from political decision making. Others have explored women’s active role in nationalist movements. Masculinities have received surprisingly little attention in these publications.2

Protection or Path Toward Revolution

Although the current wave of historical scholarship on black power has only begun to explore the richness and diversity of this movement, it has already fundamentally altered our understanding of the African American freedom struggle. In popular memory, Black Power continues to be reduced to angry cries for self-defense that fostered violent race riots, betrayed the integrationist and nonviolent vision of earlier activism, and ultimately failed to achieve its seemingly unrealistic goals. In reality, as recent studies have shown, what came to be known as Black Power was a multidimensional movement with multilayered ideologies and agendas that accomplished much more than has been acknowledged. Black activists engaged in a wide range of political, cultural, and intellectual activism, which helped reinterpret African American identity and left a significant legacy that continues to shape American society to this day1

“We Were Going to Fight Fire with Fire”: Black Power in the South

For many students of the 1960s, June 16, 1966 continues to mark the beginning of the history of Black Power in America. That day, Stokely Carmichael, the young and flamboyant chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), introduced two words that would dominate the memory of the black freedom movement in the following decades. Standing on a wooden makeshift podium in Greenwood, Mississippi, which was one stop on the Meredith March’s tour across the Magnolia state, Carmichael told some 600 blacks that the “only way” to stop white racists from “whuppin* ” African Americans would be “to take over.” “What we gonna start saying now,” he shouted, “is Black Power!” This exclamation struck a chord with his audience. It roared back in unison: “Black Power!”1 Listening to the angry chants of Carmichael and seeing armed members of the Deacons for Defense and Justice—a black self-defense organization from Louisiana—protect the march, puzzled observers feared the dawn of a new and violent era. To many, Black Power seemed to symbolize both an abrupt rupture with the nonviolent and integration ist vision of Martin Luther King and the advent of violent upheavals in northern black communities. In the following decades many historians adopted and perpetuated this interpretation, portraying the black freedom movement’s radicalization as a sudden, essentially northern, phenomenon that seemed to betray the ideals of the southern civil rights struggle.2

Protection or Path Toward Revolution?: Black Power and Self-Defense

This article examines the evolution of the ideology and practice of armed self-defense in the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Comparing self-defense tactics in the southern civil rights movement with armed militancy in the Black Power movement, the article argues that there were both continuities and discontinuities between these two phases of the Black freedom struggle. The fact that African-American activists relied on armed protection long before the advent of Black Power clearly contradicts the long-held notion that 1966 marks a sudden renunciation of Martin Luther Kings nonviolent philosophy. Compared with the pragmatic necessity to protect Black communities against racist terrorists in the South, however, the self-defense efforts of Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party tended to play a more symbolic role and served primarily as a means of affirming black manhood, gaining publicity, and recruiting new members.