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This Nonviolent Stuff Ll Get You Killed Analysis

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Former student activist and SNCC field Secretary Charles Cobb, acknowledges that guns were imperative to the Freedom Movement. Cobb asserts in his book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed as well as in his interview with Eddie Conway--that guns are left out of the conversation but black people have owned guns since the ending of the civil war. Guns were used since the Reconstruction era against white supremacist organizations. In his interview with Eddie Conway Cobb states that guns fit into the story of the freedom movement because guns were a part of the culture, people would use to protect themselves and feed their families. Being that guns were a part of everyday life in the rural south, it should not be surprising that black people …show more content…

While guns made the civil rights and freedom movement possible — Cobb admits in his interview that, there is a missed lesson. Cobb believes that what truly defines the freedom movement was not solely guns, but grassroots organizing in rural communities in the south. When discussing the violent eruption on East Eight Street Cobb writes, “As it had in the white community, word of the arrests had spread rapidly through the black community, who felt that James’s life and possibly his mother’s life were in peril” (Cobb). Over one hundred black people organized the night that white police officers and white supremacists went out looking for James Stephenson and his mother. Black people organized themselves and were ready to protect each other and their community using guns as self-defense. However, if it were not for guns, the black community would not have been able to organize the way it had during the Freedom Movement. The students who travelled to Mississippi and other southern states during this time eventually became the students Ella Baker organized into SNCC. These students were protected while utilizing grassroots organizing by southern black people who owned guns post war. Cobb recognizes organizing as tradition within the black community stemming from slavery through the freedom movement to present day

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