True Left

If we believed the whitewashed, safe-for-work version of the civil rights struggle, we would believe that a lone white man killed Emmett Till, jolting Black people out of a dreamlike state to suddenly realize that we didn’t have all the rights afforded to us by the U.S. Constitution. In response, Martin Luther King convinced everyone to hold hands and march peacefully until he could remember his dream. When he told the world about it at the March on Washington, America suddenly saw the error if its ways and handed Black people their humanity and everyone lived happily ever after.

That is the Cliffs Notes version of the civil rights struggle that exists in our collective whitewashed memory and is sold in social studies classes across America. Through a complex combination of whitewashing, guilt, and an intentional recasting of history that absolves them of their hatred, our historical translators have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a struggle for Black liberation that was eventually fulfilled by America’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic ahistorical myth that somehow became truth. They remember a socially conservative, respectable campaign of racial reconciliation, not a movement of anti-establishment revolutionaries. And for their sake, the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple “nonviolence.” They never speak of the “resisting.”

As long as America has existed, Black men and women have been engaged in a fight for full equality and liberty. But unlike the fairy-tale version would have you believe, the struggle has never been passive, nor has Black resistance been nonviolent. In their quest to “get free,” Black people have always availed themselves of the right to self-defense and armed resistance. Of course, this would lead to them being characterized as criminals or malcontents. There is a difference between how one chooses to defend oneself and how one chooses to address social, economic, and political inequality through protest. The former is a personal choice, while the latter is an organizing strategy. The truth is, peaceful protest was just one tactic used by a small arm of what we call the civil rights movement.