Thread by @michaelharriot

We should use the birthday of El-Hajj Malik Shabazz to disabuse ourselves of 2 things that MOST people believe:

1. The Civil Rights Movement = Nonviolent resistance
2. Nonviolent resistance was the sole reason laws changed

(A thread)

First of all, I understand the major reasons why this happens:

White people teach most of us our history.

In the whitewashed version of black history, the MLK was a civil rights activist but not Malcolm X. The NAACP was a civil rights organization but not the Black Panthers

MLK believed in armed self-defense. Malcolm X believed in nonviolent resistance. They BOTH had different strategies to achieve this but white history would have you believe they were diametrically opposed.

That's why I HATE the phrase: "More Malcolm than Martin."

For instance, who do you think owned more guns: Malcolm or Martin?

That notorious photo of Malcolm with an M1 rifle was taken after Malcolm X's house was firebombed with his wife and children in it.

After MLK's house was firebombed, other activists described it as an "arsenal"

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a white activist came to visit and MLK had to stop him from sitting down because the guy was about to sit on one of Martin's guns.

He even applied for a concealed weapon permit in Alabama.

But MANY, if not most, of the civil rights leaders at the time also armed themselves. They were for nonviolence UNLESS it threatened their lives or their family's lives.

But what did Malcolm believe?

I'll let him tell you:

I understand that the whitewashed history makes people equate Civil Rights activists with "nonviolence" because negroes with guns are scary.

But they also save our lives when white people were at their worst. So let's go back to the beginning:

After the War to Protect Slavery, one of the first things white Confederates tried to do was disarm black freedmen. They even formed an organization and called it the KKK.

One of the misunderstood notions is that Confederates soldiers were different from the KKK.

Contrary to popular belief, at that time, they were no different. The didn't even have membership cards or t-shirts!

They were often prevented from wearing their uniforms by the troops who occupied the South. So what would they wear?

Whatever white people wore.

That white hood shit was something they wore in parades to represent the ghosts of Confederates
But when Miss. governor James Vardaman said: “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy,” he wasn't wearing a robe

Because the Confederates were the same as the KKK, business owners wouldn't sell black people guns, and they needed them for protection

One man who worked for the Freedman's Bureau said "where might I get a gun?" was the most common question he was asked.

So when the KKK/Confederates went wild, Union Ttroops, a lot of them black, had to occupy the South, specifically to protect black people. But the KKKonfederates weren't JUST trying to stop black voters, they were trying to stop black gun owners from nonviolent resisters.

And black people resisted...

With guns.

In Arkansas, the feds took the right to vote away from KKKonfederates and simultaneously created a majority-black State Guard

You know those white boys were mad. The KKK literally went the Ark. Guard for 5 years.

When the KKK tried to lynch people in Hamburg SC, the black people posted up andsent the governor a letter that basically said:

"Look, these white boys acting a fool. You better commission us as National Guardsmen because, we're gonna protect ourselves either way."

In Mississippi, EVERYBODY had guns — white people, black people etc.

Now you can paint this as protection, but these black people were being lynched and killed because they were exercising their right to vote and bear arms.

It was a CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.

After black soldiers fought in WWI, many of them came home refusing to acquiesce to whiteness. They would do crazy stuff like look white men in the eye and call them by their first names.

They called themselves the "new negro" - who thought of themselves as equal to whites.

The attitudes of these "uppity" black men angered whites so much that they began a terror crusade. This is, in large par, what caused the Red Summer of 1919

And the reason many of these were called "race riots" is because, for the first time, black people started shooting back.

In Washington DC, whites were upset after a black man was arrested for raping a white woman so they started attacking black people. Then police joined in. It got so bad, the president had to send in the National Guard.

Why?

Because, when the smoke cleared, 15 people were dead

10 of them were white.

In Indianapolis, hundreds of white kids came to a park and began beating any black person they saw with bricks and bats.

A few black kids ran from the park to a man named Nathan Weathers' house. Hundreds of white kids surrounded Nathan's house.

So Nathan just started shooting.

The Garfield Riot ended with two people shot...

The white people.

In Coatesville Pennsylvania, whites had already lynched one man a few years prior. So when a white girl ended up dead, nearly everyone in Coatesville grabbed their guns.

Most people say the CRM to the 50s but this was the beginning of the rise of the NAACP and the anti-lynching movement that would morph into the civil rights movement.

Women like Ida B. Wells and Mary Talbert finally convinced legislators to pass an anti-lynching law.

I'm just bullshitting. It took Congress a LONG time to pass anti-lynching legislation. How long?

A couple months ago.

Seriously, the first anti-lynching law was passed in Feb 2020.

So why did lynching die down? There is only one logical answer to that question:

Black people started killing them back. There was no legislation, no Supreme Court ruling or national wypipo conference call that made white people stop killing black people. People had protested for years.

It wasn't nonviolent resistance.

But MLK singlehandedly got the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act passed, right?

That's not how this works.

That's not how anything works.

First of all, we've been led to believe that all the good negroes were down with nonviolent resistance except for a few belligerent blacks in the black power movement who wanted to kill whitey.

The reality is much more complex

First of all, nearly ALL of the leading figures in the black power movement started out in groups like the NAACP, CORE, etc. And they were NOT separate.

Stokely Carmichael made the phrase "black power" popular while working with the Student NONVIOLENT Coordinating Committee

He was registering voters when he created the mascot for the Black Panthers.

He succeeded the PRESIDENT of the SNCC

It was the SAME MOVEMENT

And contrary to popular belief, by the mid 60's a lot of activists had started to think that nonviolent shit didn't work. It was about 50-50

Now, I know that sounds like I'm trying to day people were leaving the movement for nonviolent resistance in droves. I'm not. Here's why.

MOST PEOPLE WERE NEVER IN IT.

We've been led to believe that, but MOST people thought of nonviolent resistance as a tactic used by certain groups. It was not an all-encompassing philosophy embraced by even the MAJORITY of Black America

For instance, here's a quote:

"I never was a true believer in nonviolence, but was willing to go along with it for the sake of the strategy and goals. However, we heard that James Chaney had been beaten to death before they shot him...

"The thought of being beat up, jailed, or even being shot was one kind of thing. The thought of being beaten to death without being able to fight back put the fear of God in me. Also, I was my mother's only child and with some responsibility to go home in relatively one piece.

And I decided that it would be an unforgivable sin to willingly let someone kill my mother's only child without a fight. So I acquired an automatic handgun to sit in the top of that outstanding black patent and tan leather handbag that I carried."

Who said that?

Cynthia Washington, former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

It was a STRATEGY. WHy do you think King and others had to do as much convincing and training for black folks as he had to do for white folks.

And PART of the reason that those landmark laws passed was because they knew that pacifist shit was being thrown out of the window.

We learn about MLK and not about people like the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams, or the NC Black Armed Guard.

Those groups who believed in Armed Resistance contributed as much to the Civil Rights movement as the mass protests. Because the ideology of nonviolent resistance was not separate from the: "But if these motherfuckers try me" movement.

Here's how I know?

Remember all of those COINTELPRO documents that the FBI released?
When it came to who could be the biggest threat, J. Edgar Hoover determined that MLK could be a threat if he "abandoned his supposed obedience to white liberal doctrine (nonviolence)...

But I hate when nonviolent resistance is distilled to "nonviolence" because Martin Luther King Jr. resisted like a motherfucker and Malcolm X was nonviolent.

In fact, there is really only one group in America who has NEVER practiced "nonviolence'

You know who it is.

https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/1262772340313784321