We Will Shoot Back builds upon an important and growing body of scholarship that challenges a narrow conceptualization of civil rights activism, countering the dominant interpretation of the southern Black freedom struggles as an overwhelmingly peaceful and non-violent response to the violence of white supremacy.  Akinyele Umoja’s focus on armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom struggles complements the work of historian Hasan Jeffries (2009), emphasizing the rootedness of the southern Black freedom struggles in rural communities, and complicating the rigid separation between Civil Rights and Black Power that scholars so frequently draw.  Umoja defines armed resistance broadly, to include the use of force for “protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights” (page 7). He cautions against a fetishization of guns, which are “merely technology utilized during a particular moment in history” (page 8). Through the focus on armed resistance, however, Umoja is able to emphasize the brutality and scale of the violence that activists faced.  The author does not argue that the work of well-known organizations like the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was ineffective—rather, he argues that armed resistance provided the space for such organizations to operate.

By tracing armed resistance beyond the narrow temporal confines of the traditionally-defined “civil rights era,” We Will Shoot Back challenges the Whiggish narrative of the triumphant civil rights movement—in which federal intervention effectively rendered the freedom struggles successful and no longer necessary. Umoja argues that the role of armed resistance in Black freedom struggles cannot be interpreted entirely through Western philosophical constructs.  Armed resistance frustrates attempts to interpret the freedom struggles primarily as a liberal mobilization for “first-class citizenship”. By centering his analysis within a tradition of movements for self-determination, Umoja contributes to scholarship that examines the relationship between the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, rather than emphasizing Black Power as a complete disjuncture from the Civil Rights movement.

The first chapter sets the stage for the remainder of the book by emphasizing the role of violence and fear in securing white dominance in the post-Civil War period, as well as the means of Black resistance. During Reconstruction, Black militias served as a force against white terror.  With their dismantling in 1875 and the defeat of Reconstruction, a system of racial control and suppression that would persist for almost a century was reinstated.   Along with the immediate physical effects, here Umoja emphasizes the psychological role of violence in maintaining white supremacy. Black resistance to white supremacist violence and control took many forms, from separatism and evasion to direct confrontation, and formed the foundations of subsequent movement activism.

Chapter two focuses on the support for armed resistance of movement leaders T.R.M. Howard and Medgar Evers during the 1950s. Howard was the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and was a wealthy doctor in the rural Black community of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.  Umoja uses Howard to demonstrate that the grounds for resistance during the narrowly defined Civil Rights Era were based upon economic and social structures built in Black communities during previous decades.  Medgar Evers, who became head of the Mississippi NAACP during the 1950s, was also a proponent of armed resistance to white supremacy. A student of the Mau Mau anti-British colonial movement in Kenya, Evers considered the possibility of establishing a coordinated guerilla movement in Mississippi. Like other movement leaders, however, Evers was concerned with losing the support of white northern liberals, and made the decision to publically disavow Black retaliatory violence. For Evers and others, however, non-violence was a tactical decision rather than a philosophical commitment.

Chapter three explores the complex relationship between explicitly non-violent civil rights organizations and armed resistance. Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was institutionally committed to nonviolence, Umoja argues that local activists were far less likely to disavow armed resistance entirely. SNCC voter registration and other civil rights efforts, moreover, were enabled by the land and armed protection of Black farmers.  These experiences with rural southern willingness to counter violence with violence, Umoja argues, abetted and influenced the organizational approach of SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Chapter four traces the internal debates within CORE and SNCC over armed resistance, and follows the rise of revolutionary Black Nationalism within the Mississippi civil rights movement. The sheer scope of racial terror that activists encountered made nonviolence increasingly untenable even as Black Mississippians were becoming increasingly skeptical of the response of the federal government. 1964, Umoja argues, marked the “beginning of the end of nonviolence,” as many in the major civil rights organizations began to question the feasibility of nonviolence as a movement commitment.

Chapters five and six focus upon the role of Black paramilitary organization and “enforcer squads” in demonstrations and consumer boycotts. This “Natchez model,” Umoja argues, would become the model for social movement organization in Mississippi from its 1965 organization through 1979. Natchez, a center of plantation agriculture, had industrialized by the 1960s but retained the institutional racism and deep inequality of the plantation economy.  As Black Natchez residents organized to combat pervasive racism, the paramilitary organization served to counter white violence, including Klan activity, and the enforcer squad ensured that the boycott would be upheld.  Umoja acknowledges the masculinism of the paramilitary organization, but emphasizes that many Black women were also actively engaged in armed self-defense. Umoja turns in chapter six to the rise of Black Power in response to the shooting of James Meredith during his “March against Fear”. The shooting sparked disagreement between SNCC, who wanted the Deacons for Defense to accompany marchers, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who maintained his commitment to non-violence.

Chapter seven traces the development of armed resistance in Mississippi in to the 1970s, following the development of the Black United Front and the Republic of New Africa.  Rudy Shields, who had been active in boycotts in Natchez and Belzoni, helped organize the Black United Front as a radical organizational vehicle to bring together Black activists. The Provisional Government of the People’s Republic of New Africa was formed by associates of Malcolm X in Detroit, who aimed to form an independent Black republic in a group of contiguous majority-Black rural counties in Mississippi. The Republic of New Africa intended to establish economic cooperatives, and were committed to armed self-defense.  Republic of New Africa members, however, had trouble acquiring land in Mississippi, and many members were imprisoned after an FBI raid on their headquarters.

The repression of the People’s Government of the Republic of New Africa hampered its capacity as a vehicle for Black Power activism in Mississippi. Nationalist Black Power activism had practically disappeared in Mississippi by the mid-seventies. This, however, did not put an end to the Mississippi Black freedom struggles. In the final chapter, Umoja focuses on the United League of Mississippi and radical Black organization through the late 1970s.  Through consumer boycotts and mobilizations against police brutality and Klan intimidation, the United League built upon an established tradition of militant activism. It countered fear and oppression through armed resistance and community mobilization.

The book should be of interest to scholars of violence, racism, and anti-racist movements.  The fact that Umoja’s focus on empirical detail often comes at the expense of theoretical development, however, might limit its usefulness to readers who are not engaged with the specific empirical focus of the Black freedom struggles in the United States South. Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (1995), which Umoja draws heavily upon, is a more accessible introduction to scholarship on the Mississippi freedom struggles.  While Umoja acknowledges masculinist currents within armed resistance, We Will Shoot Back lacks a sustained engagement with gender as a mode through which racialized violence is experienced and resisted. Finally, while Umoja’s detailed engagement with the role of armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom struggles could complicate analyses of the relationship between race, modes of capital accumulation (particularly the plantation), and the resistance to such projects, engagement with the political-economic components of the freedom struggles is limited. Clyde Woods’ (1998; 2007) theorization of the contested hegemony of plantation racism in the Mississippi Delta could be put in productive conversation with We Will Shoot Back.  Unfortunately, however, Umoja fails to draw upon, or even cite, Woods.

By emphasizing often-neglected modes of resistance to racism in the South, We Will Shoot Back can be seen as a crucial contribution to McKittrick’s call for attention to “plantation futures”—“ a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors and, consequently, brings into sharp focus the ways the plantation is an ongoing locus of anti-black violence and death” (McKittrick, 2013: 2-3).

Neither the racist violence nor the Black radical organizing traditions which Umoja describes have dissolved in recent decades. In 2013, the late Chokwe Lumumba, a former member of the Republic of New Africa who makes several appearances in Umoja’s book, became mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  Lumumba’s candidacy was a part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s “Jackson Plan” for “self-determination, participatory democracy, and economic justice” (MXGM, 2012). Though Lumumba died early in his term, his candidacy was built upon the same revolutionary organizing traditions that Umoja details in his book. At his inauguration, Lumumba shouted the Republic of New Africa slogan “free the land!” (Buschamp, 2014). The second half of that slogan, “by any means necessary,” is a central subject of Umoja’s book.  Umoja’s attention to the many modes of land-based resistance in the Mississippi freedom struggles, including those that sit uneasily with the dominant memory of the “civil rights movement,” make it easier to comprehend the possibility of such “plantation futures” amidst the intensity of the racial violence of the US carceral state. 

References

Buschamp H (2014) Jackson mourns mayor with militant past who won over skeptics. New York Times, 10 March. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/jackson-mourns-mayor-with-militant-past-who-won-over-skeptics.html.

Jeffries HK (2009) Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. New York: New York University Press.

McKittrick K (2013) Plantation Futures. Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17: 1-15.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (2012) The Jackson Plan: A struggle for self-determination, participatory democracy, and economic justice. Available online at: https://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice

Payne CM (1995) I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Woods CA (1998) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.

Woods CA (2007) Sittin' on top of the world: the challenges of Blues and Hip Hop geography. In: K McKittrick and C Woods (eds) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines, pp 46-81.