This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Essential reading for anyone teaching about the Civil Rights Movement, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed calls into question much of what we think we know about non-violence and the agency of African Americans in the South. Cobb writes not only as a journalist, but also from his firsthand experience as a SNCC field secretary in Mississippi who played a lead role in launching Freedom Schools. Cobb presents a bottom-up history, drawing as he explains on the thinking “of Freedom Movement veterans who have formed the intellectual spine of this book.” 

Hodding Carter III said: “Read it and be reminded that history is not a record etched in stone by journalists and academics, but a living stream, fed and redirected by the bottom-up witness of its participants.”

Credit: Written by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Published by Basic Books, 2014.