was looking around and found this:
https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/35506/5/Stewart_Kierstin_2016_thesis.pdf
A thesis written by this negress: http://www.caymanreporter.com/2015/09/25/museum-assistant-wraps-summer-tenure/
Red this part of her paper: The disruption to racial segregation that Southerners were so accustomed to in daily lives
appeared as a radical change, and therefore nonviolence can be seen as radical form of protest.
As a result, communist accusations on the movement were enacted in an attempt to quell the
activity in Southern States. By understanding how non-violent Civil Rights could be described as
radical or revolutionary we also expose the complexities of Civil Rights strategies and why
nonviolent activism was tied to communism. From the late 1950s some black activists had begun
119 Published as Martin Luther King Jr., “ Our Struggle” Liberation 1 (April 1956), 3-6.
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to develop the attitude that non-violence was a passive form of protest and in order to achieve
rights for blacks a more aggressive position. Black activists like Robert F. Williams and Stokely
Carmichael began their careers participating in non-violent protests, but once hit by the terrorism
of white extremism in the South they switched to the strategy of armed defense.120 Although
non-violence was a nonaggressive tactic in the violent sense, it did intimidate and reposition the
foundation of Southern society. Historian Wesley Hogan argues that non-violent protest is
largely misinterpreted as a docile form of resistance, yet it did provide people with a “concrete
way to act, a way forward […] it tore down the southern caste system – permanently.”121 Black
intellectuals participating in non-violent protest of the late 50s made note of its radical elements.
Bayard Rustin wrote in 1956 on the revolutionary change in black culture in leadership through
the non-violent system stating, “OUR CHURCH IS BECOMING MILITANT. Twenty-four
ministers were arrested in Montgomery. Each had said publicly that he stands prepared to be
arrested again”.122 Rustin shows that the change from respectability politics that dictated the
reactions of black activists in the past to black activists willing to be arrested for change, thus
demonstrating the “radical” attitude growing within the freedom movement by the late 50s.
Although 1960s Black Power radicals viewed non-violence as a passive form of resistance,
again, to white segregationists the overturn of their society’s status quo was deemed a major
threat. In There Goes My Everything historian Jason Sokol emphasizes that to white Southerners
the move to end segregation in their minds was a move to change “their racial attitudes and
habitual patterns of discrimination […] confront, at the very least, the fact that their cherished
120 Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns (reiss. 1998, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962.), 4;
Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely Carmichael: A Life (New York: Persus Books Group, 2014), 87-101. 121 Wesley Hogan, “Freedom Now: Nonviolence in the Southern Freedom Movement 1960-1964” in Emilye
Crosby, ed. Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2011), 188.
122 Martin Luther King Jr, “ Our Struggle,” 4.
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way of life seemed gone for good”.123 A 1958 book entitled Red Intrigue and Race Turmoil
outlines the social situation in the South in connection to a communist conspiracy. Sponsored by
a right wing conservative organization Alliance Inc, the author Zygmund Dobbs warns that the
Communist Party of America in connection with the Soviet Union’s instructions to incite a race
war was orchestrating the fight for integration in the South.124 For example, Dobbs argues that
“the red leadership was able to aid the NAACP in its ‘organizing miracles’ of 1957 – 58”.125 By
“organizing miracles” Dobbs is referring to the mass trend of non-violent resistance in Southern
States. Thus, the popularity of the nonviolent Civil Rights strategy appeared revolutionary to
white conservative Americans in a subversive sense.