SNCC

I woke up this morning thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And then I began thinking about Ella Baker, whose model of “group-centered leadership” I have recently been meditating on and writing about.

The announcement by the Obama administration that it will seek congressional authorization to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine did not generate the kind of muscular opposition and sense of urgency that one would expect from the anti-interventionist liberals and significant sectors of what use to be the anti-imperialist and anti-war left.

By providing a comprehensive history of African American resistance to white supremacy, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get you Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books 2014) makes a major contribution to black history. Author Charles E Cobb offers one of the few accounts of the 1960s Freedom Movement written from an African American perspective, often in the words of actual movement participants.
The main purpose of this book is threefold: