The other side of nonviolent resistance

WE REFUSE: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

Author: Kellie Carter Jackson

Publisher: Seal Press

Pages: 291

Price:  $30

In his 1958 memoir Stride Toward Freedom, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr laid out a series of principles — courage, friendship, spiritual transformation and so on — for combating racism and other forms of oppression. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ, King urged that the acceptance of suffering, even violence, without retaliation put one in accord with the universe and armed just people with the power to defeat hate.
 

The practitioners of nonviolence fought with “the weapon of love,” King wrote, and their method became a foundational tactic for many civil rights activists. Think of the 1950s and 1960s, when young men and women were shoved and spit on for sitting at lunch counters. Ideally, they simply waited out the assault without so much as raising a hand. Underlying this strategy is the hope, in King’s words, that “unearned suffering is redemptive” and can open the door to understanding.
 

Since the civil rights era, iterations of King’s nonviolent approach have remained the most familiar, acceptable and celebrated forms of opposition to racial oppression. You can see the roots of King’s philosophy of nonviolence in the marches and hashtags in the summer of 2020 after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others.
 

But is this singular approach the best that activists can do, even when fine-tuned for different generations or movements?
Where do they look for other models? In her compelling and often counterintuitive new book, We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson, a professor of Africana studies, argues that the usual chronicles of this resistance are both narrow and watered down. “Our culture’s fixation on nonviolence has caused us to miss entire histories of Black responses to white supremacy,” she writes. “Nonviolence on its own is not at all expansive enough to rectify the harm that has been caused by racism.”
 

Her book warns against the dangers of misremembering the past and offers a broader and more nuanced picture of resistance through the frame of refusal. It is “a halting hand, a pointed finger waving from side to side or a powerful raised fist. It is a barrier that prevents oppressed people from being consumed.”
 

She divides her exploration into five categories — revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. Her chapter on revolution centres on the Haitian Revolution. Beginning with a revolt of enslaved people in 1791, the uprising lasted 13 bloody years and led to the end of colonial rule in Haiti. The fighting inspired people from Brazil to Philadelphia to agitate for freedom and equality. In 1807, a nervous American government passed an act to make the international slave trade illegal.
 

Carter Jackson believes revolutions don’t always involve fatalities, but they must result in forfeiture and equitable redistribution of wealth and other resources. “At the core of revolution is structural change, not violence,” she writes.

Her chapter on protection covers the ingenuity of the Underground Railroad, and the chapter on flight presents the Great Migration as a mass abandonment by six to eight million Black Southerners who took their “skills, genius and artistry” with them. These concepts overlap and intersect. “Sometimes revolutions involve force,” Carter Jackson writes. “Sometimes flight is motivated by protection. Sometimes flight and force are joyful.”
 

The book is most effective in unearthing the stories of little-known, everyday rebellions, especially from the lives of Black women. These histories have been at best under-told, if not lost altogether. Her chapter on force is by far the sharpest, most convincing and surprising.
 

Force, a remedy of last resort, states Carter Jackson, can be a strike, a boycott, a vote — or it can be armed self-defence. Carter Jackson remembers stories of the men in Louisiana, including her grandmother’s brothers, who spent weekends in jail to protect themselves from being lynched. “The white men in town used to get drunk on weekends and hang Black folks,” Carter Jackson’s grandmother explained, “so if you were already in jail, you were safe.”
 

Throughout the chapter, Carter Jackson offers a catalogue of Black history heroes who owned guns, often unexpectedly so. In 1906, the scholar W E B Du Bois, who was teaching in Georgia and had considered himself a pacifist, bought a double-barrelled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells after a riot in Atlanta that left lynching victims hanging from lampposts. “If a white mob had stepped on the campus,” he wrote, “I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.”
 

Decades later, the voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer explained that she kept “a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Even the paragon of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks, sometimes had her kitchen table covered with guns, Carter Jackson writes, “in case of an emergency.”
 

Black women used guns to stop trouble, Carter Jackson asserts, not start it. “Rarely were guns fatal,” she says. “Instead, they nearly always served as warnings — bullets fired in the air to quickly quell the violent desires of the mob.”
 

Is Carter Jackson advocating armed resistance at the next protest? Her book is not an instruction manual for activists. But she does suggest that every era gets the protest movement it needs and deserves. History — complicated, clear-eyed and unrepentant — is her warning and her weapon of choice.

The reviewer is the author of  Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist ©2024 The New York Times News Service