We Will Shoot Back Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement [Hardcover]

Winner of the 2014 Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award presented by the National Council of Black Studies

Winner of the 2014 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.

This riveting historical narrative reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.

Timely and timeless. . . . Expands our understanding of the hidden narratives of Mississippi's black armed resistance groups scattered through generations. Akinyele Umojas marvelously rich and exhaustive study of Mississippi will radically transform the debate about the role of nonviolence within the civil rights movement, proving that armed self-defense actually saved lives, reduced terrorist attacks on African American communities, and laid the foundation for unparalleled community solidarity. We Will Shoot Back is decidedly not a romantic celebration of gun culture, but a sometimes sobering, sometimes beautiful story of self-reliance and self-determination and a peoples capacity to sustain a movement against all odds. This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature tol“#