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We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Akinyele Omowale Umoja. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University and a participant in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenges the traditional interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement as committed to nonviolence. Concentrating his study upon oral histories of the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, Umoja emphasizes a tradition of self-defense among blacks in Mississippi in resistance to the efforts of the white power structure to foster fear and intimidation in the post-Civil War South. Umoja argues that armed resistance drew upon the image of the "Bad Negro" who was outspoken and aggressive in opposition to white intimidation. Thus, he concludes, "Armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement" (2).
Following the murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1954, Umoja describes how Medgar Evers assumed the leadership of black resistance in Mississippi. As a public representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Evers denounced violence. Umoja, however, insists that Evers was actually a "Bad Negro," who posed as a "trickster," for in reality Evers advocated self-defense and traveled the state...