In this article Robb reviews a new book entitled This non-violent stuff’ll get you killed - How Guns made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, by Charles E Cobb, Jr. Robb in his introduction writes:
This book, published earlier this year, sets out to correct the one-sided view of the place of ‘non-violence’ in the conventional account of the great US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The tradition of armed self-defence in Black communities predated the non-violent tactics, the author explains, played an important part in the struggle, and coexisted throughout with the non-violent protests. The title of the book comes from a warning given in 1964 by a Mississippi farmer, Hartman Turnbow, to the most famous practitioner of non-violence, Martin Luther King: “This non-violent stuff ain’t no good. It’ll get ya killed.”I've always suspected that the widespread propaganda which raised the tactic of non-violence to a fundamental principle in many US activist organizations was accomplished by stealth from agents, conscious or not, of the ruling class.