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
A bold and
exciting historical narrative of the armed resistance of Black
soldiers of the Mississippi Freedom Movement
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.
