On Violence, Nonviolence, and the Distortions of Black Political Action

• In Event: Black Political Thought (I)

Abstract

In 1972, when Swedish journalist Bo Holmström asked Angela Davis (in an interview held inside the San Rafael Prison as she awaited trial) about the role of “violence” in revolutionary struggle, Davis responded by tracing and refuting the embedded logics of his question. She tutored Holmström on what it meant to have friends killed by bombs planted by racists where she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and to have her sister’s good friends killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Davis explains that when people ask her this question about violence it signals a stunning racial innocence. Nine years earlier, James Baldwin faced a similar question in a 1963 interview on CBS just days after the SCLC’s Children’s Crusade was met by police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. Baldwin answered by rejecting the framework in which black freedom struggles are made to bear the questions of violence and nonviolence and in which the legitimacy of black people’s political demands is jeopardized by those questions. This paper examines Davis and Baldwin’s interview interventions, together with excerpts from Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ 2017 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist, to explore how the framework of “violence versus nonviolence” is invoked in national discourses in ways that obscure state and extralegal violence against black communities and attempt to corral and contain the meanings of black political action.

Author

• Lisa Beard, Western Washington University