Timothy B. Tyson's astonishing biography of Robert F. Williams, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1994), continues to loom large over the history of the southern struggle for civil and human rights. Radio Free Dixie arguably did more than any other single text to redefine our understanding of the relationship between nonviolence and self-defense among African American activists. In placing its subject at the center of the southern movement, Tyson helped lay to rest the popular assumption that this social movement was defined by nonviolence. Two recent books demonstrate that we are far from the end of this line of inquiry into the nature of African American protest in the late twentieth century.

Charles Cobb Jr. offers an able grassroots history of the role that armed self-reliance played in southern black communities in the civil rights era. Cobb was a field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who participated in the justly celebrated movement in Mississippi, and is particularly keen to debunk the myth that black Christianity was wedded to nonviolence. Instead, he argues, many black southerners relied on an Old Testament-style understanding of power and vengeance, bolstered by their knowledge of the US Constitution. One of his Mississippian hosts, Joe McDonald, for example, found himself emboldened to order his mayor, a trigger-happy racist named Charles Dorrough, to return his gun after learning from his young wards that he had a Constitutional right to his own weapon. Dorrough had confiscated it on spurious grounds and McDonald demanded its return while brandishing a copy of the Constitution provided him by Cobb. That he could not actually read the document himself and that he received his gun without incident offers compelling evidence of the impact that SNCC's staff had on the local people they encountered. Peppered with such individual tales, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed is a breezy read that will be welcomed by undergraduate students. Its narrative includes sections on the Mississippi movement, Robert F. Williams, and the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense, and places particular emphasis on SNCC's organizing initiatives. Its analysis of civil rights historiography is somewhat perplexing, however. Cobb argues that historians have failed to understand the complex web of philosophies that defined the southern response to white supremacy, most importantly the centrality of armed resistance and an inattention to grassroots history. Such a complaint is of a historiography that no student of the civil rights movement would now recognize. Curiously, Cobb himself makes use of many of the key texts that overturned the very orthodoxy that he rejects. The personal accounts that bookend the text, however, suggest that Cobb's historical narrative conceals a deeper and more meaningful personal history. In mostly silencing his own voice, Cobb deprives us of his unique insight into the movement's development in the 1960s, most importantly his observations about the Mississippi movement and SNCC's decline after the election of Stokely Carmichael, and the organization's final, wholesale rejection of nonviolence.

Civil rights scholars are more likely to embrace Kenneth Robert Janken's angry, impassioned The Wilmington Ten. Janken echoes numerous strands of Tyson's work, including the complex interplay between moderate and radical elements of the African American struggle and the national and international dimensions of what initially appeared to be a local issue. At the core of The Wilmington Ten is the failure of North Carolina's education system to move beyond its begrudging response to desegregation orders and offer a truly equal education to all its citizens, and a coordinated attempt by the state authorities to railroad nine local men and one woman and leave them to rot in jail.

Janken traces the story of the Wilmington Ten back to the city's decision to close the black Williston High School and distribute its pupils between New Hanover and John T. Hoggard schools at the end of the 1968 school year. Wishing to placate the fears of any whites that their students would be forced to attend a black school, the city ensured that its black students were forced to integrate into preexisting educational communities. Few, if any, of the new black pupils received a friendly welcome. The only surprise is that it took until February 1971 for the tension to erupt. Four days of violence between white vigilante groups and local blacks saw two people killed and six injured, and over $500,000 of property damaged, including a white-owned store which occupied land close to one of the black community's churches. If this was not outrageous enough, the Ten were sentenced to prison for their alleged involvement in the violence. Thanks to a long-term campaign it became abundantly clear that the convictions were based on falsified evidence, perjury, and misconduct on the part of the state's prosecution.

Janken deftly links the Wilmington protests to the racial maelstrom that engulfed the nation in the previous decade. In the grand tradition of civil rights activism, Wilmington's African American students began their campaign against unfair treatment in the white schools with community meetings in a local church to discuss their grievances before agreeing on a boycott and the establishment of a parallel school structure that they controlled. It was only when the boycott failed that matters escalated. The protesters were animated also by insistences, influenced by the black power era, on their right to self-defense, the necessity for immediate action to alleviate the situation, and the belief that they were participating in an incipient revolution. That their list of demands replicated the ‘what-we-want–what-we-believe’ structure of the Black Panther Party's Ten Point Platform and Program was further evidence of their sympathies. Meanwhile, feeding off Nixon's law-and-order policies and the historic latitude gifted to whites who suppressed black protest, the authorities did little to prevent whites ratcheting up the tension and leading the descent into violence.

The trial that followed the Ten's arrest was a perversion of justice. When he discovered that neither of the original choices were to his liking, the prosecution attorney feigned illness to prompt a mistrial and recruit a new judge and jury. The prosecution's star witness had clearly been coached by the police prior to the trial and repeatedly lied under oath. The jury took three hours to find all the defendants guilty on all counts, and the Ten received sentences that totaled over 280 years. The campaign to free them united radicals and nationalists across the US before going international, enlisting the support of Amnesty International and a network of European human rights activists. It eventually embroiled both the Soviet Union and President Carter in the case. The state authorities, including Governor James B. Hunt, however, resisted the Ten's claims to freedom at every opportunity. Even after the Ten were freed in 1980, full pardons were not granted until 2012, when only six remained alive.

The tragedy of the Wilmington Ten's story is that, even discounting the years of imprisonment they endured, the Ten suffered in so many ways after winning their freedom. Janken's heartbreaking concluding chapter outlines the lasting effects of their disgraceful treatment. Perhaps in an attempt to preempt criticism, Janken admits here to the book's most serious flaw, which is its tendency to see the Ten as a homogeneous bloc rather than a collection of individuals. Without their testimony, readers seeking a more personal touch will have to turn to Wayne Moore's memoir, Triumphant Warrior: Memoir of a Soul Survivor of the Wilmington Ten (2014), or hope that the unpublished memoirs of his comrades find their way into the public arena. Even so, any reader of The Wilmington Ten will close the book reminded in stark terms that the moral arc of the universe might bend toward justice but its progress toward this goal is far from straightforward.