It is sometimes difficult to believe that it is fifteen years since Tim Tyson's Radio Free Dixie transformed the historiography of Black Power and the civil rights movement. The shockwaves of Tyson's majestic biography of the African American freedom fighter and staunch self-defense advocate Robert F. Williams still resonate today. Akinyele Umoja's account of armed resistance in Mississippi is further testament to the enduring significance of armed resistance strategies to the African American population of the South. For Umoja, armed resistance – which he distinguishes from self-defense by arguing that the former is an umbrella term encompassing self-defense, guerrilla action, rebellion and armed struggle – was a critical strategy for tackling white supremacy, and was crucial in protecting both lives and property from Reconstruction times onwards. Moreover, he states that without such backing, the many initiatives led by civil rights organizations such as SNCC and the NAACP would never have begun, let alone succeeded.

Umoja places considerable emphasis on the close relationship between Mississippian civil rights activists and their security forces during the 1950s. When NAACP activists Amzie Moore, Ruby Hurley and Medgar Evers traversed the Delta to investigate the murder of Emmett Till, they were accompanied by armed guards. Similarly, Mississippi NAACP stalwarts Amzie Moore and E. W. Steptoe had ample supplies of guns and ammunition in their homes. Evers, Umoja notes, was assassinated on a night when he returned home without his regular security detail. This inattention to his own safety might well have given Evers's murderers the opportunity they craved. Umoja argues that Evers was far more complex than the nonviolent leader of legend; rather he was fully cognizant of the role that firearms played in preserving the lives of African American political activists in Mississippi, and deserves positioning alongside his comrade Robert F. Williams as a shining beacon of African American armed resistance. This highlights one of Umoja's major themes: while many Mississippians owned and were prepared to use guns, they rarely presented them in public, instead reserving them for moments of severe danger. This private life was as vital to their survival as their public face.

We Will Shoot Back presents 1964 and 1965 as the major turning points in the Mississippian struggle. SNCC's 1964 Mississippi Summer Project provoked impassioned debates within the organization and some locals over the role of guns in both the organization and the black community. “Freedom Summer” witnessed the last stand of nonviolence within SNCC and exerted a powerful influence over future events in the state. The open promotion of an armed response to white supremacy took root in Natchez soon after the project concluded. Umoja persuasively demonstrates that the adoption of open armed resistance in Natchez during 1965 is a defining moment both in the Mississippi movement and in the wider transformation of the African American struggle. Where many histories suggest that the 1966 Meredith March (during which Kwame Ture first popularized the “Black Power” slogan) was a watershed in the decline of nonviolence in the South, Umoja indicates that we should turn our attention to this earlier manifestation of Black Power if we are truly to understand this pivotal moment in African American history. Thanks in part to the Natchez movement, armed resistance continued to be a salient feature of Mississippian activism through the late 1970s, a fascinating and often forgotten story that brings Umoja's narrative to a close.

We Will Shoot Back compellingly reminds readers that armed resistance was a central feature of twentieth-century African American political organizing. Its accessible style and wealth of oral history evidence will doubtless bolster the book's appeal to students of the Mississippi movement. It also reminds us of the brutality which upheld white supremacy in the state. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” crop up regularly in the text, an entirely appropriate description of those who sought (and still seek) to prevent African Americans exercising their citizenship rights. The book stands as a testament not only to the men and women who took up arms in order to protect themselves, but also to those who remained steadfast in their adherence to nonviolent practice in the face of white terror in the Magnolia State.