The speed with which paradigm shifts have been brought to bear on the historiography of the African American civil rights movement is startling. In the very recent past the prevailing view was of a movement steeped in Gandhian nonviolence, the deeply Christian ethos of which was occasionally punctured by discrete episodes of maverick-driven violence. After a tranche of work by scholars such as Timothy Tyson, Lance Hill, Jenny Walker, and Christopher Strain, however, those debates have moved on significantly: where historians once argued over whether there was any violence in the movement and concentrated on debating whether the predominant mode of nonviolence was persuasive or coercive, they now openly accept that violence was extensive and question instead whether it was the result of armed self-defence or militant aggression.

Simon Wendt's thoughtful, nuanced and tightly argued monograph is a significant addition to this new shelf of work in the library of civil rights studies. The fact that it would have been deemed truly groundbreaking less than a decade ago is testament to the speed and extent of those historiographical shifts. At a surface level, this study collects together in one place a number of episodes relating to armed resistance that close students of the movement will recognize from previously published secondary sources, most notably, perhaps, King's use of armed guards during the Montgomery bus boycott.

Those students may also question the extent to which a number of activists' memoirs are received uncritically here. Nonetheless, at a deeper, more analytical level this book offers originality. In a skilful blend of analysis and eye-catching anecdotes – ranging from Jack Palance's run-in with the Klan to the inept response to segregationist violence of a particularly hapless FBI agent – Wendt charts the evolution of armed self-defence from an era of purported nonviolence to the various incarnations of Black Power and militant black nationalism that followed. In doing so, he seeks to demolish a number of assumptions held by both contemporary activists and later historians.

Most importantly, Wendt shows that there was no binary choice between violence and nonviolence, for it was the parallel existence of armed defence groups that lent nonviolence so much of its potency and legitimacy. By the time militant nationalist groups were openly carrying weapons, armed resistance had become primarily philosophical rather than tactical. As a result, it not only lost its strategic edge, but also began to reveal more about attempted realizations of manhood than about political acumen.