Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle

As Mark Phillips has proposed, self-emancipation as a normative principle of just political practice can at least on occasion be justified on the basis of "self-defense." As historical support for this view, I would recommend a superb recent study by Christopher Strain: Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (University of Georgia Press, 2005). Strain argues in this book that we need to rethink the hard-and-fast distinction sometimes drawn between, say, King's pacifism and the various criticisms of nonviolence as a strategy made by Malcolm X (but also Robert Williams before him and the Black Panthers after him). In fact, as Strain argues, King and Malcolm X (and Williams and the Black Panthers) shared a commitment to self-defense (and, I would add, SE).