Mandy Vincent

Propaganda Analysis
Assignment #6
1 April 2014

When Civil Blood Makes Civil Hands Unclean
The Civil Rights Movement was really a time of time of multiple movements, all of
which were claiming to protect the rights of its constituents: The Black Panthers, who
claimed that violence was necessary to protect the oppressed blacks who were being
attacked by the white police; the Ku Klux Klan, who believed that violence was necessary to
win back their South from the blacks who threatened to take it away from the whites; and
the movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed that peaceful and nonviolent
protest was necessary to unite blacks and whites in order to give blacks social and legal
equality in the United States. All of these movements believed that they were completely
justified in their actions, because they all believed that what they were doing was a last
resort, and that they had no better choice.
The Black Panther Party was originally called the Black Panther Party of Self-
Defense, which gives insight into their motivations and beliefs. The Black Panthers saw the
injustice with which the police were treating blacks, and they felt that the only way to end
the mistreatment of blacks was to prove that blacks could fight back. Huey P. Newton
characterizes the movement by saying, As the racist police escalate the war in our
communities against black people, we reserve the right to self-defense and maximum
retaliation. In the eyes of the Black Panthers, the war happening on the streets of the U.S.
was just as real as the war happening in Vietnam, and if violence was necessary for ending
injustice there, it was just as necessary at home.
Another group that saw their actions as acts of war was the Ku Klux Klan. In their
minds, the Civil War had created another war in which blacks were invading and taking
over the South, and in order to prevents blacks from oppressing the whites, the KKK saw it
as self-defense to use extreme scare tactics, violence, and even homicide to maintain white
supremacy in the South. Even acts as extreme as homicides were seen as morally
acceptable because they were seen as counterviolence, not unwarranted aggression. Their
deaths were executions, and they were seen as necessary to save the South from the
anarchy of Black rule, according to the film Birth of a Nation. This war mentality meant
that acts that would normally be morally appalling were warranted.
In the eyes of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his movement, the only justifiable defense
for the mistreatment of black in the U.S. was non-violence, because violence would only
beget more violence. Instead of seeing people as the enemy, MLK turned his opposition
against abstract ideas, making it possible for both whites and blacks to be on the same side.
He appealed to the morality and religion of those who heard him, drawing on his
background as a Christian preacher to stir up a change in attitude in the American people.
By turning the enemy into an idea rather than a group of people, Dr. King maintained a
non-violent war against inequality.
All three of these movements believed that their actions were completely necessary
and justified given the circumstances. And while we only see one of these movements as
being successful, all contributed to the eventual legal equality of whites and blacks in the
United States: the violent movements provided contrast to the peaceful, supporting the
idea that violence does not solve problems, but only begets more of them. Though Dr.
Kings movement was controversial, it became a reasonable and docile alternative to
extreme violence, and was most conducive to creating lasting change that benefitted
everyone. Though seen as justifiable by its perpetrators, violence was not the answer to the
problem of racial inequality in the United States.