In the mid-1950s prominent civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., embraced nonviolent resistance as not only a tactic for achieving immediate political goals, but also a moral philosophy consistent with Christianity. Dr. King’s ethic of nonviolent resistance was influenced by the political philosophy of Bayard Rustin, a fellow activist in the civil rights movement. Dr. King came to see it as a critical part of his “Beloved Community” ideology. He saw nonviolent resistance as vital to a specific way of life. However, not everyone in the Civil Rights Movement came to embrace King’s and Rustin’s ideas about nonviolent resistance.

In many cases, debates within the civil rights movement about nonviolent resistance focused not on its value as a philosophy, but on its viability as a tactic for achieving political goals. King had suggested that nonviolent direct action, when conducted in public and captured by media, would make the stakes of the civil rights movement visible to sympathetic audiences. These audiences would see how Black people’s fair and lawful requests were rejected by local white authorities and mobs, and would then pressure the federal government to change and enforce laws. In 1959, Dr. King and a fellow civil rights leader, Robert F. Williams, had a public debate about the merits and weaknesses of nonviolent resistance and armed self-defense. King argued against retaliatory violence. But he also understood—coming as he did, like Williams, from the Deep South—the importance of protecting one’s property and life from attack. The debate helped to foreground the many questions Black Americans had about nonviolent resistance.

Younger activists in the civil rights movement were skeptical of nonviolent resistance. John Lewis embraced nonviolent resistance as a member of the Nashville Movement in 1960. But many others involved in that campaign merely saw nonviolent resistance as a tactic and not—as King or Lewis did—as a potential way of life. Such philosophical arguments would plague the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) throughout the 1960s. During this decade, young activists often found themselves living with families across the rural South who used shotguns, rifles, and other weapons to protect themselves and their property.

By the beginning of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, SNCC’s internal debates about strategy and tactics had taken on a new and urgent meaning. Since 1960, the organization had embraced direct action, voter registration drives, and various uses of nonviolent resistance. The murders of the civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, along with the frustrating setback suffered by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, led many SNCC members to be even more skeptical about nonviolent resistance as a political tactic.

A key turning point for SNCC was the realization that much remained to be done even after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Increasingly, nonviolent resistance seemed like a tactic that could be discarded if needed, as opposed to the cornerstone of a humanistic ideology. After Stokely Carmichael’s invocation of “Black Power” in 1966, more young activists drifted away from nonviolent resistance. Dr. King continued to hold onto it as a key part of his ideology and political strategy, but King’s assassination in 1968 meant that nonviolent resistance was reduced in importance among many Black activists.