Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era.

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. By Christopher B. Strain. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 254. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2687-9; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2686-0.)

Christopher B. Strain proposes to rethink conventional discussions of self-defense and violence during the civil rights/Black Power era. He couches the book as an intellectual history of "self-defense as activism." Strain's work challenges convention with a provocative argument that traditions of self-defense had a deeper, richer history of activism than previously acknowledged. It also advances the far less original idea that self-defense had always been a part of the movement and that the shift from self-defense to proactive violence contributed to the movement's demise.

Strain charts both the shift and the demise of self-defense through an examination of some of its most influential advocates, including Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. Although this approach appears promising, Strain's analysis unfortunately falters both methodologically and analytically. First, while he posits the book as a departure from the standard account, the study's time period (1955-1968) actually reinforces the declension narrative that previous researchers have challenged in their scholarship. Furthermore, this work offers very little in terms of new research. Its appearance so soon after the publication of Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, 2001) and Lance E. Hill's The Deacon For Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2004), for instance, makes it hard for him to offer new insights concerning these groups and individuals, as evidenced by his dependence on both of these works as principal sources.

There are other problems as well. Strain overstates the importance of Robert F. Williams, going as far (in the order of the chapters, at least) to set Williams up as a kind of progenitor to Malcolm X. In the process Strain reinforces the faulty assumption that Malcolm's importance derives from his sustained coverage in the mainstream media during the early 1960s. In fact, Malcolm's importance dates back at least to his taking over Harlem's Temple No. 7 in 1954 and his subsequent rise to become national spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI). Strain's analysis of Malcolm's philosophy also leaves much to be desired. His assertion, for instance, that "All of Malcolm's ideas were rooted in a message of self-defense" is a gross simplification (p. 85). In fact, Malcolm's political thought was rooted in a radical humanism that found shape and texture (even before his break with the NOI) in local black people's quotidian struggles and their connections to international anticolonial movements.

Strain's discussion of Black Power and the Black Panther Party (BPP) is equally underdeveloped and problematic. He quotes liberally from Stokely Camichael and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), but a deeper analysis of its arguments would have made for a much fuller discussion, especially in terms of self-defense. His chapter on the BPP contains some insights, such as in his discussion of the Panthers' notions of revolutionary violence. But the chapter concludes with a type of moral hand-wringing (without enough empirical evidence) that judges the BPP to have largely deserved its fate. This, of course, keeps him from probing too deeply into the sources of the Panthers' ideology of self-defense. He notes, for instance, that the BPP's "conception of self-protection had less to do with books and theory than with the immediate, personal danger posed by the Oakland Police Department" (p. 156). Fair enough. But Huey Newton and Bobby Seale's activities in both the Bay Area Afro American Association and the Revolutionary Action Movement most definitely informed their views of self-defense and provided them with crucial access to the "books and theory" that Strain claims as secondary.

Strain's discussion of cultural nationalism is also static and one-dimensional. It ignores the complex layers highlighted in Scot Brown's study of the US organization and basically reiterates the BPP's rather self-serving and purposely simplistic view of cultural nationalism as "turning traditionally racist understandings of black inferiority upside-down by celebrating blackness in a new sense of spiritual and cultural awareness" (pp. 156-57).

Toward the end of the book, Strain argues that "the move from self-defense toward a position of more aggressive violence" signaled the end of the southern civil rights movement. From this vantage point, black militants proved hopelessly unable to turn their dreams of violent revolution into reality. This analysis is deeply flawed for several reasons. One, Strain defines revolution narrowly as apocalyptic in nature. This might have been the case for some Black Power activists, but for others revolution meant picking up books instead of guns, building institutions and think tanks, not bombs, and creating black art to transform African American consciousness.

As James Edward Smethurst's recently published The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 2005) demonstrates, Black Power's antecedents are found in threads of postwar black freedom struggles influenced by radical trade unionists, black nationalists, and Pan-Africanists. Smethurst unveils a landscape more complex, daring, and rich than Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era acknowledges. Smethurst has set a high standard of intellectual excellence and scholarly rigor for Black Power scholarship, a standard that Pure Fire unfortunately fails to meet.

YOHURU WILLIAMS

Fairfield University