and rising black anger, [the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] fired its white staff workers and emerged as a national voice for black radicalism. SNCC chairperson, Stokely Carmichael, popularized the slogan "Black Power."
H. Rap Brown, succeeding Carmichael as SNCC chairperson, sent out even more overt calls for violence, declaring "that black people should form paramilitary groups to fight in support of rioters." Violence had become a leading means of expressing black rage at the system.
There is no doubt that there was much justification for black rage against a system which excluded blacks and other minorities from full participation in the economic, political and social activities of that system. The problem, however, as we have seen, is that the violence advocated by Carmichael and Brown and others did not help their cause. The original founders of SNCC recognized the problem with violence:
Some leading SNCC activists had been strongly influenced by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, who argued that the means through which social change is accomplished must be harmonious with the desired ends. [Original] SNCC members aimed for this moral consistency.
The major arguments against violence in social protest movements are the Camus-based argument enunciated above, and the argument based on practical evaluation of the situation.
In the first instance, we find that those who advocate violence lose the idealistic principles which first gave birth to their call for justice and equality. As King argued, the means do not justify the ends. If one truly seeks justice and equality, one cannot advocate means which deny justice and equality through violence. Through the advocacy and use of violence, one inevitably takes on the hatred and unjust practices and emotions which control the people against whom one is using violence. One becomes, in effect, the enemy one fights.
In the second inst...