ABSTRACT
Numerous analysts have noted that dozens of black Americans involved in freedom movements lost their lives to lynchings, bombings, and other insurrectionary violence. The black organizations working against racial oppression have taken two somewhat different but regularly overlapping and interacting tracks, one primarily accenting civil rights and nonviolent strategies, the other primarily emphasizing broader issues of black power, community control, and self-determination and a greater array of protest strategies. One important strategist of the civil rights movement was Bayard Rustin, a pacifist who exchanged ideas with India's Mahatma Gandhi on nonviolent strategies against oppression. Beginning in the colonial period, black leaders have long accented black power and nationalist themes as a response to oppression and as part of a very positive framing of black America. In both the southern civil rights movement and the northern black power movements, the leaders and rank-and-file protesters were operating out of a strong black counter-frame to the dominant white racial frame.
