After days of sit-ins at department stores in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Howard High School students reached a breaking point. White patrons threw food. Others snapped bullwhips and spat on them. In February 1960, the New York Times reported: “2 groups clash.” “Racial riot.”
Despite the media spin, today, we know the truth.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, the future Black anarchist, was in elementary school when it happened. “Instead of passively submitting to the racist scum, the Black students fought back,” he wrote, “and in their resistance beat the racists to a bloody pulp, making them literally run for their lives.”
Young children and adults alike marched into the streets to demand the high schoolers’ safety. Ervin remembered the tear gas, police dogs, and water hoses. The moment radicalized him. “Black people could fight back, and could win."
Memories of the Chattanooga youth uprising in today's media tend to erase that theme. Their rebellion has been reduced to a watered-down narrative of stoic, non-violent resistance winning equal rights. That legacy of “peaceful resistance” is being weaponized to shame and neutralize today’s youth.
Accounts like Ervin’s remind us of the whole truth.
Classifying resistance as “violent” or “non-violent” criminalizes self-defense, destruction of property, and decolonization efforts. But if we reclaim Howard students’ resistance, then the narrative used to suppress Black resistance loses its teeth.
Their resistance is our empowerment.