We Will Shoot Back

A bold and exciting historical narrative of the armed resistance of Black soldiers of the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

Winner of the Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award presented by the National Council of Black Studies
Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, African-American studies professor and activist Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. 

As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.

This riveting history reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.

“Umoja follows confrontation in communities across the state through the ends of the 1970s, demonstrating how black Mississippians were ultimately able to overcome intimidation by mainstream society, defeat legal segregation, and claim a measure of political control of their state.” ―The Clarion-Ledger

“We Will Shoot Back is decidedly not a romantic celebration of gun culture, but a sometimes sobering, sometimes beautiful story of self-reliance and self-determination and a peoples capacity to sustain a movement against all odds.” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination