Charles E. Cobb, Jr., author of This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, will explore the complex relationship between Civil Rights Movement organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the tradition of African American armed self-defense. Charles will reflect on the contemporary movements that have inherited this legacy of struggle as he explores protest, politics and the movement for black lives.

Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is a distinguished journalist and inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame. He served as field secretary in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967 for the SNCC, the most influential youth and student organization during the Civil Rights Movement. He was involved in organizing and conducting the Freedom Summer in 1964, which brought numerous civil rights organization together to register African-American Mississippian voters and hold Freedom Schools. He worked closely with key figures in SNCC and the movement, including John Lewis, Courtland Cox, Jim Forman and Stokely Carmichael. He is the co-author, with fellow activist Bob Moses, of Radical Equations, Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (2001) and also wrote On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (2008).