This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr., at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. Just for self defense, King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as an arsenal.

Like King, many ostensibly nonviolent civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection-yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American free...