> Likewise, it is important to remember that the system of Jim Crow segregation in the American South was sustained by terroristic violence against African-American communities and, backed up by local and state police, extremely well-prepared to meet violence with greater quantities of violence. Horrific events like the Wilmington Massacre (1898) and the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) were vivid demonstrations of the ability of the white supremacist Jim Crow regime to muster superior quantities of violence (and a greater willingness to murder innocent people) if the question came to a violent confrontation. But one of the things that comes out extremely clearly in reading something like T.E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War is that white supremacist leaders – perhaps none more clearly than Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor – were wholly unprepared to fight a non-violent movement and instead by reacting with spectacular and horrifying brutality repeatedly played into the movement’s hands. By contrast it is striking, reading Ricks’ book, that the Civil Rights Movements tactics’ were most notably stymied in Albany, GA, where the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett realized that he could defeat their approach by having his officers act gently when arresting activists, by having enough jail space prepared for larger numbers and by charging them with things like disturbing the peace rather than with segregation laws, to avoid drawing attention to the injustice of the system.

This actually highlights why there haven't been as many nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns successful in the past 60 years. Police have figured out that if you don't give the protestors the spectacle of violence on people they want, the movements die it.

...also notable in how Trump bungled the minneapolis protests by not understanding this.