This involves an ongoing reexamination of the meaning of nonviolence. Rather than seeing attitudes toward violence as one of the sharpest differences between the two phases of the movement, the new scholarship emphasizes the continuities, arguing that philosophical commitment to nonviolence was always rare and became more so over time; that support for self-defense was always widespread; and that, in the South, many movement participants saw little tension between nonviolence as they understood it and self-defense.
