Strain, Christopher B. 1970–

PERSONAL:

Born 1970.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Rd., Boca Raton, FL 33431. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, educator. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, associate professor of American studies/history.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Researcher of the Year, Florida Atlantic University, 2006; visiting fellow at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, 2006; two grants from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2005.

Burning Faith: Church Arson in the American South, foreword by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2008.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of African American History and Louisiana History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Christopher B. Strain is an associate professor of American studies/history at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, where he was named Researcher of the Year in 2006. He has also been a visiting fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. In Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, Strain argues that African Americans used armed self-defense as a means of political expression in the face of white aggression. As he explains in his introduction to the book: "The personal and localized act of defending oneself from harm can simulate the perquisites of open political challenge under certain circumstances. This study describes those circumstances." In his study, which looks at the period of American history from 1955 to 1968 and reexamines the roles of such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton, Strain "makes a largely persuasive case that in a movement and an era often characterized (and, if I get his argument correctly, caricatured) in America's popular imagination by the tactics of nonviolent direct action, African Americans resisted racial violence by meeting it with violence," remarked H-Net reviewer Peter A. Kuryla. The critic further noted that Strain "argues that African Americans' articulation of their right to self-defense belongs among American ideas of natural right, and more importantly, often acted as a constitutionalist expression of citizenship." Though Journal of Southern History contributor Yohuru Williams found fault with the work, remarking that the author "defines revolution narrowly as apocalyptic in nature," he added that Pure Fire "challenges convention with a provocative argument that traditions of self-defense had a deeper, richer history of activism than previously acknowledged." Writing in the Journal of African American History, Simon Wendt called Pure Fire "an important study, which is likely to spur further work on this complex subject."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of African American History, spring, 2006, Simon Wendt, review of Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, p. 228.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2006, Yohuru Williams, review of Pure Fire, p. 518.

Reviewer's Bookwatch April, 2005, review of Pure Fire.

ONLINE

Florida Atlantic University Web site,http://www.fau.edu/ (May 10, 2008), biography of Christopher B. Strain.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (April, 2006), Peter A. Kuryla, "A Politics of Self-Defense? Rethinking Civil Rights as ‘Pure Fire,’" review of Pure Fire.