Lance Hill.  _The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights
Movement_.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.  x + 363 pp.
 Map, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.  $34.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-8078-2847-5.

Reviewed for H-1960s by Yasuhiro Katagiri, Associate Professor of American
History and Government, Department of American Civilization, Tokai University,
Kanagawa, Japan

Tough Enough to Take It and Big Enough to Hit Back: Beyond the Backlash Thesis?

Southern historians in general and civil rights historians in particular may
have heard of the Deacons for Defense and Justice at least once or twice.  And
Showtime Entertainment, a cable television network in the United States, has
recently presented a dramatized history of the Louisiana-based black armed
organization, which was nominated for the outstanding television movie of the
2004 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image
Awards.[1]  But the history of the Deacons has remained largely unknown until
last year, when Lance Hill published his welcome addition to the civil rights
historiography.

Hill, who is currently serving as executive director of the Southern Institute
for Education and Research at Tulane University, is also a seasoned labor
organizer and civil rights activist.  In the fall of 1989, he directed the
Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which opposed the political
ambitions of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi leader David Duke.[2]  Now Hill has
captured the essence of the Deacons, a heretofore relatively obscure black
organization during America’s civil rights years.

_The Deacons for Defense_ recounts the history of an armed self-defense group,
which was formed in rural Louisiana communities in the mid-1960s, composed of
working-class black men, and determined to protect civil rights activists from
local white supremacists.  By the end of 1966, the Deacons had grown into a
loosely-organized federation and claimed to have “twenty-one chapters with
several hundred members concentrated in Louisiana and Mississippi” (p. 2).  For
years, southern blacks such as Robert F. Williams had organized protective
groups.  As president of the Monroe, North Carolina branch of the NAACP,
Williams had refused in the late 1950s to “turn the other cheek” and advocated
“armed self-reliance” by blacks.  He thus challenged not only white racists but
also the national civil rights establishment represented by Martin Luther King,
Jr.[3]  Like Williams and his followers, the Deacons rejected the notion of
self-sacrifice which, as the civil rights historian David L. Chappell has
argued, stemmed from black southerners’ “prophetic tradition” of
Christianity.[4]  But unlike Williams, the Deacons created their organization
outside of the mainstream civil rights groups – namely the NAACP, the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  The emergence
of the Deacons, Hill notes, consequently reflected “a working-class revolt
against the entrenched black middle-class leadership and its nonviolent reform
ideology” (p. 4).

In the summer of 1964, CORE launched a campaign to desegregate public
facilities
and accommodations in Louisiana.  The initial target was Jonesboro, a small
paper mill town located in the pine hills of northern Louisiana.[5]  As blacks
in Jonesboro began to demonstrate against restaurants and cafes for violating
the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the town’s
white establishment as well as white supremacists grew restless.  Jonesboro was
in fact the birthplace of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an offshoot
of the United Klans of America.  When the Klan paraded through the black
section of town, Jonesboro’s law enforcement authorities escorted the
procession.  Under these tense and volatile conditions, a small number of local
black men sporadically began to guard the CORE activists and their Freedom
House in Jonesboro.

In July 1964, a group of some twenty black men, led by Earnest Thomas, an air
force veteran and paper mill worker, met and decided to form a “community
protection” organization in Jonesboro (p. 38).  This gathering led to a more
formal meeting in November 1964, when the Deacons for Defense and Justice was
officially formed.  Until then, the group “had only been a patrol, a secret
auxiliary to the nonviolent movement” (p. 45).  But now the Deacons became an
armed self-defense organization in the face of Klan terror, marking a pivotal
turning point in the Deep South’s civil rights movement.  Hill admits that the
origins of the new group’s name “remain enigmatic” because the founders of the
Deacons sought to “wed two contradictory symbols: Christian pacifism and
violence” (pp. 46-47).  Many of them were not only working-class black
veterans, but also quite religious. Thus it was somewhat natural for them to
reach into their Biblical background and decide on the name “Deacons” or chosen
overseers and caretakers.  At the same time, the Deacons were no longer willing
to wait for “a mythical guardian angel to descend from Washington” to topple
their oppressors (p. 62).  Rather, they would defend themselves.

The blacks in Jonesboro were fully aware of what had happened only a few months
earlier in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the Klan had murdered Michael H.
Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James E. Chaney.[6]  In Washington Parish,
Louisiana, the black residents of Bogalusa feared similar violence.  The town
was in the heart of Klan country and had, according to a contemporary observer,
“more Klansmen per capita than any other city of the South.”[7]  With the local
police unwilling to protect civil rights demonstrators, a group of black men
led by Charles Sims organized a local chapter of the Deacons, which in time
would “overshadow” the headquarters in Jonesboro (p. 107).

In Bogalusa, the Deacons were successful in forcing the town government and the
police to do away with segregationist ordinances and to provide civil rights
demonstrators with equal protection under the law.  But the die-hard Klan
became more recalcitrant than ever and blocked the agreement with terrorist
tactics that culminated in more than thirty racial incidents.  In July 1965,
President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched John Doar, who then headed the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights Division, to Bogalusa.  Doar had a federal judge
declare the town’s white business establishments in violation of the Civil
Rights Act and enjoin both the local police officials and the Klan from using
violence against civil rights protesters.  Soon the blacks in Bogalusa had
successfully integrated all but one of the restaurants in the town.[8]

The Deacons had scored an important victory in Bogalusa by compelling the
federal government to intervene on their behalf.  But at the same time, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to investigate them.  From 1965 to
1972, when the Deacons became completely inactive, the FBI collected and
produced 1,580 pages of investigative documents on the organization.[9]
Meanwhile, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission – the state’s
“segregation watchdog agency” – dispatched its full-time investigators to keep
an eye on the eight local chapters of the Deacons.  The state agency also
shared information with federal authorities on what the commission termed the
“extremely dangerous” militant black group.[10]

In mid-1966, ten months after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the
Deacons became the focus of national attention.  In June, James H. Meredith,
who had desegregated the University of Mississippi in 1962, began a 220-mile,
one-man walk from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to encourage black
Mississippians to register to vote.  When Meredith was ambushed by a white
sniper and severely wounded, the leaders of “the big five” civil rights
organizations – Martin Luther King of the SCLC, Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC,
Floyd B. McKissick of the CORE, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Whitney M. Young
of the National Urban League – rallied to his side.  But at a strategy meeting,
mutual suspicion soon developed.  King, Wilkins, and Young wanted to make it a
non-violent and whites-inclusive demonstration.  Carmichael and McKissick, on
the other hand, demanded the exclusion of whites from the march.  Carmichael
also insisted that the Deacons for Defense be invited to patrol the highway
along which the marchers would pass.  In the end, a deal was struck – whites
could participate and the Deacons could patrol.  For King, as Hill observes,
the deal was “a risky concession” (p. 247).  It avoided a public split within
the movement, but facilitated the emergence of “Black Power” militancy, a
development in which the Deacons had played no small role.[11]

By shedding light on the thoughts and accomplishments of this obscure black
armed organization in the Deep South, Hill forcefully presents his case against
“the myth of nonviolence” – the popular perception that nonviolence alone had
aroused “the moral conscience of white America” and was the defining quality of
the civil rights movement’s triumph (p. 6).  He contends that the history of
the Deacons challenges this long-cherished “truism” and suggests that the
organization’s show of force and pride, as well as the threat of coercion and
violence, were also vital elements of the civil rights movement’s success (p.
258).  Hill is careful, however, to note that the Deacons did not perceive
their self-defense approach as being “mutually exclusive of nonviolent
tactics.”  They not only supported non-violent and direct-action protests, but
defended those who participated in them.  What the Deacons opposed, then, was
“the dogmatic idea that nonviolent direct action precluded self-defense” (p.
268).  In the summer of 1965, a _New York Times_ reporter observed that
national civil rights leaders and their followers had been “tough enough to
take it [white violence] and big enough not to hit back.”[12]  To paraphrase
these words with a slight alteration, the Deacons were indeed not only “tough
enough to take it,” but also “big enough to hit back.”

Another important argument made by Hill is that the Deacons were not
“ineffective rebels who alienated whites,” but rather “a unique bridge” between
the traditional civil rights movement and the succeeding “Black Power” movement
(pp. 6, 272).  The Deacons were, he contends, the premature embodiment of the
“black autonomist strategy” that black nationalist and separatist groups would
embrace in the late 1960s (p. 269).  As a transitional organization, the
Deacons implicitly promoted the idea of “Black Power” which, although it
certainly seemed violent and threatening to many white Americans, was at core a
“call for community” – an autonomous community of justice, human dignity, and
black self-respect.[13]

More provocatively, Hill offers an interesting twist on the “backlash thesis.”
A decade ago, Michael J. Klarman, a law and history professor at the University
of Virginia, contended that the real importance of the 1954 _Brown_ decision
lay in the fact that it mobilized a campaign of “massive resistance” by
southern whites to the civil rights movement.  This “backlash,” he argued,
stimulated northern whites to confront racial issues, and in turn led to the
eventual enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.[14]  But
according to Hill, it was only in the mid-1960s, after the emergence of the
Deacons, that these laws were “effectively enforced” and the “massive
resistance” of white Louisianans effectively suppressed (p. 259).  The triumph,
such as it was, of racial justice and equality, Hill indicates, owed much to
the black “backlash” carried out by the armed Deacons.

_The Deacons for Defense_ is not without flaws, despite its importance to civil
rights historiography.  Although Hill claims repeatedly that the Deacons were a
“southernwide organization” with an “impressive” record, he fails to provide
persuasive evidence that they were even a regional force (pp. 3, 214, 268).
For example, Hill writes: “In addition to Mississippi, there were reports that
the Bogalusa Deacons were recruiting individuals and forming chapters in
Alabama.  Clayborne Carson documents a chapter in Loundes County...” (p. 213).
But in his work on SNCC, Carson merely states that the protests which occurred
in Loundes County were “often protected by armed guards” who were “sometimes
affiliated” with the Deacons for Defense.  He did not attest that the county
had “a chapter” of the Deacons.[15]  On the whole, Hill is unable, despite or
perhaps because of his heavy reliance on oral histories, to overturn Adam
Fairclough’s observation that “[c]ontrary to exaggerated press reports, the
Deacons never grew into a statewide, let alone a southwide, organization….”[16]
 Finally, neither the notes nor the bibliography are as thorough and accurate
as one would like.  For instance, the 1965 _New York Times Magazine_ article,
which Hill cites and even terms “one of the most extensive and thoughtful
stories published on the Deacons,” does not appear in the bibliography (p.
160).

By the summer of 1967, only a year after Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power”
rhetoric shook white America, the demise of the Deacons was evident (p. 251).
But their powerful demonstration of “black pride” in concrete form would help
set the stage for a redefinition of what the civil rights movement sought to
achieve.  There is always “something inspiring,” Hill concludes, in those “who
stood up to injustice when everyone around them was afraid” (p. 273).  In
resurrecting the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Hill has
certainly told an inspiring and important story.

Notes

[1]. _Deacons for Defense_, prod. Nick Grillo, dir. Bill Duke, Showtime
Entertainment, 2003, DVD; “35th NAACP Image Awards,” _Hollywood Reporter_, Mar.
5, 2004
<https://www.vnuemedia.com/thr/film/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000454745>.

[2]. Allen Johnson, Jr., “The Education of Lance Hill,” _Gambit Weekly_, July
6,
2004 <http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-07-06/cover_story.html>;
Douglas D. Rose, ed., _The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race_
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Tyler Bridges, _The
Rise of David Duke_ (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).

[3]. Timothy B. Tyson, _Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of
Black Power_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[4]. David L. Chappell, “Niebuhrisms and Myrdaleries: The Intellectual Roots of
the Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered,” in _The Role of Ideas in the Civil
Rights South_, ed. Ted Ownby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002),
3-18; Chappell, _A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow_
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

[5]. Roman J. Heleniak, “John McKeithen, Integration, and the Louisiana State
Police: A Work in Progress,” in _Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression
of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866-2000_, ed. Samuel C. Hyde,
Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 243.

[6]. Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, _We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman,
Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi_ (New York:
Macmillan, 1988); Nicolaus Mills, _Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi, 1964—The
Turning Point of the Civil Rights Movement in America_ (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
1992); Howard Ball, _Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the
Struggle for Civil Rights_ (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

[7]. Hamilton Bims, “Deacons for Defense: Negroes Are Fighting Back in
Bogalusa,
Other Towns,” _Ebony_, Sept. 1965, reprinted in _American Journalism,
1963-1973_, vol. 2 of _Reporting Civil Rights_, ed. Clayborne Carson, et al.
(New York: Library of America, 2003), 441; Kenneth O’Reilly, _“Racial Matters”:
The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972_ (New York: Free Press,
1989), 205.

[8]. Heleniak, “John McKeithen, Integration, and the Louisiana State Police,”
244-45, 247.

[9]. Clayborne Carson, _In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s_
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 262; “Deacons for Defense
and Justice,” _Freedom of Information-Privacy Act Electronic Reading Room_,
Federal Bureau of Investigation <http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/ddj.htm>.

[10]. Yasuhiro Katagiri, _The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil
Rights and States’ Rights_ (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001);
Record nos. 11-11-0-14-1-1-1 to 2-1-1, Records of the Mississippi State
Sovereignty Commission, Archives and Library Division, Mississippi Department
of Archives and History, Jackson.

[11]. James H. Meredith, “An Oral History by James H. Meredith,” recorded
interview by Yasuhiro Katagiri, Jan. 11, 1994, transcript, Mississippi
Department of Archives and History; Meredith, “Big Changes Are Coming,”
_Saturday Evening Post_, Aug. 13, 1966, pp. 23-27; David Garrow, _Bearing the
Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference_ (New York: Morrow, 1985); John Dittmer, _Local People: The Struggle
for Civil Rights in Mississippi_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

[12]. Roy Reed, “The Deacons, Too, Ride by Night,” _New York Times Magazine_,
Aug. 15, 1965, p. 20.

[13]. Vincent Harding, “Community as a Liberating Theme in Civil Rights
History,” in _New Directions in Civil Rights Studies_, ed. Armstead L. Robinson
and Patricia Sullivan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991),
25.

[14]. Michael J. Klarman, “_Brown_, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights
Movement,” _Virginia Law Review_ 80 (Feb. 1994): 7-150; Klarman, “How _Brown_
Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” _Journal of American History_ 81
(June 1994): 81-118; Klarman, _From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court
and the Struggle for Racial Equality_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004).

[15]. Carson, _In Struggle_, 164.

[16]. Adam Fairclough, _Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in
Louisiana, 1915-1972_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 345.

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