Deacons for Defense and Justice

The Deacons were not the first champions of armed defense during the civil rights movement, but in November 1964, they were the first to organize as a force. According to historian Annelieke Dirks: Even Martin Luther King Jr.—the icon of nonviolence—employed armed bodyguards and had guns in his house during the early stages of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. Glenn Smiley, an organizer of the nonviolent and pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), observed during a house visit to King that the police did not allow the minister a weapon permit, but "the place is an arsenal." Smiley convinced King that he could not keep such weapons or plan armed "self-defense", as it was inconsistent with his public positions on non-violence. Dirks explored the emergence of Black groups for self-defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi from 1960 to 1965. In many areas of the Deep South, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan or other white insurgents operated outside the law, and white-dominated police forces practiced discrimination against Black people. In Jonesboro, an industrial town in northern Louisiana, the KKK harassed local activists, burned crosses on the lawns of Black Americans, and burned down five churches, a Masonic Hall, and a Baptist center. Scholar Akinyele O. Umoja notes that by 1965, both the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE supported armed self-defense, although they had long promoted non-violence as a tactic to achieve civil rights. They began to believe that changes in federal law were not sufficient to advance civil rights or to protect activists locally. National CORE leadership, including James Farmer, publicly acknowledged a relationship between CORE and the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana. This alliance between the two organizations highlighted the concept of armed self-defense embraced by many Black people in the South, who had long been subject to white violence. A significant portion of SNCC's southern-born leadership and staff also supported armed self-defense. Robert F. Williams, president of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, transformed his local NAACP chapter into an armed self-defense unit. He was criticized for this by the national leaders of the NAACP. After he was charged by the state with kidnapping a white couple whom he had sheltered during local violence related to the Freedom Riders in 1961, Williams and his wife left the country, going into exile in Cuba. After Williams' return in 1969, his trial on these charges was scheduled in 1975; that year the state reviewed the case and withdrew the charges. Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was another activist who armed herself; she said that in 1964 during Freedom Summer, she kept several loaded guns under her bed. ==Founding of the Deacons for Defense==

Black Americans were harassed and attacked by white KKK vigilantes in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964 including the torching of five churches, a Masonic Hall and a Baptist center. Given these threats, Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick founded the Deacons for Defense in November 1964 to protect civil rights workers, their families and the Black community against the local KKK. Most of the Deacons were veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II. Born in Jonesboro on November 20, 1935, Thomas grew up in the segregated state decades after the white-dominated state legislature had disenfranchised most Black people at the turn of the century and imposed Jim Crow laws. Drawn into local rivalries between Black and white children for swimming hole rights, Thomas learned that rights and access come not to those who ask but rather those who fight. In 1964, during Freedom Summer and a period of extensive voter education and organizing for registration, especially in Mississippi, the Congress of Racial Equality established a Freedom House in Jonesboro. It became a target of the Klan who resented white activists staying there. Because of repeated attacks on the Freedom House, as well as the church burnings, the Black community decided to organize to defend it. Before The Deacons of Defense and Justice officially formed, two groups were operating in Jonesboro to protect activists. One group acted as sentries outside the Freedom House, led by Percy Lee Bradford, a stock room worker, and Earnest Thomas. They preferred married men with military service, as well as registered voters. During the day, the men concealed their guns. At night they carried them openly, as was allowed by the law, to discourage Klan activity at the site and in the Black community. In early 1965, Black students were picketing the local high school in Jonesboro for integration. They were confronted by hostile police ready to use fire trucks with hoses against them. A car carrying four Deacons arrived. In view of the police, these men loaded their shotguns. The police ordered the fire truck to withdraw. This was the first time in the 20th century, as Hill observes, that "an armed Black organization had successfully used weapons to defend a lawful protest against an attack by law enforcement". Before the summer, the first Black deputy sheriff of the local Washington Parish was assassinated by whites. These tactics proved successful when "in July 1965, escalating hostilities between the Deacons and the Klan in Bogalusa provoked the federal government to use Reconstruction-era laws to order local police departments to protect civil rights workers". The Deacons also initiated a regional organizing campaign, founding a total of 21 formal chapters and 46 affiliates in other cities. ==Role==

The Deacons had close relationships with other civil rights groups that practiced non-violence. Such support by the Deacons enabled the NAACP and CORE to maintain their desired parameters of non-violence. The Deacons provided protection for CORE leader, James Farmer in 1965. Stokely Carmichael had first made a speech about Black Power in Mobile, Alabama in 1965, when marchers demonstrating for the vote reached the state capital from Selma. In 1967 Carmichael said, "Those of us who advocate Black Power are quite clear in our own minds that a 'non-violent' approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve." In his 2006 book, Hill discusses the difficulties in achieving change on the local level in the South after national leaders and activists left. He wrote: the hard truth is that these organizations produced few victories in their local projects in the Deep South--if success is measured by the ability to force changes in local government policy and create self-governing and sustainable local organizations that could survive when the national organizations departed ... The Deacons' campaigns frequently resulted in substantial and unprecedented victories at the local level, producing real power and self-sustaining organizations. According to Hill, local (armed) groups laid the foundation for equal opportunities for Black Americans. According to a 2007 article by Dirks, the usual histories of the Civil Rights Movement tend to overlook such organizations as the Deacons. She says there are several reasons: First, the dominant ideology of the Movement was one of non-violence. Second, threats to the lives of Deacons' members required them to maintain secrecy to avoid terrorist attacks. In addition, they recruited only mature male members, in contrast to other more informal self-defense efforts, in which women and teenagers sometimes played a role. Finally, the organization was relatively short-lived, fading by 1968. In that period, there was a national shift in attention to the issues of Black communities in the North and the rise of the Black Power movement in 1966. The Deacons were overshadowed by The Black Panther Party, which became noted for its militancy. ==FBI investigation begins in 1965==

In February 1965, after an article in The New York Times about the Deacons in Jonesboro, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover became interested in the group. His office sent a memo to its Louisiana field offices: "Because of the potential for violence indicated, you are instructed to immediately initiate an investigation of the DDJ [Deacons for Defense and Justice]." As was eventually exposed in the late 1970s, the FBI established the COINTELPRO program, through which its agents were involved in many illegal activities against organizations that Hoover deemed "a threat to the American way". ==Commemoration==

• The Robert "Bob" Hicks House in Bogalusa is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Robert "Bob" Hicks Foundation is in the process of restoring and preserving the house. ==Representation in other media==

• Michael D'Antonio wrote a fictional short story, "Deacons for Defense", based on events in Bogalusa, Louisiana.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1256877/ • The Deacons in Bogalusa are the subject of a 2003 television movie, Deacons for Defense. Based on D'Antonio's story and produced by Showtime, it was directed by Bill Duke. The movie stars Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, with Ossie Davis, and Jonathan Silverman. The film explores development of the group through events of 1964 and 1965. The plot follows the transition of a black family and community members from belief in non-violence to supporting armed self-defense. ==See also==