Chinn was personally committed to providing security for CORE workers who came to press the movement in Canton. He carried a revolver openly, and, when folk gathered for strategy sessions and rallies, Chinn sat outside the venues in his truck with a gun, scanning the terrain.183 When Canton police stalked an organizing meeting and menaced one of the female activists, C. O. Chinn’s wife walked out to the squad car and scolded them, “You cops don’t have anything better to do than sit in front of this office all the time? If you don’t, I wish you would find something. I get tired of looking at you.” People who witnessed it and knew the culture explained how remarkable this was. The cops “looked at Mrs. Chinn and didn’t say a word. Had any other Negro woman in Canton said that, they would’ve beaten her down to the ground. But they knew she was C. O. Chinn’s wife, and no one, black or white, insulted C. O. Chinn’s people and got away with it.”184
Committed pacifists within CORE considered members who flirted with violence to be traitors to the cause. But nonviolence in the face of imminent threats was easier in theory than in practice. Pacifist CORE staffer Meldon Achenson found that he was in a decided minority, writing to his parents, “Nearly everyone in the community is armed to the teeth.” He concluded that most folk were “committed to nonviolence only as a tactic.”
In West Feliciana Parish, CORE worker Mike Lesser was less conflicted. CORE was holding voter-registration clinics at the Masonic Hall in the evenings. Lesser wrote to his family back north, “We are preaching non-violence, but can only preach non-violence and practice it. We cannot tell someone not to defend his property and the lives of his family and let me tell you, these 15 to 20 shotguns guarding our meetings are very reassuring.”
In response to reports that blacks were arming against private threats, the national leadership of CORE pressed its field staff, “Urge the people not to carry guns.” These instructions prompted tensions and defiance. In a staff meeting at the end of 1963, two activists angrily responded, “to hell with CORE, we’re with the people.” Some CORE field staff began carrying guns.185
CORE’s national office worried that increased militancy would damage alliances with white progressives. Much of CORE’s financial support came from northern, white liberals. For many of them, even legitimate acts of self-defense provoked the specter of “black violence,” from which they recoiled. The growing radicalization of CORE and the evaporation of white support confirms long-standing fears that black violence would cost white allies.
CORE continued to espouse nonviolence and tried to distance itself from the publicity the Deacons were attracting. But hazards in the field eroded the commitment to nonviolence. The work of the Deacons underscored the importance of self-defense and drew CORE fieldworkers to open advocacy of resistance against violent attacks.186
For the white, middle-class pacifists who were the backbone of CORE, armed violence was anathema. CORE leadership attempted to keep the Deacons “in the background.”187 But for the growing black membership of CORE, the practical necessity of armed self-defense was obvious. And in 1965, delegates openly contested the viability of nonviolence during CORE’s annual convention.
By 1966, Floyd McKissick had succeeded James Farmer as national director of CORE. Though McKissick maintained a commitment to tactical nonviolence, his ascension marked a shift in policy and his rhetoric was more aggressive. McKissick insisted that “the right of self-defense is a constitutional right and you can’t expect Black people to surrender this right while whites maintain it.” For CORE’s pacifist, white members, this broke the bargain. By the end of 1966, CORE had lost most of its white support and became an almost entirely black organization.188
The increasingly darker complexion of CORE chapters in the North corresponded to more sympathy for the Deacons. After the Deacons protected the March against Fear, the Harlem CORE branch endorsed that model, declaring, “In any future action wherein we want to behave in a nonviolent manner we will seek the protection of our brothers to guarantee this right.”189 At the 1966 CORE convention, the northern branches were in agreement, resolving that “CORE accepts the concept of self-defense by the Deacons and believes that the use of guns by CORE workers on a southern project is a personal decision, with the approval of that project’s regional directors.”190
Marking and maintaining the boundary between self-defense and political violence has been the central challenge of the black tradition of arms. Compelling as an idea, it poses an array of practical difficulties, particularly where political violence has some popular appeal. Fuller treatment of the rise and fall of the Deacons for Defense demonstrates this spectrum of challenges.
It was not the first time that black folk had gathered in defense of themselves and their neighbors. But the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964 is important because, unlike community defense groups dating to the nineteenth century, the Deacons operated within living memory and generated a relatively rich documentary record.
From their start in Jonesboro, the Deacons expanded across the South, making contested and probably exaggerated claims of tens of thousands of members across the country. The organization evolved in stages. It grew in part from a failed attempt by the Jonesboro Police Department to co-opt rising black activists by deputizing them and then assigning them to interdict and arrest civil-rights protesters. It was a harbinger of things to come when the black deputies confronted a group of white toughs who were taunting CORE workers at the Jonesboro Freedom House. Offended by commands from Negro police, the whites huffed off and vowed to return with reinforcements. When the news spread across black Jonesboro, dozens of men with guns showed up at the Freedom House, anticipating the fight. The word spread to white Jonesboro as well and the threatened conflict fizzled.191
Soon after that, armed Negroes showed up again, this time to guard the courthouse where CORE “testers” of illegal municipal segregation laws were being held after arrest. Although the words of new civil-rights laws guaranteed blacks access to public accommodations, the reality in many places was far different. Across the South, activists “tested” local authorities to see if they would enforce illegal segregation laws. In Jonesboro, the answer was emphatically yes. The protests that followed landed CORE activists in jail and provoked a wave of Klan activity.
A Klan caravan led by the assistant police chief menaced black Jonesboro. Crosses flamed across the countryside. Then a mob of more than one hundred armed white men gathered outside the jail where the CORE activists were held. CORE deployed a phone chain, and before the evening was over, the FBI was stirred to intervene. In the meantime, indeed, for the rest of the night, black men with rifles spied the crowd from adjacent rooftops.
The show of Klan power at the courthouse and police support for a Klan parade through black Jonesboro convinced many folk of the need for something more systematic than the ad hoc decisions of black men to camp on rooftops with rifles. That worry was the seed of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.
Oddly prominent at the beginning was CORE fieldworker Charles Fenton. Fenton was white. He was also a committed pacifist who would maintain allegiance to CORE’s nonviolent principles. Fenton had a flair for organizing. And when the fledgling Deacons decided they needed a funding structure and operational protocols, Fenton was their man.
Fenton was never entirely comfortable with the Deacons’ self-defense strategy. But nothing would shock him like the night he first arrived at the Jonesboro Freedom House. “I got out of the car,” he recalled, “and realized that I was surrounded, absolutely surrounded in an armed camp. They were on top of roofs. They were under the building. . . . They were all around the buildings.” Inside the Freedom House, Fenton found more guns stacked in the corners. The men were welcoming, but Fenton reprimanded them. “I told them that I didn’t like the guns in the house.” Noting that some of the men he sent away that night never returned, Fenton reflected later on his youthful arrogance, “Here was this snotty nosed white boy, co
ming to the middle of their war and telling them that I didn’t like their weapon of choice.”192
Fenton ultimately struck an accommodation between his ardent pacifism and the practical fact that his host community was widely and justifiably armed. He would help the Deacons organize and expand. He hoped to gain their trust and eventually perhaps win them over to pacifism. As a practical compromise, he asked the men not to carry their weapons inside the Freedom House and concluded that “insofar as the long guns that would have been obvious to everyone, they seem to have complied.”
Fenton’s ambition to turn the armed black men of Jonesboro toward a robust pacifism seems fanciful. But considering the tension inherent in the name they chose—the Deacons for Defense and Justice—we might forgive his optimism. Although some would say that the name was a ruse to mask their militancy, the initial efforts to restrict membership to mature, working-class men and to exclude hotheads and those with “criminal tendencies” suggests that perhaps Charlie Fenton’s ambition was not entirely fanciful.
Some contended that the very existence of the Deacons actually changed the expectations and behavior of people in the community—that it shifted the norm, and actually made folk bolder. There is evidence of this in the aborted cross burning at the home of Reverend Y. D. Jackson. As flames snaked up the kerosene-soaked cross, the Klansmen stood in the open, admiring their work. It was a reasonable thing to do after lighting a cross in the yard of a man who was supposed to turn the other cheek. But the cross burners had miscalculated about both the man and the cheek. Soon they were ducking and running under gunfire from Reverend Jackson’s wife, who emptied her rifle at them and was diligently reloading. For black folk in Jonesboro, the incident was emblematic of the resolve that had fueled and was now emboldened by the Deacons for Defense.193
The Deacons’ growing reputation also raised new hazards. By the beginning of 1965, they were on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar. An early FBI assessment gauged them as “more militant than CORE and . . . more inclined to use violence in dealing with any violent episode encountered in civil rights matters.” Local law enforcement was also beginning to pay more attention to the Deacons. In January 1965, a member who had spent the day guarding student activists was arrested for public display of firearms as he stood outside a black café with a shotgun balanced over his shoulder.194
Although plenty of folk in the movement were armed and committed to self-defense, the Deacons were a strong draw for the national press. Receptive newsmen could have found plenty of stories about Negroes grabbing guns from behind the kitchen door. But the Deacons, courtesy of Charlie Fenton, had put a name on the thing.
The first major coverage of the Deacons appeared in the New York Times in February 1965, under the headline “Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro Unusual Town.” Although misleading in its implications about the scope of armed self-defense in the movement, it was a sympathetic account. It reported uncritically the Deacons’ own assessment of their success; that they had actually prevented Jonesboro from becoming a “battleground” and had averted a threatened lynching of a black boy accused of kissing a white girl. The New York Times also interviewed Charlie Fenton, who made a good attempt to explain that the Deacons were a separate, indigenous organization that CORE hoped to win over to the strategy of pure nonviolence.
By formalizing their mission through a corporate charter, the Deacons lured in busy newsmen with an easily verifiable account of their agenda. The decision to incorporate also had a remarkable, almost-comical effect within the membership. Although the source of their misunderstanding is not entirely clear, some the Deacons concluded that the state-granted corporate charter roughly articulating their purpose gave them a broad right to carry firearms for community defense.
Decades later, Deacon member James Stokes remained adamant in this view, explaining, “in the charter, we had to protect people’s property and churches and so forth. And therefore couldn’t no one take our weapons from us. So we would carry our weapons just like the local law enforcement officers carry theirs.” Stokes considered the charter proof against anyone, including police who objected to his gun. He actually carried around a copy of the document, insisting that it entitled him to carry a concealed firearm. Some Deacons were more insistent than others about the power of the charter. And some police capitulated, perhaps uncertain themselves whether the black men’s claims about the impressive-looking state document were accurate.195
The organization and formality signified by the Deacons’ corporate charter also carried with it something more worrisome. In their planning for self-defense, the Deacons also were flirting with the very political violence that they claimed to disdain. The problem is perhaps in the vagaries of the definition. If political violence is something undertaken in pursuit of group goals, almost any sort of organized group violence might qualify. The problem would plague the Deacons, as their activities ranged far beyond the scenario of individuals fighting off imminent threats. Even acknowledging the legitimacy of using violence in defense of another, as the organization grew, the questions became harder.
The March 1965 showdown at Jonesboro High School demonstrates the problem. It fits within the boundary of legitimate self-defense only if one attributes substantial destructive capabilities to the fire hoses that the city was rolling out to blast student protesters. It was a cold day. All the marchers were technically still children. Although lawyers have staked claims of self-defense on less, the fire-hose assault probably would not have killed anyone.
As police directed the fire truck into position, a car full of armed Deacons pulled up. They piled out with guns. One of them warned, “If you turn that water hose on those kids, there’s gonna be some blood out here today.” After some tense moments and bluster, the firemen rolled up their hoses and drove away.
The question lingers even now, was this a justifiable threat of defensive violence? What difference does it make that the aggressors were agents of the state, operating under nominally legitimate authority? Self-defense against private aggression within the window of imminence, where the state is structurally incompetent, is the model case. Whether the Deacons’ threat against the firemen fits within those boundaries depends on the judge.
The point is underscored by comparison to the plain case of self-defense by Deacon Elmo Jacobs. In April 1965, Jacobs came to the rescue of a group of University of Kansas students whose car had broken down. Driving down the highway with a car full of white kids, Jacobs was asking for trouble. He soon found it.
It is unclear whether the attack was premeditated or whether it was just a racist reflex against the interracial group traveling unapologetically on a public highway. Jacobs sensed the danger as a brown station wagon came up fast behind him. The car pulled alongside. Jacobs recalled seeing the barrel of a gun, and then feeling the concussion of the shot. He responded reflexively in a classic case of self-defense, explaining, “Well, that made me went to shooting.” The assailants seemed unprepared for Jacobs’s gunfire, perhaps anticipating just some nonviolent civil-rights folk. Under a hail of pistol fire, they screeched off, leaving Elmo Jacobs to contemplate the cost of repairing the shotgun blast to his car door.196
The Deacons eventually expanded to scores of loosely affiliated chapters. The first significant expansion was the chapter in Bogalusa that would in some ways eclipse the original group in Jonesboro. The Bogalusa chapter started with a larger appetite for risk. They welcomed a class of men that the Jonesboro chapter would reject—men like Charles Sims, who soon would lead the Bogalusa chapter and rise as a force in the brief national movement. Sims served in World War II and earned sergeant’s stripes as a shooting instructor. But he was also a brawler who carried a gun long before he joined the Deacons.197
Sims reminds us of the common hazards of the gun, stepping more than once into the milieu of intra-racial violence that feeds current worries about black gun crime. Sims’s December 1959 conflict with Beatrice Harry is emblematic. Harry and Sims were essentially man
and wife, though they had ignored the formalities. After a day of quarreling over nonsense, Harry shot Sims with his own gun. From his hospital bed, Sims told his family not to cooperate in the prosecution of Harry. He admitted that she was just defending herself from a beating at his hands. Sims survived his wounds, reconciled with Harry, and went on to live with her for many years.198
Beatrice Harry’s shooting of Charles Sims is both familiar and provocative. This brand of violence fuels contemporary policy critiques urging stringent supply-side gun controls. On the other hand, it pays to ask, as we soon will, how much difference there is between Harry’s self-defense claim and the claims of countless blacks who fought back against racist violence? The two categories resonate differently on several counts. But from the perspective of the victim, what difference does it really make that her attacker is black or white, a virulent racist or a mercurial lover?
The episode that solidified the Deacons in Bogalusa is an object lesson in the power and hazards of threat and bluff. The threat centered around Bob and Jackie Hicks, whose hosting of white CORE activists raised the hackles of local bigots. As the interracial group was sitting, talking in the living room, the Bogalusa police chief appeared on the porch with a grim warning. A mob was forming to attack the CORE activists. The police could not protect them. They had better leave town, and their black hosts too.
Neither the Hickses nor the CORE activists were inclined to run, although they surely were given pause when the police chief responded to their request for protection, declaring that “he wasn’t going to play no nursemaid to some niggers.” Shocking as it might have been to the CORE staffers, the police response really was no surprise to Bob and Jackie Hicks. It was, though, a signal that they needed to get busy.
Negroes and the Gun Page 36