They already had guns in the house. But it was clear that the two white pacifists would be of little use. As word of the threat spread, help arrived in abundance. First, neighborhood women came and carried off the children to safety. Then the men started arriving, a troop of them, carrying rifles and shotguns, and milling about in a mass that defied accurate counting.199
Ultimately, the story of impending mob attack was a lie, concocted by the police chief to scare the CORE activists out of town. But it turned out to be more than just a failed ruse. It was, in fact, the spark for the formation of one of the Deacons’ most storied chapters.
The episode at Bob and Jackie Hicks’s home would also herald a transformation within groups like CORE. The shift was small at first. But the practical lessons were enduring. CORE staffers Bill Yates and Steve Miller were not scared off by the threats or the armed preparations of their hosts. A few days later, they held a meeting at a Negro union hall. They finished up and were driving out of town when they were attacked by a carload of Klansmen who disabled their car with gunfire and then dragged Yates from the vehicle and beat him in the street. Yates and Miller managed to escape the assault and fled to a little black café as several more carloads of Klansmen joined the hunt.
In standard fashion, the CORE workers called for distant saviors and prayed that the call chain would pierce the necessary layers of bureaucracy in time for someone to do something. They were lucky that their black hosts were more practical. While Yates and Miller were feeding coins into the pay phone to plead for help from Washington, San Francisco, and New Orleans, a stream of armed black men slipped into the back of Audrey’s Café. Several of them were among the group that had responded to the call of Bob and Jackie Hicks several days earlier. For Steve Miller, the juxtaposition offered a clear lesson. “Up to that point, I embraced the concept of nonviolence. At that point I guess I said, ‘Oh, I guess I’m not nonviolent anymore.’”
Eventually, the call chain produced an FBI response and the promise of a protective escort to extract the two CORE workers. When that failed to materialize, the black men formed an armed convoy and took Yates and Miller back to the home of Bob and Jackie Hicks, where they continued to stand guard.
As the Bogalusa organization grew, the provisioning became more sophisticated. Charles Sims recounted how virtually everyone already had some sort of gun. “The average dude own a couple of shotguns. Most of us own pistols and all this type of business.” But the army veterans who rose to leadership urged standardization and purchases of ballistically superior firearms. Deacons were discouraged from buying low-powered .22 caliber pistols in favor of more powerful .38 caliber handguns. The organization bought .38 caliber ammunition in bulk to save money. For rifles, the Deacons encouraged high-powered .30-06 caliber rifles like the M1 Garand available from the federal government through the Civilian Marksmanship Program.
Philosophically, the Deacons grounded their strategy on the foundation that freedmen invoked a century earlier. In language reminiscent of black invocations of the Second Amendment in the 1860s, Deacon Bob Hicks declared in the winter of 1965, “Let’s back up on the Constitution of the United States and say that we can bear arms. We have a right to defend ourselves since the legally designated authorities won’t do it. So this is all we done. That’s all.”200
It wasn’t long before the Bogalusa Deacons put their heightened preparations into action. And again the violence swirled around Bob and Jackie Hicks. The target was the resilient Bill Yates, who had been beaten in the street several months earlier. It was now April, and Yates was shepherding a new group of student activists recently arrived from the University of Kansas. On the eve of a planned march on City Hall, Yates was attacked and then chased as he was driving to meet up with student volunteers. A pickup truck pinned his car against the curb. Then a man jumped out of the truck and attempted to break through his windshield. Yates threw the car into reverse and raced backward down the street to the Hickses’ house. The attackers broke off the chase when Jackie Hicks stepped out onto the porch with a pistol in her hand.
Fig. 7.9. Robert “Bob” Hicks standing outside his home with his Winchester repeating rifle, assessing the damage after a late-night attack. (AP Photo.)
But the peace did not last long. Later that night, Klansmen returned to the Hickses’ home, incensed by the news that white college students were staying there. They probably expected the Hickses to be armed. But they did not appreciate that seven other Deacons were stationed at various points outside, guarding the house. At around one o’clock in the morning, a car rolled up slowly and a man jumped out with something in in his hand. He tossed it through the windshield of a vehicle owned by one of the white students. Bob Hicks ran outside with his gun to investigate. The terrorists fired a shot from their car, and Hicks fired back. From cover around the house, the Deacons opened fire with reports of at least fifteen shots fired before the midnight terrorists sped out of sight. While everyone in and around the Hickses’ home came through the shootout unscathed, black hospital workers said that two Klansmen were shot, and the story was suppressed in order to conceal police complicity in the attack.201
This time, the shoot-out made national news. The story ran on the front page of the New York Post under the sensational but misleading headline, “Klansmen and CORE in Louisiana Gun Battle.” The New York Post article failed to appreciate that the Deacons were an entity distinct from CORE. Indeed, it failed even to mention the Deacons by name, referring vaguely to some “Negroes guarding the house.”
Still, the Deacons were on the ascent in Bogalusa. In the coming weeks, CORE chairman James Farmer would arrive in town to bolster protests and boycotts against merchants who refused to integrate. When the city fathers agreed to repeal segregation ordinances, a jubilant Farmer celebrated the victory with a speech declaring that the Klan had become “a laughing matter.” He was quickly proved wrong.202
Almost immediately, the Bogalusa Klan countered with a series of confrontations that culminated in the shooting of two black deputies who had been hired as part of the effort to open up the city bureaucracy to Negroes. The shooting provoked the Deacons to ramp up their organizing and recruitment, and drew more national coverage of their activity. In June 1965, the Deacons made the front page of the Sunday New York Times, under the headline, “Armed Negro Unit Spreads in South.” The article reported surely exaggerated claims of fifty-five local chapters of the Deacons across the South, totaling more than fifteen thousand members.
The Sunday New York Times report also highlighted the same difficult question that Martin Luther King navigated in assessing the role of the Deacons in the Mississippi March against Fear—“Should a civil rights organization committed to nonviolence align itself with the Deacons, and accept their services?” CORE operative Richard Haley answered with a rendition of the long distinction between legitimate self-defense and disdained political violence. Using slightly different terms, Haley argued that affiliation with the Deacons was consistent with the nonviolent movement because the Deacons were practicing “protective nonviolence.” Deacons leader Charles Sims embodied the distinction, sitting with a .38 revolver tucked into his waistband while explaining, “I believe nonviolence is the only way.”203
Any superficial contradiction here was easily resolved by folk who responded with gunfire to midnight attacks on isolated farmhouses. There, the trouble had come to them, their backs were against the wall, and there was no chance of help. But the Deacons, some argued, went seeking trouble and sometimes by their presence provoked it. Charles Sims countered that “the showing of a weapon stops many things,” and his assessment is consistent with modern measures of nonshooting defensive gun uses.204
On the other hand, there is no denying that guns have both risks and utilities. And brandishing one, particularly in the environments where the Deacons were operating, could be a catalyst for unpredictable results. The Wall Street Journal expressed this worry, quoting a Louisiana Klansman who seemingly rel
ished the emergence of the Deacons, declaring, “If violence has to settle this, then the sooner the better.” The next piece of national news coverage pressed the point even harder.205
Following the story in the New York Times, the Sunday Los Angeles Times ran its own front-page story on the Deacons, titled “Negro ‘Deacons’ Claim They Had Machine Guns, Grenades for War.” The L. A. Times indulged none of the fine distinctions that Richard Haley had sold weeks before to a New York reporter. Drawing from FBI documents leaked to various media outlets, it reported statements from an informant that the Deacons claimed to have a cache of “machine guns and grenades for use in racial warfare.” Although these claims were empty boasts, Deacons leaders refused to deny the charge.
The Los Angeles reporting depicted the Deacons as part of an emerging militant trend. It punched the hot buttons of race-driven political violence. And while the Deacons would still avow a commitment to working within boundaries of genuine self-defense, their agenda was plainly sullied. Moreover, it turned out that organizing, fundraising, and speechmaking around a theme of violence made it harder to keep the rhetoric within the boundaries of traditional self-defense. Martin Luther King identified the problem with the criticism that “programmatic action surrounding self-defense” is folly, just a short step from political violence.206
Looking back, it is fair to mark the Los Angeles Times’s coverage as the beginning of the Deacons’ slide into the dangerous boundary-land that separated common self-defense from political violence. And that slide reflected a broader militant trend that dramatically diminished the black tradition of arms in the modern era.
As the Deacons’ profile rose, individual members moved into the spotlight. They were not media savvy, and it is unclear exactly how much authority they had to speak for the organization. The group was loose knit. Individual chapters were largely autonomous. So whether Deacons spokesmen were aggressively prescribing a more radical shift, just describing an organic turn already made, or simply exaggerating the sentiment within the ranks is hard to determine. These subtleties were lost on the national press, which now cast the Deacons as part of worrisome militant trend.
Shana Alexander wondered in Life magazine “whether it was best to think of the Deacons as armed Negro vigilantes, protection racketeers, Mao-inspired terrorist conspirators, or freedom fighters.” Ultimately, Alexander was a good liberal. After interviewing Charles Sims, she wrote, “If I ever have to go to Bogalusa, I should be very glad to have his protection.”207
The perennial worry about self-defeating political violence is evident in the reported comments of California civil-rights leaders who criticized statements that Charles Sims made during his fundraising tour there. Sims raised hackles with his appearance on the weekly television show of black journalist Louis Lomax. With the conflict over civil rights at a boil, Sims said that the Deacons were prepared to use a level force that would leave “blood . . . flowing down the streets like water.” In the national black weekly Jet magazine, three prominent Los Angeles civil-rights leaders condemned Sims. Reverend Thomas Kilgore captured the sentiment of the group, declaring, “I disapprove of keeping civil rights workers alive with guns. The nonviolent approach has brought pressure to bear on those elements which discriminate. The Bogalusa movement under the Deacons—a misnomer—represents a danger to 20 million Negroes.”208
Back in Bogalusa, folk facing more immediate risks had less compunction about being kept alive with guns. Unlike the LA clerics, they were putting their skin on the line to fight for actual enforcement of laws already passed by the United States Congress. After an uneventful march to City Hall in July, protesters planned to follow up the next day. CORE activists were doing much of the planning. Their decisions reflected a discernible trend within the movement.209
Just that week, CORE had debated the boundaries and demands of nonviolence. The pacifists prevailed on the point that CORE activists should remain nonviolent. But it was a signal of changes to come that the group affirmatively resolved to accept protection from the Deacons when it was available. The decision was not unanimous. And in the days to come proponents and the dissenters alike would gain lessons about the hazards and unpredictability of violence.
The makeup of the Deacons varied from chapter to chapter. The flagship chapter in Jonesboro tried to screen out hotheads and anyone with a criminal record. The Bogalusa chapter did not. In brash new member Henry Austin, they got both a hothead and someone who had spent two years in military prison for stabbing a man who called him “Nigger.”
In early July 1965, activists staged a series of protest marches in Bogalusa. On July 8, the Deacons were on watch during a planned march through town to City Hall. There were hecklers all along the route. Henry Austin and Milton Johnson guarded the rear, driving slowly behind in a car owned by A. Z. Young, one of the older Deacons. As the marchers turned toward City Hall, some white hecklers defied police and moved in close. Then they started throwing rocks and bricks at the marchers, and some young toughs jumped onto the hood of A. Z. Young’s car.
Then one of the missiles connected—a brick to the side of the head of a teenage girl named Hattie May Hill. Milton Johnson jumped from the car and dragged Hill into the back seat. But now the mob was on him. Henry Austin came to help, gun in hand. He fired a shot into the air. But the mob was fearless and pressed in. Austin then leveled his revolver and fired three shots. The crowd recoiled as an angry young man named Alton Crowe dropped to the pavement, bleeding from .38 caliber holes in his chest.210
So now it had happened. A protest march, undeniably political, had ended in gunfire by a black man, and a white man lay bleeding in the road. This was the danger that had dogged the modern movement—the kind of hazard that had always shadowed the black tradition of arms. Henry Austin’s violent reflex showed that the boundary against political violence was not really a line so much as it was a minefield, a zone of dangerous decision making where individual exigencies crashed into the long-term strategies and aspirations of the group.
Who knows what Alton Crowe thought as he walked over to Main Street that day. Perhaps he hated Negroes with a passion that he could not explain. Perhaps he feared what Negroes, unrestrained, would do to his town, his school, and his way of life. Perhaps he just thought it would be fun to yell, toss a few stones, and shove the wretches back into their place. He probably did not think that one of them would have the audacity to shoot him.
Many men had been lynched across the South for lesser offenses than Henry Austin had just committed. Austin knew this, and so did the police who were quickly on him. The crowd pulsed back at the gunshots. But now, with Austin handcuffed over the hood of the car, the impulse to string him up right there started as a murmur and rose to a roar. Austin would not even spend the night in Bogalusa. He was moved to the jail in Slidell on the governor’s order.
Alton Crowe survived his wounds and Henry Austin was released on bail. Reactions from across the spectrum were predictable. Initially Deacons leaders denied that Austin and Johnson were part of the group. But then it became clear that local folk considered Austin a hero, and the Deacons embraced him. Governor John McKeithen condemned the Deacons as cowards and trash. Klan leaders were defiant, one of them telling a northern reporter, “I don’t care how many guns that bunch of black Mau Mau’s has, they don’t have the prerequisite guts.”211
For Martin Luther King, the Alton Crowe shooting was the danger he had long warned against. It was a full plunge into political violence. King quickly condemned the shooting and emphasized the peril of treading into the boundary-land against political violence. It was an interesting comment in contrast to his rhetoric following the Robert Williams incident. There, King recognized and respected the sphere of legitimate, individual self-defense. But here, in the aftermath of an episode that triggered the long worry about political violence, King was supremely cautious, warning that “the line of demarcation between aggressive and defensive violence is very slim. The Negro must have allies to
win his struggle for equality. And our allies will not surround a violent movement. What protects us from the Klan is to expose its brutality. We can’t outshoot the Klan. We would only alienate our allies and lose sympathy for our cause.”212
Within a year, though, King would again yield to the practical draw of the self-defense impulse. If FBI reports are to be believed, King was guarded by as many as forty Deacons on July 29, 1966, during a speech in Chicago. Although some of King’s aides objected, and Jesse Jackson adamantly so, King reportedly assented to having Deacons from the Chicago chapter act as bodyguards with the proviso that they not be identified as members of the group.213
The shooting of Alton Crowe posed a dilemma for CORE as well. The organization had strayed from its pacifist foundation through growing association with the Deacons. If CORE did not disavow the Deacons now, it surely would cost the support of northern white pacifists who would vote by closing their checkbooks. On the other hand, repudiating the Deacons might jeopardize relationships with black folk at the grassroots. As its financial decline would testify, CORE sacrificed the money.
CORE chairman James Farmer, soon to be replaced by the more openly militant Floyd McKissick, reflected the dilemma in a Wall Street Journal interview where he attempted to have things both ways. CORE was still committed to nonviolence, said Farmer. But his next statement was, depending on the observer, either an unacceptable equivocation or confirmation of the central theme of the black tradition of arms. CORE’s nonviolent stance, said Farmer, did not mean “I have any right to tell a Negro community they don’t have the right to defend the sanctity of their homes.”
The danger that the Deacons would lose control of their image is evident in Newsweek magazine’s depiction of them as dangerous, separatist militants on par with Elijah Mohammed’s black Muslims. The black press, not surprisingly, took a more sympathetic view. Jet magazine ran a front-cover story praising the Deacons as “a determined band of heavily armed Negroes who have vowed to defend themselves with guns from marauding whites who have terrorized black communities in the South.”214
Negroes and the Gun Page 37