Organized armed resistance began in the 1960s in the small North Louisiana town of Jonesboro, lying about fifty miles southwest of Monroe. The Deacons for Defense originated there within the context of CORE organizing. Jonesboro, the seat of Jackson Parish, was a demographically complex town whose population had been shaped by two large migrations. One was an exodus by poor whites seeking opportunity and an escape from drought and the depleted soil of southeastern Louisiana after the Civil War. The sandy soil in this part of North Louisiana was not much good for farming either, and the best land in the area was already owned by well-off farmers, but these impoverished whites somehow scratched out a subsistence living. The other was the relocation of large numbers of Black people fleeing plantations, the memory of chattel slavery, and the plantation-based debt peonage that had become a new form of slavery. Poor as the soil was, there were no plantations on it, and many of these Afro-Americans were enticed by the prospect of finding a piece of land here—little, perhaps, and barely farmable, but well out of the sight of white people. Indeed, one of the characteristics that came to define the black people living in and around Jonesboro was an independence of spirit.
At the opening of the twentieth century, Jonesboro’s surrounding pine forests had also attracted timber companies and paper mills. The Continental Can Company paper mill and the Olin Mathieson Chemical Company were the main employers, hiring many of the town’s residents, but most people nevertheless lived in abject poverty. In every respect, Jonesboro was a poorly serviced company town. By 1964, it had a population of about 4,000 people out of Jackson Parish’s total population of about 16,000. Roughly a third of Jonesboro’s inhabitants were black; they held only the most menial jobs. There was a strong Ku Klux Klan presence throughout the parish, and Jonesboro was strictly segregated.
But segregation also meant that there were a handful of black-owned businesses servicing Jonesboro’s black community and a small black entrepreneurial class that lived a few notches above poverty. Some black enterprise even developed in contact with the town’s white community, mostly through the use of rigs to haul pulpwood to paper mills. A black political leadership also developed and grew in influence. There were also black social networks—churches, teachers’ associations, Prince Hall Masons, and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE) among them. An NAACP chapter had been organized in Jackson Parish in the 1940s. In the 1950s, when Louisiana passed a law requiring the disclosure of NAACP membership, the chapter changed its name to the Jackson Parish Progressive Voters League. In 1956, when Jackson Parish’s Citizens’ Council conspired with the local voting registrar to remove black registrants from the voting rolls, the Voters League and the U.S. Department of Justice initiated and won a suit blocking the action and requiring the parish’s registrar to make registration records available for review by a federal judge. And nearly a decade after the Voters League won its suit, a self-defense group sprouted up within Jonesboro’s black community as well.
In late July 1964, just a few weeks after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Ernest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick brought together a group of African American men in Jonesboro. Many were veterans of World War II or of the Korean War. Thomas and Kirkpatrick had assembled them to initiate a discussion of how best to meet increasing violence from the Ku Klux Klan. CORE had recently come to Jonesboro, and white supremacists had been launching attacks against the organizers and against black townsfolk.
CORE had been invited to Jonesboro by the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a more independent black church that was not overly concerned about the financial and physical dangers of supporting the growing civil rights movement. In early 1964, two organizers operating out of CORE’s regional office in Monroe, Louisiana, began regularly visiting Jonesboro to assist the Voters League. One of the organizers, Mike Lesser, was northern, white, and inexperienced. The other was Ronnie Moore, a black native of New Orleans; in 1962 he had been expelled from Southern University for protesting segregation in Baton Rouge. By the time he made his first visit to Jonesboro, Moore had already been jailed eighteen times.
At the beginning of summer 1964, the first CORE volunteers began arriving in Jonesboro as part of the organization’s 1964 Louisiana Summer Task Force. This effort was quite unlike Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer, in which antisegregation direct-action protests were discouraged and the focus was entirely on voter registration, “Freedom Schools” aimed at addressing the poor education found in public schools, and the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In Louisiana CORE also promoted nonviolent direct action against segregation and began testing the newly passed Civil Rights Act. Jonesboro student protesters regularly targeted the public library and the municipal swimming pool.
At first the CORE summer volunteers stayed with local black families, as was customary in the southern organizing tradition. Soon, however, a local supporter fixed up an empty dilapidated house so that CORE’s young organizers could have a place of their own as their “freedom house”—their living quarters and operational headquarters. Jonesboro’s black community “was unbelievably supportive,” remembered Fred Brooks, a CORE volunteer who arrived in the town after finishing the spring semester at Tennessee A&I College in Nashville.
But as welcoming as their reception from Jonesboro’s black community was, CORE organizers found themselves the target of white terrorism almost as soon as they arrived. Although they suffered minimal police harassment, recalled Brooks, the freedom house, with its nonviolent inhabitants, was more vulnerable than a private home, most of which were protected with guns. The Ku Klux Klan brazenly threatened the freedom house and its occupants. Klansmen regularly fired into the air around the house, shot through its windows, or drove by shouting threats. Picket lines and other protests also endured Klan harassment.
But Jonesboro’s black community wanted the CORE activists in their town and had no intention of letting Klansmen run them off. So, a few men—Ernest “Chilly Willy” Thomas, then twenty-nine years old, among them—began to quietly guard the freedom house and its occupants. At first, they simply sat unarmed on the porch watching the street, shadowed CORE workers as they canvassed for voter registration, or placed themselves near picket-line protests. Their presence meant that no one was going to walk up to the civil rights workers and beat them up. But the efforts of Thomas and his companions also represented a middle ground. Thomas wanted to work with the CORE organizers, but he could not commit to nonviolence. And for their part, the CORE activists were reluctant to compromise their commitment to nonviolence. But the two groups were not as incompatible as they might seem. Thomas and his guardians simply found a way to assist the CORE activists short of the use of armed self-defense, at least temporarily.
Though at first Thomas and his guardians provided unarmed protection, before long they were watching over the CORE workers with concealed weapons. “What happened,” Brooks related, “is that Chilly Willy and others told us that they understood the nonviolent method that we were using. And they said, ‘O.K., you guys can be nonviolent, but we are not nonviolent and we are not going to allow these people to beat up on you or kill you.’” But Thomas and his group of local defenders did not join the CORE activists in nonviolent direct action. The discipline was impossible for them to accept. If they were spat upon or physically attacked in any way, they were not going to turn the other cheek, and they understood that their response would cause problems for CORE. Yet they saw no problem with standing on the sidelines and stepping in if someone threatened to harm the nonviolent activists. As Fred Brooks explained,
If we had a picket line, these guys were standing on the corner, on both sides of the street. Any time we were having a demonstration these guys would be standing there on both sides of the street. Wherever we went it was like a caravan; these guys in their pickup trucks with those high-powered rifles up in the back. White people didn’t mess with us… . They [the defenders] would come by at night an
d want to know what the next day’s agenda was. Different ones of them took different patrols. They told us we were not to leave the black community without security.
Their protectiveness made quite an impression on Brooks, who was just eighteen years old when he went to Jonesboro and considered himself on the militant, cutting edge of the movement. “Many of these guys were older people! Old people!” he marveled later. “You couldn’t be telling these people anything about security, self-defense, or protection. They were our parents.” Still, among themselves, Brooks and his fellow CORE organizers argued heatedly about the armed protection they were receiving. Could it coexist with CORE’s commitment to nonviolence? If so how? Adding urgency to this question was the steady growth of the Ku Klux Klan and Klan violence in 1963 and 1964. Louisiana’s Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was closely related to Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Louisiana organization had, in fact, been born in Natchez, Mississippi. Samuel Bowers, the leader of the Klan group that had murdered CORE workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was from a prominent Louisiana family and had studied engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans.
The ranks of CORE’s armed defenders were growing as white violence undermined the philosophy of nonviolence. Even some idealistic northern volunteers within CORE thought it unrealistic. “The concept that we are going to go South and through love and patience change the hearts and minds of Southern whites should be totally discarded,” concluded one CORE activist in a discussion paper.
Some black leaders in Jonesboro sought official parish approval for organized self-defense, and for a moment they seemed to have gotten it. After discussion and negotiations with Jonesboro’s police chief Adrian Peevy, Jackson Parish high school teacher and football coach Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick organized a five-man, all-volunteer black “auxiliary” police squad to protect both the black community and the CORE activists. The police chief (and some of the town’s more conservative blacks) may have hoped that Kirkpatrick’s group would help prevent antisegregation protests. Chief Peevy even provided Kirkpatrick’s group with an old police car, handcuffs, and a few other supplies.
Ernest Thomas, for his part, was suspicious of these new defenders, despite the fact that a couple of the men in his group were also part of Kirkpatrick’s “police” squad. “They were looking for some black policemen to do their dirty work,” he said later of the white authorities in Jonesboro. It did not take long, however, before continuing Ku Klux Klan violence and the black community’s worsening relations with official law enforcement pushed Thomas’s group and Kirkpatrick’s group closer to each other.
One night in the summer of 1964, while driving back to Monroe from Jonesboro, Mike Lesser and CORE’s regional director Ronnie Moore found themselves being chased by three cars filled with Klansmen. One of the cars passed Lesser and Moore and blocked the way forward. They made a sudden U-turn and headed back toward Jonesboro—and toward the other Klansmen, whose cars were now blocking the way back. Lesser, who was driving, pressed the accelerator to the floor, forcing the remaining Klansmen to veer away at the last minute, and Lesser and Moore narrowly escaped.
When they made it back to the CORE freedom house in Jonesboro, Lesser and Moore discovered that their ambushers had already filed a complaint with the local police. Jackson Parish sheriff Newt Loe ordered one of Kirkpatrick’s black deputies to arrest the two CORE organizers, but the deputy refused. Instead, his fellow black deputies provided an armed escort for Moore and Lesser as they drove back to Monroe later that night.
The campaign against CORE intensified. Police and Klan harassment of CORE workers became routine. But something had changed. Jonesboro’s blacks were proving themselves unwilling to stand idly by while whites threatened them and their guests—and now Thomas and his small crew were just the tip of the iceberg. One night later that summer, when whites came to the freedom house to harass and frighten CORE workers, Kirkpatrick and two of his black deputies scared the men off. Word spread throughout the black community that the retreating whites had threatened to come back with reinforcements. Soon dozens of armed men from Jonesboro’s black community were in the streets. The threatened counterattack never came.
But Kirkpatrick was reaching the end of his patience with the white police force. The day after the incident at the freedom house, he became further alienated from them when, after refusing an order from Chief Peevy to arrest fifteen young black people protesting at Jonesboro’s white-only municipal swimming pool, he watched white policemen arrest the youths anyway. The police chief also ordered two of the protesters’ mothers arrested for “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”
The tipping point came one night late in July 1964, when Jonesboro’s assistant police chief led a fifty-car Ku Klux Klan caravan through the town’s black neighborhood. Instead of firing from their car windows, the Klansmen threw leaflets denouncing the “outside agitators” and desegregation efforts in Jonesboro. Although they could have done far worse, Thomas still sped to Chief Peevy’s house and demanded to know why the police had escorted Klansmen through the neighborhood. The chief said that sometimes the department escorted funerals and that he considered the Klan caravan to be the same thing. Thomas later claimed to have bluntly told the chief that if another Klan convoy ever came through the black community, “there was going to be some killing going on.”
Elsewhere in the parish on the same night, white night riders burned crosses and an armed white mob converged on the parish jail where local protesters and CORE organizers were being held. The evening seems to have pushed Kirkpatrick over the edge, convincing him that his black auxiliary police unit was at best a useless tool and at worst a pawn in the hands of white power.
A few days later, some twenty men from both Thomas’s and Kirkpatrick’s groups met to discuss the best ways to protect Jonesboro’s black community. Kirkpatrick himself chaired the meeting. Its attendees vowed to never again be caught unprepared, as they had been when the Klan caravan rode through their neighborhood. They resolved to protect the CORE freedom house, and—most important—to supplement Kirkpatrick’s black police auxiliary with an organized group independent of local police authority, a group that would provide security to the black community without any association with the police.
The group had no name or formal organization at this point, but the galvanizing effect on the black community of even its immature presence became apparent shortly after this meeting when Klansmen attempted to burn a cross in the yard of Reverend Y. D. Jackson’s rural home. When the Klansmen put a torch to the wooden cross, shots rang out and drove them away. Jackson’s wife had opened fire on them. And before the end of 1964 Jonesboro’s emerging defensive movement would coalesce even further—urged on, ironically, by the local CORE group, and particularly by a white organizer named Charlie Fenton.
Fenton’s life experiences had already marked him as a fervent advocate of nonviolence. At seventeen he had joined the navy, where he became a medical corpsman on the assumption that he would not have to carry a weapon. When he was informed that navy regulations required him to be armed, he refused, earning himself two weeks in the brig. He became an activist in San Francisco, then joined CORE in Louisiana. In 1964, after a month’s training in Plaquemine, Fenton was assigned to the CORE project in Monroe. He wound up spending most of that summer in jail. In November he joined the CORE project in Jonesboro. It was there that he first encountered guns in the local movement.
Fenton had become a part of CORE in order to engage in nonviolent struggle, so the presence of guns alongside—and sometimes on the persons of—civil rights workers was a complete surprise. When he arrived at the Jonesboro freedom house, he later recalled, “I got out of the car 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 building.” Although he was impressed, Fenton later remembered, “I wa
s not very happy.” Like most CORE workers who had come from outside the South (and especially those who were white), Fenton was utterly committed to nonviolence, and he could not conceive of compromising his ideals for the sake of mere safety.
It did not take Fenton long, however, to realize that the armed men were a necessary part of the project in Jonesboro and that people like himself had little or no influence over their decisions to possess and use weapons. As if to drive that point home, local black CORE supporters assigned a bodyguard to protect Fenton, and there was little he could do about it.
Although he remained committed to the goal of building a nonviolent civic organization in Jonesboro, Fenton also began to suggest that the men protecting him and his fellow CORE workers formally organize themselves. “Fenton was the one who sat down and said, ‘We need to provide some structure—president, secretary, treasurer—some organization,’” Fred Brooks recalled. “And that’s what they did, although nothing really changed in terms of what they were doing to protect us.”
Although others from CORE were involved in the organization of Jonesboro’s black defenders, it was Fenton who primarily encouraged and arranged the November 1964 meeting at Jonesboro’s Masonic Hall that led to formation of a “protective association”—which in practical terms meant a merger between Thomas’s group and Kirkpatrick’s auxiliary police. The participants were nervous and uncertain, fretting over the possibility of police spies, organizational issues like whether or not there should be dues, and the dangers inherent in being a visible organization. But they did agree to meet again to talk some more, and a series of Tuesday-night meetings followed.
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