On January 5, 1965, the organization that would call themselves the Deacons for Defense and Justice was formally incorporated. For the first time anywhere in the South, representatives of a national civil rights organization had played a role in creating a group for the express purpose of providing armed self-defense. The CORE organizers, predictably, were still torn; as Fenton told the New York Times in February, he still believed in nonviolence, and he acknowledged that Jonesboro’s Deacons had difficulty understanding why he did not want them bringing weapons into the office. “I hope that they will become a civic organization,” he told Times reporter Fred Powledge, “bettering the community and eventually making the defense part of it obsolete … but still no one can tell what would have happened here if the Deacons hadn’t formed their own ideas of protection.”
The national civil rights establishment was rattled by this development in Jonesboro. Before the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, CORE, SNCC, and SCLC had consciously steered clear of any public show of support for the idea of using arms, defensively or otherwise. Only Robert Williams had organized an armed group, and he had done so against the wishes of his national headquarters; moreover, no outside organizers had helped create Williams’s rifle club. CORE’s national office was hostile to the practice of armed self-defense in its project areas, even when organized by local people. Now in Jonesboro an organized armed group had taken shape with the assistance of some of its staff.
The tension between the national CORE office and organizers in the field increased markedly as news spread of the Deacons’ formation. As Dave Dennis recounted later, “We were telling [CORE’s national leadership] that we were committed to these people and you take people where they are.” Richard Haley, CORE’s southern regional director, was even more explicit in his support for the armed defenders. “The Deacons have the effect of lowering the minimum potential for danger,” he told New York Times reporter Roy Reed. “That is a valuable function that CORE can’t perform.” The Deacons, Haley further explained, actually helped secure the place of nonviolence in the southern movement. “Protected nonviolence,” he observed, “is apt to be more popular with the participants than unprotected.”
Some people at CORE’s national headquarters in New York were more tolerant of organizers’ alignment with the Deacons than was apparent on the surface. There was growing internal tension around race in both CORE and SNCC, as nonviolence and the achievement of integration and even desegregation became less important goals than the development of a strong black consciousness or self-awareness and self-reliance in black communities. Many in CORE’s younger black leadership appreciated the challenges of organizing in some of the most violent areas of the South, and as a result, they were increasingly sympathetic to the idea of self-defense and accepting of its legitimacy. More and more, nonviolence seemed like a luxurious abstraction, an idea remote from the harsh reality in which organizers lived. They faced threats and attacks on a daily basis and were under pressure from black people in the communities where they worked to support the practice—if not the underlying principle—of armed self-defense absent any other reliable source of protection.
Protection was not forthcoming from any of the local or national agencies with the power to provide it. As late as the summer of 1964, when the projects of both SNCC and CORE in Mississippi and Louisiana were under constant violent attack, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Johnson administration were insisting that they had no authority to intercede and no way to protect organizers, their local allies, or local black communities from violence.
By the time of CORE’s July 1965 convention in Durham, North Carolina, the organization’s Resolutions and Constitution Committee seemed prepared to rescind its commitment to nonviolence. Ernest Thomas from Jonesboro addressed the meeting and emphasized that the Deacons recognized the use—even the necessity—of nonviolence in demonstrations and tests of the 1964 Civil Rights Act ordering desegregation. CORE’s traditional rules, he thought, were appropriate for such demonstrations. However, Thomas told the conference, even at these demonstrations the Deacons were willing and prepared to use their guns for self-defense and to protect protesters if necessary. Earlier in the convention, James Farmer had acknowledged the right to self-defense, citing its value in Louisiana though still arguing that guns should not be used at protests.
The convention did not abandon its commitment to nonviolence, but the organization clearly was in a state of transition. One resolution would have required that a majority of the leadership of CORE chapters be black; it was not passed, but it was discussed seriously. A year later, at the 1966 convention, attendees repealed the nonviolent clause from the organization’s constitution. Representatives of the Nation of Islam had been invited to speak at that convention.
SNCC was evolving, too. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman, replacing John Lewis, who had been committed to nonviolence as a way of life ever since his college days in Nashville. Carmichael, on the other hand, had long argued for the legitimacy and necessity of self-defense. During the June 1964 meeting in Atlanta called to discuss remaining preparations for the soon-to-begin Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the question arose of whether SNCC would support a staff worker who picked up a gun to help defend the family with whom he or she was staying. The attendees quickly decided that SNCC would indeed provide support, although carrying weapons would still be out-of-bounds. “I think it’s best to discuss the controllable things,” said Bob Moses, apparently trying to swing the discussion back toward the practicalities of organizing for the pending Freedom Summer. “I don’t know if anyone in Mississippi preached to local Negroes that they shouldn’t defend themselves,” he added. “Probably the closest is when I asked Mr. E. W. Steptoe not to carry guns when we go together at night. So, instead he just hides his gun, and then I find out later.”
SNCC workers, it soon became clear, were not handling firearms just when their host families were under attack. Following the Atlanta meeting, SNCC’s Mississippi staff met in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and the conversation once again turned to the question of carrying guns. The attendees reaffirmed the Atlanta decision not to carry guns, but when Stokely Carmichael asked who was carrying a gun at that moment, about a dozen were produced.
These discussions about SNCC workers’ need and right to armed self-defense were relatively minor compared to the larger and more serious debate about the group’s purpose, political direction, and relationships with other civil rights organizations. Few outside SNCC even knew of the group’s internal discussions about armed self-defense. Much the same can be said about CORE.
CORE’s shift in attitude on self-defense was more noticeable than SNCC’s, perhaps because CORE’s deeper roots in the philosophy of nonviolence made the shift more apparent—and perhaps also because newspaper coverage brought national attention to the Deacons and their involvement with the civil rights group. In 1968, when he was no longer CORE’s national director, Farmer reflected on CORE’s transformation in his introduction to Inge Powell Bell’s book CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence. Farmer wrote of his terrifying 1963 experience when he had been forced to flee Plaquemine because the Ku Klux Klan was hunting him to kill him. That moment, Farmer claimed, had altered CORE’s history: “CORE nonviolence—never a way of life, but only a strategy—ended on a balmy night, September 1, 1963, in a sleepy town on the Mississippi [River],” he wrote, “when a uniformed mob screamed for my blood… . The casketless hearse in which I escaped, became for CORE a symbol of the burial of peace.” The same year Farmer wrote those words, CORE limited participation by whites in the group, adopted a new constitution, and declared itself a Black Nationalist organization.
The Deacons, however, had as profound an influence on CORE’s thinking as did white-supremacist violence. In Jonesboro, the Deacons settled on their officers and structure before reaching a firm decision about their name. Percy Lee Bradford, a paper-mill worker and cab owner who had also been one of Kirkp
atrick’s auxiliary policemen, was elected president. Henry Amos, who had also been an auxiliary policeman, was elected vice president. Ernest Thomas was employed as an organizer. All members had to be U.S. citizens at least twenty-one years old, of good moral character, and preferably registered to vote. The group decided on a membership fee of ten dollars and monthly dues of two dollars. Members would supply their own rifles, but the organization would provide ammunition, bought in bulk. Most of the founding members possessed shotguns and pistols, not rifles. Thomas thought the group’s firearms should be standardized, and he favored .30 M1 carbines and .38 Special revolvers.
How individual Deacons participated varied. There were “four tiers of membership in the Jonesboro Deacons,” writes Lance Hill,
a structure that would be reproduced in other chapters. The first tier, the “activist core,” comprised approximately 20 members who paid dues and regularly attended meetings and participated in patrols. The second tier, “active members,” consisted of about 100 men who occasionally paid dues and attended meetings but usually took part in activities only when necessary. The third tier, the “reinforcements,” comprised roughly 100–200 men who did not pay dues or attend meetings but agreed with the Deacons’ strategy and could be depended on to volunteer if needed. The fourth, and most amorphous, tier contained the “self-proclaimed” Deacons: those individuals who, without official sanction, declared themselves to be Deacons. Though lacking formal ties to the organization, this fourth tier helped popularize the Deacons and their self-defense strategy. In Jonesboro, total dues-paying members never exceeded 150.
The Deacons were overwhelmingly male, although there does not seem to have been a formal ban on women members. Women had not participated in the armed patrols, but they had been active participants in Jonesboro and Jackson Parish’s civil rights struggle. Several women, among them Ruth Amos, the wife of the Deacons’ vice president, Henry Amos, participated in some of the new group’s meetings; there were also rumors that some women engaged in target practice. And there was some discussion—which eventually came to naught—of forming a women’s auxiliary—“Deaconettes.” This gender distinction was more the result of cultural habit than of any explicit organizational decision to prohibit the involvement of women, and it began to erode as female CORE workers became more involved in the group. And after CORE left Jonesboro, women were central to the local base of movement activists who continued to fight for change in the region.
The Deacons incorporated on March 5, 1965, as the “Deacons for Defense and Justice”—the precise reason for that choice of name is unclear. Some of the founding members may have actually been church deacons. When asked, Dave Dennis noted, “A number of these men were church-going folk, so people may have just begun calling them ‘the Deacons’” as a result. Kirkpatrick, who later in his life launched a folk-singing career, wrote and recorded “The Deacons,” a song in which he offers a more calculated explanation:
Let’s call ourselves the Deacons and never have no fear
They will think we are from the church
Which has never done much
And gee, to our surprise it really worked.
Kirkpatrick lost his job at the local high school because of his involvement with the Jonesboro movement. He had used his influence as a football coach to encourage students to get involved in protests, but his role in establishing the Deacons was the final straw. His dismissal, as it turned out, would trigger one of the earliest confrontations between the Deacons and Jonesboro authorities.
On March 8 students organized a boycott of the high school to protest Kirkpatrick’s dismissal, as well as other inequities. One of their demands was for black control of black schools—an unusual request at that time, given the national civil rights establishment’s calls for desegregation and integration. It was yet another illustration that the Jonesboro movement was very much a local one, guided by local concerns.
Students began to picket the school daily. One cold day, as they were picketing, police on the scene called in a fire truck. Ernest Thomas and four Deacons had also shown up, as they did every day the students picketed. They stepped out of their car and immediately began loading their shotguns. When firemen began walking to the school with hoses, apparently planning to break up the protest, Thomas—as much the Deacons’ field commander as their organizer—barked out orders: “Men, take firing positions and prepare to open fire!” One of the Deacons, deadly serious, told one of the policemen, “If you turn those water hoses on these kids there’s gonna be some blood out here today.” The Deacons’ show of force seems to have worked, for the firemen soon departed.
Such armed resistance did not go unpunished, however. After the face-off at the high school, police blocked the roads into and out of Jonesboro’s black neighborhood. On one occasion, Thomas was arrested at gunpoint for attempting to pass a roadblock to reach protesters picketing the school. He was held incommunicado for twenty-four hours before being released. But the Deacons had made their point. They had stood up to Jonesboro’s white authorities with their guns. And they had won the battle—if not yet the war.
The Deacons began to reach outside Jonesboro and even beyond Jackson Parish. They first extended their efforts into other parts of Louisiana, and then into a few other parts of the South, mainly Mississippi.
Organizing people and communities for voter registration and nonviolent protest was one thing, but organizing to provide self-defense was something else entirely. The Deacons were unprecedented. Although there were other local self-defense groups (often taking the form of neighborhood or community watches) and although individual acts of protection and self-defense, like those of C. O. Chinn, Hartman Turnbow, and E. W. Steptoe, were not uncommon, there was no incorporated self-defense organization before the Jonesboro Deacons. Furthermore, the Deacons were a formally organized political movement that by its very existence directly challenged the civil rights establishment’s approach of nonviolently appealing to sympathy and goodwill, both of people and of the government. The Deacons were not beholden to any other organization, not even CORE. Their willingness to strategically use weapons sharply differentiated them from the black middle-class institutions and liberal institutional funders who dominated national civil rights organizations—and this helped them to appeal to an entirely new segment of the black population in the South.
The Deacons’ first major outreach took place in the city of Bogalusa in Washington Parish, Louisiana. Bogalusa differed from Jonesboro in almost every respect. Almost 250 miles southeast of Jonesboro and about 60 miles north of New Orleans, it sits on the Mississippi–Louisiana border and had three times the population of Jackson Parish. A tough sawmill town, Bogalusa was dominated by the Crown Zellerbach paper mill. It was an ugly, violent place that, like the steel city of Birmingham, Alabama, dubbed itself “Magic City.” It was also one of the South’s staunchest bastions of white supremacy. Author Howell Raines characterized Bogalusa as having “no redeeming touch of grace, beauty, or elegance to surprise the eye or rest the spirit.” In the 1960s the city had more Ku Klux Klan members per capita than any city or town in Louisiana. Klansmen held offices in city government. Klan headquarters were at the fire station across from city hall. They assaulted and terrorized blacks and any whites who did not share their bigotry. Bogalusa’s sawmill and a logging pond separated the black and white communities. The city was, as one local judge put it, “segregated from cradle to coffin.”
In 1965, when Brooks Hays—former Arkansas congressman and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, but at the time a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson troubleshooting racial problems—was preparing to come to Bogalusa to address a group of white and black community leaders, the Ku Klux Klan went door-to-door handing out leaflets that threatened retaliation against any white person who attended the proposed meeting with Hays. The leaflets said in part that those attending the meeting would be “tagged as integrationists and … dealt with accordingly by th
e Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” Half a dozen crosses were burned on the lawn of the proposed meeting place, St. Matthews Episcopal Church. The church canceled the meeting, and Bogalusa’s mayor, Jesse H. Cutrer Jr., turned down a request for Hays to speak at city hall. Bogalusa’s white-supremacist terrorism would die a slow death.
Although Bogalusa seemed an unlikely place for the emergence of one the South’s most militant movements, what appeared to be black submission to white supremacy hid surprising strength. Black farmers owned their own land and were largely self-sufficient. There was a black farmers’ league. In 1950, with NAACP help, blacks had opened up voter-registration rolls, and in 1960, with NAACP help again, they beat back an attempt to purge black voters. The Crown Zellerbach plant was unionized, and workers, black and white alike, belonged to one of two unions: the United Papermakers and Paperworkers Union or the International Pulp, Sulfite, and Paper Union. Both maintained segregated locals, but the all-black locals, though small in membership, were seedbeds for the growth of organizing skills. In 1956, when the Louisiana legislature passed legislation aimed at destroying the NAACP, the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League (BCVL) was formed.
Local activists in Bogalusa began testing compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were dissatisfied with the quiet, accommodating negotiations of the BCVL’s cautious leadership. CORE, which was most active in Louisiana, could not ignore Bogalusa, and it began investigating the possibility of working in Bogalusa. On February 1, 1965, two CORE organizers based in New Orleans attended a meeting in Bogalusa during which the older BCVL leadership was replaced by a new, younger group of local blacks. A. Z. Young, a World War II veteran and a leader in the segregated union at the paper mill, became president. Robert Hicks, another union leader, became vice president. After the meeting, Hicks invited the two workers to spend the night at his home.
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