Dinner and sleep should have been the program for the rest of the night. Instead, Bogalusa’s police chief, Claxton Knight, and one of his deputies visited the Hickses’ home. The chief told the Hickses that the Klan was angry that the CORE workers—both of whom were white—were staying in a black home. A Klan mob, he warned, was gathering and intended to attack Hickses’ house unless their two guests were immediately escorted out of town by police. Mrs. Hicks, Valeria “Jackie” Hicks, was adamant, however; the CORE workers were going to stay with them. The chief left, refusing to provide protection. “We have better things to do than protect people who aren’t wanted here.”
Robert Hicks told his daughter Barbara to telephone for help, and soon men with rifles and shotguns began filling the house; the Klan attack never took place. A few weeks later, Hicks invited leaders of the Jonesboro Deacons to Bogalusa. By that time, he had his own bodyguard. “My husband could never go out without someone protecting him,” recalled Valeria years later.
They would carry him to work and pick him up at the end of the day. There was always someone in the house. It was the only form of protection we had. At one point [the police] tried to take the guns away from us, but they couldn’t. We had the right to bear arms; we had the right to protect ourselves. But it was so unusual for Black men to stand up for their rights.
The men guarding Hicks and his wife were not yet a formally organized group, but they were committed, and they extended their protection to the Hickses’ guests. The two CORE workers realized this for themselves a few days after their arrival. Returning to New Orleans from Bogalusa, they noticed that they were being followed. They turned into one of Bogalusa’s black communities to try to make a phone call, but the men who had been following them—a carful of white supremacists, almost certainly Klansmen—attacked. The CORE workers finally escaped into a small, black-owned café, where they made frantic calls as whites circled the block in their cars. Soon, armed black men began slipping in through the café’s back door. Perhaps aware that the two men they were chasing now had armed protection, the pursuers disappeared as the sun set. Both CORE activists were pacifists, but the experience left them uncertain about their own convictions. “Up to that point I embraced nonviolence,” one of them, Steve Miller, said later. “[But] at the point [that armed protection came] I guess I said, ‘Oh, I guess I’m not nonviolent anymore.’” Concealed in the backseat of a car, the two rode back to the Hicks home protected by an armed convoy.
The defense of the Hicks and their white guests marked the beginning of the Deacons in Bogalusa. These new black voices would attract the attention of like-minded individuals and would strengthen the relationship between Bogalusa’s burgeoning self-defense organization and CORE’s expanding organizing in the state.
CORE’s field secretaries encouraged self-defense-minded blacks to meet with the Jonesboro Deacons. On February 21, Thomas and Kirkpatrick drove to Bogalusa, where that night at the Negro Union Hall they met with fourteen local men, including Hicks, who had been the primary local organizer of the meeting. Kirkpatrick and Thomas had come with pistols in their waistbands, and when they sat down, they placed their guns on the table. It turned out that everyone in attendance had brought pistols, and they too placed their guns on the table, where they remained in a large heap throughout discussion. It was a tense meeting. Kirkpatrick and Thomas continually challenged the group, stressing the need for secrecy, loyalty, and discipline. They described the way they used two-way radios and secret codes in Jonesboro and Jackson Parish, and they presented their vision of a statewide network of Deacons linked via two-way radio. Cheap, small-caliber weapons, such as .22-caliber pistols, were inadequate, they insisted, and the Bogalusa men would be better off with .30-06 rifles, shotguns, and other large weapons instead. They also urged the Bogalusa group to initiate discussions with middle-class black leaders, who, they said, could be helpful so long as they weren’t shouted down and berated as “Uncle Toms.” And lastly, Thomas and Kirkpatrick proposed that if a self-defense group was organized, it affiliate with the Jonesboro Deacons. Around midnight the Bogalusa men formed a Deacons chapter and agreed to an organizational meeting the following week. At that meeting, the group elected as its president Charles Sims, an insurance salesman and a legendary brawler.
It was natural for black people in Bogalusa to take into account the experience and expertise of the Jonesboro Deacons in considering how best to organize for their own protection. Articles about the Deacons had been appearing in such national newspapers as the New York Times, and in Louisiana’s black communities—and probably in white communities too—word of mouth spread news about the Deacons even faster than the press coverage. Bogalusa, bigger and economically more important than Jonesboro, became a highly visible stage for the group.
With the Ku Klux Klan as powerful as it was in Bogalusa, the creation of a new chapter of the Deacons fueled further white-supremacist violence. But there is little doubt that the sight of openly armed black men frightened and confused many whites. The language the Deacons used was terrifying too—deliberately so. “It takes violent blacks to combat these violent whites,” Thomas said. “It takes nonviolent whites and nonviolent Negroes to sit down and bargain whenever the thing is over—and iron it out. I ain’t going to.”
On May 23, 1965, Mayor Cutrer announced that all Bogalusa segregation ordinances would be repealed; a remarkable if limited victory. It had been made possible by a movement that combined nonviolent struggle and armed self-defense to protect that struggle. The mayor was forced to take the business-sensitive, law-and-order middle ground; he was not renouncing his belief in white supremacy. He was not a changed man. “We must obey the law,” Cutrer told Bogalusa’s white townsfolk, “no matter how bitter the taste.” Business, after all, was business. Income and image, important to attracting needed new businesses to the state, were at stake in Bogalusa, and Cutrer was under pressure from both corporate powers and Louisiana’s state government to get Bogalusa and the Deacons off the front page.
Such sentiments and necessities did not sit well with some locals. Deadly antiblack danger had not been eliminated. On June 2, 1965, O’Neal Moore, who the year before had made local history by becoming the first black deputy sheriff in Washington Parish, was shot and killed while parked on the edge of Bogalusa in his patrol car—a crime that remains unsolved. His partner, Creed Rogers, the second black deputy hired by the parish, was also wounded and lost the sight of one eye.
CORE national director James Farmer traveled to Bogalusa for Moore’s funeral, and he chose to accept protection from Bogalusa’s Deacons for Defense rather than from local police, dramatically signaling CORE’s support for the Deacons. Sims, leader of the Bogalusa Deacons, picked Farmer up from New Orleans and drove him back to Bogalusa along with three other Deacons. All were armed.
“CORE is nonviolent,” Farmer said later, explaining the organization’s support for men like Sims and the Deacons. “But we have no right to tell Negroes in Bogalusa or anywhere else that they do not have the right to defend their homes. It is a constitutional right.” But men like the Bogalusa Deacons were protecting more than just their own homes and more than national civil rights bigwigs like Farmer. “CORE had projects throughout this part of Louisiana,” recalled Dave Dennis, who in 1965 became CORE’s director of southern projects. “And the Deacons would tell us, ‘Let us know when you’re coming. We’ll meet you.’ When we met them, they would put two trucks in front and two behind. In those trucks were armed men. And you rode right through town into the black community.” CORE field secretary Mateo Suarez remembers riding with the Jonesboro Deacons’ leader Chilly Willy Thomas and another Deacon. “They were telling me how dangerous it was, wherever it was we were, but assuring me that they had guns. ‘You don’t need one,’ they said.”
SNCC, too, felt connected to the Deacons, although most of its organizers were never deeply involved with the group. James Forman, for one, considered the Deacons an outgrowth of his and
other organizations’ practice of nonviolent direct action. Student protesters who would form SNCC and those who would become the heart of CORE as well “were the forerunners of the Deacons for Defense,” he wrote. Activism aimed at challenging white supremacy was going to trigger violent white reaction resulting in greater black militancy and thus greater need for protection; history showed that, Forman felt. “Given a nonviolent movement, the Deacons had to spring up.”
CORE and SNCC were sympathetic to groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, though they were not organizationally bound to them. However, SCLC, led by Martin Luther King Jr., never came close to endorsing armed self-defense, even though as a black, southern organization it was impossible for King and his group of ministers to escape the currents that led to the formation of a group like the Deacons.
King had long been ambivalent about the idea of self-defense. After the 1956 bombing of his Montgomery, Alabama, home, he had persuaded his enraged neighbors to go home with their guns, even though he was then hardly committed to nonviolence and had guns in his home. If his wife, Coretta, or their daughter, Yolanda—both of whom had been in the house when the bomb went off—had been injured or worse in the explosion, who knows how he would have responded or who he might have become? Neither mother nor daughter was harmed, however, and soon King completely embraced nonviolence. He would eventually denounce the Deacons for what he called their “aggressive violence.”
It may not be an overstatement to suggest that King was behind the curve of history on the question of self-defense. Across the South in the summer of 1964—the year the Jonesboro Deacons formed—groups and individuals were organizing for armed self-defense. Many of these groups took shape within the formally nonviolent civil rights movement. The passage of the Civil Rights Act that summer, like the 1954 Supreme Court Brown decision before it, had fueled the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the climate in the South was particularly hostile to the movement and to black people in general.
White-supremacist violence and black anger seemed to be erupting everywhere during the summer of 1964. On July 2, nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, U.S. Army Reserve officer Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn was murdered by a three-man Ku Klux Klan “security patrol” while driving through Madison County, Georgia, on the way back home to Washington, D.C. He had just completed a training exercise at Fort Benning, Georgia. Earlier, one of the Klansmen had told his two accomplices, “I’m gonna kill me a nigger tonight.”
Mississippi was particularly violent that summer. A month before Penn’s murder, CORE workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered in Neshoba County. Their murders had a profound impact in Louisiana and may partly explain the involvement of Louisiana CORE workers with the Deacons. Two new station wagons had been donated to CORE that summer, one for Louisiana and one for Mississippi. The car carrying Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman was one of them. Louisiana CORE workers could not help but feel especially connected to their murdered colleagues in Mississippi, says Fred Brooks.
Far from Louisiana and Mississippi, as early as 1963, the city of Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore was occupied by the National Guard following violent clashes between blacks and whites during a summer of protest. Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), told Ebony magazine that her small city and the nation now faced a choice “between witnessing change or experiencing destruction… . The status quo is now intolerable to the majority of Negroes and may soon be intolerable to the majority of whites.” The magazine dubbed her “the lady general of civil rights.” After a dozen of his men were wounded, General George C. Geltson, commander of the guardsmen occupying Cambridge, considered replacing the blanks in their weapons with live ammunition. Of Richardson, he declared, “She’s the only real leader in town.” A spokesman for the Citizens’ Council despaired, “We can’t deal with her and we can’t deal without her.”
Meanwhile, in that same summer of 1964, St. Augustine, Florida—America’s oldest city—was the scene of the most violent response to an SCLC campaign ever experienced by the organization, according to Andrew Young. During a night protest, Young was slugged, hit across the head with a blackjack, then kicked and stomped after he fell to the ground. Police did nothing. It was the first time Young had ever been beaten during a civil rights demonstration. By the time SCLC became involved in St. Augustine, its black community had weathered arrests, several bombings, and the Ku Klux Klan kidnapping of local movement leader Dr. Robert Hayling and three other local activists. It was Hayling who had invited King and SCLC to come into the city.
Despite the extreme violence that confronted them in St. Augustine, SCLC workers stuck to their nonviolent principles. Although tough black teenagers would sometimes place themselves at the end of protest marches, prepared to both defend marchers and retaliate against any violence by whites, nonviolence prevailed in St. Augustine, and there was no serious discussion of organizing the kind of self-defense group that existed in Louisiana. But sentiment in favor of armed self-defense was not far beneath the surface. SCLC staffer Dorothy Cotton noted, “This was about the roughest city we’ve had—45 straight nights of beatings and intimidation. In church every night we’d see people sitting there with bandages on. Some would sit with shotguns between their legs.” Hayling had no problem with these gun-toting men and women, although he had taught methods of nonviolent activism to students at his dental office. When a reporter asked him how he planned to respond to the continuing threats against his life and the lives of others, he replied, “I and the others have armed. We will shoot first and answer questions later. We are not going to die like Medgar Evers.”
King’s active, direct involvement in St. Augustine’s movement undoubtedly helped keep the protests there on a nonviolent course, but the story was different in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that summer. In January 1964, Reverend T. Y. Rogers—who had been an assistant pastor at King’s church in Montgomery—began pastoring the First African Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa. It was the city’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious black church, and King had recommended Rogers to the church’s search committee. Rogers’s admiration of King had led him to embrace nonviolence. He even imitated King’s preaching style. But in Tuscaloosa, he found himself having to reconcile his commitment to nonviolence with self-defense as never before.
Like Bogalusa, Tuscaloosa was a notorious Ku Klux Klan city. Located about fifty miles southwest of Birmingham, the city was then about one-third black, and it was also home to the University of Alabama. In 1956, after a three-year court battle, Autherine Lucy had become the first black person to enroll there. The white-supremacist violence that her bravery elicited and the response by Tuscaloosa’s black community would set a precedent for the clashes of the following decade.
On Lucy’s third day at the university, a mob of hundreds had jeered and pelted her with eggs as she walked to class. They might have killed her, but state policemen rescued her and took her to the nearby offices of a black newspaper, the Alabama Citizen. From there, the frightened, egg-splattered student was taken next door to Howard and Linton’s Barbershop, where, in its back room, two beauticians consoled her while washing the egg out of her hair. She wanted to go home, but before she could leave the shop a carload of white hoodlums pulled up and continued taunting her from outside the barbershop. Reverend T. W. Linton, one of Rogers’s predecessors among the Tuscaloosa clergy and a co-owner of the barbershop, called the police, but no help came. Somehow he was able to get a shotgun from a friend across the street. His business partner, Nathaniel Howard, made a series of phone calls and arranged for a six-car caravan of armed black men to escort Lucy to the relative safety of nearby Birmingham. When the defenders arrived at the barbershop, the hoodlums fled. In a perverse irony, shortly thereafter Lucy was expelled from the University of Alabama because the school claimed—and successfully argued in court—that it could not guarantee her safety. Neither police nor university officials seem to have given
much thought to how to actually do so.
This episode in 1956 marked the beginning of an armed network of black men in Tuscaloosa. For the rest of the decade, they would provide informal protection to the city’s black community. But it also foreshadowed the armed protection that enabled the activism, especially student activism, that would shatter segregation in Tuscaloosa with unanticipated speed in the subsequent decade.
In the early 1960s students at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, like the young people at most other historically black colleges and universities at the time, were caught up in the fervor of the sit-in movement and were mounting protests against white supremacy and segregation. By then the Ministers Alliance—a small group of young, socially conscious black ministers that had formed at First African Baptist Church in the mid-1950s—had evolved into the city’s first civil rights organization, the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC). The organization’s president was Reverend Willie Herzfeld, who before coming to Tuscaloosa had advised the Greensboro students after their February 1960 sit-in. TCAC quickly affiliated with SCLC and, officially anyway, shared its commitment to nonviolence. But TCAC had received little support from the city’s black community. When Rogers, who was deeply influenced by SCLC, arrived to pastor First African and almost immediately expressed his desire to press for civil rights, Herzfeld told him, “I’m tired. I have worked and they have not accepted me… . Maybe you are not tired and you can do something. Whatever you want to do, I’m with you in it.”
Rogers breathed new life into the organization, and in April 1964 TCAC began a direct-action campaign in Tuscaloosa, first targeting segregation at the new county courthouse. On April 23 hundreds of protestors—most of them Stillman students—gathered at First African and marched downtown carrying signs that read, “Segregation Must Go.” Rogers mounted the courthouse steps to read a statement, but police forced him off. However, he was not arrested—a sign, perhaps, that authorities in Tuscaloosa, having watched national reaction to the dogs and fire hoses used against protesters led by Martin Luther King in Birmingham the year before, were beginning to realize that a hard-line, abusive response to civil rights activism was counterproductive.
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