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Books on the Deacons for
Defense
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A Review of the
Film
By Amin Sharif
The first time I heard about the Deacons for Defense was early
June of 1965. There had been another murder down in the Deep South. This time it
wasn't three civil rights workers in Mississippi who had been slain. This time
the victim was a Black Deputy Sheriff and the place was Bogalusa, Louisiana. But
there was something different going on in Bogalusa. A group of Black men had
decided to stand up to the white terror. A group of Black men had decided to
take on the Klu Klux Klan. These Black men called themselves the Deacons for
Defense and Justice.
The Deacons were as mysterious as they were legendary for their
courage. For they did in the Deep South what the Black Panther Party would later
attempt in the West. The Deacons -- Black men -- had armed themselves against
the terror of white racism. One must remember what these men were up against to
understand what they did in Bogalusa. In the Deep South, a Black man could be
lynched for not stepping into the gutter as a white man, woman or child passed
him in the street.
The Jim Crow of the South held the entire Black population
hostage to the whims of any white person. And then there was the Klan or
the Nightriders, as some called them, dressed in sheets and gowns always ready
to defend "white honor" by murder and terror. For a Black man to raise a hand to
a white man under these conditions was an automatic death sentence. For a Black
man to point a gun at a white man was an act of insanity. Now Showtime
has brought the story of the Deacons for Defense to cable television. Starring
Forrest Whitaker and the great Ossie Davis, this production is as true a
dramatization as we can expect from a commercial undertaking.
The story of the Deacons is deftly told through the eyes of
Marcus Clay played by Whitaker. Marcus Clay is a mill worker at the highly
segregated plant that owns the town of Bogalusa. Owing his livelihood to the
white folks at the plant, Marcus is no friend to the efforts that are erupting
throughout the deep South to end segregation. He has grown up with white
violence and wishes to keep it away from his family. But Marcus' dream of
living alongside of white violence is shattered when a friend is beaten for
placing his name on a list reserved for white men at the plant where he works
and when his daughter suffers the same fate during a civil rights march to
desegregate the town. The final straw comes when, after attempting to save his
daughter from her beating, he find himself taken out and beaten by the local
police. Marcus Clay's answer to the violence visited upon friend and family is
to form the Deacons for Defense.
The story continues in the expected manner. There are a series
of victories and set backs for the Deacons. Houses are burned. White civil
rights workers try unsuccessfully to turn the Deacons back towards Martin Luther
King's technique of non-violence. Next, there is a dramatic showdown between the
Deacons and the Klan. But despite a plot where all the moves of the players are
predictable, the Deacons for Defense succeeds in gathering sympathy from its
audience. And, if the history of the Deacons gets a little disjointed, not to
worry. Showtime has smartly added a small documentary on the Deacons after the
movie. Whatever is lost in the movie is more than covered in the documentary
called "Defending the Deacons."
Taken together, the movie and the documentary do more justice
to the legend of the Deacons than harm. All in all, the Deacons for Defense
(with the documentary) is well worth watching.
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Robert Hicks, Leader in Armed Rights Group,
Dies at 81—It was the night of Feb. 1, 1965, in Bogalusa, La.
The Klan was furious that Mr. Hicks, a black
paper mill worker, was putting up two white civil rights workers in his home. It
was just six months after three young civil rights workers had been murdered in
Philadelphia, Miss.
Mr. Hicks and his wife, Valeria, made some
phone calls. They found neighbors to take in their children, and they reached
out to friends for protection. Soon, armed black men materialized. Nothing
happened.
Less than three weeks later, the leaders of a
secretive, paramilitary organization of blacks called the Deacons for
Defense and Justice visited Bogalusa. It had been formed in Jonesboro, La.,
in 1964 mainly to protect unarmed civil rights demonstrators from the Klan.
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After listening to the Deacons, Mr. Hicks took
the lead in forming a Bogalusa chapter, recruiting many of the men who had gone
to his house to protect his family and guests. Mr. Hicks died of cancer at his
home in Bogalusa on April 13 at the age of 81, his wife said. He was one of the
last surviving Deacon leaders.
But his role in the civil rights movement went
beyond armed defense in a corner of the Jim Crow South. He led daily protests
month after month in Bogalusa — then a town of 23,000, of whom 9,000 were black
— to demand rights guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. . . .
When James Farmer, national director of the
human rights group the Congress of Racial
Equality, joined protests in Bogalusa, one of the most virulent Klan
redoubts, armed Deacons provided security. Dr. King publicly denounced the
Deacons’ “aggressive violence.” And Mr. Farmer, in an interview with Ebony
magazine in 1965, said that some people likened the Deacons to the K.K.K. But
Mr. Farmer also pointed out that the Deacons did not lynch people or burn down
houses. In a 1965 interview
with The New York Times Magazine, he spoke of CORE and the Deacons as “a
partnership of brothers.” NYTimes
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By
Lance Hill
In 1964 a small group of African American men in Jonesboro,
Louisiana, defied the nonviolence policy of the mainstream civil rights movement
and formed an armed self-defense organization--the Deacons for Defense and
Justice--to protect movement workers from vigilante and police violence. With
their largest and most famous chapter at the center of a bloody campaign in the
Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons became a popular
symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent
strategy and a rallying point for a militant working-class movement in the
South.
Lance Hill offers the first detailed history of the Deacons for
Defense and Justice, who grew to several hundred members and twenty-one chapters
in the Deep South and led some of the most successful local campaigns in the
civil rights movement. In his analysis of this important yet long-overlooked
organization, Hill challenges what he calls "the myth of nonviolence"--the idea
that a united civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent direct
action led by middle-class and religious leaders. In contrast, Hill constructs a
compelling historical narrative of a working-class armed self-defense movement
that defied the entrenched nonviolent leadership and played a crucial role in
compelling the federal government to neutralize the Klan and uphold civil rights
and liberties.
Awards & Distinctions: Honorable Mention, 2005 Outstanding Book
Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.
Reviews
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(The Film)
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By Adam Fairclough
Hailed as one of the best treatments of the
civil rights movement, Race
and Democracy is also one of the most comprehensive and detailed studies
of the movement at the state level. This far-reaching and dramatic narrative
ranges in time from the founding of the New Orleans branch of the NAACP in 1915
to the beginning of Edwin Edwards's first term as governor in 1972. In his new
preface Adam Fairclough brings the narrative up to date, demonstrating the
persistence of racial inequalities and the continuing importance of race as a
factor in politics. When Hurricane Katrina exposed the race issue in a new
context, Fairclough argues, political leaders mishandled the disaster. A
deep-seated culture of corruption, he concludes, compromises the ability of
public officials to tackle intransigent problems of urban poverty and inadequate
schools. |
Fairclough takes readers to the grass roots of
the movement as it was defiantly advanced and resisted in scores of places like
New Orleans shipyards, the voter registrar's office in Opelousas, and the Little
Union Baptist Church in Shreveport. He traces the social networks that sustained
black activism, such as Masonic lodges and teachers' associations, and he also
analyzes white responses to the movement as expressed through political
factions, trade unions, business lobbies, the Catholic Church, White Citizens
Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Complex, rich, and sweeping.—Journal of
Southern History
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http://www.nathanielturner.com/index.html |
