The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an Black American self-defense group founded in November 1964, during the civil rights era in the United States, in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana.
It was intended to protect civil rights activists and their families, threatened both by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws.
A television movie, Deacons for Defense (2003), directed by Bill Duke and starring Forest Whitaker, was aired about the 1965 events in Bogalusa.
The Robert "Bob" Hicks House in Bogalusa commemorates one of the leaders of the Deacons in that city; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
According to historian Annelieke Dirks, Even Martin Luther King Jr.—the icon of nonviolence—employed armed bodyguards and had guns in his house during the early stages of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956.
Glenn Smiley, an organizer of the nonviolent and pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), observed during a house visit to King that the police did not allow the minister a weapon permit, but "the place is an arsenal.
In many areas of the Deep South, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan or other white insurgents operated outside the law, and white-dominated police forces practiced discrimination against Black people.
[4] This alliance between the two organizations highlighted the concept of armed self-defense embraced by many Black people in the South, who had long been subject to white violence.
After he was charged by the state with kidnapping a white couple whom he had sheltered during local violence related to the Freedom Riders in 1961, Williams and his wife left the country, going into exile in Cuba.
[5] Black Americans were harassed and attacked by white KKK vigilantes in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964 including the torching of five churches, a Masonic hall and a Baptist center.
Given these threats, Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick founded the Deacons for Defense in November 1964 to protect civil rights workers, their families and the Black community against the local KKK.
[8] One group acted as sentries outside the Freedom House, led by Percy Lee Bradford, a stock room worker, and Earnest Thomas.
[8][9] Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, a high school teacher, organized a second group that volunteered to monitor police arrests of Black Americans while also working to keep the community safe.
[8] The Ku Klux Klan and local police organized a caravan to intimidate the protesters and the African American community in Jonesboro.
He was joined by Kirkpatrick, a civil rights activist and member of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who had been ordained that year as a minister in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ.
[12] After traveling 300 miles to Bogalusa, in southeast Louisiana, on February 21, 1965, Kirkpatrick, Thomas and a CORE member worked with local leaders to organize the first affiliated Deacons chapter.
[11] Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed, Black people were making little progress toward integration of public facilities in the city or registering to vote.
[8] Sims considered the Deacons a "defense guard unit" who had formed simply "because we got tired of the women, the children being harassed by the white night-riders".
[14] These tactics proved successful when "in July 1965, escalating hostilities between the Deacons and the Klan in Bogalusa provoked the federal government to use Reconstruction-era laws to order local police departments to protect civil rights workers".
[8] A twenty-one year old insurance salesman and Air Force veteran named Henry Austin confronted the mob and fired a warning shot.
Other major civil rights leaders and organizations recruited hundreds and then thousands of marchers in order to continue Meredith's effort.
"'[4] Stokely Carmichael had first made a speech about Black Power in Mobile, Alabama in 1965, when marchers demonstrating for the vote reached the state capital from Selma.
The Deacons' campaigns frequently resulted in substantial and unprecedented victories at the local level, producing real power and self-sustaining organizations.
In addition, they recruited only mature male members, in contrast to other more informal self-defense efforts, in which women and teenagers sometimes played a role.
"[17] As was eventually exposed in the late 1970s, the FBI established the COINTELPRO program, through which its agents were involved in many illegal activities against organizations that Hoover deemed "a threat to the American way".
[16] The Bureau ultimately produced more than 1,500 pages of comprehensive and relatively accurate records on the Deacons and their activities, largely through numerous informants close to or who had infiltrated the organization.
[17] Although the FBI and white media regarded the Deacons as bringers of race warfare, they actually worked closely with CORE in their nonviolent protests as a way to bring about change in Bogalusa.
[8] According to columnist Ken Blackwell in 2007, activist Roy Innis had said that the Deacons "forced the Klan to re-evaluate their actions and often change their undergarments".