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Books on the Deacons for
Defense
The Deacons for Defense:
Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Lance Hill)
The Deacons for Defense and Justice: Defenders of the African
American Community in Bogalusa, Louisiana During the 1960's
(LaSimba)
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A Review
of the Film
Deacons
for Defense
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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The Deacons for Defense
Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
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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Deacons
for Defense
(The film)
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Race
and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in
Louisiana, 1915-1972 (1995)
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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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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