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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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New
Orleanian Henry Austan
Recalls
Bogalusa's Deacons for Defense & Justice
By
Jonathan Tilove
NEW ORLEANS -- It is the end of February.
Another Black History Month is drawing to a close. And it's a
good bet that few if any students were assigned to write a paper
on Henry Austan.
In the avalanche of scholarship on the civil
rights era, Austan—now 62 and living quietly in the Carrollton
neighborhood—rates barely a footnote.
"I don't think he's ever mentioned,
anywhere, even though it was a turning point," said Lance
Hill, Tulane University historian and director of its Southern
Institute for Education and Research.
The turning point in question arrived on July
8, 1965, in Bogalusa, in the heart of Ku Klux Klan country. A
month after the murder of the parish's first black sheriff's
deputy, amid rising tension, marchers confronted white violence
that had already left a black girl injured. Austan, a member of
an armed civil rights group known as the Deacons for Defense and
Justice, stopped the mob by firing a .38 caliber bullet into the
chest of a man named Alton Crowe.
Crowe lived to tell about it. Remarkably, so
did Austan, who after his arrest was never brought to trial.
Even more remarkable, the shooting did not
spark a blood bath of reprisal. Instead, it led the federal
government to launch what Hill, in his 2004 book The Deacons
for Defense and Justice: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights
Movement, describes as a "lethal attack on white
resistance in Bogalusa," crippling the Klan and forcing
local police for the first time to defend the rights of blacks.
'Noble belligerence'
This and other victories by the Deacons are
largely lost in what Hill calls the prevailing "myth"
that segregation was vanquished by nonviolence alone, that the
path to progress lay in the shedding of innocent black blood so
as to provoke Northern outrage and federal intervention. But
Austan demonstrated that shedding a little white blood could
sometimes do the trick more swiftly, more surely and, for black
men long denied their manhood, to far more exhilarating effect.
"It is easy to see how an oppressed
community would rally around this noble belligerence," Roy
Reed, a New York Times reporter, wrote about the Deacons in the
paper's Sunday Magazine in mid-August 1965. The headline:
"The Deacons, Too, Ride By Night."
"They were my idea of a civil rights
movement," Austan said, sitting at an outdoor cafe and
recalling with a fond smile what first drew him to the Deacons.
"March quietly, less singing, more shooting."
The Deacons were founded in 1964 in
Jonesboro. By the summer of 1965, they were spreading elsewhere
and grabbing attention—Time, Newsweek, Ebony
and Jet after Jet after Jet.
The Sunday after Crowe was shot, The New
York Times had a page-one story about a federal judge
ordering Bogalusa police to stop harassing black protesters and
start protecting them. In The Week in Review section was
a huge photo of Austan's arrest. And for good measure, the Sunday
Magazine featured an essay by Erskine Caldwell, author of Tobacco
Road, about "the Deep South's Other Venerable
Tradition"—the vicious violence visited upon black males
by white males, beginning in boyhood.
Quick tempered
By temperament, Austan was well-suited for
his role in history.
Born in New Orleans, he was raised in Baton
Rouge, where as a boy he threw bricks at the white men prowling
the black neighborhood for prostitutes. He came to Bogalusa in
1964 with a job selling insurance. He had already been in the
Air Force and served two years in Leavenworth for slashing a
fellow serviceman who called him "nigger."
"I'm not bragging about it," Austan
said. "I was way too quick-tempered in those days."
Almost as soon as he arrived in Bogalusa,
dressed in his nice suits, the Klan was gunning for him, he
said. When a bullet whizzed through his car as he was driving,
tattering his tie, he knew they were serious. The next time they
gave chase, he was ready, pulling into a pasture, dimming his
lights and opening fire with a double-barreled shotgun and a
.38.
Then he joined the Deacons.
"I went to talk with Charles Sims, who
was the head of the Deacons," Austan remembers, "and
he said, 'You're the (one) that shot them white folks last
night, aren't you?' I said, 'Maybe, I don't know for sure.'
"
When the shot he fired at Crowe rang out, he
said, "the line of police all turned their backs because
they just assumed that the white people had the guns and they
didn't want to be a witness."
"I really felt sorry for (Crowe) after I
shot him because he had this incredulous look on his face,"
he said. "When they first locked me up in a cell in
Bogalusa I thought, 'Well, Angola, warm up the electric chair.
Here I come.' "
Instead, he was spirited off to the Orleans
Parish Prison, where Louis Lomax, a black journalist with a TV
show in Los Angeles, bailed him out in exchange for an
interview.
"They never wanted to take me to
trial," Austan said. "I don't know how much of a
turning point it was. What it meant was that all over the South
a lot of white people realized that there are some black men who
will shoot you in broad daylight, and not to rob you either.
"With Watts exploding a few weeks later,
it made a lot of people think, especially at the federal level,
that they had to intercede at a greater level, or there was
going to be hell to pay in this country."
Leadership is key
Austan would rather be remembered for his
lecturing, organizing, and writing in the years that followed.
He would rather talk about the fate of New Orleans, where he
returned to live in 1989 from Dayton, Ohio—"getting old,
too damn cold"—and because he missed the
"flavor."
After Hurricane Katrina, much of that flavor
is gone with the wind, he said. "I don't think we'll ever
be able to recover New Orleans as we knew it," he said.
"We don't have the leadership. The civil rights movement
had good leadership: King, Joseph Lowery, Malcolm X."
And, Hill would add, the Deacons, who he
believes offer black New Orleanians seeking to reclaim their
city a useful model of a disciplined, militant, homegrown
movement.
"It's not about armed
self-defense," Hill said. "It's about the power of
self-organization, of making up your minds you are no longer
going to depend on the federal government, you're not going to
worry about whether people like you or think you are deserving,
but what you are going to do to demand what is rightly yours and
make life difficult for people until they make
concessions."
Source:
Newhouse
News Service.
Jonathan Tilove. "New Orleans man symbolizes violent
side of 1960s movement Shooting in Bogalusa seen as turning
point" (Monday, February 27, 2006
Jonathan Tilove can be contacted at jonathan.tilove@newhouse.com.
Newhouse
News
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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
posted 3 March 2006
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Deacons
for Defense
(The film)
Race
and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana,
1915-1972 (1995)
By Adam Fairclough
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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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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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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