These days, when Black Lives Matter and white supremacist
domestic terrorism is the most serious threat
to the United States, some Black people have
looked to the Second Amendment and armed
self-defense to protect themselves and their
families from racial violence.
But Black people have been down this road before. Decades
earlier, even before the Black Panthers, there
was an important chapter in the Civil Rights
Movement that not nearly enough people have
heard about - the Deacons for Defense.
Formed
in 1964 in Jonesboro,
Louisiana as
the Deacons
for Defense and Justice, the organization was
started to protect the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) from the Ku Klux Klan,
protecting civil rights workers Black people
who wanted to register and exercise their
right to vote. A pioneering self-defense group
in the South, it would grow to 21 chapters and
hundreds of members.
Although the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther
King and others was based on a commitment to
nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic and
philosophy, civil rights leaders and activists
depended on armed protection. While Dr. King
was not associated with guns, he was most
certainly surrounded by armed guards. After
all, remember that racial justice activism was
dangerous, risky, life-threatening work when
you were trying to change society and crazy
angry white men were rolling up on you with
guns and Lord knows what else. And very often,
the armed vigilantes and the police were one
and the same.
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“The NAACP was a fully nonviolent organization, and they
still stood for that [in 1965]. But they
didn't stand in the way of no one else that
decided that it took some violence to protect
yourself. They didn't stand in the way of
this, no way,” said James
Young, Secretary of the Deacons for Defense and Justice,
Natchez, Mississippi.
Civil rights workers were injured and some were made
martyrs by the Ku Klux Klan. And many more
would have died without the Deacons for
Defense. Because when you were marching down
some back road in Alabama or Mississippi - and
there were white domestic terrorists hiding in
the bushes with guns - you needed Black folks
hiding in the bushes with guns.
The
FBI under J. Edgar Hoover kept tabs on the
Deacons for Defense as part of its COINTELPRO program
targeting civil rights organizations and its
leaders for infiltration, disruption and
destruction. But the group was in decline in
the late 1960s, and the feds set their sights
on the Black Panther Party and the Black Power
movement.
For
all the Deacons did for the movement, they
never received the credit they deserved. “For CORE and others,
nonviolence had to be the face of the
movement for federal support, for northern
support, for president of the United States
support,” said Akinyele
Umoja,
professor of African American studies at
Georgia State University. “Black men with guns
was not the best way to get support.”
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When
no one else would protect you from the Klan,
there were the Deacons for Defense. In the
same way that Black militia groups such as the
NFAC are
defending against Proud Boys and other racist
rightwing groups today, the Deacons were the
protectors of the movement against white
supremacist violence. Because we ain’t finna get killed
today.
