It turns out that an little-known part of our history as a nation has been dramatized and is available on DVD. I watched it for the first time last week. The show stars Academy Award winner Forrest Whitaker and the great Ossie Davis and is directed by Bill Duke. 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.
Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black organization established to protect civil rights workers against the Ku Klux Klan, was a group of African American men who were mostly veterans of World War II and the Korean War. Charles Sims was the DDJ founder (The character played in the movie by Whitaker is a composite of three different men, including Sims). Anyhow, Sims formed the DDJ after local police escorted a Klan march through a Black neighborhood in Jonesboro, Louisiana. Based in local churches, the DDJ set up armed patrol car systems in cities such as Bogalusa and Jonesboro, Louisiana on July 10, 1964. The DDJ expanded to over 50 chapters throughout the South and a chapter in Chicago.
Their goal was to combat Ku Klux Klan violence against Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) volunteers who were participating in voter registration activities.
Disciplined and secretive, the Deacons generally limited their activities to patrolling black neighborhoods and protecting mass meetings, CORE headquarters, and civil rights workers who were entering and leaving town. In addition, the Deacons accompanied marchers from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1966, during which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokley Carmichael popularized the phrase Black Power.
J. Edgar Hoover worried enough about the DDJ to have over 1600 pages on the organization.
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 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.
Ironically, as nonviolent civil rights activities were eclipsed in the later 1960s by the Black Power Movement, with its militant rhetoric and insinuations of racial violence, the Deacons' presence declined. By 1968 the Deacons for Defense and Justice had all but disappeared.
Villagers, you can read more about this group in book called The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement by Lance Hill.
