| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. By Lance Hill. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii, 363 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2847-5.)

Founded during the summer of 1964 in the pine hills of northern Louisiana by working-class African Americans, the Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed self-defense organization whose very existence called into question the continued viability of nonviolent strategies and middle-class leadership within the civil rights movement. By the end of 1966, the core group in Jonesboro had expanded to twenty-one chapters with several hundred members. Offering a clear alternative to both the tactics and the philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights "establishment," the Deacons provided security for marches and rallies, formed community patrols to discourage night riders, and engaged in armed confrontations with Ku Klux Klansmen and police. Their disregard for "redemptive suffering" (p. 7) as well as for accredited notions of black manhood made them attractive, psychologically liberated role models for later black power–era activists.

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