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REVIEWS
| The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. By Lance Hill (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. x plus 363pp.).
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| In his Deacons for Defense, Lance Hill directs long overdue attention to the Deacons for Defense (DFD) and what he rightly calls, "The Myth of Nonviolence." Using an impressive array of sources including: archival materials, government documents, FBI files and a substantial body of oral history, Hill argues "that black collective force did not simply enhance the bargaining power of moderates; it was the source of their power."1 Even the limited success of civil rights organizations such as SNCC, CORE, the NAACP or the SCLC depended upon the threat of collective black violence in the form of Malcolm X, urban rebellions or the DFD. As one of African Americans' most successful, if least remembered, indigenous working class political movements in the South, the significance of the Deacons for Defense rested not only in their advocacy of armed self defense, but also in the ideological challenge they represented for middle class black leadership. |
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The Deacons were organized in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964 by local Blacks to protect the larger community and civil rights activists from the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes. However, they also represented, "a growing disillusionment of working-class blacks with the pacifistic, legalistic, and legislative strategies proffered by national organizations."2 The Deacons often clashed with middle class black leadership as well as the Klan. Considering their rapid expansion from Jonesboro to Bogalusa to an organization with twenty-one chapters and a national profile, Hill rightly argues that the platform of armed self-defense held deep resonance in working-class black communities throughout the nation. Despite public perception to contrary the Deacons were "not ideologues or revolutionaries" as much as they were pragmatic reformists. Hill asserts, "They were simply hardworking men,—barbers, mill hands, factory workers, church deacons—who wanted nothing more than quality and justice within the framework of the traditional American dream."(217) Though the history of the Deacons was "purposefully forgotten" due to their stance on self-defense, their efforts resulted in material gains for rural blacks in Louisiana and Mississippi and neutralized the impact of the Klan; and much like the "New Negro" movement of the 1920's the Deacons helped usher in a new era where fear and passivity were replaced by dignity, manhood and a new sense of self-determination.3 |
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While Deacons for Defense provides a powerful antidote to the "Myth of Nonviolence," Hill perpetuates other no less enduring 'myths" of what constitutes a political movement as well as of the overall goals of modern civil rights movements. Hill acknowledges African Americans' prior use of armed self-defense, but he dismisses it as a genuine form of political resistance saying:
But individual acts of self-defense did not in themselves constitute a sign of militancy or a leap of consciousness. Physically defending oneself can be motivated by nothing more than common sense and the instinct to survive. Armed resistance had no political significance until it became collective and public and openly challenged authority and white terror.4
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