I didn’t catch up with Bob Moses until 1964, when I joined the training staff for Freedom Summer. Bob led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s entry into Mississippi in 1961, which meant three years of facing a repressive situation that makes the U.S. of 2012 seem like a cakewalk for activists by comparison. In those days, even registering to vote in Mississippi could get you killed in the broad light of day if you were African American. SNCC workers often lived together in houses, sometimes in isolated rural areas. They had no official protection; local police were likely to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. They took precautions of many kinds, but they shunned security culture, believing it would reduce their safety and effectiveness.
I remember asking Bob the question that was on many activists’ minds across the U.S. then: How had SNCC workers survived for three years in the most terrifying situation in the country?
“The only way we’ve stayed alive,” he said, “was that we didn’t keep guns in our Freedom Houses, and everyone knew it.”
“I don’t get it,” I replied. “I don’t see the mechanism. I don’t see how that actually protects you.”
“Maybe this story will help you understand,” Bob said in his low-key, patient tone of voice. He was interested in teaching math; I guess he was used to students not getting it.
“A worker in a small town hardware store shows up at the store one morning all excited. He tells his boss, the owner, that ‘the guys’ — meaning the local KKK — have decided to kill the SNCC workers and burn down their Freedom House on the outskirts of town. They plan to do it that night. His boss says, ‘No you’re not.’ The worker is stunned, knowing that his boss is active in the White Citizens Council and hates SNCC as much as he does. The boss goes on: ‘You guys have no idea what the consequences would be. Mississippi already has enough economic trouble. Getting investment from the North is really tough. So you kill up a bunch of niggers, and it’s all over television in the North, and Mississippi looks to the banks up there like an out-of-control shithole of an investment. There’s no way I’m going to let you do it.’”
I walked away from Bob marveling at the political sophistication of the SNCC strategy. They were using their own vulnerability to force the middle and owning class White Citizens Council to control the working class KKK and keep them — the hated SNCC workers — alive.
We had that conversation during the 1964 training at the beginning of the summer, and I saw that this extremely dangerous project — an “invasion” of Northern white college students into Klan-ridden Mississippi — was an extension SNCC’s proven strategy. 1964’s Freedom Summer was designed by SNCC to add the vulnerability of Northern (mostly white) students to the equation, increasing the space for SNCC activity by drawing even more attention from state and (finally) federal power holders to the task of letting freedom fighters survive.
Freedom Summer did exactly that, with only three civil rights workers killed and a far more robust civil rights movement by August. In fact, the project was so successful that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party became able by August to contest nationally with the state’s all-white, traditional Democratic Party.
Rural and small town Louisiana in 1965 was, like Mississippi, Klan territory. Local black people in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, assisted by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), struggled to make gains in civil rights against racist resistance. A group of black veterans found themselves unable to tolerate the violence they saw perpetrated on the nonviolent demonstrations, and worked out agreements to bring their guns to demonstrations and serve as security guards, threatening violence against whites who wanted to hurt the activists. The group’s name became Deacons for Defense, and they gained various degrees of recognition from CORE and SNCC.
It is clear that this group of bodyguards did, on multiple occasions, deter white violence and protect demonstrators. Moreover, they sometimes shot their guns to chase away perpetrators. Historian Christopher B. Strain relays this report from Joanne Grant’s book on Black Protest:
On a sultry July evening in 1965, a cavalcade of cars driven by members of the Ku Klux Klan barreled into a predominately black neighborhood of Bogalusa, Louisiana, as they had done on countless nights before. The twenty-five car motorcade sometimes sped, sometimes cruised ominously through the streets. Leaning out of car windows, Klansmen taunted black residents, hurled racial epithets, insulted black women, and brandished pistols and rifles. When the Klansmen fired randomly into the homes of black Bogalusa residents, a fusillade of bullets met them in return. The unwelcome visitors quickly fled the neighborhood. It was the Klan’s first encounter with the Deacons for Defense and Justice.
The Deacons were reportedly careful not to step over the line from protection to retaliation; there are no recorded instances of them attacking whites for previous assaults on blacks. They offer a clear experiment of boundaried service analogous to that of security guards, with careful regard for lawfulness even though they knew that, as blacks, they could not themselves expect equal justice under the law.
Most people looking at that experiment would find no problem with it. The pacifist James Farmer, then leader of CORE, made a public statement saying he was not about to offer a moral challenge to local people for accepting the protection of the Deacons. Even if we accept Farmer’s point, we will learn more from the experiment if we ask not moral but strategic questions.
There’s no doubt that threatening violence has stopped many people from doing bad things; probably every reader of this article can name incidents from their own experience. That’s the snapshot: Someone is about to do something bad and stops because violence is threatened if they carry it out.
Strategy, however, is not about snapshots; it’s about the movie. The film starts with a snapshot and then shows the unfolding of events, the series of consequences caused by the dynamics unleashed in the initial snapshot.
The strategic difficulty about deterrence is that it works… until it doesn’t. Everyone knows stories in which a threat did not stop a bad thing from happening, and most of us know stories of a threat leading to a counter-threat, leading to a larger counter-threat, and so on.
What the Deacons’ story doesn’t show us is what happens when the other side organizes a more violent counter-move, and the local situation shifts from a social movement pressing for equality to become a war between two racial groups. No one wanted that, including Charles Sims, the best-known founder and leader of the Deacons, who believed that the most effective way to gain civil rights was by pressure from nonviolent direct action. His vision was for the Deacons to be a sideshow, not the main attraction. Keeping it a sideshow, however, depends on a lot of rationality on the other side, and on white racists holding on to that rationality if the anti-racist movement is getting stronger and closer to winning. To me that sounds more like fantasy than strategy.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database includes civil rights campaigns that failed (most notably, the Albany, Georgia, campaign of 1962) because they didn’t find a way to use the jiu-jitsu that sociologists call “the paradox of repression” — the use of the segregationists’ violence against their own privilege. Yet SNCC survived in the most dangerous period of its presence in Mississippi, 1961–63, by using a sophisticated nonviolent strategy. SNCC and its allies went on to win with a minimum of casualties in 1964 when they took power in Mississippi politics by using the presence of hundreds of Northern white students to protect them.
The more deeply we look into the actual history of the civil rights movement, the more puzzling becomes the choice of some to adopt violent defense. A decade before the Deacons for Defense appeared, in Montgomery, Alabama, the KKK decided to do an intimidation caravan during the Montgomery bus boycott. The black neighborhood got wind of it, and chose a different tactic: The residents sat on their porches drinking lemonade, in party mode, as if watching a pleasant and amusing parade going by. The Klansmen turned away from the neighborhood in short order.
Why, after 10 years of success for a nonviolent strategy when the resistance was most hardcore, was there a shift in 1965 to a violent defensive strategy, with SNCC inviting the Deacons of Defense to guard the Meredith March Against Fear? Why give up what was working?
Great example of how active nonviolence is our most effective strategy. Hope we in the Occupy movement can think strategically about what works and what can get us from here to our vision of a good society rather than adopting the tactic of violence which is part of the sickness of the old order and is destroying the world. .
Another fascinating article on how the presence of guns–and the threat of armed violence even in self-defense–can put one’s life at greater risk.
I also find Lakey’s point about the uncontrollable nature of violence to be critical. Armed self-defense works only until your opponent believes he has you outgunned. And when he retaliates, whatever peace you hoped to achieve is lost for good.
“More like fantasy than strategy” indeed.
As I read this, I also can’t help but think of Dr. King’s “autobiography” and the remarkable sadness he felt (and expressed in writings and speeches) when the civil rights movement began to turn to violence. He knew it was a road to ruin.
See Ebony Magazine Volume XV No. 1 November, 1959 beginning on page 75. It represents the story written about my father, the late Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, DDS and it featured my family in this expose (along with my late mother Josephine Haynes Davis) and his use of lethal force as self-defense against bigoted intimidation in Southern Illinois (we were the only black family in the area then) and has a picture of this writer of at the age of six months. I am Joseph Haynes Davis, Esq. a practicing attorney here in Orlando Florida. I have been educated at Illinois State University, Normal (Bachelor of Science), the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work (MSW) and the Rutgers-Camden School of Law (JD.) In addition to being a license attorney, I have been a broadcaster for over 33 years. I have been consumed by the story of the Deacons of Defense and Justice since I first learned about their story in late 2010. I was not even aware of the 2005 movie (that I purchased on line and watched and have recommended to as many folks that I can) and I find it ironic, yet understandable that their story has been kept a secret as far as African-American history and their rightful and righteous place in the history of the civil rights movement. I find it understandable because the society and other powers would like to, in my humble opinion, not romanticize African American civil rights advocates from the south during the turbulent sixties who were not going to allow the bigoted domestic terrorists always known as the Klu Klux Klan terrorize their community and the freedom workers who came into their community. The Deacons of Defense and Justice righteously advocated armed lethal self-defense to repel criminal bigoted tyranny and to question their approach by doing so is naive and condescending with all due respect. I am not surprised at all that most people in general but especially African-Americans have not even been aware of their pivotal place in this civil right history, and I find it shameful that they have traditionally and historically been ignored until the 2005 movie and the 2006 publication by Lance Hill who offered the first detailed history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. But I am not surprised because I believe that there are segments of the greater population of this country that feels good about keeping this information about their existence hidden. I totally advocate the fundamental presumption that armed lethal self-defense is relevant, appropriate, and always constitutional as a means to repel bigoted criminal tyranny against law abiding citizens of this country especially African Americans. Indeed, I am a law abiding gun owner and concealed weapons license holder and I am proud to be one. I am thankful that this great constitution of this country has the 2nd amendment and I am happy for the U.S. Supreme court holdings of D.C. v. Heller, and McDonald v. Chicago. I totally reject the presumption suggested in the prior posts that non-violence is the best way for self-defense and that essentially cowering in the face of bigoted criminal tyranny is best for the individual citizen. As an educated, professional African-American law abiding citizen who is not a political conservative (I am just a man who has a basis for thinking critically about matters) and an Obama supporter I felt compelled to contribute to the instant discourse and also because I have been trying to keep track of as many articles about the Deacons of Defense and Justice. Your article is the first that I have found to ask whether or not the Deacons of Defense and Justice were needed (which is a preposterous query in and of itself) and to actually suggest they could have been counterproductive when history itself shows otherwise. They were needed, and were relevant, and I am thankful and proud of their contribution to the history and survival of African Americans in this country.
I will leave you folks with a passage taken from a law review article written by my criminal law professor Robert J. Cottrol when I was a student at Rutgers Law-Camden, New Jersey that I think is more than appropriate to conclude my contribution:
Georgetown Law Journal, Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond. Originally published as 80 GEO. L.J. 1991, 309-361 (1991).
The history of blacks, firearms regulations, and the right to bear arms should cause us to ask new questions regarding the Second Amendment. These questions will pose problems both for advocates of stricter gun controls and for those who argue against them. Much of the contemporary crime that concerns Americans is in poor black neighborhoods and a case can be made that greater firearms restrictions might alleviate this tragedy. But another, perhaps stronger case can be made that a society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them. Perhaps a re-examination of this history can lead us to a modern realization of what the framers of the Second Amendment understood: that it is unwise to place the means of protection totally in the hands of the state, and that self-defense is also a civil right.
@Joseph Davis, Esq
Thank you so much for so eloquently voicing what I myself could never hope to articulate.
I recently learned about the Deacons of Defense in sociology class after asking my teacher about alternatives to the strictly non-violent civil rights actions we were learning about. I was shocked I had never heard of them and instantly started researching. Ever since then I have felt more confident expressing my political opinions about gun ownership, and I always refer back to the Deacons to illustrate my position. I agree 100% with the quote you published “self-defense is also a civil right”…
@Joseph Davis, Esq. Thanks you for your comments. I am currently writing my MA thesis on “Fats” Crawford, leader of the Chicago Chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. I have been amazed and enthralled learning about the Deacons. I consider it tragic, though not necessarily surprising, that their history and contribution to the civil rights movement is not more widely known. I am not a gun advocate. I live in a city where easy access to guns is claiming a heartbreaking number of lives everyday, including a six month old baby buried today after being gunned down in the street last week. Despite that, your quote is impactful and I think it is a point that needs to be considered as we work to find solutions to the tragic problem of violence in this country.