Negroes and the Gun (53 page)

Committed pacifists within CORE considered members who flirted with violence to be traitors to the cause. But nonviolence in the face of imminent threats was easier in theory than in practice. Pacifist CORE staffer Meldon Achenson found that he was in a decided minority, writing to his parents, “Nearly everyone in the community is armed to the teeth.” He concluded that most folk were “committed to nonviolence only as a tactic.”

In West Feliciana Parish, CORE worker Mike Lesser was less conflicted. CORE was holding voter-registration clinics at the Masonic Hall in the evenings. Lesser wrote to his family back north, “We are preaching non-violence, but can only preach non-violence and practice it. We cannot tell someone not to defend his property and the lives of his family and let me tell you, these 15 to 20 shotguns guarding our meetings are very reassuring.”

In response to reports that blacks were arming against private threats, the national leadership of CORE pressed its field staff, “Urge the people not to carry guns.” These instructions prompted tensions and defiance. In a staff meeting at the end of 1963, two activists angrily responded, “to hell with CORE, we're with the people.” Some CORE field staff began carrying guns.
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CORE's national office worried that increased militancy would damage
alliances with white progressives. Much of CORE's financial support came from northern, white liberals. For many of them, even legitimate acts of self-defense provoked the specter of “black violence,” from which they recoiled. The growing radicalization of CORE and the evaporation of white support confirms long-standing fears that black violence would cost white allies.

CORE continued to espouse nonviolence and tried to distance itself from the publicity the Deacons were attracting. But hazards in the field eroded the commitment to nonviolence. The work of the Deacons underscored the importance of self-defense and drew CORE fieldworkers to open advocacy of resistance against violent attacks.
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For the white, middle-class pacifists who were the backbone of CORE, armed violence was anathema. CORE leadership attempted to keep the Deacons “in the background.”
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But for the growing black membership of CORE, the practical necessity of armed self-defense was obvious. And in 1965, delegates openly contested the viability of nonviolence during CORE's annual convention.

By 1966, Floyd McKissick had succeeded James Farmer as national director of CORE. Though McKissick maintained a commitment to tactical nonviolence, his ascension marked a shift in policy and his rhetoric was more aggressive. McKissick insisted that “the right of self-defense is a constitutional right and you can't expect Black people to surrender this right while whites maintain it.” For CORE's pacifist, white members, this broke the bargain. By the end of 1966, CORE had lost most of its white support and became an almost entirely black organization.
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The increasingly darker complexion of CORE chapters in the North corresponded to more sympathy for the Deacons. After the Deacons protected the March against Fear, the Harlem CORE branch endorsed that model, declaring, “In any future action wherein we want to behave in a nonviolent manner we will seek the protection of our brothers to guarantee this right.”
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At the 1966 CORE convention, the northern branches were in agreement, resolving that “CORE accepts the concept of self-defense by the Deacons and believes that the use of guns by CORE workers on a southern project is a personal decision, with the approval of that project's regional directors.”
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Marking and maintaining the boundary between self-defense and political violence has been the central challenge of the black tradition of arms. Compelling as an idea, it poses an array of practical difficulties, particularly where political violence has some popular appeal. Fuller treatment of the rise and fall of the Deacons for Defense demonstrates this spectrum of challenges.

It was not the first time that black folk had gathered in defense of themselves and their neighbors. But the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in
Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964 is important because, unlike community defense groups dating to the nineteenth century, the Deacons operated within living memory and generated a relatively rich documentary record.

From their start in Jonesboro, the Deacons expanded across the South, making contested and probably exaggerated claims of tens of thousands of members across the country. The organization evolved in stages. It grew in part from a failed attempt by the Jonesboro Police Department to co-opt rising black activists by deputizing them and then assigning them to interdict and arrest civil-rights protesters. It was a harbinger of things to come when the black deputies confronted a group of white toughs who were taunting CORE workers at the Jonesboro Freedom House. Offended by commands from Negro police, the whites huffed off and vowed to return with reinforcements. When the news spread across black Jonesboro, dozens of men with guns showed up at the Freedom House, anticipating the fight. The word spread to white Jonesboro as well and the threatened conflict fizzled.
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Soon after that, armed Negroes showed up again, this time to guard the courthouse where CORE “testers” of illegal municipal segregation laws were being held after arrest. Although the words of new civil-rights laws guaranteed blacks access to public accommodations, the reality in many places was far different. Across the South, activists “tested” local authorities to see if they would enforce illegal segregation laws. In Jonesboro, the answer was emphatically yes. The protests that followed landed CORE activists in jail and provoked a wave of Klan activity.

A Klan caravan led by the assistant police chief menaced black Jonesboro. Crosses flamed across the countryside. Then a mob of more than one hundred armed white men gathered outside the jail where the CORE activists were held. CORE deployed a phone chain, and before the evening was over, the FBI was stirred to intervene. In the meantime, indeed, for the rest of the night, black men with rifles spied the crowd from adjacent rooftops.

The show of Klan power at the courthouse and police support for a Klan parade through black Jonesboro convinced many folk of the need for something more systematic than the ad hoc decisions of black men to camp on rooftops with rifles. That worry was the seed of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

Oddly prominent at the beginning was CORE fieldworker Charles Fenton. Fenton was white. He was also a committed pacifist who would maintain allegiance to CORE's nonviolent principles. Fenton had a flair for organizing. And when the fledgling Deacons decided they needed a funding structure and operational protocols, Fenton was their man.

Fenton was never entirely comfortable with the Deacons' self-defense strategy. But nothing would shock him like the night he first arrived at the Jonesboro Freedom House. “I got out of the car,” he recalled, “and realized that I was surrounded,
absolutely surrounded in an armed camp. They were on top of roofs. They were under the building. . . . They were all around the buildings.” Inside the Freedom House, Fenton found more guns stacked in the corners. The men were welcoming, but Fenton reprimanded them. “I told them that I didn't like the guns in the house.” Noting that some of the men he sent away that night never returned, Fenton reflected later on his youthful arrogance, “Here was this snotty nosed white boy, coming to the middle of their war and telling them that I didn't like their weapon of choice.”
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Fenton ultimately struck an accommodation between his ardent pacifism and the practical fact that his host community was widely and justifiably armed. He would help the Deacons organize and expand. He hoped to gain their trust and eventually perhaps win them over to pacifism. As a practical compromise, he asked the men not to carry their weapons inside the Freedom House and concluded that “insofar as the long guns that would have been obvious to everyone, they seem to have complied.”

Fenton's ambition to turn the armed black men of Jonesboro toward a robust pacifism seems fanciful. But considering the tension inherent in the name they chose—the Deacons for Defense and Justice—we might forgive his optimism. Although some would say that the name was a ruse to mask their militancy, the initial efforts to restrict membership to mature, working-class men and to exclude hotheads and those with “criminal tendencies” suggests that perhaps Charlie Fenton's ambition was not entirely fanciful.

Some contended that the very existence of the Deacons actually changed the expectations and behavior of people in the community—that it shifted the norm, and actually made folk bolder. There is evidence of this in the aborted cross burning at the home of Reverend Y. D. Jackson. As flames snaked up the kerosene-soaked cross, the Klansmen stood in the open, admiring their work. It was a reasonable thing to do after lighting a cross in the yard of a man who was supposed to turn the other cheek. But the cross burners had miscalculated about both the man and the cheek. Soon they were ducking and running under gunfire from Reverend Jackson's wife, who emptied her rifle at them and was diligently reloading. For black folk in Jonesboro, the incident was emblematic of the resolve that had fueled and was now emboldened by the Deacons for Defense.
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The Deacons' growing reputation also raised new hazards. By the beginning of 1965, they were on J. Edgar Hoover's radar. An early FBI assessment gauged them as “more militant than CORE and . . . more inclined to use violence in dealing with any violent episode encountered in civil rights matters.” Local law enforcement was also beginning to pay more attention to the Deacons. In January 1965, a member who had spent the day guarding student activists was arrested for public display of firearms as he stood outside a black café with a shotgun balanced over his shoulder.
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Although plenty of folk in the movement were armed and committed to self-defense, the Deacons were a strong draw for the national press. Receptive newsmen could have found plenty of stories about Negroes grabbing guns from behind the kitchen door. But the Deacons, courtesy of Charlie Fenton, had put a name on the thing.

The first major coverage of the Deacons appeared in the
New York Times
in February 1965, under the headline “Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro Unusual Town.” Although misleading in its implications about the scope of armed self-defense in the movement, it was a sympathetic account. It reported uncritically the Deacons' own assessment of their success; that they had actually prevented Jonesboro from becoming a “battleground” and had averted a threatened lynching of a black boy accused of kissing a white girl. The
New York Times
also interviewed Charlie Fenton, who made a good attempt to explain that the Deacons were a separate, indigenous organization that CORE hoped to win over to the strategy of pure nonviolence.

By formalizing their mission through a corporate charter, the Deacons lured in busy newsmen with an easily verifiable account of their agenda. The decision to incorporate also had a remarkable, almost-comical effect within the membership. Although the source of their misunderstanding is not entirely clear, some the Deacons concluded that the state-granted corporate charter roughly articulating their purpose gave them a broad right to carry firearms for community defense.

Decades later, Deacon member James Stokes remained adamant in this view, explaining, “in the charter, we had to protect people's property and churches and so forth. And therefore couldn't no one take our weapons from us. So we would carry our weapons just like the local law enforcement officers carry theirs.” Stokes considered the charter proof against anyone, including police who objected to his gun. He actually carried around a copy of the document, insisting that it entitled him to carry a concealed firearm. Some Deacons were more insistent than others about the power of the charter. And some police capitulated, perhaps uncertain themselves whether the black men's claims about the impressive-looking state document were accurate.
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The organization and formality signified by the Deacons' corporate charter also carried with it something more worrisome. In their planning for self-defense, the Deacons also were flirting with the very political violence that they claimed to disdain. The problem is perhaps in the vagaries of the definition. If political violence is something undertaken in pursuit of group goals, almost any sort of organized group violence might qualify. The problem would plague the Deacons, as their activities ranged far beyond the scenario of individuals fighting off imminent threats. Even acknowledging the legitimacy of using violence in defense of another, as the organization grew, the questions became harder.

The March 1965 showdown at Jonesboro High School demonstrates the problem. It fits within the boundary of legitimate self-defense only if one attributes
substantial destructive capabilities to the fire hoses that the city was rolling out to blast student protesters. It was a cold day. All the marchers were technically still children. Although lawyers have staked claims of self-defense on less, the fire-hose assault probably would not have killed anyone.