Negroes and the Gun (54 page)

As police directed the fire truck into position, a car full of armed Deacons pulled up. They piled out with guns. One of them warned, “If you turn that water hose on those kids, there's gonna be some blood out here today.” After some tense moments and bluster, the firemen rolled up their hoses and drove away.

The question lingers even now, was this a justifiable threat of defensive violence? What difference does it make that the aggressors were agents of the state, operating under nominally legitimate authority? Self-defense against private aggression within the window of imminence, where the state is structurally incompetent, is the model case. Whether the Deacons' threat against the firemen fits within those boundaries depends on the judge.

The point is underscored by comparison to the plain case of self-defense by Deacon Elmo Jacobs. In April 1965, Jacobs came to the rescue of a group of University of Kansas students whose car had broken down. Driving down the highway with a car full of white kids, Jacobs was asking for trouble. He soon found it.

It is unclear whether the attack was premeditated or whether it was just a racist reflex against the interracial group traveling unapologetically on a public highway. Jacobs sensed the danger as a brown station wagon came up fast behind him. The car pulled alongside. Jacobs recalled seeing the barrel of a gun, and then feeling the concussion of the shot. He responded reflexively in a classic case of self-defense, explaining, “Well, that made me went to shooting.” The assailants seemed unprepared for Jacobs's gunfire, perhaps anticipating just some nonviolent civil-rights folk. Under a hail of pistol fire, they screeched off, leaving Elmo Jacobs to contemplate the cost of repairing the shotgun blast to his car door.
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The Deacons eventually expanded to scores of loosely affiliated chapters. The first significant expansion was the chapter in Bogalusa that would in some ways eclipse the original group in Jonesboro. The Bogalusa chapter started with a larger appetite for risk. They welcomed a class of men that the Jonesboro chapter would reject—men like Charles Sims, who soon would lead the Bogalusa chapter and rise as a force in the brief national movement. Sims served in World War II and earned sergeant's stripes as a shooting instructor. But he was also a brawler who carried a gun long before he joined the Deacons.
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Sims reminds us of the common hazards of the gun, stepping more than once into the milieu of intra-racial violence that feeds current worries about black gun crime. Sims's December 1959 conflict with Beatrice Harry is emblematic. Harry and Sims
were essentially man and wife, though they had ignored the formalities. After a day of quarreling over nonsense, Harry shot Sims with his own gun. From his hospital bed, Sims told his family not to cooperate in the prosecution of Harry. He admitted that she was just defending herself from a beating at his hands. Sims survived his wounds, reconciled with Harry, and went on to live with her for many years.
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Beatrice Harry's shooting of Charles Sims is both familiar and provocative. This brand of violence fuels contemporary policy critiques urging stringent supply-side gun controls. On the other hand, it pays to ask, as we soon will, how much difference there is between Harry's self-defense claim and the claims of countless blacks who fought back against racist violence? The two categories resonate differently on several counts. But from the perspective of the victim, what difference does it really make that her attacker is black or white, a virulent racist or a mercurial lover?

The episode that solidified the Deacons in Bogalusa is an object lesson in the power and hazards of threat and bluff. The threat centered around Bob and Jackie Hicks, whose hosting of white CORE activists raised the hackles of local bigots. As the interracial group was sitting, talking in the living room, the Bogalusa police chief appeared on the porch with a grim warning. A mob was forming to attack the CORE activists. The police could not protect them. They had better leave town, and their black hosts too.

Neither the Hickses nor the CORE activists were inclined to run, although they surely were given pause when the police chief responded to their request for protection, declaring that “he wasn't going to play no nursemaid to some niggers.” Shocking as it might have been to the CORE staffers, the police response really was no surprise to Bob and Jackie Hicks. It was, though, a signal that they needed to get busy.

They already had guns in the house. But it was clear that the two white pacifists would be of little use. As word of the threat spread, help arrived in abundance. First, neighborhood women came and carried off the children to safety. Then the men started arriving, a troop of them, carrying rifles and shotguns, and milling about in a mass that defied accurate counting.
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Ultimately, the story of impending mob attack was a lie, concocted by the police chief to scare the CORE activists out of town. But it turned out to be more than just a failed ruse. It was, in fact, the spark for the formation of one of the Deacons' most storied chapters.

The episode at Bob and Jackie Hicks's home would also herald a transformation within groups like CORE. The shift was small at first. But the practical lessons were enduring. CORE staffers Bill Yates and Steve Miller were not scared off by the threats or the armed preparations of their hosts. A few days later, they held a
meeting at a Negro union hall. They finished up and were driving out of town when they were attacked by a carload of Klansmen who disabled their car with gunfire and then dragged Yates from the vehicle and beat him in the street. Yates and Miller managed to escape the assault and fled to a little black café as several more carloads of Klansmen joined the hunt.

In standard fashion, the CORE workers called for distant saviors and prayed that the call chain would pierce the necessary layers of bureaucracy in time for someone to do something. They were lucky that their black hosts were more practical. While Yates and Miller were feeding coins into the pay phone to plead for help from Washington, San Francisco, and New Orleans, a stream of armed black men slipped into the back of Audrey's Café. Several of them were among the group that had responded to the call of Bob and Jackie Hicks several days earlier. For Steve Miller, the juxtaposition offered a clear lesson. “Up to that point, I embraced the concept of nonviolence. At that point I guess I said, ‘Oh, I guess I'm not nonviolent anymore.'”

Eventually, the call chain produced an FBI response and the promise of a protective escort to extract the two CORE workers. When that failed to materialize, the black men formed an armed convoy and took Yates and Miller back to the home of Bob and Jackie Hicks, where they continued to stand guard.

As the Bogalusa organization grew, the provisioning became more sophisticated. Charles Sims recounted how virtually everyone already had some sort of gun. “The average dude own a couple of shotguns. Most of us own pistols and all this type of business.” But the army veterans who rose to leadership urged standardization and purchases of ballistically superior firearms. Deacons were discouraged from buying low-powered .22 caliber pistols in favor of more powerful .38 caliber handguns. The organization bought .38 caliber ammunition in bulk to save money. For rifles, the Deacons encouraged high-powered .30-06 caliber rifles like the M1 Garand available from the federal government through the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

Philosophically, the Deacons grounded their strategy on the foundation that freedmen invoked a century earlier. In language reminiscent of black invocations of the Second Amendment in the 1860s, Deacon Bob Hicks declared in the winter of 1965, “Let's back up on the Constitution of the United States and say that we can bear arms. We have a right to defend ourselves since the legally designated authorities won't do it. So this is all we done. That's all.”
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It wasn't long before the Bogalusa Deacons put their heightened preparations into action. And again the violence swirled around Bob and Jackie Hicks. The target was the resilient Bill Yates, who had been beaten in the street several months earlier. It was now April, and Yates was shepherding a new group of student activists recently arrived from the University of Kansas. On the eve of a planned march on City Hall, Yates
was attacked and then chased as he was driving to meet up with student volunteers. A pickup truck pinned his car against the curb. Then a man jumped out of the truck and attempted to break through his windshield. Yates threw the car into reverse and raced backward down the street to the Hickses' house. The attackers broke off the chase when Jackie Hicks stepped out onto the porch with a pistol in her hand.

Fig. 7.9. Robert “Bob” Hicks standing outside his home with his Winchester repeating rifle, assessing the damage after a late-night attack. (AP Photo.)

But the peace did not last long. Later that night, Klansmen returned to the Hickses' home, incensed by the news that white college students were staying there. They probably expected the Hickses to be armed. But they did not appreciate that seven other Deacons were stationed at various points outside, guarding the house.
At around one o'clock in the morning, a car rolled up slowly and a man jumped out with something in in his hand. He tossed it through the windshield of a vehicle owned by one of the white students. Bob Hicks ran outside with his gun to investigate. The terrorists fired a shot from their car, and Hicks fired back. From cover around the house, the Deacons opened fire with reports of at least fifteen shots fired before the midnight terrorists sped out of sight. While everyone in and around the Hickses' home came through the shootout unscathed, black hospital workers said that two Klansmen were shot, and the story was suppressed in order to conceal police complicity in the attack.
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This time, the shoot-out made national news. The story ran on the front page of the
New York Post
under the sensational but misleading headline, “Klansmen and CORE in Louisiana Gun Battle.” The
New York Post
article failed to appreciate that the Deacons were an entity distinct from CORE. Indeed, it failed even to mention the Deacons by name, referring vaguely to some “Negroes guarding the house.”

Still, the Deacons were on the ascent in Bogalusa. In the coming weeks, CORE chairman James Farmer would arrive in town to bolster protests and boycotts against merchants who refused to integrate. When the city fathers agreed to repeal segregation ordinances, a jubilant Farmer celebrated the victory with a speech declaring that the Klan had become “a laughing matter.” He was quickly proved wrong.
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Almost immediately, the Bogalusa Klan countered with a series of confrontations that culminated in the shooting of two black deputies who had been hired as part of the effort to open up the city bureaucracy to Negroes. The shooting provoked the Deacons to ramp up their organizing and recruitment, and drew more national coverage of their activity. In June 1965, the Deacons made the front page of the
Sunday New York Times
, under the headline, “Armed Negro Unit Spreads in South.” The article reported surely exaggerated claims of fifty-five local chapters of the Deacons across the South, totaling more than fifteen thousand members.

The
Sunday New York Times
report also highlighted the same difficult question that Martin Luther King navigated in assessing the role of the Deacons in the Mississippi March against Fear—“Should a civil rights organization committed to nonviolence align itself with the Deacons, and accept their services?” CORE operative Richard Haley answered with a rendition of the long distinction between legitimate self-defense and disdained political violence. Using slightly different terms, Haley argued that affiliation with the Deacons was consistent with the nonviolent movement because the Deacons were practicing “protective nonviolence.” Deacons leader Charles Sims embodied the distinction, sitting with a .38 revolver tucked into his waistband while explaining, “I believe nonviolence is the only way.”
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Any superficial contradiction here was easily resolved by folk who responded with gunfire to midnight attacks on isolated farmhouses. There, the trouble had
come to them, their backs were against the wall, and there was no chance of help. But the Deacons, some argued, went seeking trouble and sometimes by their presence provoked it. Charles Sims countered that “the showing of a weapon stops many things,” and his assessment is consistent with modern measures of nonshooting defensive gun uses.
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On the other hand, there is no denying that guns have both risks and utilities. And brandishing one, particularly in the environments where the Deacons were operating, could be a catalyst for unpredictable results. The
Wall Street Journal
expressed this worry, quoting a Louisiana Klansman who seemingly relished the emergence of the Deacons, declaring, “If violence has to settle this, then the sooner the better.” The next piece of national news coverage pressed the point even harder.
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