http://www.paperlessarchives.com/ddj.html

Our struggle has not always been about non-violence... Some brothers felt the white man had to be stopped... They picked up the gun... The Deacons for Defense was born... Read and Enjoy their FBI files(smile!) :ohmy:

Peace!
Isaiah

These brothers were the precursor for the Black Panthers....little known....but incredibly important....thank you for bringing their story!

this one i've study and love because how Marcus Clay stood up as a man
and for the defense of the black people they was under the eye of the FBI
for years this southen group of men made a stand and took out the KKK
before they could get more help from other parts of the south and change
the way black people was viewed what an honor of our struggling history !
thankz for bringing this back up i should have a few threads on this untold
story of DEACONS FOR DEFENSE AND JUSTICE ..

You Kidding????

I seen the movie about 8 times.

However.......Two things: And I would appreciate it if ANYONE explained this:



1. DID THE DFD REALLY HAVE TWO WHITE BOYS WORKING ALONG WITH THEM?

2. WHAT LED TO THEIR DISAPPEARANCE INTO THE WOODS?

Fill me in Family.

Cedric Denson

Brother Cedric, there's a great book out about the Deacons by Lance Hill, UNC Press... Sells for about 33 dollars in hard cover... I haven't gotten to read the book yet, but am told it is a definitive story, and the one the movie was based upon... Perhaps, you can find it in the library... i wasn't able to...

Peace!
isaiah

Thank you Brother Isaiah. It's always nice when a caring brotha comes along to help out a young one!

:thanks:

Cedric Denson

i found it at barns & nobles ! and look most of it up on the net doing a research
on Deacons for Defense and justice

Thank you Brother Isaiah. It's always nice when a caring brotha comes along to help out a young one!

:thanks:

Cedric Denson

Brother Cedric, doing my duty, and fulfilling my obligations to Young Bloods with major potential like yourself...(smile!) Keep on Pushing - till you reach that highter goal, I know You can make it, with a littel bit O Soul!(smile!)

Peace!
Isaiah

Brother Cedric, doing my duty, and fulfilling my obligations to Young Bloods with major potential like yourself...(smile!) Keep on Pushing - till you reach that highter goal, I know You can make it, with a littel bit O Soul!(smile!)

Peace!
Isaiah

It's all for the Best my Brotha!!

Cedric Denson

I am now reading the book by Lance Hill, and it is revelatory beyond my wildest imaginings... I had no idea that Civil Rights workers were protected from violence by groups other than the Deacons, clandestine groups with no organizational structure, but military discipline, nonetheless... This was done throughout the south, and done very quietly to protect the movement's image as a nonviolent one...

But reading of how these brothers organized, and faced down the Klan in hundreds of instances, rescuing Civil Rights workers in car chases with the Klan, and sealing off entire Black communities from marauding Night Rider cowards... Too Awesome to put into words... What is interesting is that Huey Newton, and a bunch of folk out in Los Angeles, are originally from Lousiana, where the Deacons were Organized... The Deacons, coincidentally, went public in an article in the New York Times, dated February 21, 1965... Does that date sound familiar to some of you??? Oh, the irony...

Peace!
isaiah

Maybe its time we protect our young men and women.

Have you heard about No Jail, No Arrest Day?

July 15, 2005

No Jail - No Arrest Day

The goal is to have no one in Black Communities throughout the country arrested or jailed on this day. There is a multi-billion dollar industry that depends in large part on the arrest and incarceration of blacks in this country. Since we can't fight the system we can just stop going to jail. Our success on July 15th will be a beginning.

No drugs or illegal weapons in the house, the car, or on your person. No Arrests!!!

No anger to the point of violence. No Arrests!!!

No disorderly conduct. No Arrests!!!

No traffic violations. No Arrests!!!

No excessive drinking. No Arrests!!!

No abuse of spouses, children, or parents. No Arrests!!!

Share the word from Seattle to Miami and from Portland, Maine to San Diego.

July 15, 2005 No Arrest - No Jail Day

Copy this and make a flier. Send an email. Post it on an internet bulletin board. Get the word out.

By Any Means Necessary
by MIKE MARQUSEE

The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
by Lance Hill


[from the July 5, 2004 issue]

In June 1965 James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and longtime champion of Gandhian nonviolence, arrived in Bogalusa, Louisiana, to support a desegregation struggle in the heart of "Klan nation." Farmer had been escorted from New Orleans airport by a group of armed black men, who also stationed themselves in the hall where he spoke and watched discreetly over the march he led the next day through the town center. Pressed by reporters on his organization's links with the men with guns--members of the Deacons for Defense and Justice--Farmer was coy. "Even in the church you have your sinners: we feel we can demonstrate to these people with our philosophy of love and nonviolence that there is another way."

To many, it seemed a hopeless attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, but in retrospect the scene exemplifies the tensions and contradictions that infused the African-American freedom struggle on the eve of the Watts riot. The initial advances of the civil rights movement had been met with a brutal wave of white terrorism. In the states of the Deep South, the federal government seemed unwilling to enforce either the new Civil Rights Act or the Constitution. It was in response to the growing sense of crisis and impotence that the Deacons emerged in mid-1964 in the pine hills of northern Louisiana. Offering a blend of armed self-defense, grassroots organizing and black pride, they rapidly attained legendary status in besieged black communities and attracted sensationalist coverage in the white media. Their meteoric career--by 1968 they had vanished from the scene--spanned a watershed in the movement's history, when, according to some versions, the idealism and unity of the nonviolent phase gave way to extremism, bitterness and factionalism.

That schema has always been a tendentious political construct, and the remarkable tale of the Deacons for Defense illustrates just how artificial it is. Lance Hill's book is the first full account of the group and fills a major lacuna in the history of the era and the movement. It is also a welcome corrective to the school of civil rights historians who try to fix this multipronged, protean movement into the static polarities of nonviolence and violence, liberal integrationism and radical separatism.


FOR MORE, CLICK ON THE WEBSITE BELOW...

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040705&s=marqusee


PEACE!
ISAIAH

"******* Ain’t Gonna Run This Town":
Militancy, Conflict and the Sustenance of the Hegemony in Bogalusa, Louisiana

by Seth Hague

This paper was selected by the Department of History as the Outstanding Paper for the 1997-1998 academic year.

The battle for civil rights in Bogalusa, Louisiana was a struggle for power, but it was different from the prototypical struggles in the agricultural South during the 1960s. Industrialization is the main reason for this difference, as the black laborers met challenges distinctly different than the problems associated with the struggle in the agricultural South. Oppressed rural black populations were much more inclined to follow the leadership from groups like CORE and SNCC, whereas the laboring class of blacks in industrialized towns such as Jonesboro and Bogalusa fought themselves for power and demanded that outside coalitions like CORE follow them. They exercised militancy, embedded in them as the result of the rigid class-consciousness imposed by an oppositional white power structure, through an armed self-defense organization they created known as the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The efforts already made by the Jonesboro black laborers, entrenched in a similar situation in another industrialized Louisiana mill town, further inspired militancy in Bogalusa. Once Crown-Zellerbach laborers A.Z. Young and Robert Hicks assumed leadership of the (all-black) Bogalusa Civic and Voters’ League, the community came to embrace the militant rhetoric of the Jonesboro Deacons. Many violent conflicts ensued under this ideology and culminated in a climactic summer in 1965. Consequently, the black workers’ militancy threatened not only the power of the middle class blacks, but also the political and economic hegemony of the white power structure in Bogalusa. Except for a few noteworthy courtroom "victories" versus Crown-Zellerbach, threatening the power structure was virtually the struggle’s only effect as the white power structure subsumed the militancy and rhetoric of the revolutionary Bogalusans.

The Deacons for Defense and Justice arrived in Bogalusa under extremely turbulent conditions. On February 21 Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick, Ernest Thomas, and CORE worker Charles Fenton set out from Jonesboro to Bogalusa. The trek was over three hundred miles through rough Klan country. When the group reached Baton Rouge that night, they heard a news update on the radio announcing that Malcolm X had been assassinated. Ominously, Malcolm was in Selma, Alabama less than three weeks prior to his assassination, predicting that the campaign for racial equality may be forced to abandon its non-violent image. The carload of militants from Bogalusa attested the accuracy of that prophesy.


CLICK ON THE WEBSITE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRETY...

http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1997-8/Hague.html


PEACE!
ISAIAH