*The Deacons for Defense and Justice are celebrated on this date in 1964. This was an armed African American self-defense group founded in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, during the 20th-century American Civil Rights era.
It is intended to protect civil rights activists and their families. They are threatened by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws. On the day of Malcolm X's assassination (in 1965), the first affiliated chapter was founded in Bogalusa, Louisiana, followed by 20 other chapters in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. The Bogalusa chapter gained national attention during the summer of 1965 in its violent struggles with the Ku Klux Klan.
Blacks were harassed and attacked by white Klan vigilantes in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964, including torching five churches, a Masonic Hall, and a Baptist center. Given these threats, Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick founded the Deacons for Defense to protect civil rights workers, their families, and the black community. Most Deacons were veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II.
The Deacons had a relationship with other civil rights groups that practiced non-violence. Such support by the Deacons allowed the NAACP and CORE to observe their traditional parameters of peace. The Deacons protected CORE leader James Farmer Jr. in 1965. Farmer arrived in Bogalusa to aid in desegregation and required the protection of the Deacons. They ensured his safety when he arrived at the New Orleans airport and provided security while Farmer spoke and marched at desegregation events. The Deacons attracted media attention for protecting Charles Evers' desegregation campaign in Natchez, Mississippi.
Attention was given to them because, unlike similar groups that had come before, the Deacons did not hide their names from the media. This, coupled with their use of armed self-defense and modest beginnings, made them heroes in harassing black communities. By 1968, the Deacons' activities were declining following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the entry of blacks into politics in the South, and the rise of the Black Power movement. Blacks worked to gain control of more political and economic activities in their communities.
A television movie, Deacons for Defense (2003), directed by Bill Duke and starring Forest Whitaker, was aired about the 1965 events in Bogalusa. The Robert "Bob" Hicks House in Bogalusa commemorates one of the leaders of the Deacons in that city; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. Fundraising continues for a civil rights museum in Bogalusa to honor the work of the Deacons for Defense; it was expected to open in 2018.
