Negroes and the Gun (55 page)

Following the story in the
New York Times
, the Sunday
Los Angeles Times
ran its own front-page story on the Deacons, titled “Negro ‘Deacons' Claim They Had Machine Guns, Grenades for War.” The
L. A. Times
indulged none of the fine distinctions that Richard Haley had sold weeks before to a New York reporter. Drawing from FBI documents leaked to various media outlets, it reported statements from an informant that the Deacons claimed to have a cache of “machine guns and grenades for use in racial warfare.” Although these claims were empty boasts, Deacons leaders refused to deny the charge.

The Los Angeles reporting depicted the Deacons as part of an emerging militant trend. It punched the hot buttons of race-driven political violence. And while the Deacons would still avow a commitment to working within boundaries of genuine self-defense, their agenda was plainly sullied. Moreover, it turned out that organizing, fundraising, and speechmaking around a theme of violence made it harder to keep the rhetoric within the boundaries of traditional self-defense. Martin Luther King identified the problem with the criticism that “programmatic action surrounding self-defense” is folly, just a short step from political violence.
206

Looking back, it is fair to mark the
Los Angeles Times
's coverage as the beginning of the Deacons' slide into the dangerous boundary-land that separated common self-defense from political violence. And that slide reflected a broader militant trend that dramatically diminished the black tradition of arms in the modern era.

As the Deacons' profile rose, individual members moved into the spotlight. They were not media savvy, and it is unclear exactly how much authority they had to speak for the organization. The group was loose knit. Individual chapters were largely autonomous. So whether Deacons spokesmen were aggressively prescribing a more radical shift, just describing an organic turn already made, or simply exaggerating the sentiment within the ranks is hard to determine. These subtleties were lost on the national press, which now cast the Deacons as part of worrisome militant trend.

Shana Alexander wondered in
Life
magazine “whether it was best to think of the Deacons as armed Negro vigilantes, protection racketeers, Mao-inspired terrorist conspirators, or freedom fighters.” Ultimately, Alexander was a good liberal. After interviewing Charles Sims, she wrote, “If I ever have to go to Bogalusa, I should be very glad to have his protection.”
207

The perennial worry about self-defeating political violence is evident in the reported comments of California civil-rights leaders who criticized statements that Charles Sims made during his fundraising tour there. Sims raised hackles with his appearance on the weekly television show of black journalist Louis Lomax. With the conflict over civil rights at a boil, Sims said that the Deacons were prepared to use a level force that would leave “blood . . . flowing down the streets like water.” In the national black weekly
Jet
magazine, three prominent Los Angeles civil-rights leaders condemned Sims. Reverend Thomas Kilgore captured the sentiment of the group, declaring, “I disapprove of keeping civil rights workers alive with guns. The nonviolent approach has brought pressure to bear on those elements which discriminate. The Bogalusa movement under the Deacons—a misnomer—represents a danger to 20 million Negroes.”
208

Back in Bogalusa, folk facing more immediate risks had less compunction about being kept alive with guns. Unlike the LA clerics, they were putting their skin on the line to fight for actual enforcement of laws already passed by the United States Congress. After an uneventful march to City Hall in July, protesters planned to follow up the next day. CORE activists were doing much of the planning. Their decisions reflected a discernible trend within the movement.
209

Just that week, CORE had debated the boundaries and demands of nonviolence. The pacifists prevailed on the point that CORE activists should remain nonviolent. But it was a signal of changes to come that the group affirmatively resolved to accept protection from the Deacons when it was available. The decision was not unanimous. And in the days to come proponents and the dissenters alike would gain lessons about the hazards and unpredictability of violence.

The makeup of the Deacons varied from chapter to chapter. The flagship chapter in Jonesboro tried to screen out hotheads and anyone with a criminal record. The Bogalusa chapter did not. In brash new member Henry Austin, they got both a hothead and someone who had spent two years in military prison for stabbing a man who called him “Nigger.”

In early July 1965, activists staged a series of protest marches in Bogalusa. On July 8, the Deacons were on watch during a planned march through town to City Hall. There were hecklers all along the route. Henry Austin and Milton Johnson guarded the rear, driving slowly behind in a car owned by A. Z. Young, one of the
older Deacons. As the marchers turned toward City Hall, some white hecklers defied police and moved in close. Then they started throwing rocks and bricks at the marchers, and some young toughs jumped onto the hood of A. Z. Young's car.

Then one of the missiles connected—a brick to the side of the head of a teenage girl named Hattie May Hill. Milton Johnson jumped from the car and dragged Hill into the back seat. But now the mob was on him. Henry Austin came to help, gun in hand. He fired a shot into the air. But the mob was fearless and pressed in. Austin then leveled his revolver and fired three shots. The crowd recoiled as an angry young man named Alton Crowe dropped to the pavement, bleeding from .38 caliber holes in his chest.
210

So now it had happened. A protest march, undeniably political, had ended in gunfire by a black man, and a white man lay bleeding in the road. This was the danger that had dogged the modern movement—the kind of hazard that had always shadowed the black tradition of arms. Henry Austin's violent reflex showed that the boundary against political violence was not really a line so much as it was a minefield, a zone of dangerous decision making where individual exigencies crashed into the long-term strategies and aspirations of the group.

Who knows what Alton Crowe thought as he walked over to Main Street that day. Perhaps he hated Negroes with a passion that he could not explain. Perhaps he feared what Negroes, unrestrained, would do to his town, his school, and his way of life. Perhaps he just thought it would be fun to yell, toss a few stones, and shove the wretches back into their place. He probably did not think that one of them would have the audacity to shoot him.

Many men had been lynched across the South for lesser offenses than Henry Austin had just committed. Austin knew this, and so did the police who were quickly on him. The crowd pulsed back at the gunshots. But now, with Austin handcuffed over the hood of the car, the impulse to string him up right there started as a murmur and rose to a roar. Austin would not even spend the night in Bogalusa. He was moved to the jail in Slidell on the governor's order.

Alton Crowe survived his wounds and Henry Austin was released on bail. Reactions from across the spectrum were predictable. Initially Deacons leaders denied that Austin and Johnson were part of the group. But then it became clear that local folk considered Austin a hero, and the Deacons embraced him. Governor John McKeithen condemned the Deacons as cowards and trash. Klan leaders were defiant, one of them telling a northern reporter, “I don't care how many guns that bunch of black Mau Mau's has, they don't have the prerequisite guts.”
211

For Martin Luther King, the Alton Crowe shooting was the danger he had long warned against. It was a full plunge into political violence. King quickly condemned the shooting and emphasized the peril of treading into the boundary-land against political violence. It was an interesting comment in contrast to his rhetoric
following the Robert Williams incident. There, King recognized and respected the sphere of legitimate, individual self-defense. But here, in the aftermath of an episode that triggered the long worry about political violence, King was supremely cautious, warning that “the line of demarcation between aggressive and defensive violence is very slim. The Negro must have allies to win his struggle for equality. And our allies will not surround a violent movement. What protects us from the Klan is to expose its brutality. We can't outshoot the Klan. We would only alienate our allies and lose sympathy for our cause.”
212

Within a year, though, King would again yield to the practical draw of the self-defense impulse. If FBI reports are to be believed, King was guarded by as many as forty Deacons on July 29, 1966, during a speech in Chicago. Although some of King's aides objected, and Jesse Jackson adamantly so, King reportedly assented to having Deacons from the Chicago chapter act as bodyguards with the proviso that they not be identified as members of the group.
213

The shooting of Alton Crowe posed a dilemma for CORE as well. The organization had strayed from its pacifist foundation through growing association with the Deacons. If CORE did not disavow the Deacons now, it surely would cost the support of northern white pacifists who would vote by closing their checkbooks. On the other hand, repudiating the Deacons might jeopardize relationships with black folk at the grassroots. As its financial decline would testify, CORE sacrificed the money.

CORE chairman James Farmer, soon to be replaced by the more openly militant Floyd McKissick, reflected the dilemma in a
Wall Street Journal
interview where he attempted to have things both ways. CORE was still committed to nonviolence, said Farmer. But his next statement was, depending on the observer, either an unacceptable equivocation or confirmation of the central theme of the black tradition of arms. CORE's nonviolent stance, said Farmer, did not mean “I have any right to tell a Negro community they don't have the right to defend the sanctity of their homes.”

The danger that the Deacons would lose control of their image is evident in
Newsweek
magazine's depiction of them as dangerous, separatist militants on par with Elijah Mohammed's black Muslims. The black press, not surprisingly, took a more sympathetic view.
Jet
magazine ran a front-cover story praising the Deacons as “a determined band of heavily armed Negroes who have vowed to defend themselves with guns from marauding whites who have terrorized black communities in the South.”
214

The response to the
Jet
article suggests that many folk were intrigued by the Deacons. Following the story, the Bogalusa chapter was flooded with calls, offers of support, and queries about starting satellite chapters. In towns across the South, Deacons chapters and other sympathetic but unaffiliated groups sprang up. The actual numbers are hard to pin down because various public statements about
membership were deliberately inflated. Still, there is abundant hard evidence of Negroes with guns, under the banner of the Deacons, doing dangerous work.
215

In Ferriday, Louisiana, a Deacons chapter guarded CORE activists and on January 29, 1966, repelled a bomb attack with gunfire. Across the river in Natchez, the Deacons wrestled with the same questions that had burdened their Mississippi counterparts. Reprising Martin Luther King's March against Fear strategy, Otis Firmin of the Natchez chapter explained his vision, “We don't participate in any demonstrations, any marches, anything like that.” But if needed, said Firmin, the Deacons were ready. “We be around, we watch, and we observe and we protect them if they need protecting.” And with a candid appreciation of the special and sometimes-unspoken legal barriers that applied to Negroes with guns, Firmin answered a recruit's question about getting permits to “tote a weapon.” With the same practical approach that had governed generations before him, Firmin explained that they would not dignify the legal charade of the permitting process. Instead, he advised, “We just going to tote weapons.”
216

In Centreville, Mississippi, a fledgling Wilkinson County chapter accompanied a protest march of about two hundred folk who were actually agitating against black teachers who refused to support the voting-rights agenda. Along the route, they passed by a rural gas station whose owner figured that whatever the Negroes were marching for, he was against, and he was willing to press the point with gunfire. As the man stepped from his doorway with a rifle, he faced the muzzles of more than twenty guns pointed by Deacons who accompanied the marchers. The man retreated back into his store and perhaps never learned how little he actually cared about the thing the Negroes were protesting.

There are at least two reports of the familiar dangers of firearms striking fledgling Deacons chapters. In one incident, a young recruit got into an argument with the Woodville chapter leader, drew his gun, and wounded the older man. In another incident, a Deacon from the Woodville chapter shot a black deputy sheriff, confessed his crime, and went to prison.

With the increased publicity and hyperbolic media characterizations of their militancy, the Deacons' star rose among the radical set. A month after Charles Sims raised hackles in Los Angeles, Deacon Earnest Thomas traveled to San Francisco to solicit funds through the Friends of the Deacons Network. He actually met with future Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, who talked about starting a Deacons chapter in California. Thomas was polite but concluded that Seale was too radical for the Deacons. Other groups like the Workers World Party, the Spartacus League, and the Socialist Workers Party proposed alliances with the Deacons and offered financial support.

But leftist politics did not appeal to the Deacons who encountered them. Earnest Thomas's reaction was typical: “I'm not a left-winger. I'm just a capitalist
that don't have a damn thing.” Charles Sims was of the same mind, declaring that the radical pursuit of “black power didn't do a damn thing but hurt the movement.”
217