The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.

The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. By Lance Hill. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xii, 363. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2847-5.)

When vigilantes bombed the home of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott, the young reverend faced a difficult choice. What would he tell the angry members of the community who gathered to make sure that his family was safe and to respond to this latest attack? King, of course, chose to advocate nonviolence. Not everyone would do the same.

Lance Hill's book about the Deacons for Defense and Justice explores a group of men who made a different choice. These were working-class black men, many of them military veterans, who decided to take up arms to protect themselves and their communities from the Ku Klux Klan. In Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the organization was born, the Klan was the law. There was little to stop the nightriders in white sheets or the ones in blue uniforms. The Deacons emerged in 1964 and allied themselves with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to defend nonviolent activists from the north and southern black families who were pushing for change. The Deacons grew into a network of twenty-one affiliated groups (seventeen in the South and four in the North) with several hundred members, most from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Since the Deacons kept few records, Hill had a tough job of historical sleuthing to track down their story. He relied on letters and diaries of CORE volunteers and staffers, surveillance records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and most importantly, interviews with many of the former Deacons. The book reaches its climax with a Deacon shooting a white man who attacked a civil rights demonstration. This incident galvanized Deacon supporters, helped them win important local victories in Louisiana, and gave them a voice in the national debate over the movement's commitment to nonviolence.

The "myth of nonviolence," according to Hill, has blinded scholars to the importance of armed self-defense groups and to the role of working-class southern black men in the struggle (p. 5). He argues that nonviolent activists relied too heavily on federal intervention, which often did not arrive until after a threat of violence or armed self-defense forced the issue. Like recent works by Tim Tyson, Christopher Strain, Akinyele Umoja, Simon Wendt, and others, Hill rightly corrects the naive acceptance that nonviolence was the dominant tactic and philosophy guiding the movement. But perhaps Hill goes too far when he suggests that "nonviolence discouraged black men from participating in civil rights protests in the South and turned the movement into a campaign of women and children" (p. 28). Economic and physical reprisals discouraged movement participation among men and women. Self-defense was cathartic for the men who practiced it, and, undoubtedly, it saved activists' lives in rural communities where the Klan and police shared the same roster. But this tactic was by its very nature defensive and cannot alone account for the positive changes that Hill chronicles, even in Bogalusa, where lobbying, lawsuits, and federal intervention ultimately forced the Klan to retreat.

Still, Hill has written a masterful account of a vital, understudied organization. This will undoubtedly be the book on the Deacons for a long time, and it addresses issues relevant not simply to movement scholarship but also to southern history, African American history, and American history more generally. Hill reminds us that King's fateful choice to preach nonviolence was just that--a choice that had consequences for both the man and the movement and that continues to shape American race relations.

STEVE ESTES 

Sonoma State University