In Bogalusa, Louisiana 1964

In Bogalusa, Louisiana 1964 civil-rights workers were surrounded by a horde of Ku Klux Klansmen. A Black man named Charles Sims saw that the chief of police was merely observing what could have been lots of bloodshed. Charles Sims walked over to the police chief and told him: “You better stop `em. Cause if you don’t, we’re gonna kill them all.” The top cop saw armed Black men staked out in protective formation around the building housing the civil-rights workers. There was no Klan violence that night. Sims later declared, “That night a brand-new Negro was born.” Cross burning ended suddenly in Jonesboro, Louisiana the night that a cross was set on fire in front of a clergyman’s house. The Deacons for Defense and Justice began busting shots at the KKK as the torch touched the cross. The Klan departed and never repeated that trick. In early 1965 Black students picketing Jonesboro high school were confronted by hostile police and fire trucks with hoses prepared to hose the black students until a car of 4 Deacons emerged and in view of the police, calmly loaded their shotguns. The police ordered the fire truck to withdraw. During a 1965 summer demonstration, white hecklers turned violent and threw a brick which struck a Black woman, Hattie Mae Hill. The white mob surrounded the car the Deacons were using to aid the terrified woman. As the white mob closed in on Deacon Henry Austin he fired point blank into the chest of Alton Crowe who was in the front of the mob. While Crowe survived, the fun of beating up on blacks died that afternoon in Bogalusa. No longer able to attack Black people without fear of retaliation from gun-wielding Deacons, the Klan began to lose its power-hold on the region. With the threat of violence greatly diminished the Deacons for Defense and Justice’s visibility declined. After 1968, the Deacons were inactive. The wife of one of the last surviving Deacon leaders says “I became very proud of Black men. They didn’t bow down and scratch their heads. They stood up like men.”