The Deacons for Defense and Justice formed in the Deep South during the 1960s.The Deacons exercised armed self-defense and often operated in conjunction with other civil rights organizations. Local law enforcement, state authorities and the Ku Klux Klan often enforced Jim Crow laws with impunity in places where the federal government was ineffective or unable to intervene.

Larry Pratt points out that, although Hill does not deal with the lack of Scriptural support for segregation, Jim Crow laws and segregation were very clearly a set of laws in conflict with Scripture. Exodus 12:49 requires that the same law apply to everybody alike. The black self-defense group did not engage in any theological debates over whether the use of lethal force in self-defense is Biblical. (See Larry Pratt: What Does the Bible Say About Gun Control? The Deacons’ practical self-defense approach did not square with national leadership’s stated views on the direction to be taken by the Civil Rights Movement but nevertheless contributed immeasurably to the ultimate success of the larger civil rights effort.

“The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity—Black Power—is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people.”

Stokely Carmichael wrote of the Deacons:

“Here is a group which realized that the ‘law’ and law enforcement agencies would not protect people, so they had to do it themselves…The Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?”

Proponents of non-violence had previously protected themselves with guns. Fannie Lou Hammer confessed that she kept several loaded guns under her bed. Robert F. Williams armed his local NAACP branch. The NAACP and the federal government were not happy with Williams’ stance but Martin Luther King Jr. also employed armed bodyguards and had guns in his house during the early stages of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956.

The Klan strategy to intimidate African Americans included burning five churches, destroying a Masonic hall, a Baptist center, and murdering innocent victims- often women and children. Jonesboro, Louisiana was the scene of much of the violence in 1964.

Because of state and federal governments’ failure to protect African-Americans, men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick, founded the Deacons to protect civil rights workers, their communities and their families, against the Klan violence. The Jonesboro chapter later organized a Deacons chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

The Jonesboro chapter initiated a regional organizing campaign and eventually formed 21 chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The militant Deacons’ confronted the Klan in Bogalusa and forced the federal government to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many of the original Deacons were war veterans with combat experience and the Deacons galvanized federal law enforcement by the very real threat that the Deacons would kill Klansmen in self-defense.

Ernest “Chilly Willy” Thomas understood that things were secured by force rather than moral appeal. According to Lance Hill, “Thomas was eager to work with CORE, but he had reservations about the nonviolent terms imposed by the young activists.” Thomas and others would guard the Jonesboro community in the day with their guns concealed and carried their guns openly during the cover of night to discouraged any type of Klan activity.

The Deacons became involved with the wider Civil Rights Movement during the 1966 March Against Fear. Stokely Carmichael urged that the Deacons be used as security for the march. Akinyele O. Umoja states, “Finally, though expressing reservations, King conceded to Carmichael’s proposals to maintain unity in the march and the movement. The involvement and association of the Deacons with the march signified a shift in the Civil Rights Movement, which had been popularly projected as a ‘nonviolent movement.”’

Akinyele O. Umoja suggests that ideological shifts in the movement were becoming apparent even before the March Against Fear. An alliance between CORE and the Deacons around 1965 and the support of armed self-defense by many southern-born Black people is a significant aspect of the civil rights movement that has been ignored by white and black historians. Additionally, a significant portion of SNCC supported armed self-defense. Local Southern blacks knew violence that was up close and personal. The national leadership, on the other hand, steered a wider agenda that included gaining support from Northern white liberals and mainstream media outlets.

The Deacons worked with other groups that practiced nonviolence and provided armed guards so that the NAACP and other groups could maintain their nonviolent stance. According to Lance Hill, author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement:

“The hard truth is that these organizations (i.e., SNCC, CORE, and SCLC) produced few victories in their local projects in the Deep South— if success is measured by the ability to force changes in local government policy and create self-governing and sustainable local organizations that could survive when the national organizations departed…The Deacons’ campaigns frequently resulted in substantial and unprecedented victories at the local level, producing real power and self-sustaining organizations.”

According to Hill, the Deacons were the true resistance that enforced civil rights in areas of the Deep South. Many times it was locally armed communities that laid the foundation of equal opportunity for African-Americans. National organizations played their role by exposing problems; local organizations and individuals implemented change and were not intimidated by whites who wanted to enforce and perpetuate segregation. Without these local organizations employing armed self-defense not much would have changed, according to Hill.

An example of how armed force changed the civil rights equation took place in early 1965. Black students picketed the local high school. They were confronted by hostile police and fire trucks with hoses. A car of four Deacons emerged and in view of the police calmly loaded their shotguns. The police ordered the fire truck to withdraw. Lance Hill observes that this was the first time in the Twentieth century “an armed black organization had successfully used weapons to defend a lawful protest against an attack by law enforcement.”

Another example from Hill:

“In Jonesboro, the Deacons made history when they compelled Louisiana governor John McKeithen to intervene in the city’s civil rights crisis and require a compromise with city leaders—the first capitulation to the civil rights movement by a Deep South governor.”

The Deacons kept their membership secret to avoid terrorist attacks on their supporters. The tactics of the Deacons attracted the attention and concern of the FBI which produced more than 1,500 pages of relatively accurate records on the Deacon’s activities, largely through numerous informants close to or even inside the organization.

The information herein is a summary of an article about the Deacons at Wikipedia.

Sometimes I hear people say that the Civil War was not really about slavery. I find that difficult to believe. Nevertheless, the fight for African-American freedom began in earnest after the Civil War ended. The U.S. Supreme Court cited firearms lawyer Stephen Halbrook in the landmark DC vs. Heller decision:

“Blacks were routinely disarmed by Southern States after the Civil War. Those who opposed these injustices frequently stated that they infringed blacks’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Needless to say, the claim was not that blacks were being prohibited from carrying arms in an organized state militia.”

The legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a joint Congressional Report that described how after the Civil War “in some parts of (South Carolina), armed parties… without proper authority, engaged in seizing all firearms found in the hands of the freemen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States….”

After the Civil War, Northerners recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the right to keep and bear arms to newly freed black citizens. Southerners also knew that Constitutional rights for blacks also meant extending gun rights and defiantly enacted laws prohibiting blacks from possessing guns.

An editorial in The Loyal Georgian (Augusta) on Feb. 3, 1866, assured blacks that all “men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.”

Black and white Southerners who expressed such opinions often found themselves defending their homes and families. Some black Civil War veterans were lynched for refusing to surrender service weapons to white militias that rode about enforcing laws prohibiting blacks from possessing firearms.

Martin Luther King knew that reason, not force of arms, was the only method of overcoming ignorance and hatred. But King’s strategies could only work in a nation where citizens love justice and compassion. Crusades against slavery could only be effective in nations like England and the U.S. where the people participate in representative government and are animated by mercy and the love of justice.

Leaders in nations like North Korea, Iran or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq can be less concerned about voter sensibilities. Despots have few qualms when it comes to killing and torturing demonstrators. The men and women that followed Rev. King proved that a people’s need for dignity triumphs over intimidation and violence. Dialogue alone did not stop the violence, however. In order to advance the struggle for black equality, the federal government deployed armed troops to defend black and white citizens that stood up for justice.

Prior to the Civil War, British warships and their big guns abolished the slave trade by controlling the high seas. Even as freedom marchers risked their lives in the Deep South and Northern cities like Chicago, there were armed black men like the Deacons for the Defense that made the nightriders want to stay a little closer to home. The Founders anticipated that the Republic would occasionally face such dangerous times.

Reprinted with permission of Federal Way Mirror.

The New York Times published the following article in August, 2006. Entitled States Expand Right to Shoot in Self-Defense, the article is a particularly trenchant example of media bias. Adam Liptak regularly reports on legal matters and covers many gun stories for the New York Times. We will be analyzing some of the bias and try to get the rest of the story when we have more time.

Meanwhile, please send us information that provides more objective factual background related to the impact of recent changes in the laws of self-defense cited below. Please note that every impact alleged to result from recent changes in the “duty to retreat” is presented in a manner most likely to put the armed citizen in a negative light.

“Stand your ground” laws are also called “shoot first” laws, according to Liptak. This is what antigun idealogues like the usual suspects at the New York Times and the media outlets that echo the NYT call them. In case you haven’t noticed, most of the regional newspapers reprint articles from the NYT, the Washington Post and a few other newspapers and the radio and television news broadcasts take their cues from newspapers of record, like the NYT.
According to Liptak, a prostitute in Port Richey, Fla., killed her 72-year-old client with his own gun and was not charged in 2006. A man shot a neighbor over putting out garbage. These facts are presented as though they are events that occurred because of changes in the law that remove the duty to retreat from an attacker before deploying deadly force.

A Florida law served as a model for others by giving people the right to use deadly force against intruders entering their homes. The article contains no arguments that provide a rationale for why a homeowner should be required to retreat from an assailant that has entered his home bent on committing a felony. Is there any legal rationale for requiring a homeowner to prove that he or she has reason to fear for the safety of himself or other memebers of her family? Are we to experience indignation that the new laws only require proof that that the slain trespasser had intruded unlawfully and forcefully?

The Florida law does away with an earlier requirement that a person attacked in a public place must retreat if possible. A person about to be victimized has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with lethal force when confronted with an imminent threat of death or grave bodily harm. Sounds like common sense to me

The author quotes Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, without explaining that Prof. Sebok has authored numerous articles about mass restitution litigation, including lawsuits involving tobacco, handguns, and slavery reparations.

The professor’s written works are important because they show that Sebok is a tort lawyer shilling for the anti-gun idealogues. If you doubt it look at his analysis, provided by the NYT without even a superficial effort to provide a balancing viewpoint. The duty to retreat has been eroding nationally through judicial decisions, according to the professor. But the new laws just “expand the right to shoot intruders who pose no threat to the occupant’s safety". How many intruders in your home would pose no threat to the safety of your family? It seems laughable when you think about it!

“In effect,” Professor Sebok states, “the law allows citizens to kill other citizens in defense of property.”

Sebok, who contributes to FindLaw, asks us to consider a ridiculous hypothesis. What if Bob is a panhandler who approaches Sue’s car and touches it against her wishes? Perhaps it would be obvious to most observers that he had no intention of entering the car, but what if Sue panics and thinks he is a carjacker?

The fact that the law was not designed to permit her to use deadly force under those circumstances would not alter the fact that Bob would be dead. The fact that Sue would face criminal and civil penalties, is not relevant to Sebok. Apparently the damage has already been done because the lawmakers sent Sue the wrong message!

Journalist Lipchak bemoans the fact that a cabdriver in West Palm Beach killed a drunken passenger in an altercation after dropping him off. The altercation, it turns out, was over whether the passenger would get out of the cab. When he had reached his destination and had to be ejected from the cab he allegedly pulled a knife on the cabdriver. The knife was not located but witnesses saw the passenger holding something that could have been a knife so the first jury deadlocked 9-to-3 in favor of convicting the driver.

“Mr. Smiley had a lot of chances to retreat and to avoid an escalation,” said Mr. Munnilal, a 62-year-old accountant. “He could have just gotten in his cab and left. The thing could have been avoided, and a man’s life would have been saved.”

It turns out that the cabdriver did not get the wrong message; all of events described in the NYT article transpired before the new law was passed and the case was appealed to the Florida Supreme Court on the issue of whether the old law or the new law should apply.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the N.R.A., was also concerned about people getting the right message. “If you’re going to empower someone, empower the crime victim,” he said.

Adam Liptak tells us that many prosecutors oppose the laws, saying they are unnecessary at best and pernicious at worst. “They’re basically giving citizens more rights to use deadly force than we give police officers, and with less review,” said Paul A. Logli, president of the National District Attorneys Association.

The State of Washington has a dual standard and the legislature has made a record of its intention that citizens have a slightly more relaxed standard for the use of lethal force than the standard to which police officers are held. Despite the fact that law enforcement officers have to meet a higher standard than untrained citizens in some states, aren’t there prosecutors that support empowering armed citizens?

The NYT article quotes Gary Kleck, a noted gun policy scholar. With the typical New York Times-style elitocentric assumption that Southerners have primitive legal institutions, Liptak quotes Kleck with very little context to help us understand Kleck’s intelligent approach to the subject of guns and society:

“In the South, they more or less give the benefit of the doubt to the alleged victim’s account.”

Gary Kleck, a self-avowed liberal democrat and professor at Florida State University, is author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America. When he started researching the issue of guns, he discovered that contrary to his original assumptions, violent crimes were prevented by firearms usage. The 1993 book was awarded the best book on criminology by the American Society of Criminology. Largely ignored by gun control advocates, most medical journals, the DOJ and the Center for Disease Control, the book has contributed a great deal to understanding the sociological implications of gun ownership and gun control laws.

It turns out that in the case of the Port Richey prostitute, the 72 year old man threatened to kill her and then kill himself. The man left a suicide note and other evidence supporting the conclusion that the slayer feared for her life. Before she used deadly force, the woman should have had to retreat (but for the new law). Under the new laws you don’t have to take a chance on getting shot in the back!

According to the NYT’s propaganda piece, Cliff Morningstar, the dead man’s uncle, was reportedly baffled by the killing. “He (the cabdriver) had a radio,” Mr. Morningstar stated. “He could have gotten in his car and left. He could have shot him in his knee.” Well how much more objective can you get than the victim’s uncle?

The NYT reporter apparently thinks that the man shot during an altercation over garbage illustrates the flaws in the Florida law. The NYT article states:

“I was no threat,” Mr. Rosenbloom said. “I had no weapon.”

The inference is that victimhood is being conferred on Rosenbloom, a very important mantle for the NYT’s regular readership.

The men exchanged heated words. “He closed the door and then opened the door,” Mr. Rosenbloom said of Mr. Allen. “He had a gun. I turned around to put my hands up. He didn’t even say a word, and he fired once into my stomach. I bent over, and he shot me in the chest.”

Mr. Allen, the man that shot his neighbor, claimed Rosenbloom had his foot in the door and had tried to rush into the house, an assertion Mr. Rosenbloom denied. The small amount of information that tends to explain what led to the shooting is presented in a context of skepticism towards the claim that the shooting was justified. Maybe the shooting was not justified. Without all the facts, however, such cases don’t tell us much about anything except the biases of the author and the New Yawk Times.