Deacons for Defense and Justice.

An intriguing name for a group, no?

The July 5 issue of The Nation included a review of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, by Lance Hill (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The following extract simply tantalizes:

   "...The initial advances of the civil rights movement had been met with a brutal wave of white terrorism. In the states of the Deep South, the federal government seemed unwilling to enforce either the new Civil Rights Act or the Constitution. It was in response to the growing sense of crisis and impotence that the Deacons emerged in mid-1964 in the pine hills of northern Louisiana. Offering a blend of armed self-defense, grassroots organizing and black pride, they rapidly attained legendary status in besieged black communities and attracted sensationalist coverage in the white media. Their meteoric career--by 1968 they had vanished from the scene--spanned a watershed in the movement's history, when, according to some versions, the idealism and unity of the nonviolent phase gave way to extremism, bitterness and factionalism.
   "That schema has always been a tendentious political construct, and the remarkable tale of the Deacons for Defense illustrates just how artificial it is. Lance Hill's book is the first full account of the group and fills a major lacuna in the history of the era and the movement. It is also a welcome corrective to the school of civil rights historians who try to fix this multipronged, protean movement into the static polarities of nonviolence and violence, liberal integrationism and radical separatism."

Check it out for sure.