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

Author:
Lance Hill
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Book
Narrator
Release Date
December 29, 2020
Duration
13 hours 3 minutes
Summary
In 1964 a small group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, defied the nonviolence policy of the mainstream civil rights movement and formed an armed self-defense organization—the Deacons for Defense and Justice—to protect movement workers from vigilante and police violence. With their largest and most famous chapter at the center of a bloody campaign in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent strategy and a rallying point for a militant working-class movement in the South.



Lance Hill offers the first detailed history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. In his analysis of this important yet long-overlooked organization, Hill challenges what he calls 'the myth of nonviolence'—the idea that a united civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent direct action led by middle-class and religious leaders. In contrast, Hill constructs a compelling historical narrative of a working-class armed self-defense movement that defied the entrenched nonviolent leadership and played a crucial role in compelling the federal government to neutralize the Klan and uphold civil rights and liberties.
The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement

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

Author: Lance Hill
Read by: William Andrew Quinn
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