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  • The Deacons for Defense

  • Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
  • By: Lance Hill
  • Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
  • Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins

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The Deacons for Defense

By: Lance Hill
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
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Publisher's 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.

©2004 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2020 Tantor
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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