Ingratitude Was All These People Got For Doing the Right Thing

The Forgotten Deacons

In Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons challenged the Klan directly. A Klansman was killed, and another was injured in a confrontation. In another, a Klan car caravan drove through a black neighborhood shouting epithets and firing into homes at random. To their shock, this time they received a fusillade of return fire. The caravan burned rubber as it fled. In another instance, white high school students had routinely beat up black classmates, until the black kids fought back.

Armed Klansmen showed up at the school, only to encounter armed Deacons. The Klansmen withdrew. The authorities eventually gave in, and abandoned the town’s segregationist practices. Bogalusa even hired its first black sheriff’s deputy, but the Klan murdered him just a few days after his appointment. The tensions forced a federal intervention, and the US government used a Reconstruction-era law to force the local police to protect civil rights workers.

Wherever the Deacons established themselves, white racists lost the ability to openly terrorize blacks. The group’s branches afforded civil rights workers a degree of security to register blacks to vote. Even those committed to nonviolence appreciated the protection. As one CORE activist put it: “CORE is nonviolent, but we have no right to tell Negroes … that they do not have the right to defend their homes.“

By the late 1960s, the environment had changed so much that the Deacons were no longer necessary. Between the long-overdue prosecution of violent Klansmen, the gains secured by the Civil Rights Movement, and the spirit of armed self-defense fostered by the Deacons, white racists’ ability to attack blacks with impunity was sharply curtailed. By 1968, the Deacons were in decline, and by the end of the decade, they had all but exited the scene.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Here Are Our Sources:

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Angers, Trent – The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The Hugh Thompson Story, Revised Edition (2014)

Arms Control Association – The Man Who Saved the World Dies at 77

Art of Manliness – Lessons in Manliness: Chiune Sugihara

BBC, September 26^th, 2013 – Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World

BBC History – Mary Seacole

Black Past – Deacons For Defense and Justice

Carter, K. Codell, and Carter, Barbara R. – Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (2005)

Cobb, Charles E. – This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (2015)

Daily Beast – D-Day’s Forgotten African American Heroes

Encyclopedia Britannica – My Lai Massacre

Encyclopedia Britannica – Tariq ibn Ziyad

Face 2 Face Africa – The Deacons; the Black Armed Christians Who Protected MLK, Civil Rights Supporters Before Black Panthers

Herodotus – The Histories, VI & VIII

Hervieux, Linda – Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, At Home and At War (2015)

History Collection – These World War II Heroines Should be Household Names

Jewish Virtual Library – Chiune Sugihara (1900 – 1986)

Livy – History of Rome, Books XXVI, XXVIII, XXIX

National Geographic – Mary Seacole

National Library of Medicine – The Discovery of the Double Helix, 1951-1953

Nature, April 25^th, 2023 – What Rosalind Franklin Truly Contributed to the Discovery of DNA’s Structure

NPR – The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing and Briefly Saved Lives

PBS – In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis Saved Lives With Three Words: Wash Your Hands

Sertima, Ivan Van – The Golden Age of the Moor (1992)

Times of Israel, January 4^th, 2018 – Japan’s Schindler: A Genuine Hero Tangled in a Web of Myth

United States Holocaust Museum – Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara

World History Encyclopedia – Miltiades