Deacons for Defense and Justice

[Valin]

Dave Kopel.org:

Dave Kopel

 

America's 1st Freedom, October 2013

 

While many anti-gunners want to make the debate over the Second Amendment a racial one, a look back at our nation’s history can be an eye opener on that issue.

 

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy marked this year’s Martin Luther King Day with an appreciative column about the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The Deacons were the armed black men of the Civil Rights Movement from 1964 to 1966. Like the great men who fought at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the Deacons are true American heroes.

 

Milloy interviewed Charles Hicks, son of Deacons public relations director Robert Hicks. The younger Hicks recalled, “You shoot at us, we shoot back at you. I’m convinced that without our guns, my family and many other black people would not be alive today.”

 

(Snip)

 

So who were the Deacons for Defense and Justice?

 

In the South in the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights supporters were terrorized, and even murdered, by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Many civil rights workers armed themselves for self-protection. During the 1950s, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had so many guns that one visitor called it an “arsenal.”

 

Adding to the danger was the unspoken cooperation that sometimes existed between the perpetrators of this violent oppression and local law enforcement agencies. Police protection simply was not an option for civil rights workers in some areas.

 

In 1964, CORE began community organizing in the pine mill town of Jonesboro, La. One night, the local police led a Klan motorcade through black neighborhoods, strewing Klan flyers, and then heading to the local jail to threaten imprisoned civil rights workers.

 

That summer, about 20 black Army veterans had informally founded a community defense patrol. They adopted the name “Deacons for Defense and Justice” because most of them were practicing Christians, and they aimed to serve their communities in a Christian manner.

 

(Snip)

 

H/T Shot In The Dark

[SrWoodchuck]

@Valin

 

"NEGROES WITH GUNS"- by Dr. Michael S. Brown

http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBPrintItem.asp?ID=2960

 

10 Surprising Facts About the NRA That You Never Hear

http://mic.com/articles/23929/10-surprising-facts-about-the-nra-that-you-never-hear#.I5a2njLfB

 

3. The NRA has a history of supporting the Civil Rights Movement.

KKK

While African Americans were being terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan, where the Klan were sometimes aided by local law enforcement, the NRA setup charters to help train local African American communities to be able protect themselves. The most prominent case being in 1960 in Monroe, N.C. where the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People head Robert Williams also chartered an NRA Rifle Club that successully defended an assault on one of their leader's homes by the KKK without casualties.