Deacons for Defense and Justice

Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black organization established to protect civil rights workers against the Ku Klux Klan. The Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group of African American men who were mostly veterans of World War II and the Korean War, organized in Jonesboro, Louisiana, on July 10, 1964.

Their goal was to combat Ku Klux Klan violence against Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) volunteers who were participating in voter registration activities.

Disciplined and secretive, the Deacons generally limited their activities to patrolling black neighborhoods and protecting mass meetings, CORE headquarters, and civil rights workers who were entering and leaving town. In addition, the Deacons accompanied marchers from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1966, during which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokley Carmichael popularized the phrase Black Power.

The Deacons often inflated their membership numbers in order to appear more menacing to white extremists, and they once claimed to have 50 chapters throughout the South. The resulting picture painted by the national news media—thousands of armed and angry blacks involved in secret organizations that were spreading through the South—shocked many whites into speculating that the United States was heading for a race war.

The membership claims of the Deacons attracted the notice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director, J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered an investigation of the group. Investigators found out, with Deacon cooperation, that the membership's numbers were probably in the dozens, with only three chapters, all in Louisiana.

Ironically, as nonviolent civil rights activities were eclipsed in the later 1960s by the Black Power Movement, with its militant rhetoric and insinuations of racial violence, the Deacons' presence declined. By 1968 the Deacons for Defense and Justice had all but disappeared.