Deacons for Defense
At Bogalusa Junior High in Louisiana in the fall of 1966, Royan Burris, a Black barber and civil rights leader, changed his approach with students at the school. No more nonviolence, he ordered, according to the book, “Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.” “I said, anybody hit you, you hit back. Anybody step on your feet, step back. Anybody spit on you, spit back.” The kids did as they were told and the school was overloaded with Blacks fighting whites all day. The Klansmen, Washington Parish White Citizens Council, led by Paul Farmer, came to the school for retribution, but they were met in the street by Burris and a large group of Black men carrying guns. The Klansmen observed what they were up against, holstered their weapons and left. “From that day forward,” Burris said, “we didn’t have too many more problems.”
Neighborhood Watch
Griffin McLaurin, a Covington County activist, recalled his civil rights experiences for the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History. He said civil rights activists “were guarding all of our houses” and “we formed a little group that was patrolling the community and keeping an eye on our community center.” McLaurin noted that there was still plenty of fear because they received threats on their lives every day. He added that although individual citizens and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan “blew up a lot of cars on the road going to the center,” they did not succeed in bombing it because they kept a 24-hour watch on the building. McLaurin said, “They’d come in late at night and try to get to the center, but we had our guards. We stood our ground, and whenever we heard something that we thought wasn’t right, we had our firepower.”
