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119 DEACONS FOR DEFENSE AND JUSTICE in bert’s barbershop in what whites called Bogalusa’s “Niggertown ,” Charles Sims, the tough-talking head of the city’s heavily armed Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black vigilante group, told me how he had been threatened by white racists while picketing for civil rights on a downtown street. “They said, ‘Nigger, we’re gonna getcha.’ I said, ‘You better steal me, ’cause you better not let me see you.’” Along the wall of the one-chair barbershop, several sullen-faced young blacks slouched in chairs and watched intently as I interviewed Sims, a chunky but muscular man who deemed himself ready and eager to strike back if the racists wanted to strike the first blow. Smiling wryly, he exposed several gaps in his teeth. “The Deacons,” he assured me, “was organized because we wasn’t gettin’ police protection. We organized for defense.” The Deacons for Defense and Justice had been formed several months earlier, in November 1964, in nearby Jonesboro to help protect civil rights demonstrators from Ku Klux Klan violence. And Sims was one of several blacks who formed it after the civil rights struggle heated up in Bogalusa. The blacks acted after concluding they could not count on state or local police to protect the civil rights demonstrators. I had never before heard of a black vigilante group, although it turned out that there were other groups of armed blacks elsewhere in the South. I asked Sims whether some folks might be afraid to be identified as Deacons for fear of incurring violence by the Klan and other racists. Before he could answer, Royan Burris, a thin young barber trimming a teenager’s hair, whirled around and interjected, “I’m a Deacon and I’d be proud to be identified.” In fact, all of the barbershop customers shook their heads in agreement. “We got guns, too,” one of them said, “so let ’em come on.” Chapter 19 120 deacons for defense and justice As the customers talked, about fifteen black teenagers, some carrying homemade picket signs with such slogans as “Jim Crow Must Go” and “Give Us Jobs and We’ll Give You Business,” burst into the barbershop. One of the youths said, “One of them policemen told us, ‘I’ve told you one of you niggers was gonna get it.’ I guess he was talking about the deputy that got killed. One of ’em called me a black son of a bitch.” Sims suddenly bounded out of his chair with such force that he startled the youth as well as me and several others in the barbershop. “Who said that to you?” he shouted. “What’s his badge number?” “Number 5,” the youth said. Another youth, wearing a straw hat emblazoned with “Freedom, freedom” on the band, ambled into the shop and upon seeing Sims quickly dropped his eyes. “What’s the matter with you?!” Sims demanded. “How come you ain’t out picketin’?” The boy protested that he had intended to picket, but Sims cut him off. “They whipped you. Eh? And I believe they scared you.” “Was he hurt when the whites attacked the picket line?” I asked Sims. Before he could answer, the youth removed his hat to show about three large wounds with stitches. Then, on orders from Sims, he left to “find badge number 5 and see who he is.” I asked Sims, a husky forty-two-year-old insurance agent who served as an army sergeant in Europe in World War II, about reports I had heard that he carried an automatic .30 caliber carbine in his car and usually packed a .38 pistol under his shirt. “I carry all kind of weapons,” he said, smiling broadly, “but I can’t talk about the Deacons and the number of weapons they carry ’cause it’s none of your business.” He wasn’t being hostile, he hastened to explain, but wanted me to know he wasn’t interested in telling a reporter anything about the Deacons ’ weapons because he thought it helped the Deacons from a psychological standpoint to keep both the police and the Ku Klux Klan in the dark about the size of their arsenal. I left the barbershop and drove several blocks to the home of another Deacons official, Robert Hicks, a thirty-six-year-old employee at the Crown-Zellerbach paper mill. It was a hot, humid afternoon with the temperature soaring above a hundred degrees...

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