Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/455801 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement Author: Lance Hill Narrator: William Andrew Quinn Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 3 minutes Release date: December 29, 2020 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: In 1964 a small group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, defied the nonviolence policy of the mainstream civil rights movement and formed an armed self-defense organization—the Deacons for Defense and Justice—to protect movement workers from vigilante and police violence. With their largest and most famous chapter at the center of a bloody campaign in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent strategy and a rallying point for a militant working-class movement in the South. Lance Hill offers the first detailed history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. In his analysis of this important yet long-overlooked organization, Hill challenges what he calls 'the myth of nonviolence'—the idea that a united civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent direct action led by middle-class and religious leaders. In contrast, Hill constructs a compelling historical narrative of a working-class armed self-defense movement that defied the entrenched nonviolent leadership and played a crucial role in compelling the federal government to neutralize the Klan and uphold civil rights and liberties.