Deacons for Defense is a 2003 American television drama film directed by Bill Duke. The television film stars Forest Whitaker, Christopher Britton, Ossie Davis, Jonathan Silverman, Adam Weiner, and Marcus Johnson. Based on a story by Michael D’Antonio, the teleplay was written by Richard Wesley and Frank Military. “The film is loosely based on the activities of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in 1965 in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The African-American self-defense organization was founded in February 1965 as an affiliate of the founding chapter in Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect activists working with the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), others advancing the Civil Rights Movement, and their families. Bogalusa was a company town, developed in 1906–1907 around a sawmill and paper mill operations. In the 1960s, the area was dominated by the Ku Klux Klan. During the summer of 1965, there were frequent conflicts between the Deacons and the Klan. wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_(film)

The Deacons for Defense and Justice: Armed Self-Defense and the Civil Rights Movement. A PhD. Dissertation by Lance, E. Hill

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The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, by Lance Hill (2006)

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, who grew to several hundred members and twenty-one chapters in the Deep South and led some of the most successful local campaigns in the civil rights movement. 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.

SUPPLEMENTAL: Ku Klux Klan – An American Story Documentary Part 1 and Part 2