Y'all disappointed me....None of you
- Thread starter MsJag4Jag
- Start date
sophandros
Free Thinker
Sorry, I don't own a television.
I'd rather read a book.
I'd rather read a book.
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
Sophrandos:
Well read about it here then so you can discuss it with me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10803-2003Feb14.html
It isn't the story in full version, but it is enough information for the discussion that I'd wish to have with you. Thanks!
Well read about it here then so you can discuss it with me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10803-2003Feb14.html
It isn't the story in full version, but it is enough information for the discussion that I'd wish to have with you. Thanks!
Bengal E
Active Member
I forgot. Dannnggg I thought about it for a hot second but I think by that time "Queer Ass Folks" was on. But ain't it coming on tonite? I may watch it then. I just aint no Forest Whittaker fan no mo. He's hard on my eyes and I just can't get into his roles. I may watch but I ain't making no promises....I know how ya'll pregnit women are. On second thought, I'll watch!!!
*shuddering*
*shuddering*
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
Thanks Bengal E! 
It is a part of <i>our</i> history that has not been told. At least it has not been as exploited as Martin Luther King.
Don't worry about Forrest being hard on the eyes. Just focus on the main idea of the story. AND please watch the 15 minute documentary piece that follows. I found out that my mom and some other relatives actually knew the Deacons...as this was only 1965... in her hometown of Bogalusa.
http://www.swacpage.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=334683#post334683
Go to that link for information on show times...
It is a part of <i>our</i> history that has not been told. At least it has not been as exploited as Martin Luther King.
Don't worry about Forrest being hard on the eyes. Just focus on the main idea of the story. AND please watch the 15 minute documentary piece that follows. I found out that my mom and some other relatives actually knew the Deacons...as this was only 1965... in her hometown of Bogalusa.
http://www.swacpage.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=334683#post334683
Go to that link for information on show times...
mighty hornet
The HMIC!!
MsJ4J,
Can you paste the article?
Can you paste the article?
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
Guardian Angels Of Civil Rights
The Real 'Deacons' of Bogalusa, La.
advertisement
Ossie Davis as Reverend Gregory and Forest Whitaker as Marcus, the quiet family man who finds himself drawn into the role of a gun-carrying civil rights stalwart. (Michael Gibson -- Showtime)
By Lisa Frazier Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 15, 2003; Page C01
As a teenager growing up in the 1970s amid the smoke and stench of the paper mill where my father worked, I wanted nothing more than to live and know someplace other than Bogalusa, La. I knew all I wanted to know about my home town -- or so I thought.
Just 60 miles northeast of New Orleans, Bogalusa has always been closer in character and racial history to the Mississippi towns on the other side of the Pearl River. By the time the flames of the civil rights movement swept into town in 1965, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan had the black people of Bogalusa in a firm chokehold. I was 3 then, too young to know firsthand the story of a group of working-class black men who with guns and guts forced the great white intimidators to loosen their grip on black Bogalusa.
Throughout my childhood, I heard vague references to the men, who called themselves the Deacons for Defense and Justice. But I would become an adult before I would understand the contradictions of Bogalusa's civil rights history.
A piece of that history will premiere on Showtime tomorrow at 8 p.m. "Deacons for Defense," which depicts the military-like unit constructed to protect civil rights demonstrators, is part of the cable network's lineup for Black History Month.
Directed by Bill Duke and starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Silverman and Ossie Davis, the story centers on Marcus (Whitaker), a quiet family man and war veteran who works in a menial job at the Bogalusa paper mill. He is reluctantly drawn into the civil rights struggle and organizes a group of black men to become defenders of the movement. The group's armed stance puts Marcus at odds with Deane (Silverman), the idealistic white civil rights activist who subscribes to the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Based on a book proposal and research by Michael D'Antonio, the movie is pretty close to the true story, though Marcus is a composite figure, said producer Nick Grillo. But when the two white men show up to persuade the poor black folks of Bogalusa to take a stand, the film seems headed in the same disturbing direction as "Mississippi Burning" and "Ghosts of Mississippi," which made saviors of the white characters and gave short shrift to the courage and sacrifice of black people. Marcus and the Deacons do emerge as the movie's heroes, as Grillo tried hard to make clear.
"I think," he says, "we have a movie that shows the courage of these black men at a very tough time in Bogalusa."
Despite the awful Southern accents and overly dramatic climax, Grillo and Duke deserve much credit for bringing to national attention a story that goes against the heralded nonviolent philosophy of the movement. That alone might have kept it where it has been contained all these years: in the memories and hearts of the people of Bogalusa.
The real story of the Deacons is a complex one. It reveals that the right thing to do was not always so clear in the souls of ordinary black men and women when their ideal and their reality met on dangerous street corners or in pitch-black alleys in 1960s Bogalusa.
Bogalusa is full of contradictions. Once the sixth-largest city in Louisiana, it feels more like a country town. Majestic pine trees give it a rare touch of grace, but they end up as pulp or cardboard boxes produced by the local paper mill. The mill rises from the center of town and saturates the air with a rotten-egg stink that hits you not long after you cross the 24-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Yet many in Bogalusa regard the mill, now owned by the Texas-based Temple Inland Corp., with a kind of protective reverence, for as the economy of the plant goes, so goes the town. The two are so closely tied that the population -- 13,365 in 2000 -- rises and falls with the hiring and layoff trends at the mill.
My father was part of a small group of black men recruited from area colleges for first-time professional and management positions at the plant in the late 1960s -- a direct result of the movement's dual push for equal job opportunities for the plant's black workers and the desegregation of public institutions.
I attended the city's only parochial school, one of two black students in my class. Everyone was friendly at school but not allowed to visit each other's homes. In the fifth grade, my friend Catherine Frank invited me to her slumber party. But when my classmates' parents learned I would be there, most of them kept their children at home.
Only years later did I learn that white callers had threatened to burn a cross in the Franks' front yard if "that little [you fill in the blank]" slept on their side of town. I learned, too, that while Catherine and I giggled and ate hot dogs in a back room, a loaded gun sat on a hallway closet shelf, just in case.
Those were the kinds of memories that fueled my quest to know more about Bogalusa's racial past. My questions eventually led me to Robert Hicks, a deacon at Bethlehem Baptist Church who was a black union leader at the plant. In January 1965, he was vice president of a civic league that invited the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) back to Bogalusa to test the city's compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The day of testing was peaceful, but when black people went downtown the next day, the Klan was ready with fists and sticks. Frustrated -- and perhaps intimidated -- by the chaos, the civic league president quit. Months later a man was found who was willing to take the post: A.Z. Young, a black union leader, known for his big cars, big voice and big stature.
Young would become the face and voice of the struggle for civil rights in Bogalusa. But white racists found a focus for their rage in Hicks when he invited the white activists to stay in his home. The Deacons -- in concept, at least -- were born in his back yard, Hicks says.
Three CORE workers were preparing to head back to New Orleans, escorted by the Bogalusa police, after the day of testing ended. But with images of Philadelphia, Miss., and the three boys murdered there fresh in their minds, Hicks and his wife, Valeria, insisted that they stay overnight with their family. Like a torch dropped on a stack of dry pine, the word spread. Rumors got back to Hicks that Klan members were planning to snatch the men from his home in the middle of the night.
"We called some of our friends," Hicks says. "They brought their guns and got up on our roof."
Some accounts list Jonesboro, La., as the birthplace of the Deacons. The name originated there, Hicks says, but after that night in his yard, an organized group of armed black men became a permanent component of the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League.
The Deacons accompanied protesters to demonstrations downtown and on overnight treks to the parish seat and state capital. They also drove Hicks to and from work, and black workers at the mill never left him alone at work, even in the restroom.
Hicks's son, Charles, was away at Syracuse University at the time, but on his visits home, he found that the Deacons accompanied the family everywhere.
"We knew we were a marked family," says Hicks, who now works in the black studies division of the Martin Luther King Library here. "I'm always reminded that if it had not been for the Deacons, the Hicks family would be dead."
Rickey Hill, a professor at DePauw University, recalls listening as a young boy to the real Deacons discuss events. He says the few clips he saw during a preview of the Showtime movie seemed to distort their story.
"I don't remember a time when the Deacons walked down the street with their guns cocked," says Hill. "Everybody knew they had guns. But a lot of what they did was clandestine."
The leader of the Deacons was Charles Sims, a former Army man, local insurance salesman and cab driver. A small man with a fearless streak, a mouth to match and, some say, a drinking problem, Sims may have been perfect for the role. He is said to have once bragged on a Los Angeles radio show that he was so good with a gun he could shoot a fly on a fence from yards away. With him on the scene, the other black civil rights leaders seemed more palatable to Bogalusa's white establishment.
One night, Hicks says, his home was packed with about a dozen demonstrators, including a group of white CORE volunteers, when they heard glass breaking and gunshots. Hicks and some of the Deacons rushed out with their guns in time to see three white boys in a car, firing their weapons in the air. Hicks and his men shot back, chasing the intruders away. Hicks says he was still holding his gun when the local police, followed by carloads of FBI agents, rolled up. One of the agents asked him for his gun.
"You can have my pistol if you give me yours," Hicks says he told the agent. "You're not going to leave me here unarmed."
Hicks never had a problem with intruders again, he says. Crosses stopped burning in black neighborhoods, too.
Eventually the "whites only" signs came down. After much resistance, schools were integrated.
That's not to say my generation lived King's dream. When the fire of the movement died out, we eventually settled into a separation of choice. There was one high school in town, where we all mingled peacefully. But at the end of the day we headed home to our separate lives. We even attended separate proms.
I never realized our behavior was particularly strange until I moved away and started looking back.
As a young writer in the mid-1980s I asked Charles Sims what really happened back then. He shared his story but began ranting about how my generation had failed to keep the fires of the movement burning. At one point I asked him for examples of his generation's progress in Bogalusa.
He reared back in his chair, cocked his head, picked at his white beard and said: "I'm looking at it."
In my silence, he continued: "I remember the time this would've been a white reporter sitting here, interviewing me."
Sims died a short time later, followed by A.Z. Young, and just before Christmas last year, Gayle Jenkins, one of the few women nationwide who stood front and center during the civil rights movement, making decisions, accepting blows and going to jail alongside the men.
Hicks is left to tell the story.
Maybe someday, he says, he and some of the old guys might get together one last time. Maybe they'll click on a tape recorder, talk about those dangerous old days, and for the sake of generations to come, allow themselves to remember.
? 2003 The Washington Post Company
The Real 'Deacons' of Bogalusa, La.
advertisement
Ossie Davis as Reverend Gregory and Forest Whitaker as Marcus, the quiet family man who finds himself drawn into the role of a gun-carrying civil rights stalwart. (Michael Gibson -- Showtime)
By Lisa Frazier Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 15, 2003; Page C01
As a teenager growing up in the 1970s amid the smoke and stench of the paper mill where my father worked, I wanted nothing more than to live and know someplace other than Bogalusa, La. I knew all I wanted to know about my home town -- or so I thought.
Just 60 miles northeast of New Orleans, Bogalusa has always been closer in character and racial history to the Mississippi towns on the other side of the Pearl River. By the time the flames of the civil rights movement swept into town in 1965, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan had the black people of Bogalusa in a firm chokehold. I was 3 then, too young to know firsthand the story of a group of working-class black men who with guns and guts forced the great white intimidators to loosen their grip on black Bogalusa.
Throughout my childhood, I heard vague references to the men, who called themselves the Deacons for Defense and Justice. But I would become an adult before I would understand the contradictions of Bogalusa's civil rights history.
A piece of that history will premiere on Showtime tomorrow at 8 p.m. "Deacons for Defense," which depicts the military-like unit constructed to protect civil rights demonstrators, is part of the cable network's lineup for Black History Month.
Directed by Bill Duke and starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Silverman and Ossie Davis, the story centers on Marcus (Whitaker), a quiet family man and war veteran who works in a menial job at the Bogalusa paper mill. He is reluctantly drawn into the civil rights struggle and organizes a group of black men to become defenders of the movement. The group's armed stance puts Marcus at odds with Deane (Silverman), the idealistic white civil rights activist who subscribes to the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Based on a book proposal and research by Michael D'Antonio, the movie is pretty close to the true story, though Marcus is a composite figure, said producer Nick Grillo. But when the two white men show up to persuade the poor black folks of Bogalusa to take a stand, the film seems headed in the same disturbing direction as "Mississippi Burning" and "Ghosts of Mississippi," which made saviors of the white characters and gave short shrift to the courage and sacrifice of black people. Marcus and the Deacons do emerge as the movie's heroes, as Grillo tried hard to make clear.
"I think," he says, "we have a movie that shows the courage of these black men at a very tough time in Bogalusa."
Despite the awful Southern accents and overly dramatic climax, Grillo and Duke deserve much credit for bringing to national attention a story that goes against the heralded nonviolent philosophy of the movement. That alone might have kept it where it has been contained all these years: in the memories and hearts of the people of Bogalusa.
The real story of the Deacons is a complex one. It reveals that the right thing to do was not always so clear in the souls of ordinary black men and women when their ideal and their reality met on dangerous street corners or in pitch-black alleys in 1960s Bogalusa.
Bogalusa is full of contradictions. Once the sixth-largest city in Louisiana, it feels more like a country town. Majestic pine trees give it a rare touch of grace, but they end up as pulp or cardboard boxes produced by the local paper mill. The mill rises from the center of town and saturates the air with a rotten-egg stink that hits you not long after you cross the 24-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Yet many in Bogalusa regard the mill, now owned by the Texas-based Temple Inland Corp., with a kind of protective reverence, for as the economy of the plant goes, so goes the town. The two are so closely tied that the population -- 13,365 in 2000 -- rises and falls with the hiring and layoff trends at the mill.
My father was part of a small group of black men recruited from area colleges for first-time professional and management positions at the plant in the late 1960s -- a direct result of the movement's dual push for equal job opportunities for the plant's black workers and the desegregation of public institutions.
I attended the city's only parochial school, one of two black students in my class. Everyone was friendly at school but not allowed to visit each other's homes. In the fifth grade, my friend Catherine Frank invited me to her slumber party. But when my classmates' parents learned I would be there, most of them kept their children at home.
Only years later did I learn that white callers had threatened to burn a cross in the Franks' front yard if "that little [you fill in the blank]" slept on their side of town. I learned, too, that while Catherine and I giggled and ate hot dogs in a back room, a loaded gun sat on a hallway closet shelf, just in case.
Those were the kinds of memories that fueled my quest to know more about Bogalusa's racial past. My questions eventually led me to Robert Hicks, a deacon at Bethlehem Baptist Church who was a black union leader at the plant. In January 1965, he was vice president of a civic league that invited the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) back to Bogalusa to test the city's compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The day of testing was peaceful, but when black people went downtown the next day, the Klan was ready with fists and sticks. Frustrated -- and perhaps intimidated -- by the chaos, the civic league president quit. Months later a man was found who was willing to take the post: A.Z. Young, a black union leader, known for his big cars, big voice and big stature.
Young would become the face and voice of the struggle for civil rights in Bogalusa. But white racists found a focus for their rage in Hicks when he invited the white activists to stay in his home. The Deacons -- in concept, at least -- were born in his back yard, Hicks says.
Three CORE workers were preparing to head back to New Orleans, escorted by the Bogalusa police, after the day of testing ended. But with images of Philadelphia, Miss., and the three boys murdered there fresh in their minds, Hicks and his wife, Valeria, insisted that they stay overnight with their family. Like a torch dropped on a stack of dry pine, the word spread. Rumors got back to Hicks that Klan members were planning to snatch the men from his home in the middle of the night.
"We called some of our friends," Hicks says. "They brought their guns and got up on our roof."
Some accounts list Jonesboro, La., as the birthplace of the Deacons. The name originated there, Hicks says, but after that night in his yard, an organized group of armed black men became a permanent component of the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League.
The Deacons accompanied protesters to demonstrations downtown and on overnight treks to the parish seat and state capital. They also drove Hicks to and from work, and black workers at the mill never left him alone at work, even in the restroom.
Hicks's son, Charles, was away at Syracuse University at the time, but on his visits home, he found that the Deacons accompanied the family everywhere.
"We knew we were a marked family," says Hicks, who now works in the black studies division of the Martin Luther King Library here. "I'm always reminded that if it had not been for the Deacons, the Hicks family would be dead."
Rickey Hill, a professor at DePauw University, recalls listening as a young boy to the real Deacons discuss events. He says the few clips he saw during a preview of the Showtime movie seemed to distort their story.
"I don't remember a time when the Deacons walked down the street with their guns cocked," says Hill. "Everybody knew they had guns. But a lot of what they did was clandestine."
The leader of the Deacons was Charles Sims, a former Army man, local insurance salesman and cab driver. A small man with a fearless streak, a mouth to match and, some say, a drinking problem, Sims may have been perfect for the role. He is said to have once bragged on a Los Angeles radio show that he was so good with a gun he could shoot a fly on a fence from yards away. With him on the scene, the other black civil rights leaders seemed more palatable to Bogalusa's white establishment.
One night, Hicks says, his home was packed with about a dozen demonstrators, including a group of white CORE volunteers, when they heard glass breaking and gunshots. Hicks and some of the Deacons rushed out with their guns in time to see three white boys in a car, firing their weapons in the air. Hicks and his men shot back, chasing the intruders away. Hicks says he was still holding his gun when the local police, followed by carloads of FBI agents, rolled up. One of the agents asked him for his gun.
"You can have my pistol if you give me yours," Hicks says he told the agent. "You're not going to leave me here unarmed."
Hicks never had a problem with intruders again, he says. Crosses stopped burning in black neighborhoods, too.
Eventually the "whites only" signs came down. After much resistance, schools were integrated.
That's not to say my generation lived King's dream. When the fire of the movement died out, we eventually settled into a separation of choice. There was one high school in town, where we all mingled peacefully. But at the end of the day we headed home to our separate lives. We even attended separate proms.
I never realized our behavior was particularly strange until I moved away and started looking back.
As a young writer in the mid-1980s I asked Charles Sims what really happened back then. He shared his story but began ranting about how my generation had failed to keep the fires of the movement burning. At one point I asked him for examples of his generation's progress in Bogalusa.
He reared back in his chair, cocked his head, picked at his white beard and said: "I'm looking at it."
In my silence, he continued: "I remember the time this would've been a white reporter sitting here, interviewing me."
Sims died a short time later, followed by A.Z. Young, and just before Christmas last year, Gayle Jenkins, one of the few women nationwide who stood front and center during the civil rights movement, making decisions, accepting blows and going to jail alongside the men.
Hicks is left to tell the story.
Maybe someday, he says, he and some of the old guys might get together one last time. Maybe they'll click on a tape recorder, talk about those dangerous old days, and for the sake of generations to come, allow themselves to remember.
? 2003 The Washington Post Company
mighty hornet
The HMIC!!
wow interesting story,
But I wonder just how successful this method would have been on a large scale.
But I wonder just how successful this method would have been on a large scale.
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
MH: That is what I was thinking. They had even contacted Martin Luther King to come there...but Martin's camp declined because it went against his non-violent stance. While these men didn't advocate violence, they did indeed believe in protecting their children, themselves, and those who wanted to help them with the Civil right's movement.
In the movie, their aggression with guns made the Klan's knees buckle. The klan went and called other klansmen from miles around for "help" against these negroes.
These were some strong men, unafraid of the white hood. They stood for something. I read in another place on the 'net that there were other chapters of DFD, but not as large as King's movement...They operated on a clandestine type front. When asked about it, not many would own up to being in it...until now. Many have died, but there are few left to tell the story. I can't believe I lived there during the summers of the 70's and never knew anything about it! I did know of the names of some of them... like AZ Young...Sims and a few others...but I did not know until now why their names were even significant...
In the movie, their aggression with guns made the Klan's knees buckle. The klan went and called other klansmen from miles around for "help" against these negroes.
These were some strong men, unafraid of the white hood. They stood for something. I read in another place on the 'net that there were other chapters of DFD, but not as large as King's movement...They operated on a clandestine type front. When asked about it, not many would own up to being in it...until now. Many have died, but there are few left to tell the story. I can't believe I lived there during the summers of the 70's and never knew anything about it! I did know of the names of some of them... like AZ Young...Sims and a few others...but I did not know until now why their names were even significant...
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
Ok Toi: Do you think the men of today (our age) could have done the same thing that Marcus and 'nem did? Would it have worked? How did you like how Marcus's character transformed from a calm natured-do-what-the-white-man-said kind of man...to a strong black man who will NEVER AGAIN allow harm to come to his family?
Black13: I loved it when they tried the hats on at the end and that old bitty couldn't say nothing. They had realized that these negroes were not gon' take no stuff...
With all of their struggle, this town is STILL (in 2003) segregated by neighborhoods. Some areas the blacks are buying up and moving into, and the whites are either dying off or moving out. They all work together in schools, stores, libraries, the paper mill..etc... but their is no outside socializing that takes place.
Black13: I loved it when they tried the hats on at the end and that old bitty couldn't say nothing. They had realized that these negroes were not gon' take no stuff...
With all of their struggle, this town is STILL (in 2003) segregated by neighborhoods. Some areas the blacks are buying up and moving into, and the whites are either dying off or moving out. They all work together in schools, stores, libraries, the paper mill..etc... but their is no outside socializing that takes place.
Bengal E
Active Member
Okay, I only watched half. I know baddd me! (slapping hand) I thought it was coming on at 9 so when I was settling down to watch @ 8:45 it was already on. So I missed Marcus's metamorphosis. I only saw one side. But to try and answer your question, the part that stuck out to me was when the young boys spit on the Reverend. My first thought was "man I woulda had to get those young crackers!" I actually thought he was gonna pick up a gun himself! hahahaha Then I calmed down and realized that a Rev. couldn't do that. And then I said man turning the cheek was ROUGH!!
I think men of today would take up arms, but I don't know how much will and resistance they would have to not use them UNLESS fired upon. I think we would be back over at some Klansmen house and have grabbed his wife & kids up waiting for him to return!
As to your other thought on how successful this would have been all over. I don't think there were enough black men who would have banded together to defend themselves. You know Klan would have come from all to over to support other whites, plus you had the fringe sympathizers (law enforcement, govt. officials etc) who would have tried to obstruct organization. I think sheer numbers would have hindered it from being a success.
As for segregation today, a lot of Southern towns are still like that. I don't know if it'll ever change. Shoot I grew up that way.
I know baddd me! (slapping hand) I thought it was coming on at 9 so when I was settling down to watch @ 8:45 it was already on. So I missed Marcus's metamorphosis. I only saw one side. But to try and answer your question, the part that stuck out to me was when the young boys spit on the Reverend. My first thought was "man I woulda had to get those young crackers!" I actually thought he was gonna pick up a gun himself! hahahaha Then I calmed down and realized that a Rev. couldn't do that. And then I said man turning the cheek was ROUGH!!I think men of today would take up arms, but I don't know how much will and resistance they would have to not use them UNLESS fired upon. I think we would be back over at some Klansmen house and have grabbed his wife & kids up waiting for him to return!
As to your other thought on how successful this would have been all over. I don't think there were enough black men who would have banded together to defend themselves. You know Klan would have come from all to over to support other whites, plus you had the fringe sympathizers (law enforcement, govt. officials etc) who would have tried to obstruct organization. I think sheer numbers would have hindered it from being a success.
As for segregation today, a lot of Southern towns are still like that. I don't know if it'll ever change. Shoot I grew up that way.
MsJag4Jag
Moderator
Bengal E: Thanks for watching it to share your thoughts with me.
The klan in this film did call other klan from all around to help them. However, the interesting thing was that the "Deacons" did the same thing. They got arms from a longshoreman in New Orleans and they called friends from other counties to be on guard for them throughout the night.
The tough part that I think our men would face is just as you said... "not use the arms UNLESS fired upon". I fear that our young men today wouldn't have the tolerance to just that. I think some of them would just blow their heads off for general principle. Then again, may be they wouldn't.
One thing that was tough to watch is how the "man" would manipulate the law to fit whatever circumstances he wanted. Imagine the tolerance that preacher had for getting spit in the face.....not turn around and backhand that boy....Could you do that?
The klan in this film did call other klan from all around to help them. However, the interesting thing was that the "Deacons" did the same thing. They got arms from a longshoreman in New Orleans and they called friends from other counties to be on guard for them throughout the night.
The tough part that I think our men would face is just as you said... "not use the arms UNLESS fired upon". I fear that our young men today wouldn't have the tolerance to just that. I think some of them would just blow their heads off for general principle. Then again, may be they wouldn't.
One thing that was tough to watch is how the "man" would manipulate the law to fit whatever circumstances he wanted. Imagine the tolerance that preacher had for getting spit in the face.....not turn around and backhand that boy....Could you do that?
Miami Jag
Mr. Brown Eyes
Men today claim they could have never been that submissive. Them claim that they would have been dead in a heartbeat. However, if they were reared to fear those ofays they would have been just as submissive as the ones we see on television.
The few who chose to go against the grain back then are nothing short of true American Heroes. Marcus took a stand and was able to convince others to do the same. I actually got goose bumps while watching this movie and the documentary that followed. It was the first time I have ever seen the look of confusion and fear on the face of those ofays as to what should be their next move against the Deacons. It was a difficult time back in those days and I have to question myself.............would I have joined?
JSU*Toi
New Member
I think if they had grown up in that era yes, it comes to the basic fact of protecting your family. At first I was not feeling Marcus... you all know me, but after watching the man he became I was like that is my boy. But people always talk about what they would have done then but you really can't speak on that casue you don't have to live that. But I have to disagree with Bengal E if there was a clear and present hate I do think that the black men would step up no matter how many people are against them. The difference between now and then is that the line is not so clear. I mean when you go too the mall it does not have colored and whites only signs but too me the attitude is the same. So until peole see that just casue the signs are not up does not mean we have overcome
sophandros
Free Thinker
I'm not Toi, but I can say this: When I see Black students do what is necessary to have proper treatment at PWCs (a recall a time not too long ago that a pretty big fight almost broke out--cooler heads, etc--at Tulane because of some punk arses), and I see that there are enough of us with the balls to stand up. However, since we didn't grow up in their condition, I can't say for sure. I CAN say that not every man back in the day was a Deacon of Defense. Let's not forget that. There was no "Golden Age" when everyone felt empowered, etc. People simply did and do what they feel they must. If it's taking up arms, they'll do it. If it's signing a petition, they'll do it. If they don't feel that any action is necessary, well...
I see it as a problem of motivation; people don't see the imminent threat, and quite often buy into to the propaganda, which is more divisive than uniting.
But I digress.