19. Putting the KKK to Flight
One of the Deacons’ most heroic stands took place in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the armed black volunteers took on the Klan head-on. In one confrontation, a Klansman was killed, and another was injured. On another occasion, a Klansman drove a caravan through a black neighborhood, shouting racial epithets and firing into some homes at random. As the Klansmen discovered, to their shock, times had changed. Unlike prior occasions when they got to act in a consequence-free environment, this time the KKK was met with a fusillade of return fire. The Klansmen peeled rubber as they fled.
In another instance, white high school students had routinely beat-up black classmates, until the black kids fought back. Armed Klansmen showed up at the school, only to be countered by armed Deacons. The Klansmen withdrew. The authorities eventually gave in, and abandoned the town’s segregationist practices. Bogalusa even hired its first black sheriff’s deputy, but the Klan responded by murdering him just a few days after his appointment. The mounting tensions eventually forced a federal intervention, and the US government used a Reconstruction-era law to force the local police to protect civil rights workers.