3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

who surprisingly urged CORE members to maintain their traditional adherence on
nonviolence . Farmer also helped to kill the issue by carefully distinguishing between
nonviolent direct action in demonstrations and the constitutional right to self-defense.84
Still, CORE's Northeast Region resolved that "CORE accepts the concept of self-defense
by the Deacons, and believes that the use of guns by CORE workers on a southern project
is a personal decision, with the approval of that project's and the Regional directors."~
Strikingly self-aware, Charles Sims and the Deacons were acutely conscious of
their role in history. Sims felt that standing up to white supremacists by defending their
homes and by participating in rallies signalled the birth of "a brand new Negro." He
explained, "We told [the southern white man] that a brand new Negro was born . The one
he'd been pushin' around, he didn't exist anymore . . . We definitely couldn't swim, and
we was as close to the river as we could get so there was but one way to go."~
As part of a concerted, organized effort on the part of local blacks to challenge
Klan ascendancy, the Deacons helped to flush out white resistance to civil rights reform .
Symbolic of the mounting frustration and increasing militancy of blacks in America in the
mid-1960s, the Deacons spearheaded the search for alternative methods of struggle in the
August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Studv in the Civil Rights Movement.
1942-1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 402 .
Resolutions for the Resolution Committee of the National Convention of CORE,
July 1 to July 4, from the Northeast Region, Papers of the Congress of Racial Equality
(microfilm), Reel 9, Doe Library, UC Berkeley.
"Grant, Black Protest, 359, 362 .
14 6