BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950'
s and early 1960's. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting armed black self-defense in the United States.
Williams helped gain gubernatorial pardons for two African-American boys convicted for molestation in the controversial Kissing Case of 1958. He also succeeded in integrating the public library and the public swimming pool in Monroe. He obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and set up a rifle club, which became active defending blacks from Ku Klux Klan nightriders. He used the NAACP to supportFreedom Riders who came to Monroe in the summer of 1961. That year he and his wife were forced to leave the United States to avoid prosecution for kidnapping, on charges trumped up during violence related to white opposition to the Freedom Ride. The kidnapping charges came after a white couple sought shelter in Williams' home when they were confronted by black protesters while driving through Monroe's black community. A self-professed Black Nationalist, Williams lived in both Cuba and The People's Republic of China during his exile.
Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962) details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the pacifist wing of the Civil Rights Movement. The text was widely influential; Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited it as a major inspiration. Rosa Parks gave the eulogy at Williams’ funeral in 1996, praising him for “his courage and for his commitment to freedom,” and concluding that “The sacrifices he made, and what he did, should go down in history and never be forgotten.”[1]
Early life
Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1925 to Emma Carter and John L. Williams, a railroad boiler washer. His grandmother, a former slave, gave Williams the rifle with which his grandfather, a Republican campaigner and publisher of the newspaper The People's Voice, had defended himself in the hard years after Reconstruction in North Carolina. At the age of 11, Williams witnessed the beating and dragging of a black woman by the police officer Jesse Helms, Sr.[2][3] (Later chief of police, he was the father of future US Senator Jesse Helms.)
As a young man, Williams joined the Great Migration, traveling north for work during World War II. He witnessed race riots in Detroit in 1943, prompted by labor competition between European Americans and blacks. Drafted in 1944, he served for a year and a half in the segregated Marines before returning home to Monroe.
Marriage and family
In 1947, Williams married Mabel Robinson, a fellow civil rights activist. They had two children together, including a son John.
Civil rights activities
After returning to Monroe from the Marines in 1946, Williams joined the local chapter of the NAACP. The chapter had not been very active and was declining in numbers, but Williams, elected president, and Dr. Albert E. Perry, physician and vice-president, began to turn it around. They worked on goals to change the segregated town.
First they worked to integrate the public library. After that success, in 1957 Williams also led efforts to integrate the public swimming pools. He had followers form picket lines around the pool. The NAACP members organized peaceful demonstrations, but some drew gunfire. No one was arrested or punished, although law enforcement officers were present.[4]
Monroe had a large Ku Klux Klan chapter at the end of the 1950s, estimated by the press to have 7500 members, when the city had 12,000 residents.[5] Their influence was pervasive.
Black Armed Guard
Alarmed at the violence that civil rights activities aroused, Williams had applied to the National Rifle Association for a charter for a local rifle club. He called the Monroe Chapter of the NRA the Black Armed Guard, made up of about 50-60 men, some veterans like Williams. They were determined to defend the local black community from racist attacks. Newtown was the black residential area.
In the summer of 1957 there were rumors that the KKK was going to attack the house of Dr. Albert Perry, a practicing physician and vice-president of the Monroe NAACP. Williams and his men of the Armed Guard went to Perry's house to defend it, fortifying it with sandbags. When numerous KKK members appeared and shot from their cars, Williams and his followers returned the fire, driving them away.[6]
"After this clash the same city officials who said the Klan had a constitutional right to organize met in an emergency session and passed a city ordinance banning the Klan from Monroe without a special permit from the police chief."[5]
In Negroes with Guns, Williams writes:
Followers attested to Williams' advocating the use of advanced powerful weaponry rather than more traditional firearms. Williams insisted his position was defensive, as opposed to a declaration of war. He relied on large numbers of black military veterans from the local area, as well as financial support from across the country. In Harlem, particularly, fundraisers were frequently held and proceeds devoted to purchasing arms for Williams and his followers. He called it "armed self-reliance" in the face of white terrorism. Threats against Williams' life and his family became more frequent.
Decades later, Mary E. King argued that "The patriarchal metaphors of William’s appeals for violence in response to violence in the name of protecting women curiously echoed the paternalistic rubric that was hypocritically used to justify white violence."[9] However, Timothy Tyson observed that both pacifism and armed militancy were heavily gendered in the civil rights era: "Contestations of a notion of manhood that excluded black men did not start or stop with black nationalists…foot soldiers in Martin Luther King’s nonviolent armies frequently carried placards reading, 'I am a MAN'”[10] King also wrote of Williams that he worked within the law to achieve justice; he appealed to federal authorities to combat the racism of Monroe.[9]
Kissing Case
Williams first entered the national civil rights struggle working with the NAACP as a community organizer in Monroe. When in 1958 he defended two young black boys, ages nine and seven, who were jailed after a white girl kissed one of them, he became famous around the world. His publicity campaign, inviting a barrage of embarrassing headlines in the global press, was instrumental in shaming the officials involved into eventually releasing the boys. The governor of North Carolina pardoned the boys but the state never apologized for its treatment of them. The controversy was known as the "Kissing Case".
Difficulties
On 12 May 1958, the Raleigh Eagle (North Carolina) reported that Nationwide Insurance Company was canceling Williams' collision and comprehensive coverage, effective that day. They first canceled all of his automobile insurance, but decided to reinstate his liability and medical payments coverage, enough for Williams to retain his car license. The company said that Williams' affiliation with the NAACP was not a factor; they noted "that rocks had been thrown at his car and home several times by people driving by his home at night. These incidents just forced us to get off the comprehensive and collision portions of his policy."[11] The newspaper article reported that Williams had said that six months before, a 50-car Ku Klux Klan caravan had swapped gunfire with a group of blacks outside the home of Dr. A. E. Perry, vice president of the local NAACP chapter. The article quotes police chief A. A. Maurey as denying part of that story. He said, "I know there was no shooting."[11] He said that he had had several police cars accompanying the KKK caravan to watch for possible law violations.
The article quoted Williams: "These things have happened," Williams insisted. "Police try to make it appear that I have been exaggerating and trying to stir up trouble. If police tell me I am in no danger and that they can't confirm these events, why then has my insurance been cancelled?"[11]
In 1959, Williams debated the merits of nonviolence with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr at the NAACP convention. The national NAACP office suspended his local chapter presidency for six months because of his outspoken disagreements on this issue with the national leadership.
Freedom Riders
When CORE dispatched "Freedom Riders" to Monroe to campaign in 1961 for integrated interstate bus travel, the local NAACP chapter served as their base. They were housed in Newtown, the black section of Monroe. Pickets marched daily at the courthouse, put under a variety of restraints by the Monroe police, such as having to stand 15 feet apart. Many had been beaten by violent crowds.
Around this time, a white couple from a nearby town drove into the black section of Monroe when other streets were closed by mobs because of protests at the county courthouse. They were stopped in the street by an angry crowd. For their safety, they were taken to Williams' home.[12] Williams initially told them that they were free to go, but he soon realized that the crowd would not grant safe passage. He kept the white couple in a house nearby until they were able to safely leave the neighborhood. North Carolina law enforcement admonished Williams and accused him of having kidnapped the couple. He and his family fled the state with local law enforcement in pursuit.
His eventual interstate flight triggered prosecution by the FBI. On August 28, 1961, the FBI issued a warrant in Charlotte, North Carolina, charging Williams with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution for kidnapping. The FBI document lists Williams as a "freelance writer and janitor." It said that (Williams)"...has previously been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and has advocated and threatened violence... considered armed and extremely dangerous." After a Wanted poster, signed by the director J. Edgar Hoover, was distributed announcing he was wanted, Williams decided to leave the country.
Political exile and return
Williams went to Cuba in 1961 by way of Canada and then Mexico. He regularly broadcast addresses to Southern blacks on "Radio Free Dixie." He established the station with assistance from Cuban President Fidel Castro and operated from 1962 to 1965.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Williams used Radio Free Dixie to urge black soldiers in the U.S. armed forces, who were then preparing for a possible invasion of Cuba, to engage in insurrection against the United States.
During this stay, Mabel and Robert Williams published the newspaper, The Crusader. Williams wrote his book, Negroes With Guns, while in Cuba. It had a significant influence onHuey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panthers. Despite his absence from the United States, in 1964 Williams was elected president of the US-based Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).[14] In 1965 Williams traveled to Hanoi, then the capital of North Vietnam. In a public speech, he advocated armed violence against the United States invasion during the Vietnam War, congratulated China on obtaining its own nuclear weapons (which Williams referred to as "The Freedom Bomb"), and showed his solidarity to the North Vietnamese against the United States military onslaught of the country.[15]
Some Communist Party USA members opposed Williams' positions, suggesting they would divide the working class in the U.S. along racial lines. In a May 18, 1964, letter from Havana to his U.S. lawyer, civil rights attorney Conrad Lynn, Williams wrote:
In 1965, Williams and his wife left Cuba to settle in China, where he was well received. They lived comfortably there and he associated with higher functionaries of the Chinese government. In January 1968, Conrad Lynn wrote to encourage Williams to return to the US. Williams responded:
Lynn wrote Williams in a letter on January 24, 1968: "You are wise in not making a decision to come back until the financial situation is assured." Because no financial backing could be found, no 1968 "Williams for President" campaign was ever launched by Williams' supporters in the United States. By November 1969, Williams apparently had become disillusioned with the U.S. left. As his lawyer, Conrad Lynn, noted in a November 7, 1969, letter to Haywood Burns of the Legal Defense Foundation:
Williams was suspected by the Justice Department of wanting to fill the vacuum of influence left after the assassinations of his friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover received reports that blacks looked to Williams as a figure similar to John Brown, the militant abolitionist who attacked a US facility at Harper's Ferry. Attempts to contact the U.S. government in order to return were rebuffed consistently.
His wife Mabel Williams returned first, entering the United States in September 1969.[17] He returned via London, England to Detroit, Michigan in 1969 and was immediately arrested for extradition to North Carolina for trial on the kidnapping charge. Shortly after he returned, the approaching period of détente augured a warming of relations with the People's Republic of China.
Williams was tried in Monroe, North Carolina in December 1975. The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall chaired his defense committee and a broad range of leftists arrived in town. Attorney William Kunstler represented Williams in court. The state of North Carolina dropped all charges against him almost immediately.[18]
Later years
Williams was given a grant by the Ford Foundation to work at the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies. He wrote While God Lay Sleeping: The Autobiography of Robert F. Williams.
He died from Hodgkin's disease in 1996. At his funeral, Rosa Parks, who started the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, recounted the high regard for Robert F. Williams by those who marched peacefully with King in Alabama.[2]
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