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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 1950s and early 1960s. 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.
Almost ten years before the formation of the Black Panther Party , National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch president Robert F. Williams’s 1959 press statement advocating “meeting [racist] violence with violence” sent a wave of reaction through white and conservative black circles. As an ex-serviceman disillusioned by legalist and pacifist civil rights tactics, Williams launched a local campaign of armed self-defense in his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina.
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 support Freedom 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.
he was awakened to the brutal aspects of racism at age ten, when a policeman dragged a black woman down Monroe’s main street. Williams was haunted by the laughter of white onlookers and the victim’s screams. He recalled in his autobiography Negroes With Guns how “the cop was grinning as he pulled her by the heels, her dress up over her hips and her back being scraped by the concrete pavement.” 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.”
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. (Later chief of police, he was the father of future US Senator Jesse Helms.) He was awakened to the brutal aspects of racism . Williams was haunted by the laughter of white onlookers and the victim’s screams. He recalled in his autobiography Negroes With Guns how “the cop was grinning as he pulled her by the heels, her dress up over her hips and her back being scraped by the concrete pavement.”
In 1942, at age 17 Williams left high school to receive vocational training as a machinist with the National Youth Administration (NYA). After his education at an NYA camp near Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he continued his studies at Elizabeth City State Teachers College (now Elizabeth City State University), an all-black, teachers college in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. One year later, he arrived in Detroit to gain employment in the city’s thriving war industry. Living with his oldest brother, Edward, he worked at Ford Motor.
He witnessed race riots in Detroit in 1943, prompted by labor competition between European Americans and Blacks. Drafted into the army, Williams was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After earning high scores on a radio aptitude test, he was transferred to a Signal Corps battalion at Camp Crowder, Missouri, to be trained as a radio operator. To his disappointment, however, he was assigned to a school for telephone linesmen. Before completing his telephone line training, he became ill and was re-assigned as a clerical typist.
In the months following World War II, Williams experienced the effects of low morale that spread among Camp Crowder’s segregated black troops. Defiant of the harsh treatment by white officers, Williams was confined in the camp stockade for insubordination. As Robert Carl Cohen pointed out in Black Crusader, “Williams was proud of being in the stockade because he felt he was there for resisting an unjust system-not for committing a crime.” In 1946, after a six-month stay at Fort Lewis Washington, Williams received an honorable discharge without a good conduct medal. After attending Elizabeth City State Teachers College in 1942 , he also attended West Virginia State College, 1949; North Carolina State College, 1951; Johnson C Smith University, 1953.
In 1947, Williams married Mabel Robinson, a fellow civil rights activist. They had two children together, Robert F. (deceased), John Chalmers Williams.
Not long after his return to Monroe in October of 1955, Williams, joined the predominately white local Unitarian Fellowship and the Human Relations Group--a coalition of Unitarians, Catholics, and Protestants. Williams’s increasing civil rights activity prompted him to join the Monroe NAACP as well. One year later, the organization’s dwindling membership fell to six. Rather than dissolve the branch and risk the appearance of submitting to local racist pressure, members held an election and voted Williams in as president and Dr. Albert Perry as vice president.
To build up the strength of the branch, Williams recruited members among black domestics, laborers in pool halls, and from the ranks of the unemployed. As opposed to the NAACP’s traditional membership of middle and upper-class professionals and intellectuals, Williams provided Monroe’s branch with a distinct working-class composition. Members ranged from white pacifists to African American war veterans who, as Williams described in Negroes With Guns, “were very militant and did not scare easy.” 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.
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. Their influence was pervasive.
Negroes With Guns: Robert F. Williams on Self-Defense
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.
"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."
In Negroes with Guns, Williams writes:
"Racist consider themselves superior beings and are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity." He also wrote, "It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must act in self-defense against lawless violence."
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." 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'” 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.
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".
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." 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." 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?"
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.
Robert F. Williams 1959 press conference
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
The FBI's wanted poster alerted people to an armed kidnapper.
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 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.
"While you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free. ... This is your only chance to stop your people from being treated worse than dogs. We'll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he'll never know what hit him. You dig?"
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 on Huey 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). 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.
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:
...the U.S.C.P. has openly come out against my position on the Negro struggle. In fact, the party has sent special representatives here to sabotage my work on behalf of U.S. Negro liberation. They are pestering the Cubans to remove me from the radio, ban THE CRUSADER and to take a number of other steps in what they call `cutting Williams down to size.'...
The whole thing is due to the fact that I absolutely refuse to take direction from Gus Hall's idiots...I hope to depart from here, if possible, soon. I am writing you to stand by in case I am turned over to the FBI...
Sincerely, Rob.
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:
The only thing that prevents my acceptance and willingness to make an immediate return is the present lack of adequate financial assurance for a fight against my being railroaded to jail and an effective organization to arouse the people.
I don't think it will be wise to announce my nomination and immediate return unless the kind of money is positively available...
Williams now clearly takes the position that he has been deserted by the left. How and whether he fits black militant organizations into that category I don't know. Radio Free Europe offered him pay to broadcast for them. So far he has refused. But he has not foreclosed making a deal with the government or the far right. He takes the position that he is entitled to make any maneuver to keep from going to jail for kidnapping...
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. 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.
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.
Robert F Williams-Powerful Overview Of The On Coming Destruction of Amerika (Let it Burn)
LET IT BURN - The Coming Destruction of the USA?
Robert Franklin Williams, advocate of armed self-defense in the Civil Rights Movement, hunted by the FBI since fleeing Monroe, North Carolina in 1961, after years in exile in Cuba and China, is interviewed by Robert Carl Cohen in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania in 1968. BLACK CRUSADER - 2008 Illustrated Edition, (498 Pages, B&W Photos, is now available from www.radfilms.com
Self-Defense, Self-Respect, & Self-Determination by Mabel Williams and Robert F. Williams
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