Robert F. Williams facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Robert F. Williams
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Williams in 1961
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Robert Franklin Williams
February 26, 1925 Monroe, North Carolina, U.S.
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| Died | October 15, 1996 (aged 71) Baldwin, Michigan, U.S.
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| Occupation | Civil rights leader, author |
Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was an American civil rights leader and author best known for serving as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and into 1961. He succeeded in integrating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe. At a time of high racial tension, Williams promoted armed Black self-defense in the United States. In addition, he helped gain support for gubernatorial pardons in 1959 for two young African-American boys who had received lengthy reformatory sentences.
Williams obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and set up a rifle club to defend Black people in Monroe from Ku Klux Klan or other attackers. The local chapter of the NAACP supported Freedom Riders who traveled to Monroe in the summer of 1961 in a test of integrating interstate buses. In August 1961 he and his wife left the United States for several years to avoid kidnapping charges after a white couple got lost in the black part of town in Monroe. The local police and the FBI allegedly convinced the couple to say Williams had kidnapped them, and the FBI put out a warrant for his arrest, causing him to flee to Cuba, and, later, the People's Republic of China. These charges were dropped by the state when his trial opened in 1975 following his return in 1970.
Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962) has been reprinted many times, most recently in 2013. It details his experience with racism and his disagreement with the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights Movement. The text was widely influential; Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton and African American Defense League founder Mauricelm-Lei Millere cited it as a major inspiration.
Contents
Early life
Youth
Robert Franklin Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina on February 26, 1925, to Emma Carter and John L. Williams who worked as a railroad boiler washer. He had two sisters, Lorraine Garlington and Jessie Link, and two brothers, John H. Williams and Edward S. Williams. His grandmother, a former slave of Yoruba ancestry, gave Williams his grandfather's rifle. His grandfather had been a Republican campaigner and publisher of the newspaper The People's Voice during the hard years after Reconstruction in North Carolina.
As a young man, Williams joined the Great Migration, traveling north for industrial work during World War II. He witnessed the 1943 Detroit race riot prompted by labor competition between white and black Americans. Drafted in 1944, he served for a year and a half as a private in the then segregated Marines before returning home to Monroe.
Marriage and family
In 1947, Williams married a 16-year-old African American woman named Mabel Ola Robinson, a fellow civil rights activist. They had two children named John C. Williams and Robert F. Williams, Jr.
Civil rights movement
Early NAACP activities
After returning to Monroe in 1955 following his war service in the Marines, Williams joined the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He wanted to change the segregated town to protect the civil rights of blacks. The chapter had not been very active and was declining in numbers. Williams was elected president and Dr. Albert E. Perry as vice-president; the two generated new energy in the group during the 1950s.
First they worked to integrate the public library. After that success, in 1957 Williams also led efforts to integrate the public swimming pools, which were funded and operated by taxpayer monies. He had followers form picket lines around the pool. The NAACP members organized peaceful demonstrations, but opponents fired on their lines. No one was arrested or punished, although law enforcement officers were present. At that time, Monroe had a large Ku Klux Klan chapter. The press estimated it had 7,500 members, while the city had a total of 12,000 residents.
Black Armed Guard
Alarmed at the threat to civil rights activists, Williams had applied to the National Rifle Association (NRA) for a charter for a local rifle club. He called the Monroe Chapter of the NRA the Black Armed Guard; it was made up of about 50–60 men, including some veterans like him. They were determined to defend the local black community from racist attacks, a goal similar to that of the Deacons for Defense who established chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in 1964–1965.
Newtown was the black residential area of Monroe. In the summer of 1957, there were rumors that the KKK was going to attack the house of Dr. Albert E. 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:
[R]acists consider themselves superior beings and are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones." He 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.
Williams insisted his position was defensive, as opposed to a declaration of war. He relied on numerous black military veterans from the local area, as well as financial support from across the country. In Harlem, particularly, fundraisers were frequently held. Threats against Williams' life and his family became more frequent.
Freedom Rides and prosecution
Despite losing much support, civil rights activist James Forman was still supportive of Williams. Forman also agreed to assist Williams in organizing a Freedom Ride in Monroe. 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.
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.
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 accused Williams of having kidnapped the couple. He and his family fled the state with local law enforcement in pursuit.
On August 28, 1961, the FBI issued a warrant in Charlotte, North Carolina, charging Williams with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution for kidnapping. After a wanted poster, signed by the director J. Edgar Hoover, was distributed, Williams decided to leave the country.
Exile and return
Cuba
Williams went to Cuba in 1961 by way of Canada and Mexico. He regularly broadcast addresses from Cuba to Southern blacks on "Radio Free Dixie". He established the station with approval of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, along with assistance of the government, and operated it 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 a newspaper, The Crusader. He wrote his book Negroes With Guns while in Cuba. It had a significant influence on Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panthers and in later years Mauricelm-Lei Millere, the founder of African American Defense League. Despite his absence from the United States, in 1964 Williams was elected president of the US-based Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).
Visit to Hanoi
In 1965 Williams traveled to Hanoi, then the capital of North Vietnam. In a public speech, he advocated armed violence against the United States during the Vietnam War, congratulated China on obtaining its own nuclear weapons (which Williams referred to as "The Freedom Bomb"), and showed his solidarity with the North Vietnamese against the United States military attacks against that 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.' ...
... 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.
China
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 China, Williams continued to publish The Crusader. Represented by the ACLU and human rights lawyer Michael Tigar, he won a lawsuit against the U.S. Postmaster General, in which the statute allowing the U.S. Post Office to refuse to deliver foreign-origin publications deemed to be "communist political propaganda" except at the specific prior request of the addressee was declared unconstitutional under the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. In January 1968, Conrad Lynn wrote to encourage Williams to return to the U.S., to which 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 [for President of the United States] and immediate return unless the kind of money is positively available ...
Disillusionment
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 W. Haywood Burns of the Legal Defense Foundation:
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 federal facility at Harper's Ferry before the American Civil War. Williams' attempts to contact the U.S. government in order to return were consistently rebuffed.
Return
Williams' wife, Mabel Williams returned first, entering the United States in September 1969. Williams returned via London, England, reaching Detroit, Michigan in 1969. He was immediately arrested for extradition to North Carolina for trial on the kidnapping charge.
Williams was tried in Monroe, North Carolina, in December 1975. The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall chaired his defense committee and a broad range of left wing activists arrived to support him. Noted attorney William Kunstler represented Williams in court. The State of North Carolina dropped all charges against him almost immediately.
Death
Williams died at age 71 on October 15, 1996. He had been living in Baldwin, Michigan. At his funeral, Rosa Parks, an activist known for sparking the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, recounted the high regard for Williams by those who joined with Martin Luther King Jr. in the peaceful marches in Alabama. Parks gave the eulogy at Williams' funeral in 1996, praising him for "his courage and for his commitment to freedom". She concluded, "The sacrifices he made, and what he did, should go down in history and never be forgotten."
He was survived by his grandsons Robert F. Williams III and Benjamin P. Williams, and his daughter-in-law, Melanie Williams. His wife, Mabel, lived for 18 more years after his death, dying on April 19, 2014.
Works
- Negroes with Guns (with input by his wife; 1962), New York, NY: Marzani & Munsell. Reprinted by Wayne State University Press, 1998.
- "USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution" [1964] 1965. In August Meier et al. (eds), Black Protest Thought in the 20th Century. Indianapolis and New York.
- Listen Brother!. 1968; New York, NY: World View Publishers. 40 pp.
- "The Black Scholar Interviews: Robert F Williams," The Black Scholar, 1970.
- Williams, Robert F. While God Lay Sleeping: The Autobiography of Robert F. Williams (completed 1996, unpublished).
