The third and most unacceptable position, King argued, was “the advocacy of violence as a tool of advancement, organized as in warfare, deliberately and consciously.”
Here, then, was the pale beyond which King sought to cast his adversary.
“Mr. Robert Williams would have us believe that there is no collective or practical alternative,” King insisted.
“He argues that we must be cringing and submissive or take up arms.”
Essentially, King had invented his own Robert Williams, a kind of black Geronimo plotting military strikes against the white man, and then responded to that Robert Williams.
Lacking theological training and combative in his manner, Williams made himself vulnerable to this caricature.
But the philosophical position from which King centered his own argument—preferring nonviolence, but endorsing “the principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed”— was precisely the place where Williams had taken his stand.
After the debate appeared in Liberation and began to resonate throughout the movement, W. E. B. Du Bois weighed in with a commentary, also entitled “Crusader Without Violence,” in which he discouraged applause for King’s critique of Williams.
In Montgomery, he wrote, King had “stood firm without surrender,” but Du Bois considered it “a very grave question as to whether or not the slavery and degradation of Negroes in America has not been unnecessarily prolonged by the submission to evil.”
More than the persuasive skills of their elders, the bold actions of African American college students set these philosophical debates aside and gave the battalions of nonviolence their brief but compelling historical moment.
On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into Woolworth’s in Greensboro, sat down at a segregated lunch counter, and asked to be served.
Within two months, the sit-ins had spread to fifty-four communities across nine states of the old Confederacy, infusing the freedom movement with fresh troops and new tactics.
Soon after the sit-ins began, Robert Williams followed a dozen black youths into Gamble’s Drug Store in downtown Monroe and was the only person arrested.
Marched down the street in handcuffs, a shotgun-toting guard on either side of him, Williams spoofed himself as “the dangerous stool-sitter bandit” and vowed that he had “never felt prouder in my life.”
Young insurgents in Monroe mounted an aggressive campaign of sit-ins that displayed its own unique style.
“The Negroes remained in each store only a short time,” the Charlotte Observer reported, “usually until management closed the counters.”
Under court orders to abide by the law or face imprisonment, Williams defied the judge and marched with his young troops.
“We’re using hit-and-run tactics,” Williams told reporters.
“They never know when we’re coming or when we’re going to leave.
That way we hope to wear them down,” he said, managing to sound like a platoon leader even while participating in a passive resistance campaign.
“They were always doing something,” the manager of Jones Drug Store recalled.
“It’s a wonder somebody didn’t kill him.”
It was no mystery to Williams; the main difference between the sit-ins in Monroe and elsewhere was that “not a single demonstrator was even spat upon during our sit-ins,” Williams claimed.
The uneasy peace in Monroe would soon be broken, in large measure by followers of King.
In 1961, Reverend Paul Brooks of SCLC and James Forman, soon to become president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), came to Monroe in the company of seventeen Freedom Riders fresh out of jail in Jackson, Mississippi.
The young insurgents arrived in Monroe to launch a nonviolent campaign in Robert Williams’s backyard, though Forman later denied any intention to undermine Williams.
One of the Freedom Riders announced that he had come to Monroe because he considered “Mr. Robert F. Williams to be the most dangerous person in America.”
Another proclaimed:
“If the fight for civil rights is to remain nonviolent, we must be successful in Monroe.
What happens here will determine the course taken in many other communities throughout the South.”
Williams welcomed the Freedom Riders warmly but had a similar understanding of the stakes.
“I saw it first as a challenge,” he recalled, “but I also saw it as an opportunity to show that what King and them were preaching was bullshit.”
Two weeks of picketing at the Union County Courthouse grew progressively more perilous for the Freedom Riders.
Crowds of hostile white onlookers grew larger and larger.
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, August 28, a mob of several thousand furious white people attacked the approximately thirty demonstrators, badly injuring many of them.
Local police arrested the bleeding protestors.
In his classic memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman later called this riot his “moment of death” and “a nightmare I shall never forget.”
To the consternation of SCLC, the nonviolent crusade swiftly deteriorated into mob violence.
Throughout the community, white vigilantes attacked black citizens and even fired fifteen shots into the home of former mayor J. Ray Shute, a white moderate who had befriended Williams.
At the height of this violent chaos, a white married couple entered the black community for reasons that are unclear and drove straight into an angry black mob milling near Williams’s house.
“There was hundreds of niggers there,” the white woman stated, “and they were armed, they were ready for war.”
Black residents, under the impression that the demonstrators downtown were being beaten and perhaps slaughtered, threatened to kill the white couple. Williams, though busy preparing to defend his home, rescued the two whites from the mob and led them into his house, where they remained for about two hours.
White authorities later charged Williams and several other people with kidnapping, although the white couple met two police officers on their way home and did not report their alleged abduction.
The woman later conceded that “at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about being kidnapped....
[T]he papers, the publicity and all that stuff was what brought in that kidnapping mess.”
During a long night of racial terror, Williams slung a machine gun over his shoulder and walked several miles with his wife and two small sons to where Julian Mayfield waited with a car.
The Williams family fled first to New York City, then to Canada, then on to Cuba to escape the hordes of FBI agents who combed the countryside in search of them.
One of the agents assigned to search locally for Williams reported his frustrations to FBI Director J. Edgar Floover:
“Subject has become something of a ‘John Brown’ to Negroes around Monroe and they will do anything for him.”
The FBI dragnet never snared Williams, but it did not take Floover long to hear from him.
Every Friday night from 11:00 to midnight on Radio Flavana, Williams hosted “Radio Free Dixie,” a program that could be heard from 1961 to 1964 as far away as New York and Los Angeles.
From Cuba, Williams continued to edit The Crusader for a circulation that eventually grew to forty thousand.
In 1962, his book Negroes With Guns , published from Cuba, became the single most important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, soon to found the Black Panther Party in Oakland.
Copies of The Crusader traveled down the Mississippi back roads with SNCC organizers: “this leaflet is being distributed by SNCC and COFO [Council of Federated Organizations] workers among U.S. Negroes,” the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission complained in the spring of 1964.
Later that year, when SNCC began to veer away from nonviolence, members cited Williams approvingly in the fierce internal debates.
As black activists began to reject even the tactical pretense of nonviolence, the influence of Robert Williams continued to spread.
“Armed self-defense is a fact of life in black communities—north and south—despite the pronouncements of the ‘leadership,’” a North Carolina activist wrote to Williams.
Long before Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks led the chants of “Black Power” that riveted national media attention in the summer of 1966, most elements of that ambiguous slogan already were in place.
“Your doctrine of self-defense set the stage for the acceptance of the Deacons For Defense and Justice,” Lawrence Henry told Williams in the spring of 1966.
“As quiet as it is being kept, the Black man is swinging away from King and adopting your tit-for-tat philosophy.”
Williams’s influence was not limited to the South.
“As I am certain you realize,” Richard Gibson, editor of Now! magazine in New York, wrote to Williams in 1965, “Malcolm’s removal from the scene makes you the senior spokesman for AfroAmerican militants.”
Life magazine reported in 1966 that Williams’s “picture is prominently displayed in extremist haunts in the big city ghettos.”
Clayborne Carson names Williams as one of two central influences—the other being Malcolm X—on the 1966 formation of the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense in Oakland, “the most widely known black militant political organization of the late 1960s.”
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) exaggerated considerably in 1969 when it reported that Williams “has long been the ideological leader of the Black Panther Party.”
It is closer to say that the Panthers were “a logical development” from the philosophy of Williams, as Reginald Major asserted in his 1971 book, A Panther Is a Black Cat .
According to Williams, he “talked to Bobby Seale and Mrs. [Kathleen] Cleaver by telephone when I was in Africa” in 1968 and the leadership “asked me to become Foreign Minister of the Panthers.”
At that moment, Williams had already been named president-in-exile of two of the most influential revolutionary nationalist groups: the Revolutionary Action Movement, which the CIA believed to be “the most dangerous of all the Black Power organizations,” and the Detroit-based Republic of New Africa.
“Despite his overseas activities,” the CIA reported in 1969, “Williams has managed to becoming an outstanding figure, possibly the outstanding figure, in the black extremist movement in the United States.”
Even though he became friends with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro himself, Williams grew uneasy in Cuba: he yearned to return home.
As the Soviet strings on the Cuban revolution shortened, Williams resisted pressure to make his own politics conform to the Soviet line.
“I am under constant attack by the [Communist Party of the United States],” Williams wrote to a friend in the mid-1960s.
“They are trying to cut off my facilities here in Cuba.
One would think I am Hitler and Wall Street combined.”
An FBI informant as early as 1962 stated that Williams “has stubbed his toes” with Cuban Communists through his “criticism of [the] Communist Party for barring Negroes from leadership” and that he “may not be able to regain his footing.”
The Stalinists were “getting worse than the crackers in Monroe,” Williams complained in 1964.
“Things are about to the stage when I had to leave Monroe in a hurry.”
Williams persuaded Castro to let him travel to North Vietnam in 1964, where he met Ho Chi Minh and wrote antiwar propaganda aimed at African American soldiers.
In 1965, the Williams family relocated to Beijing, where Williams was “lionized and feted by top Peking leaders,” according to CIA intelligence reports.
The Williams family dined with Mao Tse-tung and moved in the highest circles of the Chinese government for three years.
Like the Black Power movement itself, as Williams got farther away from his roots in the South he sometimes drifted into apocalyptic nonsense.
His 1967 essay, “The Potential of a Minority Revolution,” for example, depicted a scenario in which black saboteurs and guerrilla enclaves could bring down the U.S. government.
Though Williams had been one of the best organizers in the black freedom movement, his isolation from any local constituency made him vulnerable to the same frustrations and delusions that plagued the rest of the movement in the last half of the 1960s.
In the late 1960s, when the Nixon administration moved toward opening diplomatic relations with China, Williams bartered his almost exclusive knowledge of the Chinese government for safe passage home and a Ford Foundation-sponsored post at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
Not that the entire federal apparatus was happy to welcome him home: the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice observed that “Williams could be the person to fill the role of national leader of the black extremists.
We should offset attempts by him to assume such a position.”
Williams, however, wrote to a friend that “a lot of people are going to be surprised after my arrival not to find me fighting for leadership the way many others are doing.”
Returning to family ties and local activism, Williams spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in the small, trout-fishing village of Baldwin in western Michigan and died on October 15, 1996.
A week after his death, Rosa Parks climbed slowly into a church pulpit in Monroe, North Carolina.
Beneath her lay the body of Robert F. Williams, clad in a gray suit given to him by Mao Tse-tung and draped with a black, red, and green PanAfrican flag.
Parks told the congregation that she and those who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama had always admired Williams “for his courage and his commitment to freedom.
The work that he did should go down in history and never be forgotten.”
Her presence in that pulpit, nearly inexplicable when viewed through the traditional narrative of “the civil rights movement,” demonstrates in almost poetic fashion that historians should reexamine the relationship between “civil rights” and “Black Power.”
Our vision of the postwar African American freedom movement prior to 1965 as one characterized solely and inevitably by nonviolent “civil rights” protest obscures the full complexity of racial politics.
It idealizes black history, downplays the oppression of jim crow society, and even understates the achievements of African American resistance.
Worse still, our cinematic “civil rights movement” blurs the racial dilemmas that follow us into the twenty-first century.
The life of Robert Williams underlines many aspects of the ongoing black freedom struggle—the decisive racial significance of World War II, the impact of the cold war on the black freedom struggle, the centrality of questions of sexuality and gender in racial politics, and the historical presence of a revolutionary Caribbean.
But foremost it testifies to the extent to which, throughout World War II and the postwar years, there existed among African Americans a current of militancy—a current that included the willingness to defend home and community by force.
This facet of African American life lived in tension and in tandem with the compelling moral example of nonviolent direct action.
No doubt those who began to chant “Black Power” in the mid-1960s felt that slogan with an urgency specific to their immediate circumstances.
But then, as now, many aspects of its meaning endure as legacies from earlier African American struggles.
Above the desk where Williams completed his memoirs just before his death, there still hangs an ancient rifle—a gift, he said, from his grandmother.
Timothy B. Tyson Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison
