“The kissing case,” activist lawyer Conrad Lynn observed years later, “was the case that got [Williams] in national and international attention.”
The case furnished Williams not only with a network of seasoned activists in the American left but also with a growing number of supporters among black nationalists in Harlem.
Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, an important figure in both communist and black nationalist circles in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1970s, organized support for Williams.
He became a regular visitor to Louis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore on Seventh Avenue off 125th Street, where Michaux welcomed Williams to the podium the store provided for the legendary Harlem street speakers of the day.
The most important of Williams’s contacts among the Harlem nationalists was Malcolm X, minister at the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number 7.
“Every time I used to go to New York he would invite me to speak,” Williams recalled.
Malcolm would tell his congregation “that ‘our brother is here from North Carolina, and he is the only fighting man that we have got, and we have got to help him so he can stay down there,”’
Williams recounted.
Williams found ready support among Harlem intellectuals, including Julian Mayfield, John Henrik Clarke, John O. Killens, and other literary and political figures.
“They all saw something in Monroe that did not actually exist—an immediately revolutionary situation,” Harold Cruse observed.
Julian Mayfield later wrote an unpublished autobiography in which he disclosed that “a famous black writer made contact with gangsters in New Jersey and bought me two sub-machine guns which I took to Monroe.”
Williams was not the best known black leader in the United States, but he may have been the best armed.
The “kissing case” recruited new allies for Williams, but it launched him on a collision course with the NAACP hierarchy.
Since the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s, the NAACP had steadfastly shunned so-called “sex cases” and political alliances that might leave the organization open to red-baiting.
Should the NAACP “ever get identified with communism,” Kelly Alexander, head of the North Carolina Conference of Branches, told a reporter, “the Ku Klux Klan and the White Councils will pick up the charge that we are ‘reds’ and use it as a club to beat us to death.”
Differences over strategy became bitter: Alexander complained to the national office that Williams “has completely turned his back on the one organization that is responsible for him being in the spotlight today,” while Williams griped that Alexander “sounds more like a Tom than ever.”
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the national organization, began to refer to Williams in private as “Lancelot of Monroe.”
Just as the “kissing case” headlines faded in the spring of 1959, two news stories from other parts of the South gripped black America.
One was the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi.
When Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers heard that Parker had been dragged from his cell and murdered by a mob, he told his wife, “I’d like to get a gun and start shooting.”
The other was the terrifying ordeal of four young black college students at Florida A&M.
Their double date after a college dance was interrupted by four white men with guns and knives.
The drunken assailants, who had vowed, as one of them testified in court later, “to go out and get some nigger pussy,” forced the two eighteen-year-old black men to kneel at gunpoint while they undressed the two women and decided aloud which one they would kidnap and then gang-rape.
In the wake of these highly publicized outrages, Roy Wilkins conceded in a letter marked “NOT FOR PUBLICATION” that “I know the thought of violence has been much in the minds of Negroes.”
By early May, Wilkins admitted that the NAACP found it “harder and harder to keep feelings from boiling over in some of our branches.”
Right on the heels of the Parker lynching and the terrors in Tallahassee, two pressing local matters brought Robert Williams and a crowd of black women to the Union County courthouse.
B. F. Shaw, a white railroad engineer, was charged with attacking an African American maid at the Hotel Monroe.
Slated for trial the same day, Lewis Medlin, a white mechanic, was accused of having beaten and sexually assaulted Mary Ruth Reid, a pregnant African American woman, in the presence of her five children.
According to Williams, Reid’s brothers and several of the African American women of the Monroe NAACP had urged that the new machine guns be tried out on Medlin before his trial.
“I told them that this matter would be handled through the law and the NAACP would help,” Williams recalled, “that we would be as bad as the white people if we resorted to violence.”
The proceedings against the two white men compelled Williams to reconsider his assessment.
The judge dropped the charges against Shaw in spite of the fact that he failed to appear for court.
During the brief trial of Medlin, his attorney argued that he had been “drunk and having a little fun” at the time of the assault.
Further, Medlin was married, his lawyer told the jury, “to a lovely white woman...the pure flower of life...do you think he would have left this pure flower for that?"
Fie gestured toward Reid, who began to cry uncontrollably. Medlin was acquitted in minutes.
Robert Williams recalled that “the [black] women in the courtroom made such an outcry, the judge had to send Medlin out the rear door.”
The women then turned on Williams and bitterly shamed him for failing to see to their protection.
At this burning moment of anger and humiliation, Williams turned to wire service reporters and declared that it was time to “meet violence with violence.”
African American citizens unable to enlist the support of the courts must defend themselves.
“Since the federal government will not stop lynching, and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally,” he declared, “if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must resort to that method.”
The next day Williams disavowed the reference to lynching.
“I do not mean that Negroes should go out and attempt to get revenge for mistreatments or injustice,” he said, “but it is clear that there is no Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment nor court protection of Negroes’ rights here, and Negroes have to defend themselves on the spot when they are attacked by whites.”
Banner headlines flagged these words as symbols of “a new militancy among young Negroes of the South.”
Enemies of the NAACP blamed this “bloodthirsty remark” squarely on the national office.
That very morning, when he read the words “meet violence with violence” in a United Press International dispatch, Roy Wilkins telephoned Robert Williams to inform him that he had been removed from his post as president of the Monroe NAACP.
The fiftieth anniversary convention of the NAACP that summer of 1959 became a highly public show trial whose central issue was whether or not the national organization would ratify Wilkins’s suspension of Robert Williams.
The national office printed up a pamphlet, “The Single Issue in the Robert Williams Case,” and distributed it to all delegates.
As part of the coordinated effort to crush Williams, Thurgood Marshall visited the New York offices of the FBI on June 4, 1959, and urged agents to investigate Williams “in connection with [Marshall’s] efforts to combat communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP.”
Wilkins twisted every available arm.
Daisy Bates, the pistol-packing heroine of Little Rock, agreed to denounce Williams for advocating self-defense—after the national office consented to buy $600 a month in “advertising” from her newspaper.
“The national office,” Louis Lomax wrote, “subjected the Williams forces to a heavy bombardment from the NAACP’s big guns.”
Forty speakers, including Bates, King, Jackie Robinson, and dozens of distinguished lawyers, rose one after the other to denounce Williams.
But when the burly ex-marine from Monroe finally strode down the aisle to speak, he was neither intimidated nor penitent.
“There is no Fourteenth Amendment in this social jungle called Dixie,” Williams declared.
“There is no equal protection under the law.”
He had been angry, they all knew, trials had beset him, but never had he intended to advocate acts of war.
Surely no one believed that.
But if the black men of Poplarville, Mississippi, had banded together to guard the jail the night that Mack Parker was lynched, he said, that would not have hurt the cause of justice.
If the young black men who escorted the coed who was raped in Tallahassee had been able to defend her, Williams reminded them, such action would have been legal and justified “even if it meant that they themselves or the white rapists were killed.”
“Please,” he beseeched the assembly, “I ask you not to come crawling to these whites on your hands and knees and make me a sacrificial lamb.”
And there the pleading stopped.
“We as men should stand up as men and protect our women and children,” Williams declared.
“I am a man and I will walk upright as a man should.
I WILL NOT CRAWL.”
In a controversy that the Carolina Times called “the biggest civil rights story of the year,” the NAACP convention voted to uphold the suspension of Robert Williams.
The day after Daisy Bates had urged the assembly to censure Williams for his vow to defend his home and family, she wired the attorney general of the United States to complain about dynamite attacks on her home in Little Rock.
“We have been compelled to employ private guards,” she said.
Williams wrote to Bates soon afterward, “I am sorry to hear that the white racists have decided to step up their campaign against you.
It is obvious that if you are to remain in Little Rock you will have to resort to the method I was suspended for advocating.”
Against this backdrop of white lawlessness and political stalemate in 1959 and early 1960, Robert Williams moved to strengthen the local movement in Monroe and to reach out to a national audience.
Though Williams underlined the fact that “both sides in the freedom movement are bi-racial,” his emerging philosophy reinvigorated many elements of the black nationalist tradition whose forceful reemergence in the mid-1960s would become known as “Black Power.”
His militant message was neither racially separatist nor rigidly ideological.
Williams stressed black economic advancement, black pride, black culture, independent black political action, and what he referred to as “armed self-reliance.”
He connected the southern freedom struggle with the anticolonialism of the emerging third world, especially African nations.
In the late 1950s, when other integrationists focused on lunch counters and voter registration, Williams insisted on addressing persistent black poverty:
“We must consider that in Montgomery, where Negroes are riding in the front of buses,” he said, “there are also Negroes who are starving.”
His approach was practical, eclectic, and improvisational.
There must be “flexibility in the freedom struggle,” he argued, and tactics must emerge from the confrontation itself.
At the core of his appeal, however, stood his calls for absolute racial equality under a fully enforced U.S. Constitution, backed by an unyielding resistance to white supremacy.
In pursuit of this uncompromising vision of interracial democracy, Williams became an editor and publisher like his grandfather before him.
Two weeks after the 1959 NAACP convention, FBI agents reported to J. Edgar Floover that black children were “selling a newsletter known as The Crusader on the streets of Monroe.”
Its title honored the late Cyril V. Briggs, Flarlem organizer of the left-wing African Black Brotherhood in the early twentieth century.
The Crusader’s self-proclaimed mission was “ADVANCING THE CAUSE OF RACE PRIDE AND FREEDOM.”
Sample mailings yielded several thousand subscribers across the country.
Williams’s newsletter fed a lively and important debate within the freedom movement about the meaning of nonviolence.
“The great debate in the integration movement in recent months,” Anne Braden of the Southern Conference Educational Fund wrote in late 1959, “has been the question of violence vs. nonviolence as instruments of change.”
Harry Boyte, soon to be Martin Luther King Jr.’s first white aide, observed that “the idea of striking back...meets a steady response among the downtrodden, grass roots of the southern Negro population.”
For several years, Boyte argued, Robert Williams “has succeeded in reaching these grass roots,” exercising “great influence in Union County and beyond because of his militant position and refusal to submit to intimidation.” Williams “poses a real threat to more peaceful and non-violent methods of solving our problems.”
The FBI, too, remained uneasy about Williams’s expanding range of contacts. Hoover’s files, agents reported, “reflect numerous instances where groups in various sections of the country have proclaimed and demonstrated their sympathies with Williams and have sent him money.”
Not merely the FBI but also the most influential advocates of nonviolence felt compelled to deal with Williams’s growing reputation.
In a series of public debates in New York City, Williams faced A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, David Dellinger, and others.
“Nonviolence is a powerful weapon in the struggle against social evil,” Williams conceded.
“It represents the ultimate step in revolution against intolerable oppression, a type of struggle wherein man may make war without debasing himself.”
The problem, according to Williams, was that the success of nonviolence depended somewhat upon the adversary; rattlesnakes, he noted, were immune to moral appeals, as were white terrorists in the South.
“When Hitler’s tyranny threatened the world,” he argued, “we did not hear much about how immoral it is to meet violence with violence.”
Williams “drew a large audience to his debate with the pacifists,” George Weissman of the SWP wrote to Carl Braden in Louisville, “and handled himself quite well.”
In a widely reprinted debate first published in Liberation magazine, Williams faced Martin Luther King Jr.
Again careful to endorse King’s methods wherever they proved feasible, Williams advocated “armed self-reliance,” explaining that among well-armed white vigilantes, “there is open defiance to law and order throughout the South today.”
Where law has broken down, he said, it was necessary and right to defend home and family.
“Nonviolence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilized, but nonviolence is no repellent for a sadist,” Williams noted.
“Nowhere in the annals of history does the record show a people delivered from bondage by patience alone.”
King conceded that white violence and white intransigence had brought the movement to “a stage of profound crisis.”
African Americans were frustrated, he said, and the “current calls for violence” reflected “a confused, anger-motivated drive to strike back violently.”
The Supreme Court’s 1954 mandate and even the triumph at Montgomery had yielded small tokens, elaborate evasions, and widespread terror.
Only three responses presented themselves.
One could practice “pure nonviolence,” King said, but this path “could not readily attract large masses, for it requires extraordinary discipline and courage.”
A position that encompassed legitimate self defense was more practical.
King pointed out that “all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept [self-defense] as moral and legal.
The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.”
Here was where King the politician sensed his constituency.
“When the Negro uses force in self-defense,” he continued, “he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects.”
This widely accepted position was, of course, precisely Williams’s view—which was King’s problem.
