Robert Franklin Williams

Activist and writer

• Born: February 26, 1925
• Birthplace: Monroe, North Carolina
• Died: October 15, 1996
• Place of death: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Williams was an influential author and social activist who advocated armed resistance in the fight for desegregation and equality during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Wrongfully accused of crimes, he was forced to flee the United States and live in exile for nearly a decade.

Early Life

Robert Franklin Williams was the son of John L. Williams and Emma Carter Williams. He was the grandson of a slave, Sikes Williams, who became a teacher, political activist, and newspaper publisher. He was raised in the home of his grandmother, another former slave, who gave her grandson his first rifle. As a boy growing up in North Carolina, Williams was profoundly affected by an event he witnessed: police officer Jesse Helms (father of longtime U.S. Senator Jesse Helms) brutally beating and humiliating a black woman in the course of arresting her.

Williams became a machinist and, in 1942, moved to Detroit, Michigan, to work at Ford Motor Company. The next year, he experienced race riots in the city. Drafted into military service in 1944, he served with a segregated Army unit before his discharge in 1946. Williams returned to Detroit, where he worked at Cadillac Motors. In 1947, he married Mabel Robinson, with whom he fathered two sons.

During the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Williams wrote poetry and articles for periodicals, including The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. With the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he studied psychology and literature at a number of African American colleges, including West Virginia State University, Johnson C. Smith University, and North Carolina Central University. In 1953, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines but violently resisted the corps’ racial discrimination and was given an undesirable discharge in 1955. He returned to his North Carolina hometown.

Life’s Work

In 1955, Williams joined the Monroe chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a community organizer and was later elected president. He came to national attention in 1958 during the notorious “Kissing Case,” in which two local young black boys, ages seven and nine, were charged with rape after allowing a young white girl to kiss them. The boys faced fourteen-year terms in reform school for the alleged offense. Williams unleashed a barrage of protest, publicity, and outright ridicule that eventually led white authorities to drop all charges and free the boys.

During the decade, Williams began an anti-discrimination newsletter, The Crusader, and led retail store sit-ins. He campaigned successfully to integrate the town library but failed in his attempts to integrate the public swimming pool. In response to regular Ku Klux Klan-led violence against African Americans, he organized and trained a cadre of residents in self-defense; the well-armed Black Guards drove off several racist assaults. When Williams publicly spoke of meeting violence with violence, he was suspended from the NAACP, which supported a policy of nonviolence.

In 1961, Freedom Riders arrived in Monroe to help protest racism, which raised tensions in the community and led to confrontations between whites and African Americans. During the height of the demonstrations, an angry mob of African Americans surrounded a white couple in a black neighborhood, thinking they were advance scouts for the KKK. To protect the couple from harm, Williams sheltered them in his home. He was subsequently charged with kidnapping. Not wishing to be subjected to southern justice, Williams fled to Canada with his family. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) put him on its Ten Most Wanted list.

Williams made his way to Cuba, where he lived from 1962 to 1965. While there, he wrote—he completed his best-known work, Negroes with Guns (1962), in Havana—sold subscriptions to The Crusader, and hosted a revolutionary radio program of music and political commentary, Radio Free Dixie. Between 1965 and 1969, the Williams family resided in China. There, Williams’s Radio Free Dixie broadcasts were aimed at African American military personnel serving in Vietnam, to discourage them from participating in an unjust war.

Williams returned to the United States in 1969, settling in Michigan. Working as a lecturer and human rights consultant, he fought extradition to North Carolina to face trial. In the mid-1970’s, the kidnapping charges were dropped. Afterward, Williams continued to write, speak, and act for equality. He founded the People’s Association for Human Rights and served as an officer with the NAACP in Michigan. Williams also completed his autobiography, which was not published. He died of Hodgkin’s disease on October 15, 1996.

Significance

Williams’s aggressive opposition to racism and discrimination stood in stark contrast to the nonviolent methods of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights movement leaders. As such, Williams’s philosophy attracted revolutionaries willing to explore alternatives to stoic persistence. Negroes with Guns was a major influence on such young radicals as Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. In 1969, Williams was proclaimed president of the Republic of New Afrika, a social movement proposed to create an African American country within the United States. Although he only achieved mainstream recognition of his efforts late in life, Williams ultimately was accorded such honors as the Malcolm X Black Manhood Award (1989), the John Brown Society’s Gold Medal (1991), and the NAACP Black Image Award (1992).

Bibliography

Cohen, Robert Carl. Black Crusader: A Biography of Robert Franklin Williams. Rev. ed. Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace, 2008. An updated, illustrated edition of the radical’s life story first published in 1972.

Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. This work includes interviews and excerpts from Williams’s broadcasts while focusing on his years in exile.

Williams, Robert Franklin. Negroes with Guns. Reprint. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Williams’s landmark work describes the events that led to his community’s armed resistance to racism.