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“Somebody in the crowd fired a pistol and the people again started to
scream hysterically, ‘Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Pour gasoline on the
niggers!’ The mob started to throw stones on top of my car. So I opened
the door of the car and I put one foot on the ground and stood up in the
door holding an Italian carbine.

All this time three policeman had been standing about fifty feet
away from us while we kept waiting in the car for them to come and rescue
us. Then when they saw that we were armed and the mob couldn’t take us,
two of the policemen started running. One ran straight to me, grabbed me
on the shoulder, and said, 'Surrender your weapon! Surrender your
weapon!’ I struck him in the face and knocked him back away from the car
and put my carbine in his face, and told him that we didn’t intend to be
lynched. The other policeman who had run around the side of the car
started to draw his revolver out of the holster. He was hoping to shoot me
in the back. They didn’t know that we had more than one gun. One of the
students (who was seventeen years old) put a .45 in the policeman’s face
and told him that if he pulled out his pistol he would kill him. The policeman
started putting his gun back into the holster and backing away from the car,
and he fell into the ditch.

There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and
he started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he
said, 'God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to
that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t
even arrest them!’ He kept crying and somebody led him away through the
crowd. ”


-from Negroes with Guns, documenting a 1961 NAACP
campaign to integrate a public swimming pool.



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I WILL NOT

CRAWL

excerpts from Robert F. Williams on Black
struggle and armed self-defense in Monroe, NC





The following is a brief biographical sketch of an incredible man named
Robert F. Williams, along with several chapters excerpted from his famous
1962 book Negroes with Guns. Though less well known than more urban
groups like the Black Panthers, the words and actions of Monroe, NCs mil¬
itant NAACP chapter were tremendously influential on later organizations
that advocated self-determination, autonomy, equality, and self-defense.

This publication was made possible by public documents of the Na¬
tional Humanities Center and the Afro-American Studies Department of
the University ofWisconsin-Madison. Though Robert F. Williams was not
an anarchist perse, we hope that this publication can nevertheless further
dialogue(s) around the themes of southern history, race, self-defense, and

insurrection.


-in love and rage,
the North Carolina Piece Corps


Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so
much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?

This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death; the pos¬
sibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America
before; for in order to die you must first have lived.

It is in the nature of the American Negro, the same as all other men, to fight and try
to destroy those things that block his path to a greater happiness in life.

The Future Belongs to Today’s Oppressed

Whenever I speak on the English-language radio station in Havana (which
broadcasts for an audience in the United States) 1 hope in some way to penetrate
the mental barriers and introduce new disturbing elements into the consciousness
of white America. I hope to make them aware of the monstrous evil that they are
party to by, oppressing the Negro. Somehow, I must manage to clearly reflect the
image of evil that is inherent in a racist society so that white America will be able
to honestly and fully see themselves as they really are. To see themselves with the
same clarity as foreigners see them and to recognize that they are not champions of
democracy. To understand that today they do not really even believe in democracy.
To understand that the world is changing regardless of whether they think they like
it or not.

For I know that if they had a glimpse of their own reality the shock would
be of great therapeutic value. There would be many decent Americans who would
then understand that this society must mend its ways if it is to survive; that there
is no place in the world now for a racist nation. As an individual, I’m not inclined
toward “politics.” The only thing I care about is justice and liberation. I don’t be¬
long to any political party. But I think that as long as the present politics prevails
the Negro is not going to be integrated into American society. There will have to be
great political changes before that can come about.

Those Americans who most deny the logic of the future are the ones who
have driven me into exile. Those people have been cruel. Yet cruel as it may be, this
exile was not the end those people had planned for me. But it is not in the hands
of today’s oppressors to determine my end. Their role in history denies to them
an understanding of this, just as their role will not allow them to understand that
every true nationalist leader in Africa has been imprisoned or exiled, and that the
future leaders of Latin American and Asian national liberation today are experienc¬
ing imprisonment, exile, or worse.

The future belongs to today’s oppressed and I shall be witness to that
future in the liberation of the Afro-American.


40


groes are not pacifists just let them slap one. Pick any Negro on any street comer in
the U.S.A. and they’ll find out how much he believes in turning the other cheek.

All those who dare to attack are going to learn the hard way that the
Afro-American is not a pacifist; that he cannot forever be counted on not to defend
himself. Those who attack him brutally and ruthlessly can no longer expect to at¬
tack him with unity.

The Afro-American cannot forget that his enslavement in this country
did not pass because of pacifist moral force or noble appeals to the Christian
conscience of the slave-holders.

Henry David Thoreau is idealized as an apostle of non-violence, the
writer who influenced Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. But
Thoreau was not dogmatic; his eyes were open and he saw clearly. I keep with me
a copy of Thoreau’s Plea For Captain John Brown. There are truths that are just as
evident in 1962 as they were in 1859 when he wrote:

... It was his [John Browns] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect
right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the
slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery
have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder,
but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. 1 shall not
be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds
to liberate the slave.

I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of
Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor lib¬
erates me.... I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee
circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty
violence every day. Look at the policemans billy and handcuffs! Look at
the jail!... We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this pro¬
visional army. So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain
slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only
righteous use that can be made of Sharpe’s rifles and revolvers is to fight
duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt
Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them or the like. I think that for
once the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous
cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once
will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit
in which you use it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved
his fellowman so well, and treated him so tenderly. He [John Brown]
lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him.

What sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers,
but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the


39


I WILL NOT

CRAWL

Excerpts from Robert E Williams on Black
struggle and armed self-defense in Monroe, NC


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On Robert F. Williams

by Timothy B. Tyson

Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies
University of Wisconsin—Madison

Robert Williams, bom in Monroe, North Carolina, became one of the most
influential African American radicals of his time, primarily for his advocacy of what
he called “armed self-reliance” during the late 1950s and the 1960s. He engaged in a
widely published written debate with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 and, though his
leadership abilities were no match for King’s, he wielded an enduring influence. His
life in the freedom struggles revealed the deep influence of black nationalism and
armed self-defense. His influence might have been even greater had he not been
forced to flee the United States in 1961 with his wife and two small children, a
machine gun slung over one shoulder, foiling a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
dragnet. In Cuba and the People’s Republic of China, Williams shared podiums with
Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-tung. “Radio Free Dixie,” his regular
program onRadioHavanafrom 1962 to 1965, blasted“rump-lickingUncleToms” and
“Ku Klux Klan savages” from Seattle to New York City. His 1962 book, Negroes with
Guns, a decisive influence on the Black Panthers and a generation of young African
American radicals, became a classic document of the Black Power movement. Just
before his death on October 15, 1996, Williams completed a draft ofhis autobiog¬
raphy, While God Lay Sleeping. In its pages, in his life, we find a distillation of the
bitter history that shaped not only one of the South’s most dynamic race rebels but
thousands of other black insurgents whose militant resistance helped end the racial
caste system in the United States.

Robert Williams was born in 1925 to Emma C. and John L. Williams.
His father was a railroad boiler washer in Monroe, North Carolina, a town of six
thousand in the North Carolina piedmont. His grandfather, Sikes Williams, born
a slave in Union County, had attended Biddle Institute in nearby Charlotte after
Emancipation and became a Republican Party activist during the late nineteenth
century. Sikes Williams also published a small newspaper called “The People’s
Voice” and denounced the white supremacy campaign, which took the vote from
black citizens at the turn of the twentieth century.

Robert’s grandmother, Ellen Williams, also born a slave, was a daily pres¬
ence in his childhood: Williams remembered her as “my greatest friend.” He re¬
called that “she read everything” and that she “specialized in history.” She would
point to the old printing press in the shed and tell the young boy stories of the cru¬
sading editor’s political exploits. Before she died, Ellen Williams gave young Robert
a gift that symbolized much that slavery and the struggle for liberty had taught her:
the ancient rifle that his grandfather had wielded against white terrorists.

During World War II, Williams moved to Detroit, where he worked at
the Ford Motor Company, joined a militant labor union, and battled white mobs


1


tion. Discrimination and race hatred are undesirable, and I’m just as much against
racial discrimination, in all forms, every place in the world, as I am against it in the
United States.

What do we mean by “nationalism”? When you consider the present
white American society it can be classified as nothing but a nationalistic society
based on race. Yet as soon as an Afro-American speaks out for his people, and
is conscious and proud of his people’s historical roots and culture, he becomes a
“nationalist.” I don’t mind these labels. I don’t care what they call me. I believe in
justice for all people. And because the Afro-American is the most exploited, the
most oppressed in our society, I believe in working foremost for his liberation.

Non-Violence and Self-Defense

The tactics of non-violence will continue and should continue. We too
believed in non-violent tactics in Monroe. We’ve used these tactics; we’ve used
all tactics. But we also believe that any struggle for liberation should be a flexible
struggle. We shouldn’t take the attitude that one method alone is the way to libera¬
tion. This is to become dogmatic. This is to fall into the same sort of dogmatism
practiced by some of the religious fanatics. We can’t afford to develop this type of
attitude.

We must use non-violence as a means as long as this is feasible, but the
day will come when conditions become so pronounced that non-violence will be
suicidal in itself. The day is surely coming when we will see more violence on the
same American scene. The day is surely coming when some of the same Negroes
who have denounced our using weapons for self-defense will be arming themselves.
There are those who pretend to be horrified by the idea that a black veteran who
shouldered arms for the United States would willingly take up weapons to defend
his wife, his children, his home, and his life. These same people will one day be
the loud advocates of self-defense. When violent racism and fascism strike at their
families and their homes, not in a token way but in an all-out bloody campaign,
then they will be the first to advocate self-defense. They will justify their position
as a question of survival. When it is no longer some distant Negro who’s no more
than a statistic, no more than an article in a news paper; when it is no longer their
neighbors, but it means them and it becomes a matter of personal salvation, then
will their attitude change.

As a tactic, we use and approve non-violent resistance. But we also believe
that a man cannot have human dignity if he allows himself to be abused; to be
kicked and beaten to the ground, to allow his wife and children to be attacked, re¬
fusing to defend them and himself on the basis that he’s so pious, so self-righteous,
that it would demean his personality if he fought back.

We know that the average Afro-American is not a pacifist. He’s not a
pacifist and he has never been a pacifist and he’s not made of the type of material
that would make a good pacifist. Those who doubt that the great majority of Ne-


38


to the standard of Jim Crow life in a Jim Crow society. It is on this basis that they
have struck out against the insanity of racial prejudice. We know that the Southern
bigot, the Southern racist is mentally ill; that he is sick. The fact that Jim Crow
discrimination and racial segregation may very well be based on economic exploita¬
tion is beside the point.

We are oppressed and no matter what the original cause or purpose of
this oppression, the mind and personality of the racist doing the oppression have
been warped for so long that he is a mental case. Even if the economic situation
is changed it will take quite a while, and it will require quite a shock, to cure this
mental disease. I’ve read that one of the best treatments for some forms of mental
illness is the shock treatment. And the shock treatment must come primarily from
the Afro-American people themselves in conjunction with their white allies; in
conjunction with the white youth.

This movement that I led was not a political organization. It had no po¬
litical affiliations whatsoever. It was a movement of people who resented oppres¬
sion. But 1 would say one thing about our movement. What happened in North
Carolina, had better become a lesson to the oppressors and the racists of America.
Because it is symbolic of a new attitude, symbolic of a new era. It means that the
Negro people are becoming restless. It means that there will be many more racial
explosions in the days to come. Monroe was just the beginning. I dare predict that
Monroe will become the symbol of the new Afro-American; a symbol of the Afro-
American determined to rid himself of the stigma of race prejudice and the pain
and torture of race hate and oppression at any cost.

Black Nationalism; Another Label

The label Black Nationalist is as meaningless as the Communist label.
The Afro-American resents being set aside and oppressed, resents not being al¬
lowed to enter the mainstream of American society. These people who form their
own groups, because they have been rejected, and start trying to create favorable
societies of their own are called “Black Nationalists.” This is a misleading title.
Because the first thing you must remember is that I am an Afro-American and I’ve
been denied the right to enter the mainstream of society in the United States. As an
Afro-American I am rejected and discriminated against. We are the most excluded,
the most discriminated-against group in the United States; the most discriminated-
against class. So it is only normal that I direct most of my energy toward the libera¬
tion of my people, who are the most oppressed class.

As for being a “Black Nationalist,” this is a word that’s hard to define.
No, I’m not a “Black Nationalist” to the point that I would exclude whites or that
I would discriminate against whites or that I would be prejudiced toward whites.
I would prefer to think of myself as an Inter-Nationalist. That is, I’m interested in
the problems of all mankind. I ’m interested in the problems of Africa, of Asia, and
of Latin America. I believe that we all have the same struggle; a struggle for libera-


37


in the Detroit race riot of 1943. Drafted in 1944, Williams endured the ironies of
marching for freedom in a segregated army. Though the racial discrimination in
the army angered Williams, military training gave him and a generation of African
American veterans “some feeling of security and self-assurance,” he recalled. “The
Army indoctrination instilled in us what a virtue it was to fight for democracy and
that we were fighting for democracy and upholding the Constitution. But most of
all they taught us to use arms.” Like thousands of other African American veterans,
Williams came home unwilling to accept the South’s racial caste system.

Another returning African American veteran, a friend of Williams’s named
Bennie Montgomery, killed his white landlord in a dispute over wages in 1946. The Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) wanted to lynch the black sharecropper, but instead state authorities
whiskedMontgomery out oftown, tried and convicted him ofmurder, and tenmonths
later executed him in the gas chamber at Central Prison in Raleigh. Robbed of their
lynching, the local klavern of “the invisible empire” let it be known that Bennie
Montgomery’s body belonged to the Klan. “They was gonna come and take Bennie’s
body out and drag it up and down the streets,” J. W. McDow, another African
American veteran, recalled. “I rather die and go to hell before I see that happen.” A
group of former soldiers met at Booker T. Perry’s barbershop and made a battle plan.
When the Klan motorcade pulled up in front of Harris Funeral Home, forty blackmen
leveled their rifles, taking aim at the line of cars. Not a shot was fired; the Klansmen
simply weighed their chances and drove away. Former U.S. Army Private First
Class Robert F. Williams cradled a carbine that night. So did three of the men who
would become key lieutenants in the “blackmilitia” that Williams organized ten years
later. “That was one of the first incidents,” Williams recalled, “that really started us to
understanding that we had to resist, and that resistance could be effective if we
resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns.”

Williams soon left the South for almost a decade, working briefly at Cadillac
Motor Company in Detroit before using his G. I. Bill benefits to write poetry and study
psychology at three different historically black colleges: West Virginia State College,
Johnson C. Smith College, and North Carolina Central College for Negroes.
“Someday,” he vowed in a 1949 article for the Detroit edition of the Daily Worker, “1
would return seasoned from the fight in the north and more efficient in the fight for the
liberation of my people.” In 1952, Williams wrote an essay for Paul Robeson’s
newspaper, Freedom, in which he predicted that African American college students
would soon become “the most militant agitators for democracy in America today.
They have nothing to lose and all to gain.” In 1953, Williams ran out of money for
college and reenlisted in the armed forces, this time in the United States Marine
Corps.

“Whereverhehas gone,” an FBI observer notedduring this period, “Williams
has constantly complained, both in the Army and at previous places of employment,
that he has been discriminated against.” The Marine Corps was no different.
Objecting bitterly to racial discrimination, Williams clashed with his officers, spent
much of his sixteen months in the Marine Corps in the brig, and received an


2


undesirable discharge in 1955. His one bright moment as a marine came on May 17,
1954, when he heard that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school
segregation. “At last I felt that I was a part of America and that I belonged,” he wrote.
“I was sure that this was the beginning of a new era of American democracy.”
Upon his return to Monroe in 1955, Williams joined both the local branch of the
N ational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a mostly
white Unitarian fellowship. In a Sunday sermon delivered to his fellow Unitarians in
1956, Williams hailed the Montgomery bus boycott and celebrated what he called
“the patriots ofpassive revolution.” His bitter collision with the Marine Corps had not
dampened his commitment to equal rights for all under the U.S. Constitution and to
those elements in the American political tradition that he believed undergirded black
liberation. Invoking “the spirit of Concord, Lexington and Valley Forge,” Williams
declared from the pulpit that, as he put it, “the liberty bell peals once more and the
Stars and Stripes shall wave forever.”

The atmosphere at the Monroe NAACP was less exuberant. In the wake ofthe
Brown decision and the triumph at Montgomery, KKK rallies near Monroe began to
draw crowds as large as fifteen thousand. Dynamite attacks on black activists in the
area were common and lesser acts of terror routine. “The echo of shots and
dynamite blasts,” the editors of The Southern Patriot wrote in 1957, “has been almost
continuous throughout the South.” The Monroe NAACP dwindled to six members
who then contemplated disbanding. When the newest member objected to
dissolution, the departing membership chose him to lead the chapter. “They elected
me president,” Williams recalled, “and then they all left.”

Findinghimselfvirtually a one-man NAACP chapter, Williams turned
first to the African American veterans with whom he had stood against the Klan
that night back in 1946. Another veteran, Albert E. Perry, M.D., became vice presi¬
dent. Finding it “necessary to visit homes and appeal directly to individuals,” as
Williams informed the national office, he painstakingly recruited from the beauty
parlors, pool halls, and street corners, building a cadre of roughly two hundred
members by 1959. The Monroe branch of the NAACP became “the only one of its
kind in existence,” Julian Mayfield wrote in Commentary in 1961. “Its members
and supporters, who are mostly workers and displaced farmers, constitute a well-
armed and disciplined fighting unit.”

The branch became “unique in the whole NAACP because of a working
class composition and a leadership that was not middle class,” Williams wrote. “Most
important, we had a strong representation of black veterans who didn’t scare easily.”
In response to the drownings of several local African American children whom
segregation had forced to swim in isolated farm ponds, the Monroe NAACP launched
a campaign to desegregate the local tax-supported swimming pool in 1957. Not
surprisingly, the KKK blamed the affluent Dr. Perry for the resurgent black activism,
and a large, heavily armed Klan motorcade attacked Perry’s house one night that
summer. African American veterans greeted the night riders with sandbag
fortifications and a hail of disciplined gunfire. The Monroe Board of Aldermen


3


Afro-American newspaper, which began publication in 1827. The truth of these
words has not dimmed in the century and a half since they first appeared in Free¬
dom’s Journal. They are more appropriate than ever.

There are white people who are willing to give us aid without strings
attached. They are willing to let us direct our own struggle; they are genuinely
interested in the liberation of the Negroes. I wouldn’t have been able to remain in
the South as long as I did if it had not been for the support that I got from some
whit people in the North. And I might never have succeeded in escaping the legal-
lynching manhunt fomented by the FBI nor have reached Cuban sanctuary but
for the help of whites. They will be willing to continue helping us for the sake of
justice, for the sake of human decency.

“Every Freedom Movement in the U.S.A. is Labeled
‘Communist’”

I’m not a member and I ’ve never been a member of the Communist Party.
But most decent-minded Americans should realize by now that every movement
for freedom that is initiated in the United States; every movement for human dig¬
nity, for decency; every movement that seeks fairness and social justice; every move¬
ment for human rights, is branded as “Communistic.” Whenever a white person
participates in a movement for Black liberation, the movement is automatically
branded as “under the domination of Moscow.” I can’t expect to be an exception.

This Communist-thing is becoming an old standard. An old standard
accusation now. Anyone who uncompromisingly opposes the racists, anyone
who scorns the religious fanatics and the super-duper American conservatives
is considered a Communist.

This sort of thing gives the Communists a lot of credit, because certainly
many people in my movement in the South don’t know what a Communist is.
Most of our people have never even heard of Marx. When you say Marx some of
the people would think that maybe you were talking about a fountain pen or a New
York City cab driver. Or the movie comedians.

But people aspire to be free. People want to be liberated when they are
oppressed. No matter where the leadership comes from. The enslavement and sup¬
pression of Negroes in the American South were going on before Karl Marx was
born, and Negroes have been rebelling against their oppression before Marxism
came into existence. As far back as the 16th century, and the beginning of the 17th
century, Negroes were even rebelling on the slave ships. The history of American
Negro slavery was marked by very many conspiracies and revolts on the part of
Negroes.

Certainly the Marxists have participated in the human rights struggle of
Negroes, but Negroes need not be told by any philosophy or by any political party
that racial oppression is wrong. Racial oppression itself inspires the Negro to re¬
bellion. And it is on this ground that the people of Monroe refused to conform


36


better to bleed for a just cause than to bleed just for the thrill of the sight of blood.
Rebellion ferments in modern youth. It is better that it expend itself against its true
enemies than against teen-age schoolmates who can’t even explain the reasons for
their dangerous skirmishes.

The Montgomery bus boycott was perhaps the most successful example
of completely pacifist action. But we must remember that in Montgomery, where
Negroes are riding in the front of buses, there are also Negroes who are starving.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a victory—but it was limited. It did not raise
the Negro standard of living; it did not mean better education for Negro children,
it did not mean economic advances.

Just what was the issue at hand for the white racists? What sacrifice? Re¬
member that in Montgomery most of the white Americans have automobiles and
are not dependent on the buses. It’s just like our own experience in Monroe when
we integrated the library. 1 just called the chairman of the board in my county. 1
told him that I represented the NAACP, that we wanted to integrate the library,
and that our own library had burned down. And he said, “Well, 1 don’t see any
reason why you can’t use the same library that our people use. It won’t make any
difference. And after all I don’t read anyway.” Now, this is the attitude of a lot
of white Southerners about the Montgomery bus boycott. The white people who
control the city didn’t ride the buses anyway; they had their own private cars, so it
didn’t make any difference to them.

But when Afro-Americans get into the struggle for the right to live as hu¬
man beings and the right to earn the same amount of money, then they’ll meet the
greatest amount of resistance, and out of it will come police-condoned or -inspired
violence. When that happens, the racist must be made to realize that in attacking
us he risks his own life. After all, his life is a white life, and he considers the white
life to be superior; so why should he risk a superior life to take an inferior one?

Now I believe, and a lot of other Negroes do too, that we must create a
black militancy of our own. We must direct our own struggle, achieve our own
destiny. We must realize that many Afro-Americans have become skeptical and
extremely suspicious of the so-called white liberals who have dominated “Negro”
freedom movements. They just feel that no white person can understand what
it’s like to be a suppressed Negro. The traditional white liberal leadership in civil
rights organizations, and even white radicals, generally cannot understand what
our struggle is and how we feel about it. They have always made our struggle sec¬
ondary and after all these years we really never got any place.

They have a patient sense for good public relations. But we’re not interest¬
ed in a good press. We’re interested in becoming free. We want to be liberated. To
me, oppression is harmful. It is painful. I would wake up in the morning as a Negro
who was oppressed. At lunchtime, I would eat as a Negro who was oppressed. At
night, I would go to bed as a Negro who was oppressed. And if I could have been
free in thirty seconds, it would not have been too soon.

“Too long have others spoken for us,” began the first editorial in the first


35


immediately passed an ordinance banning KKK motorcades, a measure they had
refused to consider prior to the gun battle.

An evenmo re remarkable local dramadraggedRobertWilliamsontothestage
of international politics on October 28, 1958. Two African American boys, “Fuzzy”
Simpson and FTanover Thompson, ages eight and ten, met some white children in a
vacantlot.Akissinggameensuedinwhichtheten-year-oldThompsonandaneightyear-
old white girl named Sissy Sutton kissed one another. The worldwide
controversy that stemmed from the “kissing case” underlined the power of sexual
questions in racial politics and demonstrated both the promise and the problems of
cold war politics for the African American freedom struggle.

After the kissing incident, Sissy Sutton’s mother reported that “ I was furious. I
would have killed Hanover myself if I had the chance.” Sissy’s father took a shotgun
and went looking for the two boys. Neighbors reported that a white mob had roared
up to the Thompson home and threatened not only to kill the boys but also to lynch
their mothers. Later that afternoon, police officers spotted Hanover Thompson and
Fuzzy Simpson pulling a red wagon loaded with soft drink bottles. “ Both cops jumped
out with their guns drawn,” Thompson recalled. “They snatched us up and
handcuffed us and threw us in the car. When we got to the jail, they drug us out of
the car and started beating us.” The local juvenile court judge reported to Governor
Luther H. Hodges that the police had detained the boys “for their own good, due to
local feeling in the case.”

Authorities held the two boys for six days without permitting them to see
parents, friends, or attorneys. Passing gunmen fired dozens of shots into the
Thompson home. Klan terrorists torched crosses on the lawn. Hanover’s sister
found his dog shot dead in the yard. For many white citizens, the case seemed to
resonate with the sexual fears that accompanied their vision of where school
desegregation would lead. “If [black children] get into our rural schools and ride the
buses withourwhite children,’’one local woman wrote, “the Monroe‘kissing’incident
is only a start of what we will have.” On November 4, Judge J. Hampton Price
convened what he termed “separate but equal” hearings for the white parents and the
black boys and sentenced the pair to Morrison Training School For Negroes. If they
behaved well, Judge Price told the black boys, it might be that they could be
released before they were twenty-one.

Robert Williams saw the “kissing case” as more than a local expression of the
irrational sexual lynchpin of white supremacy; the bizarre clarity of the case and the
strange politics of the cold war suggested a larger strategy. Like Martin Luther King
Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would do in
Birmingham four years later, Williams and his friends in Monroe set out to use
international politics of the cold war as a fulcrum to push the U.S. government to
intervene. Determined to make the “kissing case” a global metaphor for the American
racial dilemma, they fired off press releases, pestered reporters, hounded the wire
services, and put in motion what Time magazine called “a rolling snowball” of
worldwide publicity.


4


This publicity campaign quickly attracted the support of the Socialist
Workers Party (S WP), aTrotskyite group attempting to break with the American left’s
tendency to subordinate race to class. Efforts for socialism and black liberation must
meet as equal partners, C. L. R. James and Claude DeBruce had persuaded their
SWP comrades. DeBruce, an African American member, saw the need for an
independent black political leadership, preferably with ties to the NAACP, that could
“project a program in the interest of the mass of Negroes.” Thus when Robert
Williams emerged from the black South in 1958, the SWP stood poised to assist him
on his own terms. Beginning in 1958, The Militant, the SWP’s newspaper, carried
dozens of articles about Williams and Monroe—twenty-five on the “kissing case”
alone—coverage that overshadowed their reports on the Cuban revolution, the
anticolonial uprising in the Belgian Congo, and all the other developments in the
African American freedom struggle combined. “They knew I wasn’t going to join any
party,” he recalled, “because I had made that plain. 1 wasn’t interested in them.” The
reverse, however, was not true. Robert Williams “has some audacious plans which 1
think are feasible,” SWP organizer George Weissman wrote. “Indeed, the more I see
of him the more I think he has the possibility of becoming a real Negro leader.”
With logistical assistance from the SWP, Williams addressed audiences at labor
halls, liberal churches, and college auditoriums across the country. Soon the “kissing
case” emblazoned front pages around the globe. John Shure, head of the United
States Information Agency at the Hague, reported that he himself had received over
twelve thousand letters “even though the response does not appear to have been
organized.” While the White House and the State Department expressed alarm at the
damage to U.S. foreign relations, Williams had a ready answer. “It is asinine for
colored people to even think of sparing the U.S. State Department embarrassment
abroad,” he replied. “If the U.S. government is so concerned about its image abroad,
then let it create a society that will stand up under world scrutiny.” Three and a half
months after Hanover and Sissy had kissed each other, Governor Hodges
announced, under enormous political pressure, that the boys would be released.

“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” Moo re, an importantfigureinboth 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 125 th 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, andhe is the only fighting
man that we have got, and we have got to help him so he can stay down there,”’


5


because he defends himself, his family, his home, and his dignity. He does not in¬
troduce violence into a racist social system—the violence is already there, and has
always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist so¬
cial system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes
“resorting to violence” what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes
defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced
by white racists. We have shown in Monroe that with violence working both ways
constituted law will be more inclined to keep the peace.

When Afro-Americans resist and struggle for their rights they also possess
a power greater than that generated by their will and their hands. With the world
situation as it is today, the most racist and fascist United States government con¬
ceivable could not succeed in exterminating 20,000,000 people. We know there
is a great power struggle going on in the world today, and the colored peoples
control the true balance of power. We also know, from the statistics of the Detroit
race riots, that production in this country would fall in forty-eight hours. People
everywhere in the world would be ready to support our struggle.

Nor should we forget that these same deceiving pacifist-preaching well-
to-do southern blacks profit from the struggle, living lives of luxury while most
Afro-Americans continue to suffer. Are they any better than the Negro Quisling
in neighboring Charleston, North Carolina—a black man who rode around in a
new pink Cadillac with anti-NAACP and anti-integration literature, a huge roll of
money, and an expense account, all the blessings of the White Citizens’ Council? It
is an ironic sign that black Judases are becoming more expensive as the white racist
becomes desperate—though it is a small consolation to those of us who suffer from
his betrayals.

In Monroe, where we fought the Klan, we were being penalized. There
are children there growing up without any education, children without shoes, chil¬
dren without food. Old people without medical attention. For the Monroe Negro,
there is no work; there is no welfare. From all the money raised in the North by
the official black leadership, no one would send a penny to Monroe, because white
liberals who gave this money considered us to be outlaws and thugs. They preferred
to let us suffer rather than to identify themselves with our position. They sent truck
convoys into other places in the South, but penalized us because we took a militant
stand.

But our children who are growing up without shoes are also growing up
with a sense of direction they cannot obtain in the Jim Crow schools. There once
was a threat, in Monroe, of Negro teen-age gang war. It abated as the teen-agers re¬
solved their difficulties by coming to understand the problem. It is only natural to
expect the black youth to be infected with a desire to do something. Frustrated by
less active adults, this desire may be projected in the wrong direction. The vigor of
the youth can be channeled into constructive militant actions. It is simply a matter
of common sense to have these young Negroes constructively fight racial injustice
rather than fight among themselves. Danger is not a respecter of color lines; it is


34


traitors.” In Atlanta, a university professor, energetic about the new spirit on the
part of the Negroes, was very hopeful that new militant leadership would replace
the old Uncle Toms, whose days, he was confident, were numbered.

There are exceptions among us. The Uncle Toms, the Judases, and the
Quislings of the black “elite” would deny this rising consciousness. They do every¬
thing possible to make white Americans think that it is not true, while apologizing
to us for the very people who oppress us. Some of these “responsible” Negroes are
afraid that militant action damages “amiable race relations.” They complain that
race relations may deteriorate to a point that many Negroes may lose jobs. What
they mean is that they may lose their jobs. For the black workers, who are the first
to be fired, and last, if ever, to be hired, the situation is so bad it can’t deteriorate.

We realize that there must be a struggle within our own ranks to take the
leadership away from the black Quislings who betray us. Then the white liberals
who are dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into our struggle in the South
to convert us to pacifism will have to accept our understanding of the situation or
drop their liberal pretensions.

Why do the white liberals ask us to be non-violent? We are not the ag¬
gressors; we have been victimized for over 300 years! Yet nobody spends money
to go into the South and ask the racists to be martyrs or pacifists. But they always
come to the downtrodden Negroes, who are already oppressed and too submissive
as a group, and they ask them not to fight back. There seems to be a pattern of
some sort of strange coincidence of interest when whites preach a special doctrine
to Negroes. Like the choice of theology when the plantation-owners saw to the
Christianization of the slaves. Instead of the doctrines which produced the rugged
aggressively independent and justice-seeking spirit that we associate with Colonial
America as the New England Conscience, the slaves were indoctrinated in the most
submissive “trust-your-master” pie-in-the-sky after-you-die form of Christianity.

It is because our militancy is growing that they spend hundreds of thou¬
sands of dollars to convert us into pacifists. Because our militancy is growing they
come to us out of fear.

Of course, the respectable Negro leadership are the most outspoken ex¬
ponents of non-violence. But if these people, especially the ministers, are such pure
pacifists, why is it that so few, if any, criticize the war preparations of this country?
Why is it that so few speak out against the Bomb? Isn’t that the sort of preaching
one expects and hears from sincere pacifists? The responsible Negro leadership is
pacifist in so far as its one interest is that we do not fight the white racists; that we
do not “provoke” or enrage them. They constantly tell us that if we resort to violent
self-defense we will be exterminated. They are not stopping violence—they are only
stopping defensive violence against white racists out of a fear of extermination.

This fear of extermination is a myth which we’ve exposed in Monroe. We
did this because we came to have an active understanding of the racist system and
we grasped the relationship between violence and racism. The existence of violence
is at the very heart of a racist system. The Afro-American militant is a “militant”


33


Williams recounted. Williams found ready support among ITarlem intellectuals,
includingjulian Mayfield, John Henrik Clarke, John O. Killens,andother 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
identifiedwithcommunism,” Kelly Alexander, head oftheNorth 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
beingin 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 P UB LI CATION ” that “ I know the thought ofviolence 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


6


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 recon¬
sider 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?” He 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 an¬

ger 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 na¬
tional organization would ratify Wilkins’s suspension of Robert Williams. The
national office printed up a pamphlet, “The Single Issue in the Robert Williams
Case,”
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