Robert F. Williams

Robert Franklin Williams was born on the twenty-sixth of February 1925 at Monroe, North Carolina, the son of John L. Williams — a railway worker and World War One veteran — and Emma C. Williams, a domestic worker. His paternal grandfather Sikes Williams had been a Reconstruction-era Republican who edited a small Black newspaper in Monroe in the 1880s before being driven out by white-supremacist violence. Williams was raised in the Newtown district of Monroe and educated at the segregated Winchester Avenue High School.

He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1944 to 1946 — the first cohort of African Americans admitted to the Marine Corps under the Roosevelt executive order desegregating combat-arms recruitment — and returned to Monroe in 1947 under conditions of severe Klan and Citizens' Council violence. He was elected president of the Monroe NAACP branch in 1956. He led across the following five years the campaign that desegregated the Monroe public swimming pool, the city library and the bus station.

His decisive intervention was the petition of the National Rifle Association in May 1957 — granted by the NRA in October 1957 — for a charter of the Monroe Black Armed Guard. He organised the Monroe NAACP branch as the National Rifle Association-chartered Black Armed Guard with sixty members, and on the fifth of October 1957 the Armed Guard repelled a Ku Klux Klan motorcade that had besieged the home of the Monroe NAACP vice-president Dr. Albert E. Perry. The action — the first documented instance of an organised armed African American defence of community against Klan violence in the twentieth-century South — became the principal documentary basis of his subsequent writing.

In August 1961 he was charged by Monroe authorities with kidnapping a white couple who had — by Williams's account — sought shelter in his home from a riot occurring nearby. He fled with his wife Mabel and two sons to Cuba, where they were granted political asylum and he conducted from Havana the Radio Free Dixie broadcasts from 1962 to 1965 that reached the southern United States via short-wave. He published his decisive book Negroes with Guns in 1962. He moved from Cuba to China in 1965 and lived there until 1969.

He returned to the United States in 1969 — the North Carolina kidnapping charges were dropped in 1976 — and settled in Baldwin, Michigan. He died of Hodgkin's lymphoma at Grand Rapids on the fifteenth of October 1996, at seventy-one.

He is honored here as the theorist of armed self-defense.