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Robert Franklin Williams (1925-1996)

Robert Franklin Williams (1925-1996) was an African-American leader who became famous for advocating “armed self-defense” and inspiring groups such as the Black Panthers.   

Born in Monroe, North Carolina, in Union County on the South Carolina border, Williams worked in Detroit in the 1940s and served in the Marine Corps.  Returning to Monroe, Williams helped revive the Union County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Williams recruited members who did not fit the generally middle-class mold of the NAACP.

 Like civil rights activists throughout the South, Williams and the members of his chapter challenged Jim Crow segregation.  For instance, the public swimming pool was operated on a whites-only basis, and Williams’s NAACP chapter organized demonstrations in protest.  Williams also formed an African American self-defense association under the auspices of the National Rifle Association, and he claimed credit for resisting the local Ku Klux Klan.  In his newsletter, Crusader, Williams updated readers regarding his activities and elaborated his militant views.

Williams became a major influence in his community and in North Carolina.  When local courts, in two separate cases (one involving assault and one for rape), acquitted white defendants accused of mistreating black women, Williams told the media that black people should “meet lynching with lynching.”  The national NAACP denounced the remark and suspended Williams from his post for six months.  Williams also took a leading role in protesting the case of two African-American children sent to a reformatory for kissing a white girl.  The “Kissing Case” received worldwide publicity and embarrassed North Carolina leaders.  The children were ultimately released.

The Freedom Riders, activists who traveled the South employing nonviolent action to undermine segregation laws, came to Monroe in 1961.  Williams was willing to work with the Freedom Riders, but not to endorse their nonviolent principles.  As angry whites confronted the Freedom Riders, the situation degenerated into a race riot.  While driving through an African-American neighborhood of Monroe, a white couple was captured by angry residents, and Williams kept the white couple at his house, he said, to protect them.  The white couple later claimed that they had been kidnapped by Williams, and their allegations led to an indictment of Williams and several codefendants.  Claiming to fear for his life, Williams fled Monroe and remained elusive during a federal manhunt; he went to Canada and then to Mexico.  Eventually he flew to Cuba. While in Cuba, Williams became a guest of the Fidel Castro’s regime and continued sending Crusader to supporters in the United States.  He also ran a radio propaganda program, Radio Free Dixie, with African Americans as the target audience.

Although he lived in Castro’s Cuba, Williams claimed that he was never a Communist.  While on the island, however, he was involved in the infighting then affecting the global Communist movement.  The Castro regime, and the U.S. Communists whom it supported, held that a Communist revolution in the United States would involve workers of all races.  Williams, however, believed that white workers were racists who profited from the exploitation of African Americans, thereby ruling themselves out as a revolutionary force.  Williams’s views, and his support of Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse-Tung, made for tension between Williams and his Cuban hosts, who sided with Soviet Russia in its split with China.  Williams ultimately moved to China, where he found the political atmosphere more congenial, and where he was able to continue publishing Crusader for dissemination in the United States.

Crusader articles during Williams’s exile gave detailed explanations of how black revolutionaries in the United States could wage war against the government.  Suggested methods included the use of Molotov cocktails, flying remote-controlled airplanes filled with explosives into military bases, and literally lighting fires throughout the country so as to tie down emergency personnel.  Williams later told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that his advice on revolutionary techniques had not been intended as incitement but only as warnings to white Americans as to what they might experience if they continued denying African Americans’ constitutional rights.

During his exile, Williams agreed to serve as nominal leader of various radical African-American groups, including the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).  Radical African Americans found a source of inspiration in Williams and his militant attitude toward an allegedly racist American establishment.

Williams returned to the United States as the 1960s ended, flying into the Detroit airport in a special plane and opposing efforts to extradite him to North Carolina to face kidnapping charges.  In 1976, the kidnapping charges were dropped and the extradition effort ceased.  Williams spent the final years of his life in Baldwin, Michigan, where he worked with various local organizations such as Peoples Association for Human Rights and FiveCAP Inc. 

Williams died in 1996.  At his funeral service in Monroe, civil-rights heroine Rosa Parks delivered one of the eulogies.  Parks had been involved with the less militant branch of the civil rights movement yet was willing to praise a fellow enemy of Jim Crow segregation.

In line with the ethos of many 1960s radicals, Williams called uncompromising confrontation with what he saw as the racist, white-power structure controlling the United States.  Criticizing the less-violent stance of the mainstream civil rights movement, Williams tapped into the anger many African Americans at the behavior of racist whites.  Williams naturally appealed to the Black Panthers and other more radical African Americans, who treasured Williams’s Negroes With Guns, an account of his struggles in Monroe.