Gun Ownership : Negroes with Guns : Rob Williams and Black Power

Akilah

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The first African American civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and violence, Robert F. Williams was born on February 26, 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina. The fourth of five children born to Emma Carter Williams and John Williams, Williams quickly learned to navigate the dangers of being black in the Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan was a powerful and feared force in Monroe, and the community where Williams grew up experienced regular brutalization at the hands of whites.

Williams’ grandmother, a well-read and proud woman who was born a slave in Union County in 1858, taught Williams to cherish his heritage and to stand up for himself. Before she died, she presented her young grandson with his first gun, a rifle that had belonged to his grandfather, as a symbol of their family’s resistance against racial oppression.

After high school Williams joined the Marines in hopes of being assigned to information services, where he could pursue journalism. Instead, he received a typical assignment given to African American Marines at that time: supply sergeant. Williams’ resistance to the Marine Corps’ racial discrimination earned him an “undesirable” discharge and he returned to Monroe.

In 1956, Williams took over leadership of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was close to disbanding due to a relentless backlash by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams canvassed for new members and eventually expanded the branch from only six to more than 200 members.

Williams also filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and formed the Black Guard, an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population. Members received weapons and physical training from Williams to prepare them to keep the peace and come to the aid of black citizens, whose calls to law enforcement often went unanswered.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/film.html
 
It is recognized that Rob Williams is another history telling moment in civil rights achievement. But he has did some deeds that would make him and his history used in a political slant for the Republican Party.

Some links to author of Robert Williams biography, attacking another attempt at 'white liberal' revisionist history. Since the author emphasis this himself, would that make him a 'white conservative' or 'white moderate'?

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/aas/tyson.html

Another symbolic feature is Robert Williams shaking hands with an alleged Chinese Communist forefather Mao and the State Department eagar for a debriefing from him.

Why him in particular?

The director and crew of the film.
http://www.jou.ufl.edu/documentary/negroeswithguns/bios.asp

Relationship with Jesse Helms, who happen to be the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina in the twentieth century, signifying the Southern politics move to the Republican Party. And Jesse Helms 'allowed' him to be let go from vicious authorites. Very suspect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms
In 1972, Helms ran for and won a seat in the United States Senate, defeating Nick Galifianakis. Benefitting from Richard Nixon's landslide re-election, Helms became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina in the twentieth century. In 1978, he successfully defended his seat against state Insurance Commissioner John Ingram. In 1984, in one of the most expensive contests in North Carolina history, Helms narrowly defeated Governor Jim Hunt, thanks largely to (then-President) Ronald Reagan's support and status. In 1990 and in 1996, Helms won against Harvey Gantt, who had been mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, thanks to a late-running ad appealing to racial tensions. Helms never won more than 53% of the vote, and he made no bones about the fact that he really only spoke for (or cared about) his older, conservative supporters.

And lastly Black Power and Robert Williams is a part of the title. Who was one of their founders? Eldridge Cleaver who became a 'born-again' Republican. From CNN,
http://www.cnn.com/US/9805/01/cleaver.late.obit/

Quote from CNN,

Cleaver became a born-again Christian, embraced anti-communism and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination for a Senate seat in California. He said his "red fighting" was born from his experiences in communist countries during his years on the run.
"I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die," Cleaver told interviewers during his congressional campaign.


We can make a simultaneous exchange with Robert Williams.

Lastly the article.
New Documentary Remembers Civil Rights Figure Robert Williams

Date: Sunday, February 05, 2006
By: Tim Whitmire, Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - In the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s, Robert Williams seemed to be everywhere.

The civil rights activist's 1962 book "Negroes with Guns" is credited with being part of the intellectual foundation for the founding of the Black Panther Party. After fleeing the United States in the early 1960s, the North Carolina native ended up a guest of Fidel Castro in Cuba, where he met Che Guevara. He left Cuba for China, where he witnessed the beginning of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

"Robert Williams," said Malcolm X, "was just a couple years ahead of his time."

But Williams' name isn't included in most present-day accounts of the civil rights movement. He is little remembered even in his home state, where his argument that blacks should arm themselves against the threat of violence by segregationist whites earned him at the height of his notoriety the label "violent crusader."

Williams is a natural subject for study, said filmmaker Sandra Dickson, whose documentary "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power" premieres Tuesday as part of PBS' Independent Lens series (check local listings).

The film, co-directed by Churchill Roberts, explores the events in the small town of Monroe, N.C., that made Williams a leading advocate of deviating from the nonviolent methods of Martin Luther King Jr. and the mainstream civil-rights movement.

"It's a very dramatic story," said Dickson, co-director of the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida. "He's a controversial and, in my opinion, often misunderstood figure."

The son of a railway worker, Williams grew up in Depression-era Monroe, about 25 miles southeast of Charlotte. He served in the military before returning home in the 1950s and getting involved in the fight to end Jim Crow laws.

He first came to prominence after a 1958 incident in which two black children, ages 8 and 10, were jailed on a rape charge after a white girl said she had kissed one of the boys. A local judge sentenced the boys to reform school.

Williams, who headed the local NAACP chapter, became what biographer Timothy Tyson calls "a one-man press office for the kissing case," winning international media coverage that compelled Gov. Luther Hodges to release the boys after four months.

But while Williams used nonviolent protest and boycotts, he was also arming local blacks and teaching them marksmanship and self-defense. He and other activists lived in fear for their lives amid what the documentary describes as widespread and open Ku Klux Klan activity in Monroe and surrounding Union County, where Tyson said Klan rallies regularly attracted thousands of participants.

"We were never looking for trouble," said Yusef Crowder, a member of one of Williams' "Black Guard" units, in the film. "As long as you're peaceful, we're peaceful; but if you become violent, we have to become violent."

That position conflicted with the beliefs of some civil-rights leaders and many of the white liberals who were beginning to support the movement. In 1959, the NAACP suspended Williams' chapter because of his Black Guard activities.

The two approaches clashed openly in the summer of 1961, when Freedom Riders from King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in Monroe to try to integrate the town through nonviolent protest - and prove to Williams that nonviolence was the best path. On a Sunday afternoon, the Freedom Riders clashed with the Klan and others in downtown Monroe, sparking what Tyson and the documentary describe as a race riot.

In the middle of the chaos, a white couple drove into the heart of Monroe's black community and were surrounded by a mob.

"Williams comes out of his house, saying, 'You're not killing these people in my front yard,' and stops them from being killed," Tyson said. He kept the couple in his home for a couple of hours, shielding them from the mob - an action that led local police to charge him with kidnapping.

"Negroes with Guns" brings the events of that summer to life with still photographs, newspaper articles and a contemporary news documentary -- "Robert Williams: Violent Crusader" -- broadcast in 1961 by Charlotte television station WBTV.

"We knew that this existed, but the station didn't know about it," Dickson said.

No film, however, is believed to have survived of Williams' 1961 interview with Jesse Helms, then a commentator for Raleigh's WRAL-TV who went on to a long career as a conservative U.S. senator. Helms, perhaps Monroe's most famous native, is believed to have been one of the last people to speak to Williams before he fled the city to avoid the kidnapping charge.

Few whites who lived in Monroe at the time were willing to work with the filmmakers, Dickson said, and only one white local, Vann Secrest, is interviewed onscreen. The owner of a vintage automobile Dickson wanted for the documentary refused to rent her the car because the film is about Williams.

The hourlong film speeds tantalizingly through Williams' globetrotting later years: his exiles in Cuba and China and his return to the United States at the behest of a Nixon-era State Department eager to debrief him on Mao prior to making their diplomatic efforts to reopen relations with China.

"Don't look at our film as a biography," Dickson said. "It is not. It nails down this key chapter in Rob Williams' life."

Tyson, author of the Williams biography "Radio Free Dixie," is interviewed extensively. He believes Williams is left out of modern accounts of the civil-rights movement because he "didn't fit into our kind of sugarcoated version" of that era.


"The history of the civil-rights movement has been largely written by white liberals who admire the movement and in their sort of paternalistic way wish to protect it from its complexities," Tyson said. In writing a "politically acceptable and soothing account ... they've tended to grind off the rough edges and paper over the passionate differences of opinion."

He said many of the tributes to Rosa Parks following her death last year left out the fact that she was a black nationalist and a gun owner. Williams and Parks were close - she delivered his eulogy when he was buried in Monroe following his death in 1996 at age 71.

"Williams gets ignored because you can't tell his story without messing up the mainstream story," Tyson said.


And now the NRA affiliation is like the icing on the cake.
 

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