The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.39           November 4, 1996 
 
 
Tribute To Life Of Black Rights Fighter  

We are reprinting below a tribute sent by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes to the Robert Williams Tribute Committee, which is organizing a meeting to celebrate the life of civil rights activist Robert F. Williams. The meeting, which will take place November 1 in Detroit, was originally planned to honor Williams while he was still alive. Williams died on October 15; the letter below was written prior to his death.

Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1925. After working various factory jobs in the north and spending time in the military during the Korean War, Williams returned to Monroe where he led a fight by Blacks in the late 1950s and early 1960s to defend themselves, including with guns when necessary, from violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. He was framed-up and forced into exile in 1961 for his civil rights activity and defense of the Cuban revolution. After living in Cuba and China, he returned to the United States in 1969.

Dear Friends,

The Socialist Workers Party welcomes this opportunity to greet and pay tribute to Robert F. Williams. His integrity and courage as a leader of the struggle against racism, exploitation, and oppression set an important example for a generation becoming active in politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The struggles he helped initiate and lead to desegregate public facilities in the Jim Crow South, and to organize self-defense of the Black community against Ku Klux Klan nightriders, made Monroe, North Carolina, in those years an emblem of resistance to bigotry and social injustice, not just in the United States but around the world.

In 1958-59 Robert F. Williams came to the defense of two Monroe schoolboys - one seven years old, the other nine, both of them Black - who were arrested and railroaded to jail on charges of "assaulting and molesting a white female." Their "crime?" That one of the boys had been kissed by a seven-year- old white girl in the presence of the other boy (the latter was convicted as an "accomplice"). Williams and other fighters in Monroe launched the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice, in which members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance participated alongside many others across the country. Many of its supporters later formed the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants in 1961, when Williams himself was framed up on kidnapping charges and forced into exile for eight years.

I personally met Robert Williams in early 1961, when members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and civil rights supporters at Minnesota's Carleton College organized a meeting at which he was a featured speaker. Along with Ed Shaw, a Midwest leader of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee who was also a leader of the Detroit branch of the SWP at that time, Williams was on a nationwide speaking tour in defense of the Cuban revolution and in support of the rising struggle for Black rights. The meeting had an enormous political impact on all of us. I recall being struck during the discussion period by how comfortable each of the speakers was in fielding questions about both the socialist revolution unfolding in Cuba and the battles for Black rights under way in this country.

Working people and youth today need to learn and relearn this history, so we can emulate these examples. Doing so will better prepare all of us to resist probes against our democratic rights, as the bipartisan rulers press to take back social gains won by labor and civil rights struggles earlier in this century. In the course of such battles, as Malcolm X said, young fighters will recognize and assert their self-worth and transform themselves as they work to transform society. These militants are and will be the best tribute to those like Robert F. Williams in whose footsteps they tread.

Once again, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party I send greetings to Robert Williams, Mabel Williams, and other participants in the Detroit meeting your committee is organizing.

In solidarity and in fond salute,

s/Jack Barnes

National Secretary,

Socialist Workers Party  
 
 
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