The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 70/No. 20           May 22, 2006  
 
 
N.Y. forum discusses role of Black rights,
working-class leader Robert F. Williams
 
BY MICHAEL ITALIE  
NEW YORK—“The life of Robert F. Williams is of interest especially for those who want to build a revolutionary working-class party to achieve fundamental social change,” to work toward bringing the working class to power, said Joel Britton at a well-attended Militant Labor Forum here. His March 24 talk was on “Robert F. Williams, the Fight for Black Liberation, and the Coming American Revolution.” Britton is a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

Britton pointed out the best source for this history is the Militant. The socialist paper’s coverage of the Black rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s—including events that otherwise went unreported—gives a vivid picture of the mass, proletarian character of the movement that overturned Jim Crow segregation in the South.

He referred to numerous Militant articles depicting the outstanding role played by Williams when he headed the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina. What comes across is his confidence in the ability of working people and the oppressed to successfully stand up to their oppressors.

There is increased interest today in his legacy, Britton noted, because the documentary Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power has recently been shown on public television in many cities. The film takes its name from the 1962 book Negroes with Guns, which Williams wrote to explain why he and others in Monroe had organized armed self-defense against rightist thugs who tried to terrorize the Black community into giving up the fight against Jim Crow.

Getting out the truth about this working-class leader who was Black is especially important now, said Britton, because “the documentary omits so much of what Robert F. Williams fought for and did that you end up with a falsification of history.” It leaves out in particular his activity in defense of the Cuban Revolution and his collaboration with socialists and others in Black rights and other political struggles.  
 
Sustained working-class struggle
When the struggle began to heat up in the 1950s, said Britton, the middle-class individuals who headed up the local NAACP withdrew from the line of fire, and Williams stepped forward to become president of the chapter. He immediately set out to recruit workers to build up the ranks of the NAACP— at local pool halls, beauty parlors, and tenant farms. Williams drew on the skills and discipline he had acquired as a soldier in the Marines and as a worker in a union-organized auto plant.

“KKK meets gunfire in North Carolina,” read a headline in the Oct. 14, 1957, Militant. In the middle of a battle to desegregate the public swimming pool in Monroe, led by the reorganized NAACP chapter, the Black community had come under attack from the Ku Klux Klan, which acted with the complicity of local police and government officials. After an October 5 rally, an armed Klan motorcade drove to the home of NAACP vice president Dr. Albert Perry. But the night riders were put to flight by a well-organized defense force led by Williams.

A year later, the “kissing case” hit the national headlines. The Militant covered this fight, an example of the new fighting leadership that was developing in the civil rights movement. The socialist paper helped spread the truth about the story of how two Black boys, Hanover Thompson, aged nine, and Fuzzy Simpson, aged eight, were arrested in Monroe because one of them had been kissed by a white girl playmate.

Williams helped initiate the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (CCRI) to win broader support in the fight to free the two boys, who had been convicted of “sexual assault” and faced being sentenced to reform school until the age of 21. In addition to Williams and Perry, leaders of the CCRI included attorney Conrad Lynn, longtime civil rights worker Carl Braden, and George Weissman, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

“North Carolina Children Win Freedom. World-Wide Protest Compels Racists to Let Boys Go Home,” reported a Feb. 23, 1959, headline in the Militant. The CCRI had been receiving petitions across the country and worldwide calling for Hanover and Fuzzy’s release.

In the spring of 1959, following the acquittal of a white man for an attempted rape of a Black woman in Monroe, Williams was quoted in the press saying that in face of racist terror, the Black community should be willing to “meet violence with violence.” Leading up to the 1959 national convention of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins and other NAACP leaders seized on this incident to distance itself from Williams’s militant methods of mass struggle and charged him with advocating “retaliation” against whites. He was suspended for six months from his office as president of the Union County, North Carolina, chapter, but he refused to withdraw from the struggle.  
 
Defends Cuban Revolution
On Jan. 1, 1959, U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba as the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, headed by Fidel Castro, led workers and farmers to establish a revolutionary government. It mobilized working people to carry out a far-reaching social transformation including the outlawing of racist discrimination. “I wish every American Negro could visit Cuba and see what it really means to be treated as a first-class citizen,” said Williams, who first traveled there in 1960.

Williams became a founding member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), which campaigned to tell the truth about the revolution and organized protests against Washington’s efforts to overthrow it. “You would never have known this fact from the video documentary being shown now,” said Britton.

The Militant, on the other hand, published an article in its March 13, 1961, issue on a large FPCC meeting in Los Angeles. It reported how right-wing thugs “failed to prevent an audience of over 800 from entering the hall to hear Vincent Hallinan, former Progressive Party candidate for President, and Robert F. Williams, militant Southern Negro leader, speak on ‘The Case for Cuba.’”

During these years Williams was a target of government harassment. In the summer of 1961, framed up on kidnapping charges, Williams decided to flee the country. He lived in exile for eight years, first in Cuba, where he was the voice of Radio Free Dixie, and then in China, before returning to the United States.

Britton quoted from a message sent by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes to a November 1996 meeting in Detroit honoring Williams. The revolutionary fighter’s “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.” Barnes wrote.

“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.”  
 
 
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