Robert F. Williams

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Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was an American civil rights leader and author best known for being president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1950s and into 1961 and serving as the first president of the provisional government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), a black nationalist and separatist organization. During the Jim Crow era, Williams succeeded in integrating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe. At a time of high racial tension and official abuses, Williams promoted armed Black self-defense in the United States. In addition, he helped gain support for gubernatorial pardons in 1959 for two young African American boys who had received lengthy reformatory sentences in what was known as the Kissing Case of 1958. Williams obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and set up a rifle club to defend Black people in Monroe from Ku Klux Klan or other attackers. The local chapter of the NAACP supported Freedom Riders who traveled to Monroe in the summer of 1961 in a test of integrating interstate buses. In August 1961, Williams and his wife left the United States to avoid federal kidnapping charges, first traveling to Canada, then Cuba, and later the People's Republic of China. These charges were dropped by the state when his trial opened in 1975, following his return in 1970. Williams advocated black self-defense. Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962) has been reprinted many times, most recently in 2013. It details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights Movement. The text was widely influential; Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton and African American Defense League founder Mauricelm-Lei Millere cited it as a...