Robert Williams returned home from the army in the spring of 1946 to the same bitter irony that had confronted countless black veterans before him. They shed blood to protect democracy abroad, and bled again under racial apartheid at home.
Monroe, North Carolina, remained much the same as when Williams was a boy and witnessed a scene of petty brutality that confirmed what it meant to be on the wrong side of the color line. Turning the corner toward the courthouse, he stepped into the scene of a burly white cop arresting a woman in a fashion that captured the status of Negroes across the South. The man with a badge was “Big Jesse” Helms Sr., father of the future United States senator. For the rest of his life, Williams carried the image of Big Jesse flattening that woman with a sock to the jaw, and then dragging her off to jail with her dress up over her head and screaming as the concrete singed her back and thighs. As an old man, Williams the revolutionary—leaning on a cane, sporting a big, grey afro—would talk like it was yesterday about the laughter of the white bystanders and how the cluster of black courthouse loiterers hung their heads and scurried away.
The courthouse loiterers represented a particular stripe of man. Some would say that Robert Williams was a different kind of man. Maybe so. But more important is that Robert Williams was not alone. He is an exemplar, but he was not unusual. He was part of a long tradition of black men and women who thought it just and natural to answer aggression with corresponding force. They kept and carried guns and believed in self-defense as a fundamental right. Their story is obscured by the popular narrative of the nonviolent civil-rights movement. But alongside that narrative, deep in the culture, is a rich vein of grit and steel. Robert Williams was heir to that tradition. His bloodline was thick with it.
Williams’s early experiences confirmed the privilege of white skin, but that did not cow him. Even though his people were no match for the power of the state and the culture of Jim Crow, when pushed to the wall, they bucked up and fought back. There is a hint of this in the Williams clan back as far as grandfather Sikes. Over the course of his life, Sikes Williams was a slave, a farmer, a reconstruction newspaper editor, a perpetual optimist, and finally, always, a realist. In the middle of a hostile environment, with powerful reasons to despair, Sikes Williams worked hard and hoped for the best for himself and his family. He also understood his responsibility in that moment where his next breath or the safety of those he loved was threatened by imminent violence. One of Robert’s prized possessions was a rifle that, according to family lore, had been used by Sikes Williams in matters of life or death.
Grandpa Sikes was a hero of Robert’s imagination. But the firsthand confirmation of the Williams family backbone came in another childhood episode, when word spread that a mob was forming to lynch a Negro who had fought with police. Rumor circulated that in addition to dragging the man from his cell for a hanging or burning, the mob also was planning to run some black folk out of town. The old people, and some young ones, who had witnessed the terror of the lynch mob, hid or prepared to flee.
Williams’s father, “Daddy John” heard the rumors too. But when it was time to head out for work on the graveyard shift at the mill, he picked up his lunch pail and left the house as usual. The only difference this time was, before stepping out the door, he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his overalls. Fortunately, neither the lynching nor the chasing came that night. But Robert never forgot his father’s steel in that environment of fear and carried with him the image of that pistol, slipped quietly into the overalls pocket of a man who was not looking for trouble.
Later, when Robert Williams became an inflammatory figure, white people would say he should be more like his father, someone they considered a good Negro who kept his place. Robert knew the only difference between them was that Daddy John had the luck never to face a threat that would have turned him into a bad Negro with a gun. While the casual observer might take his kindness for weakness, even as an old man, Daddy John thanked his luck and still prepared for the worst. “Always the shotgun was there,” Robert remembered, “it was always loaded and it was always at the door. And that was the tradition.”1
Robert Williams was honorably discharged from the service, but only barely so. He served at least one stint in the brig for insubordination, or, in his words, “refusing to be a nigger.” Back home, he faced a similar problem. Monroe in 1946 was Klan territory. And it was not long before the insubordinate soldier was in conflict with the Invisible Empire.
Bennie Montgomery was Williams’s childhood friend. Bennie was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and discharged with a metal plate in his head. He was never really the same after that. Out of the service, Bennie cycled quickly back to his ordained place in the Jim Crow South—into the fields, chopping and shoveling. Home only a few months, he got into a scrap with his white employer. With the pleasures of Saturday night on his mind, Bennie approached the boss around noon and asked for his wages. Workers were always paid at the end of the day, and Bennie knew it. The boss rewarded his impudence with a slap and a kick. They tussled. By the end of it, Bennie had pulled a knife and killed the man. Later, police found Bennie, still in bloody clothes, drinking beer at a local dive, just sitting there like nothing had happened.2
The Klan threatened to lynch Bennie. So the authorities moved him from Monroe. He was quickly convicted of murder and executed. But the execution of Bennie Montgomery did not satisfy the Klan. When the state shipped his body back home for burial, the Klan proclaimed that the remains belonged to them. They planned to drag Bennie’s body through the streets.
Before that could happen, the black men of the community met at a barbershop and worked up a plan. By the time the Klan motorcade reached the Harris Funeral Home to seize Bennie’s body, forty black men with rifles and shotguns were already in place, hidden where the cover allowed. The motorcade stopped. The black men showed themselves and leveled their guns. Unprepared for a real fight, the Klansmen drove away and Bennie got a civilized burial.3
Robert Williams was one of the men who drew down on the Klan that night. That same year across the South, black veterans marched and protested and armed themselves against reprisals in Birmingham, Alabama; Decatur, Mississippi; and Durham, North Carolina. Among these men was a young Medgar Evers, home from the army and pressed to the edge of an armed confrontation at the Decatur courthouse, where a mob rose against his attempt to register to vote. Robert Williams was not alone.
Monroe had a slippery hold on Williams. After marrying Mabel and seeing his first son born, he ranged north to Detroit for work on the assembly lines. But almost as soon as he was gone, he talked of returning home. By 1950, he had moved the family back south and enrolled under the GI Bill in the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. He wanted to be a writer. A year before finishing, with his government money spent, Williams moved north again for work. He and Mabel sublet a little apartment on Eighty-Eighth Street, in New York City. The building was not generally available to blacks, but the Williamses got in through some radical unionist friends Robert had met at work. The white neighbors were less enlightened than Williams’s progressive coworkers. Retreating from the hostility, Mabel stayed in the apartment most of the time. She kept a 9-millimeter pistol close by. It was not a place to make a home, and the Williamses soon left, with Robert chasing work wherever there was promise or rumor of it.
In 1954, induced by promises of training in radio and journalism, Williams enlisted in the Marine Corps. Posted at Camp Pendleton, California, he was promptly installed as a supply sergeant. The promise of training in journalism evaporated with the explanation that blacks did not work in the Information Services. Angry and defiant, Williams fired off missives to Congress complaining about the bait and switch. Then he sent a nasty letter and a telegram to President Eisenhower, threatening to renounce his US citizenship in protest of his mistreatment. This ultimately was enough to earn him a dishonorable discharge from the Marines and a train ticket back to Monroe.
Despite Williams’s immediate circumstances, the outlook actually was brightening for blacks in 1954. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. But it would take far more than a Supreme Court opinion to kill off Jim Crow. White opposition to Brown was deep and often vicious. North Carolina governor Luther Hodges, immediately went nuclear, fulminating about black and white amalgamation. State government bureaucrats schemed to maintain de facto segregation. In Monroe, the white reaction against those who aimed to live the message of Brown ran from veiled warnings to economic reprisals, to threats and acts of violence.
In 1956, the Klan held a huge rally, led by Reverend James “Catfish” Cole, a tent evangelist and carnival barker from South Carolina. Cole stirred up support through a series of rallies, some drawing more than fifteen thousand people. In the space of a few months, two murders, a cross burning, and dynamite attacks were attributed to the Klan. The combination of economic pressure and violence dampened local enthusiasm for the NAACP’s efforts to press enforcement of Brown.
When Robert Williams joined the Monroe NAACP, membership was down to six, and the chapter was ready to disband. Fearing economic sanctions as well as Klan violence, the comparatively middle-class folk who had run the branch handed Williams the presidency and soon abandoned the organization. Set adrift by the cautious strivers, Williams recruited new members from people who had been ignored by the clique of black bourgeoisie. He went to the pool halls, the street corners, and the tenant farms, and to the black veterans, some of them comrades in the 1947 defense of Bennie Montgomery’s remains. Within two years, Williams would grow the Monroe branch from basically just him, to more than three hundred members.
One of Williams’s first controversial acts as chapter president came after a young black boy drowned at a local swimming hole. Monroe had a pool for whites. It was built with public money but excluded blacks, who were relegated to ponds, lakes, or old quarries. Every summer black children drowned in these makeshift swimming holes. The Monroe Parks Commission briefly considered granting black kids one or two days a week to swim. But that was deemed too expensive because of the need to change the pool water after Negroes used it. When Williams and his allies continued to press the issue, including one encounter where he brandished a pistol to escape a threatening crowd of counter-protesters, whites circulated a petition asking that “local Negro integrationists especially Williams and NAACP Vice President, Dr. Albert Perry, be forced to leave Monroe.”4
The petition was at least nominally democratic compared to the work of Klan potentate Catfish Cole. Cole whipped up sympathetic crowds screeching that “a Nigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath. He is looking for a funeral.” Cole held five rallies over as many weeks. At the end of each one, the Klan drove through Monroe’s black section, blaring horns, throwing debris, and shooting into the air. At the head of these drives was Monroe Police chief, A. A. Mauney, who described them as “motorcades” that he led simply to keep order. On at least one occasion, members of the motorcade fired shots into Dr. Albert Perry’s home. Williams complained and requested intervention from the mayor and the governor and with notable persistence sent another letter to President Eisenhower. The only evident response was from local politicians who explained that the Ku Klux Klan had a right to meet and organize, same as the NAACP.5
Around the same time, the death threats started. The main targets were Williams and Dr. Perry. Williams began wearing a Colt .45 caliber automatic pistol wherever he went. The gun was familiar, identical to the US Army Model 1911 sidearm. Surplus Colts were widely available in the civilian market and sometimes sold through the US government’s Civilian Marksmanship Program, administered by the National Rifle Association, which Williams promptly joined. Williams carried the big gun in a hip holster, “cocked and locked,” the hammer clicked back (some would say menacingly), so with a quick swipe of thumb safety, the gun would fire eight fat 230 grain slugs as fast as he could press the trigger.
Williams carried the .45 out of legitimate fear of attack, but it was still an inflammatory act. Up to that point, the Monroe NAACP had enjoyed a smattering of support from progressive whites. That support had faded when Williams pushed the swimming-pool issue. It ended entirely when he began wearing the Colt.6
Although Williams was president of the Monroe chapter, many whites felt that the vice president, Dr. Albert Perry, was the greater threat. He was comparatively affluent, and many suspected he was the group’s primary financial backer. Unlike many middle-class black folk, Perry was relatively immune from white economic pressure.
One night, Perry’s wife interrupted a chapter meeting with a panicked call. They had received another death threat. She knew about the earlier threats, of course. But this was the first time she had answered the phone herself and heard a voice dripping with venom say we are going to kill you.
Dr. Perry rushed home. The rest of the men disbanded the meeting, retrieved their guns, and went to guard Perry’s house. They camped that night in his garage, some sitting up in folding chairs with shotguns and rifles across their laps, others standing watch and napping on cots, with rifles and shotguns stacked nearby. They soon determined that the threat was too serious for such ad hoc measures and developed an organized system of rotating guards. Off and on, more than sixty of them guarded the Perrys in shifts.7
In October 1957, Catfish Cole held another big Klan rally in Monroe, followed by the traditional motorcade. The destination was Dr. Albert Perry’s house. As they approached, some of the hooded revelers fired shots at Perry’s neat brick split-level. They were surprised at the response. Anticipating the threat, Williams and the black men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions. One account puts it this way:
It was just another good time Klan night, the high point of which would come when they dragged Dr. Perry over the state line if they did not hang him or burn him first. But near Dr. Perry’s home their revelry was suddenly shattered by the sustained fire of scores of men who had been instructed not to kill anyone if it were not necessary. The firing was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some abandoned their automobiles and had to continue on foot.8
Maybe exaggerated in memory, another defender recalled, “When we started firing, they run. We run them out and they started crying and going on. . . . The Klans was low-down people that would do dirty things. But they found out that you would do dirty things too, then they’d let you alone. [They] didn’t have the stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community.” In the aftermath, the local press was actually critical of the Klan, attributing the incident significantly to the provocative motorcade. The city council agreed. In an emergency meeting, it passed an ordinance banning KKK motorcades. Outside Monroe, however, the defiance of Williams and his neighbors prompted sympathetic responses like the $260 contribution from a congregation in Harlem to purchase rifles and requests from other communities for help in setting up black rifle clubs.9
This was a time of tremendous stress for Williams. His financial situation was precarious. White employers or lenders often tightened the screws on blacks who pressed the civil-rights agenda. At least partly due to his activism, Williams had difficulty finding and keeping work. His frustration is evident in an article he wrote for the newsletter, the Crusader. He disdained “Big cars, fine clothes, big houses and college degrees.” Manhood, Williams claimed, was more elemental. It meant standing up and taking care of people who depended on you.
But what precisely did that mean? What about the chance that standing up got you knocked down or carried off? Then what good were you to your family and community? Williams’s thinking on these questions would soon be sharpened. The lesson came from an unlikely confrontation between the nearby Lumbee Indian tribe and the Klan.
The Lumbee incident was instigated by the now-familiar Catfish Cole, this time exercised by reports of race mixing between whites and Lumbees. Cole laid this sin at the feet of the Lumbee women, disparaging their morals and their “half-breed” children. He announced publicly, “we are going to have a cross burning and scare them up.” After several small cross burnings and public fulminations about mongrelization, Cole’s Klan planned a widely advertised rally, near Maxton. Before the rally, Cole was warned by the sheriff against further provoking the Lumbees. He had gotten perfunctory warnings like this before. Undeterred, he continued plans for the big event.10
On the appointed day, in a roadside field, the Klansmen gathered in the darkness. They set up a portable generator, a PA system, and a kerosene-soaked cross. As the speechmaking started, a Lumbee man swooped in on Catfish Cole. Out of the surrounding darkness, more Lumbees, some would later say several hundred of them, gave a war cry and fired guns into the air. Many of the Klansmen were armed but were unprepared for a gun battle with unknown adversaries hidden in the darkness. Klansmen ran for their cars, abandoning their generator, their little buttons and pamphlets, and their cross. Catfish Cole fled into the swamp, leaving his wife, Carolyn, behind. Four people were injured, reportedly by falling bullets.
The Lumbees’ celebration was carried by the national news. After pushing Carolyn Cole’s Cadillac out of the ditch and bidding her good-bye, the Indians lit the Klan cross and burned an effigy of her husband. The next day, some of them strutted in Klan robes and hats abandoned by members of the Invisible Empire. Life magazine featured a playful photograph, taken several days later, of a beaming Simeon Oxendine, a Lumbee leader, wrapped in a confiscated Ku Klux Klan banner. Even a few local papers seemed to celebrate the Lumbee rout of Cole and his minions, quoting Simeon Oxendine, that “if the Negroes had done something like this a long time ago, we wouldn’t be bothered with the KKK.”11
Oxendine’s assessment is intriguing because it raises questions that would plague Robert Williams. Williams was committed to standing like a man and fighting back. But the tougher questions were how much fighting, what type, and within what boundaries? The Lumbees were a tiny slice of the population and insignificant at the ballot box. Their rout of Catfish Cole, the carnival barker, was a sideshow that did not threaten the balance of political power. Responding to Cole’s threats to return to Lumbee territory with thousands of armed Klansmen, Governor Hodges pressed the state to indict Cole on charges of inciting a riot. Cole was convicted and served more than a year in prison.
Negroes with guns had defended Bennie Montgomery’s body from desecration and had backed down Klansmen intent on savaging Dr. Albert Perry. But those episodes could still be cast as simple self-defense against Klan provocation. Certainly, Williams saw them that way. They did not clearly cross the line into organized political violence.
This had been a crucial distinction for generations. In different ways over time, blacks recognized the folly of political violence. Ultimately outnumbered and out-gunned, Negroes would win nothing as a people through violence. The only plausible tools for group advancement were moral suasion rooted perhaps in religion or American ideals and generally dependent on coalitions with white progressives or enlightened pragmatists. Like generations before him, Williams was acutely conscious of the essential boundary between self-defense and political violence. And, at least in his own mind, he was cautious not to step over it.
Of course, even legitimate private self-defense could be perilous for blacks. Even those who took up arms and protected themselves against imminent threats might still be at the mercy of some sheriff or prosecutor or all-white jury, who would say their violence was not justified. But many times, things did not get that far. Many blacks benefited from the phenomenon, now confirmed by modern researchers, that in most episodes of armed self-defense, no shots are fired and in the remaining fraction, mostly no one is hit. So even in an era where the justice system was overtly biased against blacks, it was plausible to gamble on armed self-defense. And many people would.12
Even where shots were fired and someone was injured or killed, the aftermath could vary greatly. In black-on-black confrontations, white authorities might easily dismiss the incident as just a black thing, not worth pursuing. This fueled responses like the 1940s initiative of the Mississippi Delta Committee for Better Citizenship to “ensure greater punishment for Black criminals who committed offenses against Blacks.” As circumstances changed, white intervention could also complicate things further, as reflected in one activist’s lament that “a Negro who is the favorite of an influential white man can kill another Negro with impunity.”13
Black protest against injustice was growing across the South. The evolving political strategy—pressed by national civil-rights organizations (some of them capitalizing on interracial coalitions and formally disavowing violence), their local affiliates, and independent grass-roots groups—was mainly passive resistance using the tools of sit-ins, marches, and boycotts. The white reaction was sometimes vicious, and self-defense by blacks under those circumstances risked a spillover into political violence. This was the atmosphere in which Robert Williams sparked an incident that captures the strategic burden, continuous tactical assessment, and boundary drawing that frame the black tradition of arms.
In May 1960, at the Union County Courthouse, Lewis Medlin stood charged with rape. Medlin was white. His accuser, Mary Ruth Reed, was black. At the time of the alleged attack, she also was pregnant. According to the charge, Medlin came to her cabin while her husband was in the fields and tried to rape her as her five children stood by. Mary Ruth broke away and fled into the yard, where Medlin caught her and beat her. A white neighbor intervened and then called the police.
The Reeds resisted both blandishments and threats in pursuit of their full measure of justice in the courts. With Mary Ruth’s white neighbor backing up her story, there was reason to be hopeful. But Medlin’s lawyer had a good feel for the dynamics of the place and time. He pursued a two-prong defense, arguing first that Medlin was innocent because he was just “drunk and having a little fun.” Next, he brought Medlin’s wife to the stand, introduced her as “a pure flower of life . . . one of God’s greatest gifts.” Then he asked the jury of twelve white men whether it was plausible that Medlin would have strayed from his beautiful southern flower—then pointing to Mary Ruth—“for that!” The jury deliberated for about half an hour and then acquitted Medlin.14
Blacks in the balcony of courtroom erupted in anger. Medlin was skirted out the side door. Robert Williams, who had urged calm and pressed people to let the system work, was besieged by the angry and the tearful. Some of them, most cuttingly the women, who over time had come to trust Williams as a man in the community they could depend on, actually blamed him for urging restraint. It was a tipping point for Williams. Later, he would recall it in grander themes, invoking the long American tradition of armed resistance to tyranny. But on the day of the acquittal, his reaction was visceral, provoked by raw impulses of sex, race, and a code of honor as old as the South. The case had drawn enough attention that national news organizations were on hand to broadcast Williams saying this.
We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court and it becomes necessary to punish them ourselves. In the future we are going to have to try and convict them on the spot. We cannot rely on the law. We can get no justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is done, we must right then and there, on the spot be prepared to inflict punishment on these people. Since the federal government will not bring a halt to lynching in the South, and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally, if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method.15
Williams’s statement triggered the perennial worry. An organized program of violence risked an overwhelming violent response and promised to alienate essential white allies. It also highlighted the paradox that despite the worry about political violence hurting the broader freedom movement, armed self-defense was a crucial private resource for blacks. Through rhetoric, policy, and practice, emerging leaders and ordinary black folk tried to accommodate these two concerns by maintaining a clear boundary between foolish political violence and righteous self-defense. In the view of some people, Robert Williams had crossed over the line.
The headlines blazed, “NAACP Leader Urges Violence.” The Carolina Times called it the biggest civil-rights story of 1959. Southern editorials attributed Williams’s “bloodthirsty remark” directly to the national office. The Charleston News and Courier ranted, “Hatred is the stock in trade of the NAACP. High officials of the organization may speak in cultivated accents and dress like Wall Street lawyers, but they are engaged in a revolutionary enterprise.”16
When word of Williams’s statement reached NAACP headquarters in New York, Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins was immediately on the phone to him. The gravity of the situation was plain, and Wilkins recorded the call. Hearing that Williams was planning to make a follow-up statement on national television, Wilkins warned, “You know, of course, that it is not the policy of the NAACP to advocate meeting lynching with lynching. You are going to make it clear that you are not speaking for the NAACP?” After a tense exchange, and realizing that Williams’s statement was now firmly linked to the NAACP, Wilkins dispatched a telegram suspending him as branch president.17
At a press conference the next day, Williams dialed back his tone, stating that he was not advocating any sort of group political violence by blacks and was not advocating retaliatory lynching. But still he insisted, “Negroes have to defend themselves on the spot when they are attacked.” At NAACP headquarters, Roy Wilkins was not convinced by Williams’s contrition and worried privately that Williams’s rhetorical opposition to political violence was a facade deployed to win sympathy and perhaps gain reinstatement.
With Wilkins unmoved, Williams appealed his dismissal directly to the membership at the 1959 annual convention. The body upheld Wilkin’s decision but added an important caveat: “We do not deny but reaffirm the right of an individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults.” The report of the Resolutions Committee that brought the issue to the floor noted in its preamble, the NAACP’s long support of the right of self-defense, “by defending those who have exercised the right of self-defense, particularly in the Arkansas Riot Case, the Sweet case in Detroit, the Columbia, Tennessee Riot cases and the Ingram case in Georgia.”18
This view was underscored and systematized by Martin Luther King’s separate assessment of the Williams controversy. King’s treatment is the signal statement of the thrust and boundaries of the black tradition of arms, capturing the organic policy and practice of generations.
In a widely reprinted exchange of essays with Williams, King articulated three distinct categories of response to violent attacks and political oppression. The first, pure nonviolence, is difficult, King said. It “cannot readily or easily attract large masses, for it requires extraordinary discipline and courage.” The second response, said King, was implicit in the freedom struggle and should not discourage outsiders from supporting the movement:
Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi. . . . When the Negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects.
This explicit endorsement of armed self-defense, contrasted with King’s third assessment, illustrates vividly the core theme of the black tradition of arms. The third approach, Williams’s approach, said King, advocated “violence as a tool of advancement, organization as in warfare . . . [and posed] incalculable perils.” Political goals, King argued, were best achieved by nonviolent, “socially organized masses on the march.”19
King’s assessment was only one aspect of a robust community engagement of the issue. Louis Lautier of the influential Baltimore Afro-American argued that Williams had not advocated political violence, but merely that “colored people should defend themselves if and when violence is directed at them.” In the Arkansas State Press, legendary activists Daisy and L. C. Bates, longtime gun owners who soon would fire shots in self-defense, were equivocal on Roy Wilkins’s contention that Williams had crossed the line into advocacy of political violence. Wilkins offered the Bateses a series of blandishments to secure their support in the fight against Williams. Wilkins got his vote, but Daisy and L. C. Bates remained firm on the principle of private self-defense, warning that “nonviolence never saved George Lee in Belzoni, Miss., or Emmett Till, nor Mack Parker at Poplarville, Miss.” Anne Braden, enduring white activist for racial justice, reprinted the King and Williams essays in the Southern Patriot, and her summary succinctly captured the black tradition of arms. No one disputes the right to defend home and family, she explained, “What the nonviolent movement says is that the weapons of social change should be nonviolent.”20
The NAACP national office received protests from the branches that supported Williams. In Monroe, the branch showed its continuing support for Williams by electing his wife, Mabel, president in his place. The Brooklyn branch wired Roy Wilkins in protest of the “illegal and arbitrary removal from office of Robert F. Williams for expressing sentiments to which we subscribe.” This and other support for Williams raised the question of whether some in the community had abandoned the traditional commitment to avoid political violence at all costs. As we will see, this was neither the first nor the last time that this commitment would be challenged.21
Fig. 1.1. Robert and Mabel Williams in the 1950s. (From the personal collection of Mabel R. Williams.)
A more moderate tone was exhibited by black journalist John McCray, in a Baltimore Afro-American article titled, “There’s Nothing New about It.” McCray’s assessment confirmed the basic boundaries of the black tradition of arms. On issues of social change, he said, “A minority group cannot hope to win in campaigns of violence.” On the other hand, McCray acknowledged without criticism that black self-defense had deep roots. “Today, thousands of our people have secured ‘protection’ in their homes, mostly with the intent to repel night riders who, years ago, were terrors to their forbearers.”22
With debate raging, Roy Wilkins defended his position in a pamphlet titled The Single Issue in the Robert Williams Case, arguing that his approach was consistent with the black tradition of arms. “There is no issue of self-defense. . . . The charges are based on his call for aggressive, premeditated violence. Lynching is never defensive.” Here, Wilkins wrapped himself a century-old philosophy. While condemning political violence as a hazard to the movement, he recognized armed self-defense as a crucial private resource. At a June 1959 fundraising dinner in Chicago, Wilkins pressed the point, drawing applause and Amens. “Of course, we must defend ourselves when attacked. This is our right under all known laws.”23
Wilkins reiterated this position throughout his life. On national television in 1967, Wilkins affirmed his support for private firearms ownership. The nation was wrestling with urban rioting, militant rhetoric, and violence from black radicals, and was weighing proposals for sweeping firearms restrictions. Asked whether he would endorse a “massive effort to disarm the Negroes in the ghettos,” Wilkins maintained the legitimacy of armed self-defense. “I wouldn’t disarm the Negroes and leave them helpless prey to the people who wanted to go in and shoot them up. Every American wants to own a rifle. Why shouldn’t Negroes own rifles?” In his 1982 memoir, Wilkins confirmed, “Like [Robert] Williams, I believe in self-defense. While I admire Reverend King’s theories of overwhelming enemies with love, I don’t think I could have put those theories into practice myself. But there is a difference between self-defense and murder, and I had no intention of getting the NAACP into the lynching business.”24
The Williams affair is remarkable for the detail in which it elaborates the black tradition of arms and shows the community openly endorsing armed self-defense. But it is just a single episode in a more-than-century-long tradition of Negroes with guns, one where the legitimacy and utility of firearms was an article of faith and where the best people in the community were armed.