Robert F. Williams {Negroes with GUNS}

Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader, the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s, and author. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting armed black self-defense in the United States. He and his wife left the United States in 1961 to avoid prosecution for kidnapping. A self-professed Black Nationalist and supporter of liberation, he lived in both Cuba and communist China in exile.
Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962), published while he was in exile in Cuba, details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the pacifist Civil Rights Movement philosophies. Among others the book influenced Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers.

Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina in 1925 to Emma C. and John L. Williams, a railroad boiler washer. His grandmother, a former slave, gave Williams the rifle with which his grandfather, a Republican campaigner and publisher of the newspaper The People's Voice, had defended himself in the hard years after Reconstruction. At the age of 11, Williams witnessed the beating and dragging of a black woman by the police officer Jesse Helms, Sr. (He was the father of future US Senator Jesse Helms.)
As a young man, Williams joined the Great Migration, traveling north for work during World War II. He witnessed race riots in Detroit in 1943, prompted by labor competition between European Americans and blacks. Drafted in 1944, he served for a year and a half in the segregated Army before returning home to Monroe.

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First published in 1962, "Negroes with Guns" is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The single most important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, "Negroes with Guns" is a classic story of a man who risked his life for democracy and freedom.