Robert F. Williams: A Flawed African-American Leader
Williams preached the doctrine of “armed self-defense,” which was rejected by Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached instead the Gandhian doctrine of non-violence, which was adopted by the mainstream civil rights movement. (In fact, when Bayard Rustin first met King at his home, he found the minister sitting with a gun on his table. Rustin told him if he was to be a leader extolling Gandhi, he had to immediately get rid of it.)
The other half of the story of Robert F. Williams, however, is a difficult one for anyone who is conservative to bring up as an example. What Coulter leaves out of her story is that Williams was a far-left revolutionary of a Maoist bent.
Williams, who was facing arrest because the racist North Carolina government put out a warrant for his arrest for supposedly kidnapping a white couple — whom he and his group were actually protecting from a mob — fled to Cuba. With the permission and support of Fidel Castro, Williams broadcast regularly to the U.S. from Cuba, operating a station he named “Radio Free Dixie.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Williams urged American black soldiers to turn their guns on their commanders and engage in armed insurrection against the United States government. He said: “While you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free. . . . This is your only chance to stop your people from being treated worse than dogs. We’ll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he’ll never know what hit him. You dig?”
In fact, Williams wrote his book while in Cuba, and its first edition was published by a far-left American publisher. His book served as an inspiration to the late Huey P. Newton who, after reading it, formed the original Black Panther Party in California, which took up the cry of armed resistance and formed itself into a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organization. Williams then joined what was called the Revolutionary Action Movement. In 1965 he traveled to Hanoi, where he called for armed revolution in the United States and praised Maoist China for developing an atomic weapon, which he dubbed “The Freedom Bomb.”
Not every Pashtun is Taliban, but every Taliban is Pashtun.
“Robert F. Williams was a civil rights hero.”
Well, the guy was hardly a civil rights hero if his ultimate goal was to enslave all of us under Communist rule no?
Sometimes the truth is best told through fiction; sometimes the truth can only be told through fiction. Everyone interested in this should give Harry Turtledove’s alternative history of the US Civil War a read, starting with “How Few Remain” and continueing on into the modern era to see how communist influence came to bear on black America. If your only knowledge of Turtledove is “Guns of the South,” forget that book, writers have to make mortgage payments, too. Turtledove is a REALLY good historian who knows how to change just one thing and see what happens as the result of the change.
It’s sad how blacks feel the need to maintain this constant insurrectionary stance. For them it seems it’s always “black and white” (literally). Most white people’s ancestors never had slaves. Mine came here from Lithuania, worked hard and built a beautiful Catholic school and church on the South Side of Chicago. Then in the 1960′s the blacks showed up, starting trouble, and now the neighborhood is a welfare-dependent ghetto of crime and drugs. The school recently closed because the new arrivals from the South can’t support it. That’s pretty much my experience of blacks. Am I racist? Or maybe do blacks have a lot to answer for, too? Detroit?
“Radical Reconstruction”? Ugh. That’s what the KKK and the Democrats called it. Blacks voting was radical for them. Why does the author call it that without quotes?
Radical Reconstruction because it reduced the former Confederate states to military districts, essentially abolished all civil institutions, deprived all men who’d served in CS governments or the military of the right to vote and a good, long list of other abuses and usurpations foremost among which was the ongoing military occupation and government under martial law. The words carpetbagger and scalaway didn’t come out of thin air.
I am white and grew up in the South in the fifties and sixties, right beside the biggest black neighborhood in my city. Ann Coulter is exaggerating, and I resent the slander just to push her point. Exaggeration is her stock-in-trade. Even when some blacks committed a heinous crime against one of my white neighbors, there was no wave of murders, lynchings and beatings.
A quick search in Wikipedia turned up a study by the Tuskeegee Institute that reported nine lynchings of blacks and four of whites in the United States for the nineteen years from 1950 to 1968. That is not much of a wave even if they all occurred in the South.
There is a lot of mythology about “lynchings” and other “murders” in rural area perpetuated by academics and commentators who know little or nothing about rural areas or the period from the end of US occupation in 1876 through WWII. I was in a Literature class a few years ago and the reading assignment was Tom Wolfe’s “Child By Tiger,” the story of a former “Buffalo Soldier” who returned to a small Southern town and worked as a handyman. He had an affair with the wife of a Pullman Porter and when the Porter returned unexpectedly and caught his wife in flagrante delicto, the Porter wound up dead at the former Buffalo Soldier’s hand. He fled. As was common in the day, the Sheriff deputized a posse to seek the fleeing felon. When they found him, he chose to shoot it out with the posse rather than surrender and was killed. A pretty straightforward and fairly common story in much of rural America and the stock in trade of Western movies for many years. But what does the “professor” do? He jumps up on his soapbox and launches into a rant about how the poor black man was lynched! More than a few fleeing criminals, black and white, wound up dead in rural America in much the same way, and some of them really were executions without benefit of trial, but if they involved a black, they were universally claimed to be a lynching even if they were in fact a perfectly lawful, even under todays evah so enlightened laws, arrests of fleeing felons in which the fleeing felon resisted and was killed by a deputized posse.
I was astounded hear Ann Coulter on Hannity’s program last night. She knows better, but she must be out of her mind or cynically pandering to the left to sell her book. Most murders in US are committed by Black against Blacks. She suggested that the Blacks should arm themselves with guns to protect themselves from White on Black crime. She was upset about the Zimmerman/Martin incident and saw this as a rise in violence against Blacks promoted by White racism. There are enough guns to go around as it is without promoting it.
If anything there is a rise in violence against White all over America which goes unreported by the Mass Media. If there is any rioting after the Z/M trial it will be Blacks murdering Whites with no shortage of guns.
I think Coulter has lost all creditablity She should take the time to read Thomas Sowell.
I had to give a lecture on this guy one time, and was chastised for emphasizing his preaching of communist revolution in the United States. I could say a lot on this subject, but I’ll just leave it at this: Robert F. Williams was a hardened communist prior to his NAACP work, and stayed that way his whole life. Portraying him as a positive influence on American society is just plain stupid.
Coulter is a troll, she will go with any narrative that will annoy the Left and she won’t let details get in the way of a good rant.
It’s a good reminder though that you should never assume that conservative writers and media people will tell you the full truth just because they are conservatives. Facts tend to muddy the water and ruin the direct emotional appeal of political writing and conservatives can be just as guilty of that as those on the Left.
Ann Coulter should get her history straight.
Not completely illiterate, only moderately so, but I would appreciate a citation for the assertion that the KKK is an outgrowth of the Democrat Party. I’m a committed Republican but a bit familiar with the origins of the KKK begun by N.B. Forrest in 1865 in Pulaski Tennessee with 5 members, intending to protect white folks from some newly freedmen who were running amuck (shades of the New Black Panthers I suppose). I doubt the origins of the KKK are founded in any political party though because the South was primarily Democrat in the post war (War between the States) period if KKK membership were matched to Democrat Party membership the correlation would likely be high… but no cause and effect can be inferred from that correlation.
An Aside, as far as I’m concerned Ann Coulter is no trustworthy voice for the political right. IMHO she is only self serving a media whore in search of a constituency…. Someone to be completely discounted and ignored.. We have problems to solve and need truth as a tool to solve them.. AC would not recognize the truth if it bit her in her checkbook.
Ron Radosh wrote: “What Coulter leaves out of her story is that Williams was a far-left revolutionary of a Maoist bent.”
Radosh conveniently ignores Williams was not far-left, revolutionary, or Maoist. Williams was a non-political man, a Korea veteran, who when violently attacked by the KKK and the government, took up arms to defend his family and community.
Radosh also omits that at the time neither Democrats nor Republicans (or any political force left or right) were willing to support equality for blacks. The commies made hay with this —credit where it’s due— that the USA was the sole remaining first world nation that kept a portion of its population as thralls.
Williams succeeded at the local level, but was driven out of North Carolina by a trumped-up warrant (probably a good idea considering the chances of making it to his trial alive) and fled to Canada. Pressure at the federal level on our northern neighbor for extradition led him to flee to Cuba. Williams stayed there a while but was disappointed by Cuban racial division. Rejecting other (commie) offers of refuge, he moved to China where he found little or no racial inequality.
The bottom line is that we —US citizens of all political stripes— made Williams’ life intolerable, and the commies offered refuge. When Nixon opened China, Williams obtained amnesty and assisted the administration as an expert on the Chinese government.
We should all be ashamed of how we treated Robert Williams; he acted like any red-blooded American would to protect his family and friends, and we collectively threw him to the wolves. That he changed is disappointing, but should come as no surprise.
Both Radosh and Coulter commit a vast range of intellectual dishonesty here. For example, despite what Radosh and some others here claim, Williams was not a communist, let alone “a hardened communist,” as our FBI friend claims. Coulter’s piece is beneath comment, but Radosh’s makes all kinds of claims that he cannot back up, and pretends that my book, RADIO FREE DIXIE: ROBERT F. WILLIAMS AND THE ROOTS OF BLACK POWER, is his source. If so, he did not read it very carefully. From Cuba, Williams complained, “I am under constant attack from the Communist Party USA. They have been trying to cut off my facilities here in Cuba. One would think I am Hitler and Wall Street combined.” He goes on to say that the Communists in Cuba “are getting worse than the crackers in Monroe,” where he had been forced to flee from KKK mobs and an FBI dragnet. Radosh’s claim that “Williams and his wife decided that Cuba was not radical enough” is ridiculous. Cuba, though it prided itself on its vaunted racial egalitarianism, still looked like the Jim Crow South to suit Williams. He also rejected the ideological rigidity imposed by the ever-shortening Soviet strings on the Cuban Revolution. But the move to China was not ideological, and if the Williams family had been at liberty to do so, I am sure they would have moved back to North Carolina instead. He was never a communist, but instead an American radical who believed in one person, one vote, freedom of speech, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms. “I had always considered myself an American patriot,” he said. “They didn’t see it that way. I always stressed that I believed in the Constitution of the United States and that I thought it was the greatest document in the world. The problem is the government and many citizens didn’t respect it.” He learned his politics not from Moscow or Mao or Che or Fidel, but from his grandmother, who had been born enslaved, become a Reconstruction militant and an organizer, along with her husband, of an interracial coalition in North Carolina that won the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, and swept the state legislature. But Conservatives overthrew the government and took away African American political rights. Before she died, she gave young Robert the ancient rifle that his grandfather had carried against the Klan at the turn of the century. And she taught him to keep an eye on international politics. The caricatures that Radosh and Coulter are slinging have little basis in fact, and the clumsy Cold War rhetoric is unbecoming and ill-fitting.
PGK–it is intersting to read in your comment that you, as a member of the White community, wish not to be associated with those White’s that owned slaves, committed ill treatment of others, etc. As you stated, “Most white people’s ancestors never had slaves. Mine came here from Lithuania, worked hard and built a beautiful Catholic school and church on the South Side of Chicago”. And yet, you elect to lump ALL blacks together based on your experiences with those from your area. Not Whites are all bad…you’re an example of that. Blacks are all bad…your experiences are examples of that. But don’t you see that it’s the same thing on both sides? Why should Whites be labeled according to the individual and not as a group when people like you don’t do the same for Blacks? Are you a racist, you ask. Probably. So what? Probably so am I.