A review by seeceeread
Negroes with Guns by Robert F. Williams

Why do white liberals ask us to be nonviolent? We are not the aggressors; we have been victimized for over 300 years. Yet nobody spends money to go into the south to ask the racists to be martyrs or pacifists.

After he became president of the local NAACP, Williams desegregated the public library, picketed the whites only pool, and reconstituted the membership with working class Black folks. The KKK reacted by hosting rallies with thousands of attendees and threatening the lives of residents, so he asked for help – from the county police, the state and even the feds. When none came, he determined to abandon the nonviolence as a strategic tactic, responding to his aggressors instead with like threats on the lives they were so sure were more dignified and valued than his own. Williams continued his political education and realized that while important, institutional integration would be piecemeal at best. Upon concocting an economic plan for racial justice, the threats on his life (and the lives of those associated with him) escalated, so that now the governor's office and FBI were involved in defaming him. He fled – to Canada, Cuba, China and eventually back to the US, where charges were ultimately dropped.

This reads like fiery speeches, stirring essays, distilled soundbytes from many years of inquiry. Williams quickly and easily explains how he reached his conclusions, the fallacies of some of his critics, and his hardwon convictions. His pan-Africanist liberatory frame echoes WEB DuBois and Cedric Robinson; this reads as a first-person corroboration of the personalities Umoja writes about in We Will Shoot Back (albeit those folks were in Mississippi).

I'm super curious about what MLK, Jr contributed to a different edition. And about the Black women who Williams doesn't name, including his wife, who surely made so much of this possible, too.