1. MURPHY BROWNE (Abena Agbetu)
"Why do I speak to you from exile?
Because a Negro community in the South took up guns in self-defense against
racist violence-and used them. I am held responsible for this action, that for
the first time in history American Negroes have armed themselves as a group to
defend their homes, their wives, their children, in a situation where law and
order had broken down, where the authorities could not, or rather would not,
enforce their duty to protect Americans from a lawless mob. I accept this
responsibility and am proud of it. I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet
the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense-and have acted on it. It
has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western
states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the
citizens can, and must, act in self-defense against lawless violence."
Excerpt from the prologue of "Negroes With Guns" by Robert Franklin Williams
published in 1962
Robert Franklin Williams wrote "Negroes With Guns" while he and his family (wife
and two children) lived in Cuba. Williams was born on February 26, 1925 in
Monroe, North Carolina. In 1925 when Williams was born Monroe, North Carolina
was a segregated town with African Americans at the mercy of violent White
Americans. In 1936 as an 11 year old child Williams witnessed White police
officer Jesse Alexander Helms brutally beat an African American woman on the
streets of Monroe, North Carolina. The 11 year old “looked on in terror as Big
Jesse flattened the black woman with his huge fists, then "dragged her off to
the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man
would club and drag his sexual prey." The memory of witnessing this White
supremacist violence and the laughter of White onlookers was a memory he carried
for the rest of his life and he told this story often during his adulthood as he
remembered: "Her tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction
of the concrete."
Williams told the story on "Radio Free Dixie" (his radio program on “Radio
Havana“ which he hosted from 1962 to 1965) and retold it while he lived in Hanoi
during broadcasts directed at African American soldiers in Vietnam. The
traumatic childhood experience is also included in his autobiography "While God
Lay Sleeping" which Williams completed in 1996 just before his transitioning on
October 15. Williams also wrote of that fateful day in 1936 when as an 11 year
old he witnessed the White police officer brutally beat an African American
woman on the streets of Monroe, North Carolina: "The emasculated black men hung
their heads in shame and hurried silently [away] from the cruelly bizarre
sight." It is not surprising that as an adult Williams would put his life on the
line to prevent similar violence being meted out to African Americans.
As a teenager Williams travelled north settling in Detroit where he found work
as an autoworker and was there during the 1943 “Detroit Race Riots“ when White
Americans attacked African Americans. During the racial disturbances of June 20-
21, 1943 White men roamed the streets with guns while any African Americans who
were found with even a knife were arrested by police.
(https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/clio/detroit_riot/DetroitNewsRiots19
43.htm)
Williams was drafted the following year (1944) into the segregated US armed
services and he served “overseas“ before returning to the US in 1946. In 1946
when the 21 year old returned to Munroe, North Carolina not much had changed.
African American veterans of the war were still expected to be subservient to
White men, women and children. Williams after a taste of life in Detroit working
for a living wage and after fighting for democracy in Europe did not return to
the southern US to “pick cotton.“ However in the introduction of "Negroes With
Guns" White American historian Timothy B. Tyson writes: “Another returning black
veteran, a friend of Williams“s named Bennie Montgomery, did come home to raise

2. cotton on the farm that his father operated as a sharecropper for W. W. Mangum,
a large-scale white landowner near Monroe. Saturday, June 1, 1946, was a regular
workday on the Mangum place, but Montgomery asked Mangum for his wages at noon,
explaining that he needed to go to Monroe and have his father’s car repaired.
Mangum apparently kicked and slapped the young veteran, and Montgomery pulled
out a pocketknife and cut his employer’s throat. The Ku Klux Klan wanted to
lynch the black sharecropper, but instead the state police whisked Montgomery
out of town, tried and convicted him of murder, and ten months later executed
him in the gas chamber at Central Prison in Raleigh.’ Explaining the mindset of
the White supremacist members of Munroe, North Carolina and the activism of the
African American veterans who had returned from the war, Tyson writes: ’State
authorities shipped the sharecropper’s remains back to Monroe. Robbed of their
lynching, however, the local chapter of ’the invisible empire’ let it be known
that Bennie Montgomery’s body belonged not to his family, but to the Ku Klux
Klan. ’They was gonna come and take Bennie’s body out and drag it up and down
the streets,’ J. W. McDow, another African American veteran, recalled. ’I rather
die and go to hell before I see that happen.’ A group of former soldiers met at
Booker T. Perry’s barbershop and made a battle plan. When the Klan motorcade
pulled up in front of Harris Funeral Home, 40 black men leveled their rifles,
taking aim at the line of cars. Not a shot was fired; the Klansmen simply
weighed their chances and drove away. Former U.S. Army PFC Robert F. Williams
carried a carbine that night. So did three of the men who would become key
lieutenants in the ’black militia’ that Williams organized ten years later.’
’That was one of the first incidents,’ Williams recalled, ’that really started
us to understanding that we had to resist, and that resistance could be
effective if we resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns.’’
The African American men who had returned from fighting in Europe were not
willing to return to the state of ’boy’ after their experiences of ’fighting for
democracy’ in Europe for Europeans. Williams wrote of the realisation that came
from understanding the power of armed resistance: ’When an oppressed people show
a willingness to defend themselves, the enemy, who is a moral weakling and
coward, is more willing to grant concessions and work for a respectable
compromise. Psychologically, racists consider themselves superior beings and are
not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are
most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity.
Moreover, when because of our self-defense there is a danger that the blood of
whites may be spilled, the local authorities in the South suddenly enforce law
and order when previously they had been complacent toward lawless, racist
violence. It is remarkable how easily and quickly state and local police control
and disperse lawless mobs when the Negro is ready to defend himself with arms."
Williams and his wife Mabel Robinson Williams (married June 19, 1947) became
involved in the fight for African American human rights. Mabel Robinson Williams
(June 1, 1931- April 19, 2014) was secretary for the Union County Council of
Human Relations an interracial organization founded by her husband to work for
African American civil rights. When Williams filed for a charter from the
National Rifle Association and formed the ’Black Guard’ to defend African
Americans in Monroe he was suspended from his position as president of the local
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP.) In 1961 the Williams family with threats against their lives from the
KKK and trumped up charges from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were
forced to flee to Cuba with their 2 sons, where they were granted asylum.
While living in Cuba, China and North Vietnam the Williams’ published ’The
Crusader’ which they used to expose the White supremacist and hypocritical US
state. "It is a universally known fact that the power structure of the racist
USA is rabidly opposed to self-defense on the part of our people. They have a
morbid fear of violent self-preservation on the part of U.S. freedom fighters.
Is this because they love the dehumanized Negro? Is this because they are
concerned with the welfare and well-being of our brutalized people? Is this

3. because the American society is a pacifist society with an aversion for
violence? No! A thousand times No! If the power structure had ever manifested
any true concern for the welfare of our people (for whom it now professes great
fear that we may commit suicide by fighting for the right to live as human
beings) there would be no question of violent liberation struggle. The question
of peaceful persuasion, as a moral issue, is belied by its imperialist military
actions against Cuba, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and other liberated areas."
In 1969, the family moved back to United States and settled in Michigan. The
Williams’ remain unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement even though their
activism contributed to the eventual ’gains’ for African Americans and other
racialized people. When Rosa Parks spoke at Robert Franklin Williams’ funeral on
October 22, 1996 she mentioned that she was delighted to be at the funeral of an
African American leader who had died peacefully in his bed and that she and many
other Civil Rights workers had: "always admired Robert Williams for his courage
and his commitment to freedom. The work that he did should go down in history
and never be forgotten."
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