Notes on African-American History Since 1900
Download 3 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- The National Negro Labor Council (NNLC)
- What was the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama and what did they do
- Who was Queen Mother Audley Moore
- Notes on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Who Was Robert F. Williams
- Why did Southern African-American Ministers led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) provide leadership to the southern civil rights movement in the 1950’s and early 60’s
1947 “White Primary” outlawed – declared unconstitutional (NAACP). -President Truman integrates the armed services. -On June 24, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball becoming the first African American player for the Dodgers team in Brooklyn, New York in the national league. On July 5, 1947, Larry Doby became the second African American player in the major leagues playing for the Cleveland Indians and the first African American baseball player in the American League 1948 Race became a key issue in the presidential elections. African Americans were a decisive vote because of the international situation with decolonization in Africa and Asia and the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Truman made racial equality a plank in the Democratic Party. Southern Dixiecrats (racists) broke from Truman and ran their own candidates. Thomas Dewey, Republican candidate from New York under estimated Truman and didn’t campaign. Henry Wallace ran as a third party candidate, (Progressive Party) on an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly capitalist campaign. (Truman was aware that the African American population was going to break from the Democratic Party. He stole the program of Henry Wallace and implements it). Truman wrote a “white” paper (office white house documents) titled to Secure These Rights. The NAACP wins primary cases against segregation building legal presence to Brown. Wall failed to win the African American vote, which went overwhelming to Truman. Wallace got 1.5 million votes. Truman took a train ride to local whistle stops. “Give em Hell, Harry!” became a mass slogan. 1949 Mao Tse Tung and the Chinese Communists are victorious in China. The 1950's, the Terror of McCarthyism and the Mass break in Montgomery, Alabama: In 1950 the United States and the United Nations after the Soviet Union walked out of the Security Council, entered the Korean Conflict. Integrated U.S. troops were used for the first time in war. Paul Robeson, president of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) in a mass rally in Madison Square Garden of 10,000 persons advocated that African-Americans not participate in the Korean War. The Civil Rights Congress which existed from 1946 to 1956 led freedom rides in Virginia and engaged in mass demonstrations against racial discrimination. The CRC also attempted to save the lives of Willie McGee, an African-American accused of raping a white woman and the Martinville Seven in Virginia in 1951. Attorney William Peterson drafted the CRC’s petition to the United Nations charging the U.S. government with crime of genocide against African-Americans. The CRC had 10,000 members and was subpoenaed by the House on Un-American activities Committee (HUAC). The mass hysteria created by Senator McCarthy in his anti-communist crusade put extreme pressure on the NAACP and the AFL and CIO to purge their ranks of communists. The NAACP and some labor unions compiled. The National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) The National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), an interracial group that fought employment discrimination was founded October 27, 1951 in Cincinnati, in response to Union practices of collecting dues from African-American workers but barring them from office. Under the leadership of William R Hood, the membership was 5,000 consisting of African-Americans and whites; mostly trade unionists. The NNLC picketed and protested for labor equality in Unions and private companies nationwide. Through picket lines and protests, the group helped African-Americans get jobs in banks, the airlines, and department stores. The NNLC led the first picket around American Airlines in Cleveland, because the company was not hiring African-American female flight attendants. The NNLC picketed the Commonwealth Bank in Detroit creating jobs for African-Americans as tellers and protested the hiring practices of Sears, Roebuck and Co. The organization also pushed San Francisco’s T System Street Railway to hire African-American drivers. The NNLC disbanded on April 29, 1956 rather than submit its membership list to the government for which a hearing had been scheduled before the subversive Activities Control Board in Washington, D.C.184 Joe William Trotter, Jr. in The African-American Experience Volume II From Reconstruction, states, that when the NNCL disbanded in 1956, African-American trade unionists formed the American Labor Council (ANLC) in 1959 which heightened the connection between the labor and civil rights movements emphasizing the utility of non-violent direct action strategies for social change.185 In 1954 the NAACP won a major decision from the Supreme Court outlawing Separate but equal and overruling Plessey vs. Ferguson of 1896. Charles Houston’s protégé, Thurgood Marshall won the case for the NAACP. A year later two major events occurred, Emmett Till, an African-American teenager visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi was lynched because he whistled at a white woman. The event shocked the nation. Then on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, the secretary for the Montgomery, Alabama NAACP and a member of the Women’s Political Council decided not to give up her seat in a segregated arrangement to a white man on a bus while she was riding home from work. What was the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama and what did they do? The Women’s Political Council in Montgomery was an organization of African American women that had been working in Montgomery trying to change the segregated bus system even before the arrest of Rosa Parks. Upon Mrs. Parks’ arrest, it was the council women who contacted the local ministers and organized the first Montgomery bus boycott.186 This event led to the development of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the mass ascendancy of its leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King advocating the use of non-violent resistance and creative social disorder to end Jim Crow emerged as new and dynamic leader. In 1955, Queen Mother Audley Moore founded the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves. Queen Mother who pioneered grassroots education on reparations for more than three decades, taught young African-American activists and intellectuals the importance of demanding reparations.187 Queen Mother explained reparations in her pamphlet, Why Reparations? After 244 years of free slave labor and the most inhuman, sinister and barbaric atrocities which surpass in magnitude any savagery perpetrated against human beings in the history of the planet earth and an additional one hundred years of so-called freedom accompanied by terror, the Committee seeking Reparations for the descendants of African Slaves concludes that the payment of Reparations is an absolute necessity if the Government of the United States is ever to wipe the slate clean, redeem herself and pay for the damages she has inflicted upon more than 35 millions, who are members of the African Race. The payment of Reparations is the only position the U.S.A. can take in the interest of justice and make an effort to restore the dignity to 15 percent of the people thus injured.188 Who was Queen Mother Audley Moore? Moore, Queen Mother (1898-1997). Born on 27 July 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore was involved in both the communist and black nationalist movements. While Audley only had three years of formal schooling, her education in southern folkways prepared her for a political life. After marrying at an early age into a black middle-class family, she promptly repudiated this background and joined Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement in 1919. That same year, Queen Mother organized a massive demonstration of armed blacks to support Garvey’s right to speak at Longshoreman’s Hall in New Orleans. In the early twenties, Moore, as one of Garvey’s most ardent supporters, migrated to New York City to work in the Garvey organization. Garvey’s incarceration and subsequent deportation left her searching. In 1936 Moore joined the Communist Party. She was an active street agitator and orator, enjoining Harlemites to come to the aid of Ethiopia after its Invasion by Italy. In 1938 she was the Party’s candidate for state assembly from the Twenty-first District and in 1940 she ran for alderman from the Nineteenth Assembly District. In 1941 she was elected executive secretary of the Twenty-First District, the Harlem section of the Communist Party. By 1942 she had risen to become secretary of the New York State branch of the Party. In the late 1940’s she, along with others, began to assert the Afro-American “national question” within the Party, after its suppression during the Earl Browder years. For this she was ignored, and she finally left the Party in 1950. In the early 1950’s Queen Mother Moore’s political activities took on a decidedly nationalistic bent. She and her sister Eloise, Mother Langley, and Dara Collins founded the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, which protested the reign of lynch-law in the South. She led the support teams for Robert Williams, an advocate of armed self-defense, after his standoff with authorities in Monroe County, North Carolina, in 1959. She also tutored the young Malcolm X and prodded Elijah Muhammad to call for a separate state for black Americans in the south. During the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, she established a Reparations Committee to advocate compensatory payments to descendants of slaves for their ancestors’ forced labor and for subsequent social and economic injustice. Throughout the 1960’s, Queen Mother Moore’s presence became a catalyst for the new generation of “Black Power” advocates. In 1968 she was one of the critical forces involved in the declaration of the Republic of New Africa and initiated its statement of independence. Throughout the 1970s, she was actively engaged in support of nationalist political prisoners. During her long career of political activism, Queen Mother Moore fused black nationalism, socialism, and Pan-Africanism. She was mentor to many of the sixties and seventies generation of activists. In 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Alabama laws regarding public transportation were unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted about a year and was successful. Daisy Bates of the Little Rock, Arkansas, NAACP helped organize a group of nine African-American students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. President Eisenhower eventually had to send troops to Little Rock to protect the African-American students. On the third anniversary of the Brown decision, Dr. King along with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, organized a mass prayer vigil in Washington, D.C. of some 15,000 to 20,000 people, which was the largest African-American protest demonstration, up until that time, in history. Highway construction programs cut up African American Communities. Notes on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican Parties. The Democrats have betrayed us by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed us by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing reactionary Northerners.189 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a 25-year-old minister when the Montgomery boycott began. Dr. King eventually became the spokesman for a mass resistance movement, which lasted for nearly a year. After several clashes with authorities and brutalities concerning segregation on the buses in Montgomery by individuals, the African American community responded when an African American female organizer (Mrs. Rosa Parks), who had a base of mass support, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. When Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress at a downtown Montgomery, Alabama department store, a loyal member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a model of personal industry and propriety, defied the city’s segregated transportation ordinance, by refusing to surrender her seat to a white person on the first day of December, 1955, she inaugurated an era in the struggle for civil rights.190 After several African American women’s groups rallied around Mrs. Parks’ arrest, they went to Dr. King to seek his support. The idea of a bus or mass boycott had long been discussed in movement circles in Montgomery by E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter and union organizer. The mass turnout in court to bail out Mrs. Parks, and the 100% support of the boycott of the buses on the first day radicalized Dr. King’s thinking and led to a new phase in the civil rights movement—mass civil disobedience. The Montgomery Improvement Association, a broad unified front, was created, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was chosen as its President. During the boycott, from December 1, 1955 until December 21, 1956, car pools were organized to carry African Americans to and from work, and weekly mass rallies were held. At these mass rallies, one could see democracy at work, with the masses voting on, and deciding what strategies to utilize. Dr. King emerged as an eloquent speaker, and a competent philosopher in describing his variation of nonviolent civil disobedience. Accompanied by Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, the MIA shaped and molded a mass resistance movement against segregation. Facing harassment, terror, bombings, and beatings, the Montgomery African American community held fast. On November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court decreed Alabama’s state and local laws enforcing segregation on buses unconstitutional. The entire national African American community, and the nation at large, had watched the event in Montgomery. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged from the success of the Montgomery bus boycott as a new Southern based leader of the civil rights movement. By the late fifties, Dr. King symbolized the new African American spirit and was generally acknowledged as the most important African American leader in America. In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called together progressive African American ministers from around the South. Ministers replaced schoolteachers, as the principle spokespersons in this initial period of mass social protest against segregation, because the African American community directly financed the ministers, and they were less vulnerable to economic reprisals from the white community. The ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Dr. King was elected SCLC’s president and the new trend of mass nonviolent resistance took an organized form. Dr. King was also careful in not making the SCLC into a mass-membership organization, in order not to compete with the NAACP. As we shall see later, this may or may not have been a mistake. While SCLC did not advocate the right of armed self-defense, as NAACP did, SCLC from its inception was more mass oriented. The formation of the SCLC meant that, for the first time in American history, Southern blacks were openly organizing to confront the structure of white-ruled society. And, for the first time, Southern blacks began openly providing leadership for blacks in the nation.191 Dr. King called a conference on civil rights with President Eisenhower. When Eisenhower didn’t respond, King approached Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, to discuss an SCLC proposal of a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. Some 15,000 to 20,000 people, ninety percent of them African American, assembled at the capitol on the third anniversary of the Brown decision in 1957, because the Eisenhower Administration was dragging its heels in the matter of voting rights. In 1959, the Louisville NAACP tried sit-ins. Sit-ins were tried in Charleston, West Virginia, and in Lexington, Kentucky CORE tried them. But it was not until February 1, 1960, that the sit-in movement caught on. On that date, four African American college students sat down at the food counter of the local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina and ordered lunch. The four were asked to leave. They refused, and remained there until the store closed. They returned the next day, and for several days with more people. The sit-in movement spread like wildfire across the South. In two weeks, sit-ins spread to fifteen cities in five Southern states. Within two years, over 50,000 people, mostly African American, participated in some kind of demonstration or another, and over 3,600 demonstrators spent time in jail. In one year, several hundred lunch counters had been desegregated in Southern cities. Miss Ella Baker, an organizer for SCLC, asked Dr. King and SCLC to financially underwrite a conference to bring the sit-in leaders together. Although Dr. King was at the student conference, the students decided not to affiliate with SCLC, but to form their own organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). When the students sat-in in Atlanta, Dr. King joined them. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized freedom rides to test interstate laws of desegregation. The buses were attacked, and SNCC carried the freedom rides on. In 1962, SNCC started mobilizing a Southern rural community in Albany, Georgia. The president of the Albany movement asked Dr. King to come there to help with the leadership of the movement. Little preparation was made for various changes in strategy and tactics. What resulted was thousands of demonstrators being jailed with no negotiated settlement for desegregation taking place. Albany, Georgia proved to be the first setback for Dr. King. Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 The struggle to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama was the turning point for Dr. King, SCLC and the civil rights movement. Dr. King, and SCLC, learning from the Albany experience, made careful preparations for the Birmingham campaign. King, Abernathy and Walker visited Anniston, Gadsden, Tallageeda, Montgomery, Birmingham and the rural areas around Selma, as part of SCLC’s People to People tour to stiffen the resolve of Alabama’s African Americans to place their names on voter rolls (thirty-seven teachers had recently been fired for trying), and to garner needed area support and national publicity for the campaign.192
Dr. King arrived in Birmingham. Bull Conner obtained a court hearing banning demonstrations until a full court hearing could be held. King protests anyway. Connor then set about arresting the demonstrators. At first, the protests were peaceful, and relatively few African-Americans were jailed. April 12: Dr. King stepped into the streets, joined the demonstrators and was arrested on Good Friday, for violating a court injunction against protest marchers. It was while he was confined over Easter weekend that Dr. King wrote his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. April 20: King posted bail, but he did not leave Birmingham. The demonstrators continued and Dr. King continued to march. May 2: SCLC organized the Children’s Crusade coordinated by James Bevel, which recruited 16,000 elementary and high school students aged 6 to 16 into the movement. Thousands of school-age children poured out of the public schools and into the streets. Over 900 children went to jail on May 2nd alone. Helmeted police swept marchers off their feet by turning high-pressure fire hoses on them. Police K-9 dogs tore at marchers’ arms, legs and clothes. As protesters lay helpless on the ground, police beat them with clubs and dragged them into waiting police wagons. King’s brother (A.D. King) home and hotel room were both bombed. King still pleaded with the masses of African-Americans to remain non-violent. The African-American masses responded by throwing rocks and bottles at police during the night. During this crisis, Kennedy sent federal troops around Birmingham. The city remained calm as civil rights activists agreed to halt demonstrations in exchange for an agreement that businesses would desegregate and hire African-Americans. June 10: President Kennedy addressed the nation about the tense racial situation and his proposed Civil Rights bill. June 11: Medgar Evers, Mississippi state chairman of the NAACP, was shot in the head from behind and assassinated within 24 hours of Kennedy’s television appearance. The emphasis of direct action mass demonstration in the North was on increased job opportunities and an end to de facto segregation in housing and education. In New York and Philadelphia demonstrators sought to block tax-supported construction on which African-Americans received little or no employment. In Philadelphia, PA, RAM working with the NAACP organized mass demonstrations against union discrimination in the building trades, centered in North Philadelphia’s African-American community. In a week’s time, over 30,000 people participated in the demonstrations. This was considered the first mass breakthrough in the North, which led to others pattering their demonstrations after the Philadelphia demonstrations. Dr. King spoke at a Los Angeles fundraising rally, organized by singer, Harry Belafonte, and had private meetings with the press to prepare for the campaign. Demonstrations began on April 3rd, led by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and SCLC. Thousands demonstrated and filled the jailed in Birmingham. Sheriff “Bull” Connor turned his police loose on the demonstrators, using dogs to attack children, police using clubs on women, firemen using high pressure water hoses to strip the backs of demonstrators bare and tear gas to strangle demonstrators. Dr. King was jailed, and wrote his famous “letter from a Birmingham jail.” Millions were shocked by the atrocities they saw on television, and hundreds of protest demonstrations started across the nation. Burke Marshall, assistant United States Attorney General in charge of civil rights, was sent to Birmingham to set up negotiations. The UAW raised nearly $300,000.00 in bail money, and the U.S. Supreme Court declared sit-in demonstrations legal in cities that enforced segregation ordinances. While segregation began to end in Birmingham, the civil rights movement had picked up momentum nationwide, with African Americans demanding that Washington do something. Militant activists in CORE, while holding impromptu street rallies, started the rumor, which turned into a mood, to “March on Washington”. The second March on Washington movement was in full swing when President Kennedy called the leaders of the “big four” together (SCLC, NAACP, SNCC, CORE) to gain relative control over the movement, which was calling for total social disobedience to close down Washington. All of the civil rights organizations cooperated to have a peaceful, nonviolent march, where 250,000 people converged on Washington to demand full equality. The March on Washington was the largest demonstration for civil rights ever held in the country up until that time. Dr. King gave his famous, “I Have A Dream” speech, as the highlight of the demonstration. But soon after, the reality of the white black-lash, racist reaction struck. On September 22nd, four African American girls attending Sunday school in Birmingham were murdered when a bomb exploded in the church. Dr. King had to call on his reserves, to ask thousands of African Americans to remain nonviolent in the aftermath. President Kennedy was assassinated not long afterward. In 1964, Congress, under the approval of President Lyndon B. Johnson, passed the Civil Rights Act. In return, Dr. King, fearing that Barry Goldwater would be elected, called for a moratorium on demonstrations and support Lyndon Johnson for President. But the mood of African Americans was getting consistently more militant, and this eventually became a crisis for Dr. King. African Americans began to react violently against police brutality in the North, and urban rebellions spread during the summer of 1964, in Rochester, New York, spreading to New York City, Chicago, Jersey City, New Jersey and Philadelphia, PA. SNCC was engaged in the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign designed to register African Americans to vote. In August 1965, the bodies of three SNCC volunteers, two white and one African American were found in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In late 1964, SCLC targeted Selma, Alabama to launch a major voter registration campaign. The campaign got underway in early 1965. Dr. King came in, mobilized demonstrators, and was put in jail. Malcolm X, who had met with Dr. King, came to Selma and spoke, promising support from his forces. As the campaign dragged on, Dr. King was released from jail and went back to Atlanta to raise funds. On Sunday, March 7th, as thousands of singing demonstrators marched across Selma’s Pettus Bridge, on their way to petition their right of the ballot to Governor George Wallace in Montgomery. There, they were savagely repulsed and chased by state troopers and Sheriff Clark’s deputies. Some demonstrators retaliated with rocks and bottles.193 A couple of days later, Dr. King led 3,000 demonstrators across Pettus Bridge, but to avoid the possibility of bloodshed, Dr. King knelt in prayer and turned back, rather than break a court order blocking the march. SCLC, working diplomatically, managed to get the Federal injunction lifted. On March 21st, thousands marched with Dr. King on the Selma to Montgomery march, demanding voting rights. In Montgomery, Dr. King gave one of his most important speeches. Congress passed the Johnson sponsored, Voting Rights Act. Dr. King moved to Chicago in early 1966, where he demanded adequate housing, jobs, and complete public school integration for African Americans. Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy rented an apartment in the inner city and used that as their base. Dr. King also met with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. Dr. King’s demand for open housing led him to march into white community. He had made an alliance with African American street gangs in Chicago and they marched with him and were mobbed by white racists. Dr. King himself was stoned. The Chicago campaign ended with a summit agreement between Dr. King and Mayor Richard Daley. SNCC changed its policy in 1966, from the goal of integration to achieving “Black Power” (cultural pluralism), and from nonviolent to armed self defense. SNCC opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and supported the PLO in its struggle against Israel. SNCC also sought to form a third black political party in Alabama, which spread to other parts of the country, called the Black Panther Party. The Meredith March: Black Power, the Movement Shifts When James Meredith was shot in the March Against Fear, in Mississippi, the civil rights movement was floundering, or in flux. By that point, Dr. King was already beginning to realize that in order for African Americans to achieve freedom, the American social order had to be radically altered. He said, “Some of the nation’s industries must be nationalized” and a guaranteed annual wage enacted.” Dr. King had also become a target of J. Edgar Hoover, of the FBI, and the rumor that Southern businessmen had a contract on his head, was widespread. During the Mississippi March, Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, and Floyd McKissick of CORE, embraced the concept of “Black Power” and openly challenged Dr. King for leadership of the movement. Though Dr. King felt that he couldn’t embrace the concept of Black Power, he refused to aggressively attack it publicly. Thousands of African Americans participated in spontaneous violent uprisings in Northern cities in 1966. How to harness this anger into a positive social outlet, and the change in SNCC policy caused Dr. King to make a reassessment and develop a radical alternative to changing a racist society.
The core of this Poor People’s Campaign was SCLC’s $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights (originally proposed by A. Philip Randolph), guaranteeing employment to the able-bodied, viable incomes to all those legitimately unemployed, a Federal Open Housing Act, and vigorous enforcement of integrated education.194 Responding to the struggle of striking municipal sanitation workers (mostly African American), Dr. King went to Memphis, Tennessee, on March 28, 1968. While leading a demonstration, African American teens, known as the Invaders, clashed with police and started a mini-rebellion, which grossly upset Dr. King. He was also aware of a plot against his life, but was determined to go on. He planned to return to lead the struggle, and if necessary, to ask the Teamsters to go on a general strike. After receiving a message of his impending assassination, delivered by Bayard Rustin, Dr. King gave his last message, after returning to Memphis, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”. Dr. King was ruthlessly assassinated on April 4, 1968. His goals of mobilizing and eventually organizing poor people, to demand political, social and economic democracy (equity) still burns in the hearts of many who say that the struggle continues. Who Was Robert F. Williams? In 1957 Robert F. Williams president of the Monroe, North Carolina branch of the NAACP organized an armed defense guard and had gun battles with the Ku Klux Klan. Robert F. Williams, known as “Rob,” was born February 25, 1925, in Monroe, North Carolina. Robert Williams was raised on stories from his former-slave grandmother, Ellen, and tales of his grandfather Sikes Williams, also born into slavery, who stumped North Carolina for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and published a newspaper called “The People’s Voice.” Before she died, Ellen Williams gave young Robert the rifle which his grandfather had wielded against the terrorist “Red Shirts” who ravaged Southern blacks at the turn of the century.195 As a youth, Rob Williams became radicalized by blatant racist Southern terror. Williams came face to face with racism early on. As an 11 year-old in 1936, he saw a white policeman, Jesse Helms, Sr., beat an African-American woman to the ground. Williams watched in terror as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helm’s father hit the woman and “dragged her down the street to a nearby jailhouse, her dress over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his prey.”196 In his mid-teens, Rob Williams organized a group called X-32 to throw stones at white men who drove nightly into town trying to assault African-American women.197 Later, Rob Williams was trained as a machinist in the National Youth Administration, where he organized a strike of workers at the age of 16.198 During World War II, he went north to find work. He moved to Michigan where he worked for a year at the Ford Motor Company as an automobile worker. Rob and his brother John Williams fought in the Detroit 1943 riot, when white mobs stormed through the streets and killed dozens of African American citizens.199 Drafted into the army in 1944, Rob Williams served for 18 months, fighting for freedom in a segregated army. In the late 1940s Williams wrote a story in The Daily worker entitled “Some Day I Am Going Back South.”200 Williams returned to Monroe and in 1947 married Mabel Ola Robinson, a beautiful and brilliant 17 year-old whom he had known for several years and who shared his commitment to social justice and African-American liberation. In 1953 Williams joined the U.S. Marines before attending West Virginia State College, North Carolina, and Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1955 as a husband and father of two sons (Robert F. Williams, Jr. and John C. Williams), he returned home with an honorable discharge from the U. S. Marine Corps. Keenly aware of social injustice, Rob Williams joined the local NAACP and became its president. As president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP branch he went into the bars and pool rooms to recruit members of the African-American working class. He was also a member of the Monroe Unitarian Fellowship and the Union County Human Relations Council. Facing armed harassment and intimidation of African American women by the KKK and denied justice in the courts, Williams began to advocate armed self-defense of the Monroe, North Carolina African American community. Members of the NAACP branch formed a rifle club, with a National Rifle Association charter, and protected their homes with rifles, machine guns, and sandbag fortifications. The Monroe, N. C., NAACP branch fought the KKK on numerous occasions with rifles and Molotov cocktails. From 1957 to 1961 the armed self-defense units militarily fought the racists. Because of his militancy, Rob Williams was stripped of his presidency of the branch by the national NAACP. But through Williams’s leadership, the Monroe branch had grown from a membership of 50 to 250. The Kissing Case Williams attracted worldwide attention in 1958, when he took up the defense of two black Monroe boys accused of molesting a white girl. David “Fuzzy” Simpson, 8, and James “Hanover” Thompson, 10, were convicted of molesting the 7-year-old girl after she kissed them on the cheek during a game instigated by a white boy. Police nabbed the boys later that day as they pulled their wagon down Franklin Street. They were tossed into jail and held for six days without seeing or speaking to their parents. The peck on the cheek set off a tempest. A white mob surrounded the jail. White supremacists fired shots into Fuzzy and Hanover’s homes. Six days later during a court hearing a judge sentenced the children to reform school near Rockingham indefinitely. As head of the NAACP, Williams rushed to defend the children and masterminded a media blitz that landed the “kissing case” on the front page of newspapers from the New York Post to the London News chronicle. He sent out press releases, called major newspapers and embarked on a national speaking tour. The publicity sparked worldwide protests. Activists implored President Dwight Eisenhower to intervene. N.C. Gov. Luther Hodges received tens of thousands of letters beseeching him to release the boys. He finally relented. Three months after they were snatched off a Monroe sidewalk, Fuzzy and Hanover came home. And Williams became a hometown hero among African-Americans.201 The Fight for Desegregation Between 1960 and 1961 Williams organized demonstrations (peaceful pickets) to desegregate the city-owned, white-only swimming pool. The African American community engaged in a struggle to use the local swimming pool that had been constructed with federal funds. Local white authorities would not allow integrated use nor would they consent to separate use. When the African American community refused to give up and did not accept promises of construction of a pool at some undefined date in the future, the town government filled the pool with concrete rather than let the African American community use it.202 When the sit-in movement began among Southern African American students, Rob Williams staged sit-ins at lunch counters, organized boycotts of department stores and desegregated the local library. He was a candidate for mayor of the city of Monroe in 1960, running as an independent. Also in 1960, Williams visited Cuba, met Fidel Castro, and became a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He would even fly a Cuban flag in his back yard.203 Rob Williams was a forerunner in the motion toward black political empowerment. Rob Williams’s physical and political stance on armed self-defense impacted upon Malcolm X, who then was a minister of the Nation of Islam. Minister Malcolm X on one occasion let Williams speak at Mosque No. 7 in New York to raise money for arms. Freedom Riders Come to Monroe When the Freedom Rides began in 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rob Williams – who had debated nonviolence vs. self-defense as a tactic or philosophy – agreed to test nonviolence in Monroe. It was Rob Williams’s belief in the right of having peaceful demonstrations but using them in tactical flexibility with self-defense that led him to invite Freedom Riders to Monroe, North Carolina, in 1961 to test nonviolence. But when the Freedom Riders came to Monroe, white mobs numbering in the thousands attacked them. The final confrontation came when the Black community came to the aid of nonviolent freedom riders who were demonstrating in front of city hall. The demonstration had been attacked by a vicious mob that had beaten Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist James Forman with a shotgun, splitting his head open. Unsuccessful efforts were made to rescue them and get them back to the Black community. Armed Black people set up defenses at the border between the white section of town and the Black community of Newton.204 A racial riot broke out as shots were fired. During the race riot a white couple wandered into the angry African American community. Their car was surrounded by African Americans from adjoining communities who had come to Newton for a showdown with the Klan. Rob Williams allowed the couple to take shelter in his home. Although the couple left unharmed, the local authorities pressed kidnapping charges against Williams. Receiving word that the he would be held accountable for all the violence that was taking place and knowing the racists were preparing to kill him, Robert F. Williams, along with his wife and two sons, left town. Escaping a nationwide manhunt of at least 500 FBI agents, Rob Williams and his family were forced out of the country and into exile. His successful escape from “legal” racism was one of the early victories of the civil rights movement. Rob Williams’s example of courageous struggle stimulated a young generation of activists to emulate his actions. Williams in Exile Williams went to Cuba, where he was given political asylum by Fidel Castro and welcomed by the Cuban people. He was a personal friend of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. While living in Cuba for five years, Rob and Mabel Williams organized a radio program called “Radio Free Dixie.” Radio Free Dixie brought the message of collective armed self-defense to the African American masses who were battling the racists in America’s streets. From exile in Havana Williams wrote the book Negroes with Guns (published 1962) about his experiences from 1957 to 1961. He also continued to publish his newsletter The Crusader, which called upon African Americans to unite with their allies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the Third World) and with progressive whites in the United States and through out the world. Appealing to all heads of state to make a call in support of the civil rights movement, Robert F. Williams was influential in the issue by Chairman Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China of a declaration of support to the cause of African American Liberation. As international chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM, 1965), Rob Williams traveled in Asia representing the African American freedom struggle. He moved to the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1966 and resided there during the height of the “Cultural Revolution.” While there he met and talked with Chinese leaders and toured the country. He visited North Vietnam, met and talked with President Ho Chi Minh. He also broadcast antiwar messages to African American soldiers in South Vietnam from North Vietnam. The example Rob Williams set in the African American Freedom movement inspired the formation in the South of groups such as the Deacons for Defense (1965) and the development of the student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which changed its policy from nonviolence to armed self-defense in 1966; the Black Panther Party (BPP, 1966) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW, 1969) considered Rob Williams the godfather of the armed self-defense movement. White in China, Williams was elected President-in-Exile of the Detroit-based self determinationist organization, the Republic of New Africa. Williams visited Africa and was imprisoned in Britain while trying to return to the U.S. In 1969 he returned to the U.S.A. and fought extradition from Michigan to North Carolina. He finally returned to North Carolina in 1976, after all charges against him had been dropped. Back in the U.S.A. After returning to the United States he continued his political relations with the People’s Republic of China, helping to establish an import-export trade agreement with China and paving the way for President Nixon’s historic trip to that country in 1972. Rob Williams was a Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies. Williams also published an article on the “Cultural Revolution.” He served as director of the Detroit East Side Citizens Abuse Clinic, where he was “too” successful in rehabilitating clients. Rob William resided in Baldwin, Michigan, remaining active in the People’s Association for Human Rights. In the late 1970s he traveled the country speaking for the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.205 Rob Williams completed the first draft of his autobiography, While God Lay Sleeping: The Autobiography of Robert F. Williams. Up until his untimely death, October 15, 1996, due to Hodgkin’s disease, Williams was planning to further escalate his leadership activities in the African American liberation movement, even at the age of 71.206 His fighting spirit and leadership will be felt forever. Rob Williams’s shining example as a courageous, sincere, scientific, spiritual, visionary, and honest freedom fighter will be honored. Robert F. Williams’s insight and foresight is an inspiration for those who cherish the establishment of a people’s democracy based on humanitarian principles. In 1958 Dr. Martin Luther King in a meeting with sixty ministers from across the South was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC advocated the use of non-violent direct action as a strategy for achieving equality. Ella Baker is chosen interim executive secretary of the organization. Why did Southern African-American Ministers led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) provide leadership to the southern civil rights movement in the 1950’s and early 60’s? The African American church and its leaders have always had a prominent role in all facets of life in the African American Community. It not only nourishes the spirit but the minds and hearts of African Americans and its leaders are usually well respected in the community. The church is the place of solace, guidance, information and social interaction. Thus, when the civil rights movement began, the church and its leaders were the ones who could rally the support and cohesiveness necessary to affect change. It was also because the previous leaders, (the teachers), could be fired by the southern state governments.207 Directory: Documents -> Finder -> Black%20Liberation%20Disk -> Black%20Power! Documents -> The great global switch-off Documents -> Nonprofit grant application Documents -> The Truth about the Rwandan Genocide Documents -> Annual InStructional unit plan Documents -> Chaos equipment included Black%20Power! -> The Need (Importance) for Student Activism in the 21st Century Black%20Power! -> When and how I wrote toward black liberation part I and malcolm X and the black liberation movement Black%20Power! -> Notes on African-American History Since 1900 Download 3 Mb. Share with your friends:
|