True Left

Robert F. Williams may have been the biggest badass of them all. Born in 1925, Williams served in the Marines before returning to his hometown in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1955 and joining the NAACP. The press estimates that more than half of Monroe’s twelve thousand residents were members of the KKK. So Williams applied to the National Rifle Association to charter a chapter and formed the Black Guard. Made up of around sixty men who were mostly veterans, they charged themselves with protecting Monroe’s Black neighborhoods from the white boys in the pointy hats. In 1957, the Klan tried to attack the home of local NAACP vice president Dr. Albert E. Perry, but the Black Guard had fortified the house with sandbags, and the two groups engaged in a Wild West–style shootout. The Klan never returned, and the city of Monroe banned Klan motorcades.

Williams’s bold tactics were not just deployed by men in town, either. When Dr. Perry was arrested on charges of “criminal abortion on a white woman,” Williams led a group of armed women to the police station as they “surged against the doors, fingering their guns and knives until Perry was produced.”9

And his words were just as radical as his actions. In response to the acquittal of a white man charged with raping Mary Reed, a Black woman, Williams said:

We cannot rely on the law. We can get no justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is done, we must right then and there on the spot be prepared to inflict punishment on these people . . . Since the federal government will not bring a halt to lynching in the South and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally, if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method. We must meet violence with violence.10

The statement, made on the courthouse steps in Monroe, prompted the NAACP to suspend him from the organization. But Williams wasn’t cast out; he essentially became the de facto security guard for some of the largest civil rights protests. During a 1961 protest for the Freedom Rides, a white mob held Monroe’s Black community under siege. In the mayhem, a white couple made a wrong turn and wound up in Williams’s neighborhood. Williams offered them a place to stay and warned them that he couldn’t guarantee their safety if they tried to leave. After a few hours they left unharmed, but law enforcement agents convinced the couple to say that Williams had kidnapped them, forcing his family to flee the state. On August 28, 1961, the FBI issued a warrant for Williams, charging him with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution, warning agencies that he “has advocated and threatened violence” and should be considered armed and dangerous.11 Williams fled to Cuba, where he established a radio station urging Black soldiers to participate in an insurrection against the United States. He returned in 1969 and was extradited to North Carolina, and the state immediately dropped all charges.

Williams’s legacy loomed large. He always noted that his proudest accomplishment was that during the entire existence of the armed guard, no Black person under their protection lost their life to racial violence. At his 1996 funeral, Rosa Parks said he “should go down in history and never be forgotten.”12