The documentary: Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams & Black Power
An International Action Center Black History Month Forum
Los Angeles Premiere Film Showing
7:30 pm, Friday, Feb. 27th
422 S Western Ave, Rm 114, L.A.
Dinner at 6:30 pm. $5 donations
No one turned away for lack of funds
213-487-2368
This documentary by the University of Florida’s noted College of Journalism & Communications details the extraordinary life of Robert Williams.
Robert Williams, a NAACP leader in Monroe, North Carolina in 1958, played a pivotal role in the struggle for respect, dignity & equality by advocating an oppressed people’s right to defend themselves against Klan & police terror. He believed in & practiced armed resistance in opposing the Ku Klux Klan who routinely drove into Black communities and opened fire. The attacks stopped when Williams, and those he trained, returned the fire.
He played a major role in making an international cause of the 1958 “Kissing Case”. The case involved two Black boys, 7 & 9-years old, accused of rape for the “crime” of kissing a 9-year-old white girl. (Yes, that’s how insane things were then.)
In 1962, Williams wrote his now famous book, “Negroes With Guns”, which had a major influence on Huey Newton & the Black Panthers.
To escape an FBI frameup, Williams moved to Cuba. From Cuba, he broadcast progressive programs into the U.S. on a radio station he started & named, “Radio Free Dixie”. From there he went to China, where he was a honored guest of the government.
He returned to the US in 1969, and worked as a China scholar. In that rarest of all occurrences for a revolutionary and freedom fighter, he died peacefully and in his retirement years – in 1996 at age 71 holding hands with his wife of forty nine years.
He was buried in a suit given to him by Mao Zedong. Rosa Parks spoke at the funeral, saying she and those who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama “always admired Robert Williams for his courage and his commitment to freedom. The work he did should go down in history and never be forgotten”.
Indeed.