The Civil Rights Movement : Robert F. Williams

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Robert F. Williams was one of the most influential active radical minds of a generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever affected American and African American history. During his time as the president of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950’s, Williams and his most dedicated followers (women and men) used machine guns, Molotov cocktails, and explosives to defend against Klan terrorists. These are the true terrorists to American society. Williams promoted and enforced this idea of "armed self-reliance" by blacks, and he challenged not just white supremacists and leftists, but also Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, and the civil rights establishment itself. During the 1960s, Williams was exiled to Cuba, and there he had a radical radio station titled "Radio Free Dixie." This broadcast of his informed of black politics and music The Civil Rights movement is usually described as an nonviolent / peaceful call on America 's guilty conscience, and the retaliation of Black Power as a violent response of these injustices against African Americans. Radio Free Dixie shows how both of these racial and equality movements spawned from the same seed and were essentially the same in the fight for African American equality and an end to racism. Robert F. Williams 's story demonstrates how independent political action, strong cultural pride and identity, and armed self-reliance performed in the South in a semi-partnership with legal efforts and nonviolent protest nationwide.
The radicalistic Robert Williams 's philosophy of armed self-reliance opposed Martin Luther King 's nonviolent resistance, but honestly each man represented two different sides of the civil rights movement. Williams and King both understood though that the Cold War a...

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...pping charges against Robert F. Williams in 1976. Williams pressing times beyond his prime became frustrated by what he considered as the irrational and impulsive nature of Black Nationalist Politics. Occasionally Williams wrote letters to the press, critical commentaries, and hosting lectures kept him in touch with this new generation of young and radical minds, especially many of the young Black radicals of the 1980s-90s. Reflective of the period, Williams grew politically muted and outdated, rejoining the NAACP (peacefully might I add), and even disconnecting from militant organizations. His own vast output of radicalism with words, ideas, and actions, unfortunately, was also put on pause. He was not remembered for much of what happened in his later years of life, but he did leave a relevant and effective impact of American society and its African American peers.

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