In 1936 in the Jim Crow South,
Robert F. Williams was an 11-year-old black boy in Monroe, North Carolina, who watched helplessly as
Jesse Helms Sr. (father and namesake of the
former senator) beat an African-American woman to the ground and
"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." Years later, after a stint in the segregated military, Williams returned home to Monroe and worked as an NAACP organizer, where he brought international attention to the
Kissing Case, a 1958 incident in which two black boys under the age of 10 were sentenced to a reformatory for kissing a white girl. By then, Williams had also attracted controversy for his advocacy of armed self-defense, a position he outlined in the book
Negroes with Guns. But it would all change overnight in 1961, when Williams landed on
FBI's Most Wanted list, after being charged with kidnapping a white couple that Williams claimed he was trying to save from an angry black crowd.
[more inside]
posted by jonp72
on Jun 8, 2010 -
36 comments
