Book Review: Negroes With Guns by Robert F Williams

If you were attacked, what would you do? Fight back? Call the police? What if the police deliberately ignore or even participate in the violence against you? For African-Americans in the Jim Crow South these weren't hypothetical questions, they were things to be faced regularly as part of their everyday existence.

Martin Luther King Jr. advocated nonviolence and that's what gets remembered every February or whenever there's another uprising. Never could quite wrap my head around that, learned at an early age that there are times in which the only thing that will keep you safe are your willingness and ability to defend yourself. It wasn't until a friend recommended I read Negroes With Guns by Robert F Williams that I found a voice from that era speaking to my hillibilly heart.

Williams was a World War II veteran, serving in the segregated Marines. After returning to his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina in the mid-1905s, he quickly became active in his community, getting elected president of the local NAACP chapter. With the police oscillating between callous indifference and active hostility, he got a charter from the NRA and formed a rifle club that would double as a community self-defense group to protect against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted racists.

In Negroes With Guns Williams chronicles the many struggles they faced; with the racists, with the government and police, with the NAACP (they suspended him for six months at one point), with liberal 'allies', among others. It's no collection of anecdotes though, more of a setting the record straight while driving home the point that self defense is both a right and an effective way of reducing violence.

For you tl;dr types, this quote should sum things up well enough:

I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense--and have acted on it. It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must, act in self-defense against lawless violence. I believe this right holds for black Americans as well as whites.

Forced to flee lynching and bogus kidnapping charges, Williams wrote the book in exile in Cuba, with it being first published in 1962. It's not a long book, only 128 pages with a good third of that being commentary and essays by others. No easy read, many of the actions and attitudes described are hard to stomach, much less understand how it was ever found acceptable.

Must confess there was a long gap between when I was told about Negroes With Guns and when I actually read it. It was not until after the events of 2020 that I got my hands on a copy, memories of which were never far from my mind as I read it. Made it rather slow going, it was absolutely infuriating to see just how little had changed in sixty years. They called them communists too. At the same time it was oddly heartwarming to see how much, knowingly or otherwise, Mr. Williams's thinking had been put into practice during the protests here.

Although it doesn't make for light reading, Negroes With Guns is definitely worth a read. If you have an interest in history or the civil rights movement here in the US I highly recommend it, it's an unfiltered glimpse of Jim Crow in action. Even if you're a pacifist, you should check it out, Williams wasn't opposed to nonviolence, rather he demonstrates it's limits and what can be done when it fails.

Photos are all of the Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) from their two appearances in Louisville in 2020. NFAC's leader also got hemmed up on some bogus charges but unlike Williams, he's ended up in a federal prison. (Williams returned in the 1970s to face trial, whereupon the charges were dropped.)