Today’s Wake-Up Call started with the story of the Black Armed Guard of Monroe, N.C.
Robert Franklin Williams was born on Feb. 26, 1925, in Monroe, N.C., to Emma Carter and John L. Williams. During his teen years, Williams’ grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman of Yoruba ancestry, gave Robert the rifle of his grandfather, who served as a political organizer and published the post-Reconstruction Newspaper, The People’s Voice. At age 11, Williams witnessed Monroe’s police chief brutally beat and drag a Black woman, an event he later described as a defining moment. The police chief was also a Klan leader who was raising his son in his own image:
Jesse Helms Sr., father of the future U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms Jr.
As a young man, Williams joined the Great Migration, moving to Detroit to work in the auto industry during World War II. He was drafted into the Army and later enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he openly opposed racial segregation in the armed forces—a stance that led the Marines to place him under investigation and give him an undesirable discharge. In 1947, he married Mabel Ola Robinson, a fellow civil rights activist who would become his lifelong partner in both marriage and political struggle.
Williams returned to Monroe in 1955 and was elected president of the local NAACP chapter the following year. He and Mabel built the branch’s membership from just six to over a hundred by recruiting from pool halls, barbershops and working-class neighborhoods. Under his leadership, the chapter successfully integrated Monroe’s public library and fought to integrate the town’s public swimming pool—a campaign that ended when the city filled the pool with concrete rather than allow Black swimmers to use it.
Recognizing the threat posed by Monroe’s large Ku Klux Klan chapter, which boasted an estimated at 7,500 members in a city of 12,000, Williams successfully applied for a charter from the National Rifle Association, founding the Black Armed Guard, a group of roughly 60 military veterans. The Guard trained with firearms and publicly declared they would meet violence with violence, directly protecting the Black community from Klan attacks.
Williams was also instrumental in the Kissing Case of 1958, when two young Black boys were arrested for kissing a white girl and sentenced to reform school. The case drew international outrage, and with Williams’ intervention, the boys received pardons from North Carolina’s governor.
In 1961, after Freedom Riders arrived in Monroe and a white couple got lost in the Black neighborhood during a volatile standoff, local authorities accused Williams of kidnapping the couple. Facing charges he maintained were fabricated, Williams and Mabel fled to Cuba, where he broadcast a radio program called “Radio Free Dixie” and wrote Negroes with Guns, the foundational text for radical Black activists that directly inspired Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton.
The Williamses moved to China and traveled through Africa and Asia speaking against racism and colonialism before returning to the U.S. in 1969. The charges against the couple were eventually dropped in the mid-1970s. Williams died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma on Oct. 15, 1996, in Baldwin, Mich. Rosa Parks delivered his eulogy.
In 2017, the FBI issued a warning about a new terrorist threat called “Black Identity Extremists.” According to the report, the agency concluded that it is “very likely Black Identity Extremists (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.”
Nine years later, the FBI still cannot list a single murder caused by a Black identity extremist.
In fact, the only person remotely prosecuted was a man named Christopher Daniels. According to a court transcript, in 25 months of FBI monitoring, Daniels had not engaged in a single act of violence against an officer or another human being. The only evidence that the FBI offered for Daniels being the subject of 25 months of federal surveillance was “anti-police rhetoric” on social media. But after searching his home, the FBI assessed Daniels as a threat because of three items:
He legally purchased firearms.
He was a founding member of the Huey P. Newton gun club.
He owned a copy of Robert F. Williams’ Negroes with Guns.
Today’s Reading List:
You have a dream, I got these hands: The secret history of non-nonviolent resistance by Michael Harriot
Remembering Southern Black freedom fighter Mabel Williams by Sue Sturgis
Drapetomaniax: Robert F. Williams and The Kissing Case featuring Bob the Drag Queen
Mennonite Petition Against Slavery by Garrett Henderich
By the way, here is the clip y’all wanted.
Thank you KJ Kearney, Lazy&Golden🌱, Jeanne Elbe, AntoDiNetto, Joy, and many others for tuning in to the Wake-Up Call. Join me next Friday at 9 a.m. ET.
