By Rachel Harmon
Gargoyle correspondent
Posted Sunday, April 2, 2006, The OG, opinions

“Get off your ass and fight for what you deserve!”

Those are the words of Rob Williams (1925-1996), who was the controversial leader of the Monroe, N.C., chapter of the NAACP in the late1950s. Williams, who spent much of the 1960s in exile, first in Cuba and then in China, advocated armed resistance to white supremacists and helped to define the meaning of black power in America.

Williams was the subject of a documentary film, “Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power,” shown last week as part of a major conference at the University of Illinois, “Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power.” The conference, sponsored by the U of I's African American Studies and Research Program, took place Wednesday through Saturday.

I came into this conference not knowing much about the black power movement, or Rob Williams at that, and I walked out of the showing of the documentary with a new idol.

Amongst all of the “respectful” African-Americans in segregated Monroe, and in the country as a whole, Rob Williams and his group, the Negro Gun Club, stood out.

In the midst of all of these many people running inside their homes when the Ku Klux Klan came around, the people who bowed down their head in the presence of a white person, the people who smiled and grinned for the simple purpose of “keeping the peace,” the people who had peaceful rallies and were spit at and persecuted openly, the people who were submissive — amongst these people Rob Williams stood out.

He stood out because instead of running inside of his house, he would run outside armed and ready for combat; instead of putting his head down, he would straighten his back and stand up proud; instead of smiling and grinning when he was tired, he would frown; instead of being persecuted openly, he fought back; instead of being submissive, he demanded that he be treated like the man he was.

The Negro Gun Club, a group of mainly young African-American men organized by Williams with the National Rifle Association's approval, started to be really serious after an incident in Monroe, where the Klan forced an African-American woman to dance in the middle of the street by gunpoint, reducing her to being subhuman. Williams and his group were determined that it would no longer be possible for the Klan to have supremacy over blacks simply because of weapons; they would get their own.

Among the many accomplishments of Rob William was his work in the “Kissing Case” of 1958. In the Kissing Case, two black boys, ages 8 and 10, were arrested for kissing a white girl. They were locked in jail, beaten, and not allowed to see their parents or a lawyer for six days. They were sentenced to a reform school until the age of 21, but Williams got the sentence reduced to four months.

In all of the cases from this period of the segregationist South, one can see how violent the world was toward blacks. In the documentary, a historian noted that what Williams did in advocating armed resistance would be considered normal for a white man in Monroe, but it was considered just insane for a black man to protect himself.

Williams stated that the reason he advocated violence for black people was because it was a form of self-defense; how can one be obligated to stand there and be beaten up repeatedly without, eventually, hitting back? It was a preposterous demand from the country and community for blacks to submit to such treatment, and a demand that would not be met by Rob Williams.

I walked away from this documentary with a new sense of what black power actually was. It was a movement that advocated self-defense from a group of people who had been subjected to oppression since their forced arrival in America. I walked away from this documentary knowing who Rob Williams was and what it meant to have a Negro Gun Club, what it meant to have that security of which blacks had been deprived for so long, and what it meant to have pride in your race.

“They had to know that we were going to fight for justice,” Williams said.

The question I leave with is: Will we fight for our justice?