Robert F. Williams

Robert F. Williams

Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader, the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s, and author. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting armed black self-defense in the United States. He and his wife left the United States in 1961 to avoid prosecution for kidnapping. A self-professed Black Nationalist and supporter of liberation, he lived in both Cuba and communist China in exile.

Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962), published while he was in exile in Cuba, details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the pacifist Civil Rights Movement philosophies. Among others the book influenced Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers.