Early Life
Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina in 1925 to Emma C. and John L. Williams, a railroad boiler washer. His grandmother, a former slave, gave Williams the rifle with which his grandfather, a Republican campaigner and publisher of the newspaper The People's Voice, had defended himself in the hard years after Reconstruction. At the age of 11, Williams witnessed the beating and dragging of a black woman by the police officer Jesse Helms, Sr. (He was the father of future US Senator Jesse Helms.)
As a young man, Williams joined the Great Migration, traveling north for work during World War II. He witnessed race riots in Detroit in 1943, prompted by labor competition between European immigrants and African Americans. Drafted in 1944, he served for a year and a half in the segregated Army before returning home to Monroe.
Read more about this topic: Robert F. Williams
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
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