The other, and perhaps more interesting, side of the civil rights movement

The Pen and the Gun:

Robert Franklin Williams's Project of Cultural Subversion from the Margins of the Civil Rights Movement

Born in Monroe, North Carolina in 1925, Robert Franklin Williams was a controversial figure at the margins of the civil rights movement who rose to national prominence in the late 1950s as an antagonist to Martin Luther King. His early stand on the necessity and morality of armed self-defense, and his 1962 publication Negroes with Guns, established him as a pioneer of the later militancy of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. In exile from 1961 to 1969, Williams traveled through Havana, Hanoi, Moscow, Peking, and Dar es Salaam. From Havana, he broadcast into the American South a program titled Radio Free Dixie, which was periodically rebroadcast via Radio Hanoi. Throughout his exile he published a newsletter, The Crusader, which he described as a weapon of "cultural warfare." The FBI and CIA monitored Williams from the age of sixteen throughout his life; the Justice Department considered an indictment on charges of treason and sedition, and both Naval Intelligence and congressional committees investigated him for subversive activities. Largely lost from narratives of the civil rights movement, and associated principally with the gun, this thesis argues that Williams is as well remembered for his use of the pen, and that his position was less extreme than its rhetorical peaks sometimes suggested. The most symbolic evidence for such a conclusion came upon his death in 1997, when he was eulogized by Rosa Parks.