Negroes With Guns: The True Story of a Fearsome Town

How one man and his community turned back the Klan with rifles and sandbags—and rewrote the rules of Black power.

Image: "Wild Kingdom," artist Lynd Ward. Source collection: https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/lynd-ward-wood-engravings-and-other-graphic-art-circa-1920-1975

“When an oppressed people show a willingness to defend themselves, the enemy, who is a moral weakling and coward is more willing to grant concessions and work for a respectable compromise. Psychologically, moreover, racists consider themselves superior beings and they are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity. This we have shown in Monroe.”

—-Robert Williams, Negroes With Guns

August 27, 1961 — Monroe, North Carolina.

The Klan came in daylight. Cars packed with armed white men, some locals, some from just across the South Carolina line, poured into the Black section of town. The Freedom Riders were here, and Monroe’s white establishment meant to make an example of them. The riders—young men and women from the North—had come with a conviction that passive resistance could turn even Monroe. Robert F. Williams thought otherwise. He had seen Monroe too closely to believe in its conversion.

By midafternoon, the streets were a battlefield. Freedom Riders were being pulled from cars, beaten, dragged toward the jail. In Williams’s neighborhood, the cars kept coming, rifles out the windows. Behind sandbag walls, men waited—men Williams had trained, armed, and drilled for years. The Klan fired; the defenders answered. Gunfire cracked over the narrow streets. Then, as suddenly as it began, the Klan broke off. No one on either side lay dead, but the message was sent: Monroe would not be an easy target.

Image: A firebomb was thrown into a bus ridden by Freedom Riders on the outskirts of Anniston, Ala., on Mother’s Day in 1961. The author, then 12 years old, rushed to help the injured. Underwood Archives.

“When the Klan is shooting at you, you are justified in shooting back.”

—-Williams, Negroes With Guns

In the confusion, a white couple—the Stegalls, known Klan sympathizers—drove into the district. Neighbors shouted for their blood. Williams stopped them. He ordered the couple unharmed, got them out. It would become the pretext for his ruin: a “kidnapping” charge, false but lethal. That evening, Police Chief A.A. Mauney gave him the choice—“In thirty minutes you’ll be hanging in the courthouse square”—and Williams knew Monroe was closed to him for good.

But to understand that day, you have to understand the place, and the boy who grew up in it.

Monroe — 1925.

Williams was born into a town where the rules were unwritten and absolute. The Black part of town was the labor pool: tobacco hands, domestic workers, cotton pickers. The white part of town was the command post. At the center stood the courthouse, its stone and clock tower a statement of who made the law and for whom it was enforced. “Whites Only” signs marked the library, the swimming pool, the waiting rooms. The violence of the Klan wasn’t the collapse of order; it was its enforcement.

Image: US Sen Jesse Helms Jr. circa 1973.

The Helms family personified the arrangement. Old Man Helms, sheriff of Union County, carried the authority of the law on his hip. His son, Jesse, would inherit that worldview and take it to Washington, becoming the most prominent segregationist senator of his generation. The Helmses worked in partnership with the real power in North Carolina: Duke Power, the tobacco companies, and the Southern Railroad—now Norfolk Southern—whose lines carried Carolina crops to port. The railroad was controlled from New York by the J.P. Morgan banking house, but it depended on Monroe to remain “safe”: no unions, low wages, a Black workforce kept in place by fear.

Williams’s grandparents lived in another order—one that had existed briefly after the Civil War. His grandmother Ellen had been born enslaved. His grandfather Sikes was a Reconstruction Republican, traveling the state to organize Black voters, publishing The People’s Voice. In their stories, young Robert heard of possibilities Monroe had since shut down: free assembly, the ballot, the hope of equality enforced by law. Before her death, Ellen gave him Sikes’s rifle—the one he had used to defend himself against night riders. It was an heirloom with a message: survival is not given; it is secured.

Image: A Harlem newsboy stands in front of a poster for a series in The People's Voice (May 1943). Photographer: Gordon Parks.

1936.

Robert was eleven when the truth of that message played out in front of him. On a Monroe street, Jesse Helms Sr., in uniform, beat a Black woman to the ground, then dragged her toward the jail. As he hauled her, he lifted her dress, exposing her before the men watching. It was part arrest, part demonstration. The boy watched the woman’s humiliation and saw the lesson: this was what the law looked like when it was owned.

The world outside Monroe.

In 1943, Williams was in Detroit when white mobs killed Black citizens in the street. A year later, the Army drafted him into a segregated unit. Eighteen months later, he came back with the uniform but without illusions. In 1947, he married Mabel Robinson, who shared his belief that Black dignity was not to be negotiated.

By the late 1950s, Williams was president of the Monroe NAACP. The chapter had shrunk to six members. The Klan’s Saturday night motorcades still came, firing into Black neighborhoods, sometimes from across the South Carolina line. The governor did nothing. Williams organized a local NRA chapter, taught marksmanship, fortified homes with sandbags, armed men with military-surplus rifles.

In 1957, when the Klan attacked the home of NAACP member Dr. Albert Perry, the armed defenders fired back. No one died. The night-riding stopped. The story never made the white press, but it traveled in the Black papers—Jet, the Afro-American, the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

Image: Dr Albert Edwin Perry Jr. Photograph via Patricia Poland.

“The Afro-American is a “militant” because he defends himself. His family, his home, and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system – the violence is already there, and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetrate itself,”

—Williams in his 1962 book Negroes With Guns

1958 — the kissing case.

James “Hanover” Thompson, nine, and David “Fuzzy” Simpson, seven, were arrested after a white girl kissed one of them during a children’s game. A mob formed, police beat the boys, kept them six days without contact with their families, sent officers in white sheets to their cell, burned a cross on the Thompsons’ lawn, fired into their home. The mothers lost their jobs. After a sham hearing without counsel, the boys were sentenced to “indefinite” reform school—fourteen years. Williams fought. He wrote to President Eisenhower. He rallied protests in Europe. Three months later, the governor pardoned them. No apology was offered.

Image: The young boys James Thompson and David Simpson with Kelly Alexander of the NAACP in Wadesboro, North Carolina, in January 1959. Jet Magazine.

Williams’s doctrine hardened. “The violence is already there, and has always been there,” he wrote. Self-defense was not an abandonment of nonviolence; it was its companion in a country where the state wore two faces—judge by day, mob by night.

The break with the movement.

King believed that America could be shamed into justice. Williams believed Monroe proved otherwise. “When the Klan is shooting at you,” he said, “you are justified in shooting back.” The national NAACP suspended him for six months. In Monroe, his chapter became known for its militancy.

“Nonviolence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilized, but nonviolence is no repellent for a sadist...Nowhere in the annals of history does the record show a people delivered from bondage by patience alone.”

—Robert Williams, Negroes With Guns

Return to August 1961.

The Freedom Riders came. The Klan answered. In the heat of that day, the armed defenders held their ground. The Klan retreated. But the kidnapping charge—built from the Stegall incident—would force Williams into exile.

From Cuba, with Fidel Castro’s backing, he launched Radio Free Dixie, broadcasting into the South. From China, he urged Mao Zedong to issue a message of solidarity with African Americans. Huey Newton read Negroes with Guns and used it to shape the Black Panther Party’s armed patrols. Malcolm X called him “a couple years ahead of his time.”

Epilogue.

Williams died in 1996 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His unpublished memoir, While God Lay Sleeping, waits in manuscript. His life challenges the neat narrative of a nonviolent civil rights movement giving way to a violent Black Power. Both, his story shows, grew from the same ground—Jim Crow’s violence, the state’s complicity, the refusal of Black Americans to be victims. The rifle his grandmother gave him was never just a weapon. It was an inheritance: a reminder that the right to live had to be defended, and that, in Monroe, the defense would never be granted by the law.

Image: Robert Franklin Williams Content Date: 1/5/1995, VALICIA BOUDRY Charlotte Observer file photo

Image: Robert Franklin Williams, in 1969, the year he returned to the U.S., and settled in Michigan where he worked to clear false kidnapping charges from 1961 in Monroe. The charges were dropped in 1975. Charlotte Observer archives

Image: 8/20/95. Ernest Crawford a Winchester grad talking to Robert Williams. Photo by Sherry Hodgin Charlotte Observer Archives

The story of Robert Williams.

Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power. Directed by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2004. DVD.

Books and Articles

Williams, Robert F. "THE BLACK SCHOLAR INTERVIEWS: ROBERT F. WILLIAMS." The Black Scholar 1, no. 7 (1970): 2-14. Accessed April 16, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41163455.

Williams, Robert F. Negroes with Guns, (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 1962).

Tyson, Timothy, ed. “Part 2: The Robert F. Williams Papers,” Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. http://www.lexisnexis.com/documents/academic/upa_cis/9353_BlackPowerMove...

Barksdale, Marcellus C. "Robert F. Williams and the Indigenous Civil Rights Movement in Monroe, North Carolina, 1961." The Journal of Negro History 69, no. 2 (1984): 73-89. Accessed April 16, 2020. doi:10.2307/271759

Rucker, Walter. "Crusader In Exile: Robert F. Williams and the International Struggle for Black Freedom in America." The Black Scholar 36, no. 2/3 (2006): 19-34. Accessed April 16, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41069202.

Sturgis, Sue. “Remembering Southern Black freedom fighter Mabel Williams.” Facing South: A Voice for a Changing South. Institute for Southern Studies. April 25, 2014.

https://www.facingsouth.org/2014/04/remembering-southern-black-freedom-f...

Tyson, Timothy. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

PBS; Independent Lens. "Negros with Guns: Robert F. Williams and Black Power."

Hill, Lance. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Website Resources

Equal Justice Initiative Calendar entry (The “Kissing Case”)

“On this Day Oct. 28, 1958: Police in Monroe, North Carolina, Arrest, Jail, and Beat Two Black Boys after a White Girl Kisses Them on the Cheek,” A History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiative.

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/oct/28

National Humanities Center — Excerpt from Negroes With Guns

Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns, chaps. 3–5 (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1962), excerpted in The Making of African American Identity: Vol. III, 1917–1968, National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text6/williamsnegroeswithguns.pdf

NCpedia — “Robert F. Williams and Black Power in North Carolina”

Sarajanee Davis, “Robert F. Williams and Black Power in North Carolina,” NCpedia, revised by SLNC Government and Heritage Library, August 2025.

https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/robert-f-williams-black-power-north-carolina

Encyclopedia.com — Biography of Robert F. Williams

“Robert Franklin Williams,” Encyclopedia.com, updated May 29, 2018.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/historians-and-chronicles/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/robert-franklin-williams#F

NCpedia — “Mabel Williams: Standing Up To The Klan”

David S. Cecelski, “Mabel Williams: Standing Up To The Klan,” NCpedia, November 14, 1999.

https://www.ncpedia.org/listening-to-history/williams-mabel

. BlackPast.org — Robert F. Williams entry

Daren Salter, “Robert F. Williams (1925–1996),” BlackPast.org, December 10, 2007.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-robert-f-1925-1996/

Marusak, Joe. “He Fought Bigotry in NC, Made the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted List’ and Was Eulogized by Rosa Parks.” Charlotte Observer, February 25, 2025, 6:00 AM. Accessed [today’s date]. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article299871529.html.

Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power. Directed by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2004. DVD.

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