Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online

best, barely noticed outside the black community.
    The notion of a violent struggle against White America received little currency during the 1950s; King’s message was the only one most Americans, black and white alike, were able to hear. But the specter of racial violence was always there, and as the years wore on with little sign of the seismic changesmany blacks demanded, the voices of militancy grew louder. Between 1959 and 1972, the torch of “self-defense” was passed between five consecutive black men and their acolytes.
    The first, and least remembered, was Robert F. Williams, head of the NAACP chapter in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Monroe, North Carolina. A grandson of slaves, Williams spent his early years working in Detroit factories, where he became a labor organizer. Returning home in 1955, he wasted little time confronting Monroe’s white power structure, boycotting whites-only lunch counters and demanding in vain that black children be allowed to use the town pool. After watching a Klansman force a black girl to dance at gunpoint, Williams formed the Black Armed Guard, arguing that “armed self-reliance” was necessary in the face of Klan “terrorism.” Its members were mostly NAACP men who started carrying guns. “If the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie at this time, then Negroes must defend themselves, even if it is necessary to resort to violence,” he once told reporters.
    Williams became an international figure during 1958’s infamous “Kissing Case.” Two black boys, aged seven and nine, had participated in a schoolyard kissing game in which a white Monroe girl gave one of the boys a peck on the cheek; the boys were arrested for molestation, jailed, beaten, and sent to a reform school. Williams led a defense effort that eventually included Eleanor Roosevelt and, after a British newspaper exposé, demonstrations in Paris, Rome, and Vienna; in Rotterdam the U.S. embassy was stoned. Soon after, the boys were released. Williams, in turn, emerged as a minor celebrity, feted by Northern progressives in Harlem and other black strongholds.
    During and after the case, Williams gave newspaper interviews in which he openly advocated black self-defense; if the Klan attacked a black man in Monroe, he swore, there would be retribution. “We must be willing to kill if necessary,” he told one reporter. Alarmed, the NAACP suspended him. Williams was unrepentant. Then, in 1961, when Freedom Riders came to the area to register black voters, a white couple drove into an angry black crowd. Williams took the couple into his home, then briefly refused to let them leave, saying it would be unsafe. Afterward, prosecutors charged him with kidnapping. When Williams fled, the FBI issued a warrant charging him with unlawful interstate flight. With the help of radical friends in Harlem, he made his way to Canada and then to Cuba, becoming among the first, but far from the last, U.S. radical to be warmly welcomed by Fidel Castro.
    In Cuba Williams became a one-man factory of anti-Americanism. It was there he wrote the book that became his legacy, Negroes with Guns , in which he argued that North Carolina authorities began protecting blacks only after they armed themselves. Between 1962 and 1965 Williams churned out a stream of bellicose writings, many in a self-published newspaper, the Crusader . Castro even gave him a radio show broadcast into Southern states, called Radio Free Dixie . During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Williams called on black servicemen to engage in armed insurrection. Even at the height of his notoriety, however, he remained a marginal figure, familiar mostly to other radicals and the FBI. He all but disappeared after moving to China in 1965.
    The second, and vastly more influential, messenger of black militancy was a charismatic Harlem preacher named Malcolm Little, better known to history as Malcolm X. Unlike Williams