dallaspenn.com

It must be Black History Month again because the Birkenstocks at PBS have another one of their ‘once a year’ investigative documentaries to throw out to the peoples.

This years docu-poop is titled ‘Negros With Guns‘ and surprisingly, it has NOTHING to do with crap music. This piece is the story around little known activist and civil rights leader, ROBERT WILLIAMS, who urged African Americans to arm themselves against violent racists. In doing so, WILLIAMS not only challenged the Klan-dominated establishment of his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina, he alienated himself from the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, which advocated peaceful resistance.

As the leader of the Monroe chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), WILLIAMS drew international attention to the harsh realities of life in the Jim Crow South when he led protests against the illegal segregation of Monroe’s public swimming pool. This is incredible to me because I didn’t even realize that Black people could swim.

For WILLIAMS and other African Americans who had witnessed countless acts of brutality against their communities swimmers and waders, acts like atomic wedgies and dunkings from the deep end, armed self-defense was a practical matter of swimming survival, particularly in the violent, racist heart of the Deep South deep end of the public pool. It would be evident much later that aquatic equality was necessary for the progress of African Americans and not just from the water that came from fire hoses in Alabama.

In August 1961, the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists trained by MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr. to lead non-violent resistance, came to Monroe to demonstrate the superiority of passive resistance. An angry mob of whites turned on the protestors and, by the end of the day, the Freedom Riders had been bloodied, beaten and jailed, and ROBERT WILLIAMS was on the run from the FBI.

For eight years, WILLIAMS and his family lived in exile, first in Cuba and then in China. While in Havana, WILLIAMS began to broadcast a 50,000-watt radio program called “Radio Free Dixie” as well as teach young Cubans how to swim to Florida. The radio show fused cutting-edge music with news of the Afro-American freedom movement and WILLIAMS’ editorials, which, among other things, urged blacks not to fight in Vietnam or swim in the Olympics.

In exile from 1961 to 1969, at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement, ROBERT WILLIAMS and his accomplishments have been largely erased from the public consciousness. According to the filmmakers, ‘Negroes With Guns’ helps to “restore ROB and MABEL WILLIAMS to their rightful place as important civil rights figures who defied the white power structure without the protection of large numbers or the attention of television cameras.