Robert Franklin Williams
Page 8
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THE MONROE CASE: CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE NEGRO
Robert F. Williams at a press conference with the Cuban Bar
Association, March 1962.
I've described. Much pressure is building up throughout the
country. Many people are preparing to protest this great
miscarriage of justice because these indictments carry lifetime sentences in prison.
When Mrs. Mallory was first arrested in Cleveland considerable protest occurred in Ohio. Responding to this pressure by the Afro-American community, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. signed a Monroe Defense Committee petition
65
NEGROES WITH GUNS
TH E C R U S A D E R
M O N T H L Y N E WS L E T T E R
ROBERT F. WILLIAMS, EDITOR
-IN EXILF--
VOL. 3 - No. 8
APRIL 1962
Truth Crushed to Earth Shall Rise Again
IT has truly been said that "truth crushed to earth shall
rise again." True to this adage, the fighting little
CRUSADER Newsletter returns to the vanguard of the
�
��O:�',sr ALlOW£D JlER[ !
CUBA : TERRITORIO LIBRE DE AMERICA
liberation struggle. Yes, it yet lives to haunt those who
thought they had destroyed it. THE CRUSADER with its
editor in exile is going to be a monthly printed journal. It
66
THE MONROE CASE: CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE NEGRO
asking Gov. Michael DiSalle not to extradite Mae Mallory.
Mrs. Mallory was granted an executive hearing and two
months later Gov. DiSalle made his decision. It was to extradite Mrs. Mallory back to Monroe.
Despite thousands of petition signatures, telegrams,
and letters of protest from trade unions, civil liberties organizations, and civic groups not only in Cleveland but throughout the country, Gov. DiSalle made this decision and
refused to reverse it. Gov. DiSalle justified his decision on
the basis of two telephone conversations with North Carolina's Gov. Terry Sanford, who "assured" Gov. DiSalle that
"Mrs. Mallory would receive a fair trial in a North Carolina
court."
Does this great liberal Governor of Ohio really believe
Negroes can secure justice in North Carolina courts just because the Governor of that state assured him that such justice exists? North Carolina is a state where a Negro man was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison because it
was said that he leered at a white woman, that he looked at
her too attentively. Despite the fact that he was 75 feet away,
he was still convicted in a state superior court and sentenced to five years.
This is also a state where just two years ago a seventeen-year-old Negro girl was beaten to death in prison by a guard because she complained about the bad prison food.
The state entered into a settlement with her parents. They
paid her parents $ 1 ,900 as a settlement for having killed their
daughter.
Evidently this is Gov. DiSalle's concept of "assured"
justice for Negroes. Does he find even more reassuring the
instances of so-called North Carolina "justice" that have occurred since the August frame-ups?
This is a state where in early fall, while Gov. DiSalle was
talking over the phone with Gov. Terry Sanford and "carefully examining the North Carolina record in administered justice," a young girl, a Negro teen-ager, raped by four white
men she could positively identify, was unable to obtain justice from any North Carolina law enforcement agency. When she went to the Marshville police, the Union County sheriff's
67
NEGROES WITH GUNS
office, and finally to the FBI and told them that she had been
raped, giving them the names of the men who had raped her,
all refused to do anything about it. The local FBI office refused because they said this was a local matter. Then finally, when the pressure from the Negro community threatened to
become explosive, one of the men was charged, brought to
trial, and in five minutes acquitted.
In this same state, just weeks after Gov. DiSalle made
his decision to extradite Mae Mallory, a twenty-year-old
Negro was convicted of rape and sentenced to ten to twenty
years in prison. Despite the fact that the white woman involved repeatedly asserted in court that it was not he who had raped her, the white jury brought in their verdict of
guilty. They did this because they knew that the accused
and the woman had been long-time friends-something
these people cannot tolerate.
At the same time, in this same state, North Carolina, in
this same city, Monroe, another Negro youth, held incommunicado for twenty days on three trumped-Up charges, was shot in the leg by a policeman when he attempted to escape
from the dungeon cell in which he was being kept in solitary
confinement-the same cell in which Richard Griswold was
so brutally beaten. No North Carolina attorney would represent this boy, Jayvan Covington. Finally, two young Washington, D.C. , lawyers volunteered their services as counsel only a week before the trial was scheduled, but the court refused
them more time to prepare the defense. Jayvan Covington
was found guilty of three felony charges and was also convicted on two misdemeanors: resisting arrest-he wanted to know what he had been arrested for-and attempted escape. He was sentenced to seven to ten years on these charges. When an appeal was filed, a $ 1 5,500 bond was sent
pending appeal. So Jayvan Covington is still in his cell and
recently has been threatened with an extra charge of "secret
assault" if he goes through with his appeal.
This is the same law, the same court that set bail at
$2,000 for a white man, a known member of the Klan, who
was charged with murder, charged with killing a Negro man
by shooting him in the back of the head. This white man
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THE MONROE CASE: CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE NEGRO
doesn't even deny the shooting; he claimed he had caught
the Negro peeping into a local joyhouse. A week prior to this,
another Negro was shot in the hip and is in serious condition. Yet he is in jail unable to raise the $8,000 bail while the white man who shot him is free-claiming he shot the Negro
for attempting to break and enter, or for peeping. The Monroe court hasn't decided yet what to call it so it will sound most believable at trial.
This is North Carolina, the state where the second highest official in the government expressed surprise that I was still alive when we appealed to him for no more than enforcement of law and order. This is what Governor Sanford would like to have Mae Mallory return to. This is the type of justice
in store for the Negro youth who are now facing trial there,
and for John Lowry.
The Mallory case reminds us once more that no Afro
American is out of the reach of Klan justice so long as he is
on soil presided over by racists. It is an indictment of American justice to have a Northern state collaborate with the South in a legal lynching. The Mallory case proves that even
a Northern state like Ohio helps the racists. Terry Sanford
knows that he can depend on a fellow Democrat like DiSalle
to return fugitive slaves.
To the World: "Take Note of Monroe"
On a date to be fixed after Mae Mallory is returned to
North Carolina, my co-defendants will be brought to trial in
a Monroe, North Carolina, courtroom. Only an aroused and
outraged world opinion can possibly save them from the
frame-up fate that the authorities have planned. Only an attentive world opinion, sharply focused on that Monroe courtroom, can possibly restrain the racist authorities.
We are asking the world to take note of Monroe, to register its indignation and shock that a government which proclaims itself leader of the "free world" persecutes its
freedom-fighting youth.
We have started a world-wide campaign for signatures
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to a petition which will be presented to the Human Rights
Commission of the United Nations. It demands an immediate
international investigation into the denial of human rights
in Monroe. We are asking labor organizations, human rights
committees and student organizations all over the world to
join in this protest.
Our one hope for the Monroe defendants is that the
United States will be civilized enough and responsive
enough to be mindful that the whole world is disgusted with
its treatment of the Afro-American. We hope that the pressure of world resentment will force the U.S. government to give them justice regardless of their race, regardless of their
role as freedom fighters, and regardless of their dissent in a
racist system, and that they will be restored to the decent
society of people who believe in social justice.
This is not a new tactic. World protest saved two young
boys from fourteen-year reformatory sentences in the Monroe "Kissing Case." In 1 960, when the Monroe city officials drafted an "urban renewal plan" calling for Federal "slum
clearance" funds to condemn and destroy the houses of the
colored community, we telegraphed a protest-appeal to honorary NAACP member Jawaharlal Nehru, who at that moment had President Eisenhower as his guest in India. The Federal Housing Administration subsequently refused to approve the Monroe project. In 1 96 1 , after the Cuban invasion fiasco, when President Kennedy justified U.S. intervention
for "the cause of freedom," we sent an open telegram (read
at the United Nations) to the President requesting equivalent U.S. tanks, airplanes, artillery, machine guns, and mercenary troops to fight the Klan in North Carolina.
The only difference now is that we will mobilize opinion
on a larger scale. When the racists forced me into exile they
unwittingly led me onto a greater field of battle.
This is the time for demonstrations like the one we had
in the United Nations protesting the lynching of Patrice Lumumba. We must display the type of courage that will embarrass this nation before the world. All this time we will further identify our struggle for liberation with the struggle
of our brothers in Africa, and the struggle of the oppressed
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THE MONROE CASE: CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE NEGRO
of Asia and Latin America. They in turn will further identify
their struggle with ours. The U.S. government is powerful
enough to eliminate racial discrimination overnight. But it
tolerates and abets Jim Crow.
This government will increasingly discover that every discriminatory action against Afro-Americans it tolerates or abets will be understood as a crime against their brothers
by the "uncommitted" colored peoples it so wishes to influence.
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Chapter 7
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Self-Defense:
An American Tradition
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by
a plea to the oppressor's conscience. Social change in something as fundamental as racist oppression involves violence.
You cannot have progress here without violence and upheaval because it is a struggle for survival for one and a struggle for liberation for the other. Always the powers in
command are ruthless and unmerciful in defending their position and their privileges. This is not an abstract rule to be meditated upon by Americans. This is a truth that was
revealed at the birth of America and has continued to be
revealed many times in our history. The principle of selfdefense is an American tradition that began at Lexington and Concord.
Minds Warped by Racism
We have come to comprehend the nature of racism. It
is a mass psychosis. When I have described racial conditions
in the United States to audiences of foreign newsmen, Cubans and other Latin Americans, they have been shocked to learn of the depths of American race hatred. When I have
cited as illustrations such extreme situations as the segregation of telephone party-lines in Union County or the segre-72
SELF-DEFENSE: AN AMERICAN TRADITION
gated pet-animal cemetery in Washington, D.C., where an
Afro-American cannot bury his dog, they find such things
comic as well as pathetic.
Such extreme examples of the racist mentality only appear comic when looked upon as isolated phenomena. In truth they are perfectly logical applications of the premises
that make up the racist mentality. Look at the phenomena
this way and they are the logical inventions of a thoroughly
diseased mind. The racist is a man crazed by hysteria at the
idea of coming into equal human contact with Negroes. And
this mass mental illness called racism is very much a part of
the "American Way of Life."
When Afro-American liberation is finally achieved in the
U.S.A., one of the many new developments in such a society
will be some sort of institution that will correct those Americans whose minds are thoroughly warped by racism. Somehow a way will be found so that these insane people will be made whole and well again.
"We Must Create a Black Militancy . . . "
This is the time for the Afro-American to act. Our sense
of national consciousness and militancy is growing. I speak
of the masses of people, the masses of Afro-Americans that
I know and have visited: in Jacksonville, Florida; in Atlanta,
Savannah and Macon, Georgia; in Columbia, Charleston and
Greenville, South Carolina. The oppressed and exploited
black men that I've met on the streets of Harlem, on the
streets of Detroit, and in Chicago. And I speak of the people
in Monroe where five years ago, when I started talking about
self-defense on the street, many of my black neighbors
would walk away to avoid me. Today, despite the FBI manhunt and my exile, despite the frame-up arrests and the shootings since, despite the intimidation campaigns like the
one to drive Mrs. Johnson of The Crusader staff from Monroe,
despite all this, black Monroe continues its struggle.
As editor of The Crusader, I went south in the fall of
1 960, deep into Jim Crowland, to observe the freedom strug-
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NEGROES WITH GUNS
gle. I was confronted with this new wonderful spirit rising
throughout Dixie-this determination to break the chains of
bondage and the spirit of valor of a people who just a few
years ago were submissive peons in civilization's no-man'sland. Daily I saw the old myth about Afro-Americans being incapable of unity and action exploded.
In Savannah an NAACP leader contributed $30,000 to
the local branch. The branch has a full-time worker and a
suite of office space. Pickets and sit-iners have been beaten
and jobs have been lost, but the struggle goes on. The leader
is not afraid of violence to himself because
the people are
with him. In that city an Afro-American union leader said
that it had come to pass that the masses of Afro-Americans
can see that "We must defend ourselves against violence
with violence." Many of them now say that the American
white racist needs a good "whipping" to bring him down to
earth and to break his white supremacy mania.
I learned in Atlanta that Mr. Elijah Muhammed had
made quite an impression and that many Afro-Americans are
learning, to the consternation and embarrassment of the
black respectable leadership, that he has more to offer than
weak prayers of deliverance. A prominent minister in South
Carolina said, "Our biggest stumbling block is the Uncle Tom
minister-the people must stop paying these traitors." In Atlanta a university professor, energized by the new spirit on the part of the Negroes, was very hopeful that new militant
leadership would replace the old �ncle Toms whose days,
he was confident, were numbered.
There are exceptions among us. The Uncle Toms, the
Judases, and the Quislings of the black "elite" would deny
this rising consciousness. They do everything possible to
make white Americans think that it is not true, while apologizing for us to the very people who oppress us. Some of these "responsible" Negroes are afraid that militant action
damages "amiable race relations." They complain that race
relations may deteriorate to a pOint that many Negroes may
lose jobs. What they mean is that they may lose their jobs.
For the black workers, who are the first to be fired and last, if
ever, to be hired, the situation is so bad it can't deteriorate.
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SELF-DEFENSE: AN AMERICAN TRADITION
We realize that there must be a struggle within our own
ranks to take the leadership away from the black Quislings
who betray us. Then the white liberals who are dumping
hundreds of thousands of dollars into our struggle in the
South to convert us to pacifism will have to accept our understanding of the situation or drop their liberal pretensions.
Why do the white liberals ask us to be non-violent? We
are not the aggressors; we have been victimized for over 300