African History Series: Rob Williams and Black Power in the United States

Robert Franklin Williams was a black American civil rights leader who served as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Williams advocated armed self-defense against racism decades before the black power and black nationalist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s made it a central message of their activism. Rob Williams lived in exile in Cuba for five years, during which he wrote Negroes with Guns in 1962; the book that formed the basis of a documentary on Williams and the Black Power movement. This episode reproduces the very documentary released in 2005 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Independent Lens. The episode is part of the Africanist Press African History Series that aims to feature voices, institutions, and individuals engaged in the story of Africa’s past and present development.