An international alliance of “colored humanity”: Robert Williams in Asia

Abstract

In 1965, the African American civil rights leader Robert Williams left Cuba to live in China as an invited guest of Mao Tse-Tung. After several trips to Hanoi and personal meetings with Ho Chi Minh, he authored a pamphlet titled Listen, Brother! (1968), which deemed the war in Vietnam “a Honky trick worked up against the other oppressed colored people”. Filled with scenes of total devastation of “colored humanity” where bodies burned with napalm, Listen, Brother! urged African American soldiers to realize that participation in the war made them part of a “big mob of savage klansmen who maim and kill in the name of Christian democracy”. Critiquing the dominant cold war ideology of a bipolar power struggle as well as a perceived crisis in representative democracy, Williams hoped to turn cold war violence back against itself. He saw the war in Vietnam as a model for minority revolution in the US, where “black saboteurs” and “guerilla enclaves” were a second front in the war for a lasting world black revolution. While he was criticized for advocating unpredictable revolutionary violence, Williams was also profoundly affected by the Cultural Revolution in China and turned increasingly to art and culture as a means to sustain the coming revolution. In Chinese propaganda, Williams found a model in which he could imagine the African American man and woman of his future nation, the Republic of New Africa.

Keywords:

• Robert Williams
• internationalism
• civil rights
• black revolution
• Vietnam
• Cold War

Acknowledgments

This essay was made possible through the assistance of a Bordin-Gillette Researcher Fellowship from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank William Wallach and Karen Jania for their help in researching the Robert Williams archive held there. Thanks go also to Julie-Françoise Tolliver, Cedric Tolliver and Vered Maimon for their editorial criticism and to Bill White for his support.

Notes

1. Williams cited Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism as influential on his thinking that black nationalism was, at its core, internationalist. His advocacy of international solidarity between “colored humanity” was further shaped during his contacts with tricontinentalism in Cuba and the years (1965–1969) that he spent in the People’s Republic of China during the period of the Cultural Revolution.

2. In an interview published in The Black Scholar in 1970, Williams explained his departure from Cuba as resulting from “political differences with the party” regarding black nationalism.

3. In 1959, Williams worked to bring international attention to a shocking incident in Monroe, NC, dubbed the “kissing case”, when two young African American boys were sentenced to reform school for upwards of 10 years for allegedly playing a kissing game with a white girl. As letters from European schoolchildren poured into the governor’s mansion, Williams hoped that this negative attention would embarrass the regime into releasing the boys.

4. Robert Williams Papers, Microfilm edition, reel 13. Microfilm and originals at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

5. Nkrumah’s Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968) and his Neo-Colonialism: Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) were both included on the reading list of the Republic of New Africa. Williams’ keen interest in Nkrumah’s writings was already evident in 1968 when he extracted and saved a clipping from the Afro-American newspaper on the upcoming release of the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, which is now housed in his archive at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

6. It should also be noted that Hoover sought to exploit the situation, finding in Williams’ communist connections a means to discredit and marginalize civil rights activism (Tyson 1999, 285).

7. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been keeping a file on Williams long before his arrival in Cuba. In Monroe, NC, the FBI had pursued a deliberate policy of keeping him unemployed to squash his activism (see Tyson 1999, 131–132, 155, 193, 208–209, 283–285, 287, 292, 302). After his return to the US in 1969, Williams used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain his FBI files. The staggering amount of surveillance and material kept in his files was enough to prompt him to photograph his desk overwhelmed with four massive stacks of the files. He also noted that a number of counterfeit issues of The Crusader were published as part of a conspiracy to undermine his influence.

8. On the Tricontinental conference, see Prashad (2007, 105–119); and the 2009 Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7 (3), special issue, “New Transatlanticisms: Africa and the Americas”.

9. The idea of establishing a separate nation in the “black belt” was initially proposed by the Comintern which passed two resolutions on the black national question in the US in 1928 and 1930, the first being published in The Daily Worker, a newspaper printed by the Communist Party of America (12 February 1929). Following the nationality policies of the Soviet Union, the Comintern called for “national self-determination in the southern states” (Comintern 1947).

10. A clipping that he saved in his archive about an exhibition of Soviet Posters in New York City attests to his interest in Soviet art.

11. This article, “New Africa Demands 5 States, $400 Billion” (Henry 1968) was clipped by Williams and held in the Robert Williams Papers, Microfilm edition, reel 10. Microfilm and originals at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.