armed self-defense,
“God Has Spared Me to Tell My
Mabel Robinson Williams and the Civil Rights-Blaok Rower Movement
PERO GAGLO DAGBOVIE
Today, Robert Franklin Williams (1925-1996) is a well-known figure in African American history. A leading proponent of armed self-defense, he is most widely rec- ognized for challenging the viability of non- violent direct action during peak years of the “conventional 1954/1955-65 timeframe” for the “classic” civil rights movement.^ As the president of the Monroe, North Caro- lina, branch of the NAACP during the late 1950s, he mobilized many in his commu- nity to, in his words, “act in self-defense against lawless violence.”^ Shortly after he was removed from his position as presi- dent of the Monroe NAACP branch by Roy Wilkins, then-executive secretary of the NAACP, in late August 1961 Williams and his family fled from Monroe and eventu- ally made it to Cuba. He remained in exile mainly in Cuba and China until he returned to the United States in 1969. In 1962, he published Negroes with Guns, which ac- cording to his chief biographer “is one of the most telling and important documents of the African American freedom struggle” that “influenced a generation of young black in- surgents and helped lay the groundwork for the Black Power movement.””
Robert Franklin Williams’s wife, Mabel Robinson Williams, is a much less familiar historical personality. Born on June 1, 1931,
in “a small shot-gun type house on Bickett Street in the ‘poor house hill’ Negro sec- tion” of Monroe, North Carolina, a mature sixteen-year-old Mabel Ola Robinson mar- ried twenty-two-year-old would-be radi- cal civil rights-Black Power activist Robert Franklin Williams on June 19, 1947. Five de- cades later, reminiscing on this major turn- ing point in her life, Mabel Robinson Wil- liams recalled, “In the late 1940s, the world, as 1 had known it, was about to come to an end. I had fallen madly in love with a man who had a vastly different outlook.”‘ Social- ized as a youth within the veil of Jim Crow segregation in an isolated yet nurturing, pro- tective, and tight-knit black community, Wil- liams has credited her husband with helping
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is professor, gradu- ate director, and associate chair in the Department of History at Michigan State University in East Lansing. His books in- clude Black History: “Old School” Black Historians and the Hip Hop Ceneration (Bedford Publishers, 2006), The Early Black History Movement, Carter C. Wood- son, and Lorenzo Johnston Creene (Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 2007), and African American History Reconsidered (Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 2010). As the princi- pal investigator for the Carter G. Woodson Home, National Historic Site, he is also the author of “Willing to Sacrifice”: Carter C. Woodson, the Father of Black History, and the Carter C. Woodson Home, NHS (National Park Service, US Department of Interior, 2010). His current project is What Is African American History? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, forthcoming).
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 69
Mabel Robinson Williams (center) on September 6, 1969, with Queen Mother Moore, Minister of Health and Welfare for the Republic of New Africa (left), and Milton Henry (Caidi Obadele), Vice President of the Republic of New Africa (right). ® Bettmann/Corbis
radicalize her. “I had little contact with per- sons who could be considered radical. . . . Eventually he [Robert F. Williams] helped me realize that we should never accept our so-called place if we were to indeed be par- ticipants in the creation of a better world,” she affirmed in 1999. “That was a real strug- gle for me since I had been steeped in the tradition of accepting the status quo.” ‘̂ At the same time, Williams was reared in a fam- ily that valued the tradition of armed self- defense that her husband embraced. “My stepfather always kept his pearl-handled pistol under his pillow,” she remembered. “And it was my job to make up his bed every morning. So 1 would go and get the pearl- handled pistol and put it in the linen closet
every morning. . . . I found out hearing the older people talk that that gun was there be- cause there was a threat to our lives—that possibly some nightriders might come and try to do something to us in the middle of the night.”‘
Mabel’s marriage to Robert did, nonethe- less, have more concrete consequences. In 2005, Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Mississippi civil rights activist and martyr Medgar Evers, observed that “widows whose husbands were sacrificed to the civil rights struggle” belonged to “a private club” that was “open to new members—if one is will- ing to pay the price.” She underscored, “That price begins with marriage to men who are thrust willingly or not into the public
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arena.”^ Though Williams did not officially join this “private club” until 1996, when her husband died, she did indeed “pay the price” for being married to an outspoken ac- tivist who was being monitored by the FBI beginning when he was sixteen years old. Her life, and the lives of her two sons, born in 1948 and 1950, was threatened on a daily basis in Monroe during the 1950s and they faced an uncertain future abroad. “Some nights we were fortunate if we were able to get four hours of sleep. And we slept in shifts at home because the threats,” Williams rem- inisced. “I remember one time a liftle boy . . . was beaten up by some white men. They thought he was Rob’s son. They beat him up downtown. . . . We had to restrict their activities. . . . It was known that Rob had kids and that they were in danger. . . . 1 was scared to death.”‘ After the Williams family escaped from Monroe in late August 1961 because Robert was charged by the FBI for interstate flight and kidnapping, Mabel suf- fered emotionally when separated from her children, ages eleven and thirteen, for sev- eral months. The Williamses’ sons stayed with friends of the family’s good friend Julian Mayfield in Hempstead, New York. Mabel never met the West Indian couple, Ruth and Kelly Young, who watched their children for several months before they were reunited in Cuba. “We put our trust and our lives into his [Julian Mayfield’s] and their [Ruth and Kelly Young’s] hands,” Mabel told the author. “I was horrified. 1 was afraid. I did not want to separate from my kids.”‘”
The roll call of wives of notable black male leaders who made sacrifices like Wil- liams is long. As historian Ula Y. Taylor pointed out in her 2002 biography of Mar-
cus Garvey’s second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, the wives of famous black lead- ers have all too often been viewed as be- ing mere extensions and emissaries of their husbands.” For forty-nine years, Mabel was not only Robert’s devoted “helpmate” and “co-warrior,” as she has often described her role as this Black Power icon’s wife, but she developed into an innovative and effective civil rights activist and reformer in her own right who wore many hats and labored side- by-side with her husband before, during, and following his ascendency as a leading spokesperson for the tradition of African American armed self-defense. Today, she embodies living history; her memories and personal history serve as illuminating win- dows into important phases of the Black Liberation Movement. It was not until more than a decade following the decline of the Black Power era that historians and scholars began unpacking and theorizing the roles and accounts of women like Williams in the “classic” civil rights movement. A comment made by a New York Times journalist several years ago has some merit, especially when considering American popular culture’s por- trayal of an often romanticized period: “The women of the civil rights movement who are most celebrated tend to be the brave victims, like Rosa Parks.”‘̂ Moreover, the first com- prehensive revisionist study on Parks’s once oversimplified life of civil rights activism is Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks {20^ 3).
Emerging during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, historical scholarship on black women activists of the modem civil rights movement has developed into an estab- lished subspecialty.’^ Within this dynamic
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 71
field of historical inquiry, a growing coterie of scholars has focused on black women’s memoirs and autobiographies. As Allison Berg has observed, there exists a tradition of civil rights memoirs authored by “black, female participant-witnesses” that are “sig- nificant not only as firsthand accounts that provide insight into black women’s subjec- tive experiences of civil rights era events, but also as memory texts that illuminate the complex relationship between individual testimony and cultural memory.”‘”* The nu- merous individual black female civil rights- Black Power movement activists’ published personal stories—case studies of “black women’s subjectivity”—have helped histori- ans more thoroughly grasp and reconceptu- alize the nuances, intricacies, and gendered realities of the civil rights-Black Power movement. ̂ ^
In Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000), Margo V. Perkins called for a new approach to un- derstanding 1960s black history by specifi- cally examining how Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown employed “life- writing” to demonstrate the existing “mul- tiplicity of stories” and to “recreate them- selves as well as the eras they recount.”‘^ In Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (2001), editors V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas corroborated Perkins’s observations. “The personal tes- timonies of black women activists are an important source of documentary evidence and analysis of black women’s contribu- tions to social protest movements,” Frank- lin and Collier-Thomas underscored. “The biographical studies are the personal and
professional reflections of the individual re- searcher on the lives and activities of their subject.”‘^ Further, in documenting the pow- erful “personal memory” and life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Chana Kai Lee has stressed, “As I have argued elsewhere about reconstruct- ing histories of black women, I can think of few exercises as profitable and instruc- tive as reflection over the meaning of their lives for those who lived those lives. How can we not think about this in our effort to yield a more complete measure of a life and a movement?”‘^
This essay showcases the memories of “unsung heroine” and “participant-witness” Mabel R. Williams. More specifically, this essay overviews the evolution of Mabel’s consciousness, worldview, and activism; deconstructs how she has been portrayed in the media and historiography; situates her within a black female “helpmate” tradition; and explores her involvement in a collabor- ative undertaking with her husband as a ve- hicle of social change. Central to this essay is Williams’s own “life-writing.” Unlike the publicized memoirs of some of her contem- porary freedom fighters, Williams’s memoirs have not been widely published and must, therefore, be gleaned from interviews and numerous unpublished writings. This essay is in part a collaborative piece between the author and Mrs. Williams. She shared with the author not only revealing primary docu- ments—including her unpublished autobi- ography, letters, rare photos, and a dozen lectures that she delivered from the late 1990s until well into the new millennium— but also vital recollections of her life.
Williams’s “personal memory” and his- torical record of activism complicates how
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scholars have characterized her husband’s efforts while adding to our knowledge of black women’s contributions to and expe- riences during the civil rights-Black Power movement. While her commitment to the black freedom struggle was intimately inter- twined with that of her husband, Williams clearly distinguished herself as a freedom fighter and social reformer before, during, and after the conventional, “classic” civil rights era. She made enormous sacrifices for her husband, family, and broader com- munity. She raised two children; operated a day care center in the 1950s; worked vari- ous menial jobs to help support her family; served as the secretary of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP chapter that her husband founded in 1957; cofounded and helped maintain The Crusader weekly newsletter in the United States and abroad; organized the Crusaders’ Association for Relief and Enlightenment, a grassroots mutual aid so- ciety in Monroe; worked tirelessly in many key civil rights cases that received local, na- tional, and international aftention; collabo- rated closely with her husband on produc- ing Negroes with Cuns (1962) and Radio Free Dixie in Cuba from 1961 until 1965; and traveled around the world as an infor- mal cultural ambassador and spokesperson for black America to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Moscow, China, Japan, Vietnam, Europe, and Africa where she met with revolution- ary leaders (including Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong).
After returning to the United States from exile in 1969, the Williams family settled down in Baldwin, Michigan, in 1972 and Mabel R. Williams embarked on a new phase of her activism. “From that time on-
ward, we continued to be involved in the struggle for civil and human rights and the fight against racism,” Williams reflected in a 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemo- rative speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “We also worked to help promote interna- tional friendship among people all over the world.”!^ Between 1972 and 1996, Williams continued to be deeply “concerned with the needs of black people, poor people, and the elderly.”^” Advocating for senior citizens became her cause célèbre. After retiring in 1996, Williams served her community through numerous volunteer activities, in- cluding working on the preservation of the historic black town of Idlewild, Michigan. During the 1990s and new millennium, she has granted many interviews and has shared her fascinating personal history and ideas with audiences at high schools, colleges and universities, and churches throughout the nation.
Portrayals of Mabel Robinson Williams
Despite her contributions to a movement that her husband launched and her con- sistent commitment to progressive social change, civil rights-Black Power movement historians have under-acknowledged this re- markable woman’s contributions most likely because of the status of her husband. This observation is best epitomized by the title that Williams has given the memoir she is writing. Walking in His Shadow. As it was the case for countless of her black female contemporaries, she unsurprisingly received close to no attention from the mainstream
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 73
press. For example, in “Pioneer Black Na- tionalist: Robert Franklin Williams,” a 1969 article in the New York Times that covered the Williams family’s return to the United States, she was depicted as follows: “His wife, described as a well-educated woman who has been his political aide, was self- effacing. She wore a Western dress and her hair was styled in a way that made it evident it had been straightened.”^’
In describing Mabel as wearing a “West- ern dress” and having “straightened” hair, the New York Times writer implied that pre- sumably because she did not sport an Afro and dashiki and supposedly did not look like Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, O^een Mother Moore, or the rank- and-file female members of the Black Pan- ther Party or Maulana Karenga’s US, Williams was somehow not “militant.” Williams’s choice in personal style may have been cal- culated. Her so-called straightened hair per- haps adhered to notions of “respectability” that black women, especially those in the scope of the white public’s gaze, have ad- opted and refashioned since the Progressive era and earlier. As Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward have argued, before and during the civil rights movement, black women like Williams strategically ap- propriated and redeployed attire and physi- cal appearance. Reuniting with her husband at a well-publicized press conference on September 12, 1969, in Detroit, Michigan, it is possible that Williams was seeking to cre- ate a “respectable community identity” dur- ing a time of explicit black cultural pride.^^ At the same time, upon further investigation it is clear that Williams was in fact dressed in a manner that meshed “respectability” and
Afrocentricity. She showed the author a rare photo of her, Robert, Oueen Mother Moore, Gaidi Obiadu Obadele (Milton R. Henry), and members of the Republic of New Af- rica at the major press conference in Detroit on the day her husband arrived back into the United States from eight years of exile. While her hair was pressed in an Afro-like shape, she was clearly dressed in African attire, wearing hoop earrings and a color- ful beaded necklace and a dashiki-like pat- terned dress that she had recently purchased in Tanzania. In reality, the “first lady” of the Republic of New Africa looked like a quint- essential black female cultural nationalist.
In September 1998, Timothy B. Tyson published an important article in the journal of American History, “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle,” and argued that the activities and philosophy of Robert F. Williams demonstrated that “our vision of the African American freedom movement between 1945 and 1965 as characterized solely and inevitably by nonviolent civil rights protests obscures the full complexity of racial politics.”-^^ Tyson highlighted the contributions of the then largely forgotten Williams. When Tyson’s essay appeared, black women’s history was an institutional- ized field of study and important scholar- ship had been published on black women and the civil rights movement.^” Numerous scholars—such as Sharon Harley, Rosa- lyn Terborg-Penn, Francille Rusan Wilson, Deborah Gray White, Evelyn Brooks Higgin- botham, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Darlene Clark Hine—had by 1998 offered a range of useful theoretical frameworks for analyz- ing the twentieth-century African American
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female historical experience.” Nonethe- less, Tyson mentioned in passing the role of women in the Monroe NAACP chapter that Williams spearheaded in 1957. For those ac- tive in the field of black women’s history or black women’s studies, Tyson’s discussion of how black women “both deployed and de- fied gender stereotypes” was lacking.^”
More surprising is the virtual absence of Mabel. In fact, based upon this 1998 essay, the only indication that she even existed is from two photos. The first photo of her is to- day well known, for it graces the covers of Tyson’s exhaustive, multiple prize-winning book Radio Free Dixie: Robert Franklin Wil- liams and the Roots of Black Power (1999), the documentary film Negroes with Cuns: Rob Williams and Black Power (2005), and Freedom Archives’s audio CD Robert Frank- lin Williams: Self-Defense, Self-Respect, and Self-Determination (2005). The caption of this famous photo in the middle of Tyson’s 1998 article reads, “Robert F. Williams teaches his wife Mabel Williams how to use a pistol given to him by Fidel Castro. Four months earlier, she held off Monroe officers with a .12-gauge shotgun when they tried to arrest her husband.”^^ The other photo with Mabel shows her sitting next to her hus- band in Baldwin, Michigan, in 1996 several weeks before he died. Both photos of Mabel tend to reinforce the limiting notion and im- age of Mabel as a bystander and background figure in her husband’s struggle.
In Radio Free Dixie (1999), Tyson oftered a brief biography of Mabel, highlighting her role as her husband’s helpmate. “Robert Williams was a member of the 52-20 club when he met a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl named Mabel Ola Robinson,” Tyson
recounted. “Over the next five decades, Mabel became Robert’s most important po- litical ally, mother to their two sons, editor of his writings, and partner to this troubled activist and intellectual, sometimes at the great price to herself but with increasingly shared commitment to black liberation. Had Williams fallen in love with someone else, things could have gone very differently.”^^ In discussing Robert Franklin Williams’s struggle, Tyson also incorporated informa- tion from several interviews with Mabel. Tyson, however, did not elaborate on the experiences of black women in the Monroe NAACP chapter or Mabel’s life and contri- butions. At the same time, Tyson did exam- ine Robert’s gender politics; Mabel’s and other black women’s contributions to early issues of The Crusader, as well as the eftorts of several black female activists in Monroe. Mabel’s life in Monroe during the late 1940s and 1950s and activism abroad from 1961 until 1969 is mentioned but begs for further analysis.
In 2005, the Documentary Institute, Uni- versity of Florida, and California Newsreel released Negroes with Cuns: Rob Williams and Black Power, and this film (55 min.) featured numerous comments from Ma- bel.^”With passion, seriousness, and humor, throughout the film Mabel reflected upon many key turning points in her husband’s evolution as a leader. In one brief clip, she did talk about herself, mentioning how she missed her family in the United States while she was in China during the mid- to late 1960s. In an instructional website for the documentary, one can listen to Mabel speaking on Radio Free Dixie. One of her available speeches is a brief and passionate
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 75
lecture that she delivered on January 21, 1966, addressing the important role of black socially conscious musicians in the African American freedom struggle.^”
Between 1976 and 1979 and then from 1983 until 1997, the Robert Franklin Williams Papers were donated to the Bentley Histori- cal Library at the University of Michigan. In 2002, these papers were microfilmed by Uni- versity Publications of America, an imprint of LexisNexis Academic and Library Solutions. The opening paragraph of a 2007 advertise- ment for the papers highlighted Mabel’s role in the struggle that she and her husband were engaged in: “Williams’s lifelong partner was his wife, Mabel, who joined him in armed defiance of racist assaults, co-hosted his ra- dio program, and networked for his social causes. As the materials in this collection document, Robert and Mabel Williams pro- vide an extraordinary record of a husband- wife partnership in the cause of social trans- formation.”^’ In May 2003, March 2004, and January 2005, Freedom Archives conducted numerous exclusive interviews with Wil- liams, one of which was produced in 2005 as Robert Franklin Williams: Self-Defense, Self- Respect, and Self-Determination (as Told by Mabel Williams). While they are revealing, in the vast majority of these interviews Williams recounts stories of her husband’s struggle.
“Helpmate”-Activist During the 1950s
Like Amy Jacques Garvey, through her ac- tions Williams “encouraged women to edu- cate themselves and to perform as both help- mates and leaders in their communities.”^^
In numerous speeches since 1996, Williams has routinely referred to herself as being “the wife,” “co-warrior,” and “helpmate” of her late husband. She provided Robert the sup- port that he certainly needed. In 1999, she concluded one of her speeches by saying, “I lived with, loved, and learned from, grew, and fought by the side of the man, Robert F Williams.”^^ In no uncertain terms, she avowed that they helped each other survive. “One of the miracles of my life is the fact that I am able to stand here with you today as a survivor of the civil and human rights struggles of the 1950s through this present day,” she proclaimed at a conference on the black family in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2002. “As the helpmate of my late husband, Robert F Williams, I know that one of the main reasons that we were able to survive the struggles that we endured was the tradi- tion of Black love, ‘Kupenda,’ that we were privileged to be born into.”^*
Williams played a primary role in raising their two young sons while working outside of the home and within the movement. With the help of a black doctor and midwife, she gave birth in her home to two sons, Robert Franklin Williams Jr. (born on January 29, 1948) and John Chalmers Williams (born on April 27, 1950). From 1948 until 1951, she worked, attended high school when she could, and raised her children. While her husband traveled alone during the late 1940s and 1950s, she remained in her fa- ther-in-law’s home with her sons. When Robert reenlisted in the US armed forces as a marine from 1953 until 1955, Mabel raised her sons with the help of her mother, sister, and extended family. In 1950, pregnant with her second child, she traveled with Robert to
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Detroit and attended one of the city’s large high schools. According to Mabel, they re- mained there for approximately six to eight months. Though she had visited relatives in Philadelphia and Chicago before, this was the first time she had spent significant time, more than a few months, outside of the Jim Crow South. While in Detroit, she attended the city’s Northwestern High School. She explained to the author how much different this school was compared to Monroe’s Win- chester Avenue High School. Though segre- gated and underfunded, the African Ameri- can educational system in Monroe was much more supportive to Williams; all of her black teachers were encouraging. At North- western, Mabel recalled, all of her teachers were white and her typing teacher advised her not to take any college prep courses and not to even consider being a secretary.̂ ^ A young mother of two, Williams eventually graduated from Winchester Avenue High School in 1951 at age twenty.
Her herculean work ethic was probably influenced by her mother, who worked “for pittance” but nonetheless made, in Wil- liams’s words, “our home life so pleasant, so wonderful, that 1 wasn’t able to see . . . the hurt that she was feeling, except I could hear it in her voice.”^^ Williams had a very close relationship with her mother, Emma R. Barber, a domestic worker for the Belk fam- ily, a wealthy white family of Monroe who owned the city’s largest department store. Williams was named after the daughter of her mother’s employer. More than twenty years her senior, Mabel Belk used to take a young Mabel Ola Robinson, from age five to nine, to her father’s department store once a year during the Christmas holidays
to purchase clothing for her. The young Ma- bel Robinson could never try on the clothes and received glares from resentful patrons and employees. Yet, she was addressed as “Lil’ Miss Mabel” while in the presence of her white namesake. Reflecting upon these experiences more than seven decades later, Williams remembered how embarrassed she felt, being inspected by her chaperon and treated like a charity case and pet. This re- lationship is reminiscent of the relationship between some slave children and owners that historian Wilma King depicts in Sto- len Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth- Century America.^”
During the 1950s in Monroe, Williams followed in her mother’s footsteps, work- ing as a nurse’s aide, a cook, a maid, and a worker in a turkey plant. In describing her experiences laboring in low-wage domes- tic service, Williams explains how she felt and struggled internally at the time and how her husband, in her estimation, was perhaps psychologically impacted by her ability to join the labor force. “They’d always open up and let me work. And I didn’t always under- stand why I could get a job and he couldn’t get a job,” Williams contemplated in a 1999 interview. “I understand the technique, the tactics now. How that undermines the unity of the family because he’s supposed to be the head of the family. The husband’s sup- posed to be the head of the family tradition- ally to support his family. But it undermines his manhood when he can’t do that. It un- dermines his manhood. So that creates a lot of problems. Created a lot of problems for us. . . . So the whole time we were here until we got totally involved in civil rights I was able to maintain a job. . . . I worked at the
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 77
turkey plant. . . . Yeah, 1 think we got fifty cents an hour. . . . And standing in water all day cleaning turkeys. But it was a job and I was able to maintain that for, at least, for a
Between 1948 and 1950, Williams worked at the Ellen Fitzgerald Hospital and later at Union Memorial Hospital, experi- ences that drastically shaped her conscious- ness. In 2004, she deduced that these expe- riences were “part of the beginning of my education.”^” In the segregated hospital, the black clients and patients were mistreated, especially the children. She observed that the black patients were relegated to the basement and that the black newborns were taken to the basement’s utility room “where we washed out the bedpans and emptied the bedpans . . . and that was just horrible,” Williams remembered. “Yeah. We’re talking about little children who are being exposed to germs that could be life threatening. . . . It was just so hurtful to see what was hap- pening to our people. They allowed nurses’ aides and maids in the Ellen Fitzgerald Hos- pital waiting on the black people to do in- jections, and all kinds of things that when I was on the white floor only, I found, only licensed nurses could do. . . . And to this day I feel that was a form of genocide. I feel that that was a form of genocide that they were actually using to curb our population . . . because they just didn’t care.”””
Not only did she plug away at a range of menial jobs to make ends meet, but she also worked closely with poor working mothers and disadvantaged black youth. During the 1950s, Mabel and Robert Williams worked closely with a white Catholic priest. Father Thomas McAvoy, who established a mission
church in Monroe’s black community. After organizing a “used clothing and home items store in the rectory” with McAvoy’s support, Williams “organized St. Joseph Day Care Center to care for the children of working black parents in the neighborhood,” serving as its director for several years. “St. Joseph’s became my passion, both in my home and community as well as my church life,” Ma- bel wrote in her unpublished autobiogra- phy.”” Raised as a Baptist, Williams “became Catholic” during the 1950s in large part be- cause of McAvoy. Her husband, on the other hand, joined the Unitarian church.**̂
As their primary caretaker, Williams so- cialized her sons to become active in the civil rights movement when they were young. The Williams sons knew firsthand the dangers they faced, yet wanted to par- ticipate in the movement often against their mother’s wishes. According to Williams, on one occasion when her younger son, John, was told that he should not participate in a Monroe civil rights demonstration, he re- torted to his protective mother, “I want my civil rights too!””^ Williams agreed to let her sons participate in protests, but she was armed and ready. Reflecting on her sons’ participation in picketing the segregated swimming pool at the Monroe Country Club in the late 1950s, she underscored, “I didn’t picket. I was in the car with guns. . . . We had to protect the kids. . . . At the time, you know, guns were legal as long as they were not concealed in North Carolina. So we had the guns on the seat. [Laughter] They were not concealed.”
Williams and many other women in the Monroe NAACP chapter and community embraced armed self-defense. Commenting
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on the rifle club that her husband founded, she explained, “We were all members. I was a member of the rifle club. We had several of our ladies become members of the rifle club and we started training . . . all for the protection of our homes and ourselves when the Klan and other rabble rousers decided that they wanted to come in and invade our homes and our neighborhoods.” Upon sev- eral occasions, she prevented police officers from invading her home at gunpoint.””
With her neighbor, fellow Crusader writer and good friend Azalea Johnson, Williams provided services for children other than her own. In 1959, Williams and Johnson founded the Crusader’s Association for Relief and En- lightenment, known by the Monroe com- munity as CARE. Consciously critiquing the lack of intervention in poor African Ameri- can communities of the CARE relief agency founded in 1945, the Crusader’s Association for Relief and Enlightenment was a mutual aid society run by Williams and Johnson with the help of eight to ten core committed coworkers. Dozens of poor black families in Monroe benefited from this organization’s basic services. They sponsored clothing and canned-goods drives and local farmers of- ten donated fresh food to distribute to those in need. The organization provided black women and children with sewing classes as well as history classes that focused on black history and stressed a civil rights liberation theology The group also held fish fries and potlucks to raise money to help poor fami- lies. Women were the primary movers and shakers in this organization; men usually helped distribute goods and attended the social functions on the weekends. Every week from 1959 until 1961, CARE provided
services to dozens of impoverished African American families in Monroe.”^
Like the Amy Jacques Garvey described by Ula Y. Taylor, Williams also “stepped for- ward to become an ambassador for her hus- band.””* She worked very closely with her husband in the Monroe NAACP chapter and participated in the various activities that he embraced. During the six months that her husband was suspended as an official of the NAACP in 1959, the people of her commu- nity elected her interim president. Williams also spoke on behalf of her husband while they were in exile and when he traveled alone. In her diary that she maintained in China from May until October 1968, she re- peatedly recorded how she carried on many of his affairs and remained as active as she could while he was traveling throughout the world. She edited The Crusader, worked on her husband’s anti-Vietnam War pamphlet, “Listen Brother,” and communicated with a coterie of activists, African American and international.
“THE CRUSADER was our voice in the community'”*^
Like many black women activists before her, Williams became a self-trained journalist, writer, and historian. During the late 1940s and 1950s, she typed many of the protest letters that her husband sent to the edi- tors of local and national newspapers and magazines. In 1999, Williams observed, “Acting as his secretary, I typed those let- ters that castigated the meanness of a sys- tem that deprived black children of an equal share, . . . letters that ridiculed the system
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 79
that demanded that black veterans accept
jobs working for less money than they could
receive from their earned unemployment
benefits while looking for work, letters that
decried that the federal government was is-
suing contracts to companies that hired only
white workers and refused to hire black
people simply because they were black.'”*^
With her husband, Williams also wrote ar-
ticles published in the Monroe Fnquirer in
the late 1950s challenging segregation and
anti-black violence.
As Timothy B.Tyson has pointed out, Wi l –
liams and her close friend Azalea Johnson
both played important roles in the produc-
tion and distribution of The Crusader, inau-
gurated on July 26, 1959.”^ Yet, Williams’s
account of the founding of this grassroots
newsletter has not been acknowledged. In
a correspondence with the author, she öfters
her side of the story:
In 1959, after it was decided that we needed
to have a means to tell our own story, we
needed to find out how to go about doing
so. Ethel Azalea Johnson, another one of
our neighbors on Boyte Street, had become
one of our close friends and collaborators.
She, Robert, and I had tried out a Ditto pro-
cess where you imprinted an original doc-
ument on a jelly like pad and then pressed
a clean copy paper on it. We realized that
that would never work, so we drove up to
Charlotte, N.C. to look for an alternative
method. We had no money other than our
own meager funds so that is what we were
prepared to invest. After exploring several
office supply stores, we finally decided
on a manual, hand cranked mimeograph
machine. . . . The three of us discussed for
weeks what we would call our newsletter
and who would be responsible for what.
We would each write our own articles with
Rob as the Editor. Our original equipment
was an old upright typewriter on which we
learned to type stencils to run on the mim-
eograph machine. We talked about making
it a personal journal but decided to make it
a community journal to keep unity within
our local struggles and to inform our out
of town friends and supporters. We already
had a small contact mailing list acquired
from Robert’s speaking engagements and
our travels and experiences “up North.”
The three of us worked on our indi-
vidual articles to be included and collec-
tively worked on composing the cartoons
based on Robert’s take on the issues of the
day and his editorials. We had lots of fun
finding, sketching, and creating the car-
toons. None of us knew how to draw but
we included our crude sketches. Our most
productive time for working was usually
late afternoons into the wee hours of the
mornings. Robert suffered from extreme mi-
graine headaches and was sometimes inca-
pacitated for days. Sometimes, Azalea and
I would get our articles ready to run them
off while waiting for the editorials. Robert’s
editorials and the cartoons were usually the
last to be printed. She and I would search
for historical fillers to accommodate the
spacing before we actually cut the stencils.
Our friends and neighbors were also re-
cruited to help us with the publishing and
distribution both locally and for mailing.
. . . We made a party atmosphere on the
day that we ran the assembly line. We ate
snacks, some we provided and some were
brought in by the other lady volunteers. I
80 THEBLACKSGHOLAR TBS ‘ Volume 43 » Number 1/2 • Spring 2013
was responsible for attaching and inking
the machine. Azalea fed the copy paper
and we all took turns at the crank. We had
to spread out the pages to dry before we
could print them on the other side. Once
the assembly was finished, our sons and
other neighborhood kids sold the papers
locally. They were instructed to leave the
paper whether or not the residents could
pay for them. The lady volunteers then
came back and helped us fold, stuff and
address the envelopes for mailing.^”
Williams wrote more than a few essays for The Crusader, edited it, and sent the gal- leys to the printers. She wrote several essays in The Crusader dealing with African Ameri- can history. She focused on publicizing the lives of poor blacks in Union County, Afri- can and African American history, and inter- national affairs relevant to black Americans’ conditions. In the first issue of the newslet- ter, Williams authored an essay titled “All in a Lifetime,” that chronicled the personal his- tory of one of her elderly neighbors, “Mama Stitt,” who “was born in slavery.” An amateur community historian, Williams shared with her readers direct quotes and folklore from this elder African American woman. Wil- liams’s interest in African American history stemmed back to her early years in Monroe. Not only was she surrounded by the elders in her extended family, but one of her teach- ers was Baxter Perry, “a Booker T Washing- ton type,” who, in Williams’s words, “tried to instill in us a pride in being who we were as black people and the fact that we had a his- tory. . . . Dr. Perry would tell us about people like Nat Turner… he was teaching us about the rebels within our race who would not
accept being less than a human being in the society.”̂ ^
“Ours was and is a part of an international struggle”: Activism in Exile, 1961-^1969
From 1961 until 1969, Williams lived in ex- ile abroad with her family: between 1961 and 1965, she was in Cuba, from 1965 un- til 1969 she was in China, and while based in China, she visited North Vietnam, Kenya, and Tanzania. As she asserted in 2005, “We were able to survive, having built a network of people who had really the true interests of the people at heart—all over the world.”” Exposed to various cultures (she learned Spanish and Mandarin Chinese), she de- veloped a transnational and international outlook. In late August 1961 after escaping from Monroe with her family, Williams trav- eled for the first time outside of the United States, first to Toronto, Canada, and then to Cuba. She saw Castro speak on several occasions and met him once briefly in the lobby of a hotel in Havana shortly after she arrived in Cuba. She remembers, “When he [Castro] reached us, he welcomed all of us in English and proceeded to pass and shake our hands. When he got to me, I was in an emotional state, tears were flowing and I blurted out a thank you to him for saving Robert, our boys, and me. I was told later that his reply was: ‘No need to thank me, it was our duty.'” While in Cuba, she lived in Havana’s Hotel Capri, room 1405, and in a home in Marianao and regularly wrote her friends and family expressing how much she missed her family and home. “How are my
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie “God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story” 81
dearest kinfolks?” Williams wrote home on April 4, 1962. “Maybe someday in the future you will all be able to visit us here. I hope so. It is such a beautiful country. 1 would love to see you. I can just see you now. (Smiles).” Williams routinely requested that her family members send her up-to-date photos, letters, medicine, and certain cooking ingredients. The letters that she received from her mother were especially touching, often signed with “Your ‘Mommy’ to My Baby.””
In Cuba, Robert, with Mabel’s help, de- cided to create a radio program so that, in Mabel’s words, “we could get people’s atten- tion and then we would be able to give them the message of what was happening to our people in the United States in the struggle.” She continued, “Mainly, Rob wrote his own script. The editorials were his. One of my main jobs was reading news items that we were able to get from the struggle going on in the United States and making announce- ments as well as helping to select the music. And we had a weekly program that was re- broadcast, so it came out twice a week. And that’s how ‘Radio Free Dixie’ was born.” Listeners routinely heard Mabel, in a clear, professional-sounding radio voice, say the following: “From Havana, Cuba, Free Terri- tory of the Americas . . . Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the free voice of the South! Stay tuned with us for music, news, and commentary from Robert F. Williams. . . . You are tuned to Radio Free Dixie, the voice of armed self-defense, broadcasting in the Year of Fire.”^” The Williamses worked closely together on each hour-long episode of Radio Free Dixie. Mabel said that her husband often read his speeches to her for feedback before broadcasting them and that
she, a deejay of some sort, played socially conscious rock and roll and jazz.
“In 1965 the Williams family relocated to Beijing, China where Williams was ‘lionized and feted by top Peking leaders,’ according to CIA intelligence reports,” Tyson wrote. “The Williams dined with Mao Zedong and moved in the highest circles of the Chinese government for three years.”” Mabel re- membered meeting Chairman Mao at their National Day Celebration where he issued his “Statement of Support of the American Negroes inTheir Struggle Against Racial Dis- crimination.” The Williamses indeed “moved in the highest circles” in China. “He [Mao] was, to my great surprise, warm, friendly and outgoing. He spoke through his interpreter and welcomed us to China,” Williams told the author. “When he greeted me and shook my hand, I thanked him for lending his sup- port to our struggle. I was so very excited that I do not remember all of the details of that first meeting. In that atmosphere, I truly began to feel that I was playing an important role in the international movement to make a difference in the world for our people and the struggling people all over the world.”
While in China, Williams visited North Vietnam with her husband and members of the China Peace Committee to participate in the International Conference for Solidar- ity with the People of Vietnam Against US Imperialism for the Defense of Peace from November 25 through November 29, 1965. Williams described her meeting with com- munist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh at his presidential palace: “We were met at the door by President Ho who welcomed us in- dividually in English and shook our hands vigorously. He then escorted us into a cozy
82 THEBLACKSGHOLAR TBS » Volume 43 * Number 1/2 •• Spring 2013
room where we were invited to sit. . . . He
proceeded to tell us that he did not live there
in the Palace but in a simple home in the
countryside where he had been living since
their anti-colonial struggle began. He talked
about the war and his life experiences grow-
ing up in the struggle. There was much ani-
mated discussion including his interaction
with black people in his world travel as a
merchant seaman. He talked about Marcus
Garvey.” Williams added, “After describing
the terrors of the current war, a young boy
was brought in and introduced to us. He
was scarred all over his body from napalm
bombs that had been dropped in his village.
He told us about the horror that these bombs
were inflicting on peasants trying to work in
their fields. At that point I knew that I hated
war and what it did to people, especially
children.”‘^
While in Peking, China, in 1966 months
after Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) be-
gan popularizing the “Black Power” slogan,
Williams wrote a poem that reflected the
cultural nationalist sentiments of her broth-
ers and sisters struggling in the United States.
Like many expatriates, she kept abreast of
what was happening to her African Ameri-
can counterparts. Her poem “Transition”
(August 29, 1966) demonstrates how Wi l –
liams’s thoughts centered on the African
American struggle for advancement and lib-
eration. Especially noteworthy is her view
of how history was central to the evolution
of African American consciousness. Clearly
influenced by the Black Power movement,
Marxism, and Maoism, Williams wrote:
Dance and sing you black creatures
of Mother Africa.
Move to the sound of the drums
of your forefathers.
Hold on to your drums and beat