WILLIAMS HAILS CUBAN MILITARY MIGHT

Havana English School of the Air in English January 3, 1962–F

(A Special Broadcast: Robert Williams Tells His Impressions of the Third Anniversary Rally and Military Parade on the Plaza de la Revolucion)

Question: Tell me, Bob, are you an American citizen? Answer: Yes, I was born in the United States as an Afro-American. An Afro-American in the United States is a second-class citizen.

Question: Were you invited here as a member of the delegations to the anniversary of the revolution? Answer: Well, I am a foreigner here. I am a guest of the Cuban people. I was invited indirectly by John F. Kennedy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a trumped-up charge of kidnapping in the United States. Question: Have you seen any Americans here among the guests who were invited from all over the world? Answer: No, I have not seen any American with the exception of the ones who are already here. It is very difficult for Americans to come to Cuba. In fact, such displays as we witnessed today are meant to be kept away from the American people. The U.S. government is determined not to let the truth be known about Cuba. Therefore, they have decided not to let Americans travel here, and the strong thing about this is that the United States claims to be a democracy. Yet I tried to come here for the 26 July and asked permission to do so from the U.S. State Department. The U.S. State Department said that I could not be allowed to travel to Cuba, because they had broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba and that they could not guarantee my safety here. The strange thing about this is that in another two weeks the U.S. government attempted to kill me. It happened that I ended up in Cuba and that is the only place that I could be safe. Question: Are you a veteran? Answer: Yes, I am a veteran of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps of my State. Question: I suppose then that you have seen a great many military parades in your life? Answer: Yes, I have participated in military parades in the United States in the Army and in the Marine Corps.

Introducing Power

I still remember waking up with a knot in my stomach on June 26, 2015. The US Supreme Court was due to announce its findings in Obergefell v. Hodges, and I hoped my same-sex marriage would still be legal in an hour. That day brought good news for my household and many other households. Almost exactly seven years later ( June 24, 2022), I woke up with a knot in my stomach again for a different reason: it seemed clear that the Supreme Court was about to overturn Roe v. Wade and, in so doing, take rights away from women and make a lot of lives harder. Sure enough, an hour later, rights that allowed women to flourish had been stripped of their national protection and were soon overturned in many states. And indeed, another year later ( June 30, 2023), the Supreme Court ruled, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, that it was legal to discriminate against same-sex couples in the marketplace if the discrimination was based on sincerely held religious beliefs.

These three rulings are a useful place to begin considering how power works as well as its relationship with systemic inequality. The rulings have two lessons for us: first, some people have the capacity to impact other people's lives, for good or for ill, in ways that are built into our society and accepted by most if not all people. Second, while this point is not immediately obvious to some people, heterosexuals and men, rarely, if ever have to worry about their rights (as heterosexuals or as men) being up for a public vote, about Congressional legislation that might overturn those rights or about a Supreme Court decision that might strip those rights.

We began this series by reviewing the way comparison set up the beginnings – and perhaps the limits – of our discipline, anthropology. We then moved to the history, and indeed the myth, of ethnography, our mainstay method. In the last lecture we considered the importance of historical diachronism as a key element in the production of social – we might bravely say “cultural” – forms, and what I like to call cultural flows. But where are we with regard to culture itself, that contested term? Can we recuperate the concept of culture from its embattled terrain? And if so, how might we productively define it in such a way that we avoid the pitfalls that led many in our discipline to challenge – even discard – the word in the first place?

Over the past half-century, we have encountered a series of critiques of the concept of culture that explains why we have tried to leave it behind. For starters, it sounds fixed; it sounds narrow; it sounds bounded. Lila Abu-Lughod has eloquently argued that the concept “tend[s] to overemphasise coherence” (1991: 146); Sherry Ortner points to “the problem of essentialism” in the attribution of qualities attached to human collectives (2006: 12). Kuper worries not only that we have “endow[ed] it with explanatory power,” but also that the conflation of the concept of culture with ideas of identity, especially in a political climate where nationalism is on the rise, makes it unsuitable for anthropological use at all (1999: xi). Together these constitute a good set of reasons for why anthropology might consider being a post-culture discipline altogether.

And yet I am suggesting that we reject the idea of culture at our peril. My argument in this book is that we bring culture back into our disciplinary conversation, not in the form that we knew it – singular cultures attached to singular places – but as the living, active process through which we as humans, invariably as part of collectives, come to see and act in the world. The process of human perception means that that which we see (or experience, or feel, or understand) is always and only through such a lens: there is no other way to perceive. That is why we need to continue to grapple with culture as part of the human condition: it is integral to what makes us human.

LETTER TO FIDEL CASTRO FROM ROBERT F. WILLIAMS

August 28, 1966, Peking, China

Dear Fidel:

First of all, I want to thank you and the Cuban people for assisting me when I was escaping from the United States. I will always be grateful to the Cuban people, and I will always be a friend of the Cuban Revolution. In fact, this is the very reason that I take the liberty to write you this letter from my second exile. The reason that I bother to bring these matters to your attention, or later to the attention of the public, if necessary, is because I find it impossible to believe that Commandante Vallejo, Peniero, and others close around you have fully, truthfully, and faithfully informed you of these ignominious experiences that I encountered while living in Cuba.

Shortly after my arrival in Cuba, I requested support for the Afro-American struggle in the United States. I first requested an information office with the purpose of acquainting the peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa with the revolutionary potential of the Afro-American struggle and the brutal nature of U.S. racism and its relation to U.S. imperialism. This revolutionary request was never granted. I also requested permission and facilities to broadcast both long and short wave, especially to the Afro-American people in the United States. After much bickering and red tape, I was finally allowed to proceed with the broadcast from Radio Progresso, however, the facilities of Radio Havana, which was to be the short-wave broadcast in the name of Radio Free Dixie, were completely denied. I was told that this was because Radio Havana is the official voice of the Cuban government and that the Cuban government could not be identified in this way with the Afro-American struggle. I was never allowed the use of the shortwave facilities which would have enabled me to reach the great masses of our people all over the United States and especially on the West Coast where there is a heavy concentration of my fellow workers and followers.

This week we turn to the subject of history, or more precisely, to the subject of time. Rather than speaking about the formal – or even the conceptual – relation between the disciplines of anthropology and history, my comments today are offered in the spirit of Barney Cohn's famous book, An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987): I am thinking about anthropology in a relaxed conversation with history, in order to evoke different ways that we can think about – and use – the arc of history in anthropology. My intention is partly to emphasize the importance of history and historiography, alongside mythography or even, perhaps, what I might call mythopoeiography, the process of the production of myth, in our discipline. But more importantly, it is to consider the concept of time, and specifically how historical trajectories – let us call them cultural flows, or cultural pasts – can be traced or tracked in a particular cultural milieu. My contention is that anthropology is uniquely capable of understanding how what Geertz called “symbolic action” or “symbolic formulations” (1973: 27; 120) can, over time, come to constitute a particular landscape that we are researching in the contemporary moment. Those “systems of symbolic meaning” (49) have led us to where we are today, and anthropology can research both the past and the present through a lens that accommodates such temporal flow.

My discussion of “history” is thus not an archival one as such (cf. Dirks 2001, 2015). I am interested instead in the way we map cultural flows that evolve or develop over time, and how we can use those cultural genealogies – genealogies of ideas; of symbolic nexuses; of praxis and ideology – to help us understand the contemporary formations of social worlds. In short, I am talking about the social – and the historical – construction of the present. To understand the ways ideas have been transmitted and inherited – not in a fixed way, but in a dynamic one – is part of what anthropology must undertake if we are to uncover how they come to be seen as natural.

My genealogy of our discipline in these lectures is not unlike the kind of genealogy I am suggesting is productive for the study of any cultural mode of thought.

Part III includes a selected bibliography of published works written by and about Williams. This selected bibliography consists of important institutional papers in archival collections, including the papers of Robert F. Williams, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Mae Mallory, Conrad Lynn, Richard T. Gibson, and others, as well as a list of primary and secondary sources, including books, government documents, as well as a list of secondary sources, including books, book chapters, dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, pamphlets, and the online newspaper articles I discovered that were useful in my scholarship.

The documents selected for the prefatory notes for Robert Franklin Williams Speaks provide a summarized account of Williams's life and activism across various geographical locations, offering insight into the broader content of the civil rights movement, racial tensions in the U.S., and international solidarity during the mid-20th century. Each section of document serves a specific purpose in illuminating Williams's journey and the political and social environment he and Mabel navigated.

In Chapter 1, from 1956 to 1961, the family of Robert Sr. and Mabel Williams, which included their sons, Robert Jr. and John Chambers Williams, lived on Boyte Street in the Newtown neighborhood of Monroe. After returning home from the Marine Corps in 1955 and being elected as president of the Union County chapter of the NAACP, my detailed account of his efforts to combat racial injustice, his involvement in the Negroes with Guns campaign, and his early activism are revealed. This section underscores the genesis of Robert Williams's approach to civil rights, emphasizing his philosophy of armed self-defense and direct action against systemic racism. It sets the stage for understanding his evolution from a local activist to an international figure in the Black liberation movement. Four months after the August 28, 1955, Mississippi kidnapping, brutal beating, lynching, and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till, and three months after the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Robert Williams escalated his resistance against the policies of the Monroe government, its local police and sheriff's department, and the white racist and terrorists threats from citizens over Jim Crow beliefs and politics. A map drawing of Monroe illustrates the racial divisions in Monroe through the railroad track marking. Because Williams, a veteran of two wars, believed the Constitution guaranteed African Americans full citizenship rights, he made efforts to address white America's refusal in Monroe and elsewhere to abide by its federal laws. Williams delivers a rousing sermon on March 25, 1956, entitled, “Col. Jim Crow's Last Stand” at All Soul's Chapel Unitarian Fellowship Church, calling out “the hypocrisy of a democracy with Jim Crow policies.”

Roots, Racism, Routes, and Resistance: Robert and Mabel Williams's Take on Patrick Henry's “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”

In the American tradition, Patrick Henry's rousing 1775 speech during the Second Virginia Convention “fired up America's fight for independence.” Henry's meaning of self-defense in the battle for independence internalized a love for freedom and humanity against tyranny. Robert and Mabel Williams's meaning of self-defense expressed the same kind of love for freedom, justice, and independence. Robert Williams's meaning was offensive, not on the defensive despite what some imagine. Williams was a pragmatist and he believed, to borrow from Malcolm X, that armed self-defense meant to embrace a “by any means necessary” approach if required to defend oneself and to achieve freedom. Williams's mandate was a rallying call for self-love but open to guerrilla tactics to achieve self-preservation, human dignity, and community objectives. The philosophy of Robert F. Williams as president and Dr. Albert Perry as vice president of the Union County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed “self-defense prevents bloodshed,” “forces protection,” is “born of our plight,” and is “an American tradition.”1 Self-defense, from Williams's perspective and Afrocentric worldview, guarantees humanity and that every African American individual, family, and community receive equal protection and support from the three branches of the federal government. Williams insisted on and petitioned for these native-born American rights. However, when studying him, scholars tend to under-appreciate important aspects of his political philosophy, identity, and family history. As such, multidimensional figures such as Robert F. and Mabel R. Williams—and by extension their most vocal supporters: Mae Mallory, Rosa Parks, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall—“are often ignored [and/or misinterpreted] because they cannot be cap-tured by singular analytical constructs nor reduced to single dimensions of Black political activism for social justice. Extant treatments of complex figures such as Robert F. Williams are often framed by scholars as homogenized or reduced to characters that fit one of the diverse dimensions of their makeup.”

I moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2003, and promptly got my first speeding ticket ever. I was driving 40 mph, which I noticed right after I drove past the 30-mph sign. Then I heard the siren.

The (white) police officer was very polite. He could see that I was nervous and apologized for having to write me a ticket. As he left, he waved and yelled, “Drive safe now!” Throughout the interaction, he was gentle and friendly. His final words felt more like a kindness than an instruction. I still remember how light his voice was. He wasn't worried or concerned or afraid. He did not see me as a problem.

To this day, that is the only speeding ticket I’ve ever received. Not that I haven't driven above the speed limit. I do so regularly. And not that I haven't sped in front of marked police cars. I have, on multiple occasions. But somehow, my speeding is never an issue. Every time I speed past a police officer, they decide that I am not a problem. They give me the benefit of the doubt.

On November 22, 2014, a 12-year-old Black boy playing alone in a park and causing no harm to anybody was seen as a problem and denied the benefit of the doubt. Police officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir Rice to death for the “crime” of playing with an Airsoft gun in a park while being 12 years old and Black. The 911 responder appears to have asked twice whether Tamir was Black or white before deciding whether to send police. Loehmann fired within two seconds of arriving on the scene.

Loehmann, it turned out, had been deemed “an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty” in a prior position as a police officer and supervisors had sought to terminate him for lying and insubordination. He had not revealed this to the Cleveland police, and they never reviewed his previous personnel file before hiring him.

I remember my first encounter with Robert Williams as if it happened yesterday. I was briefly introduced to Robert Williams by Mabel Williams, whom I had met three weeks earlier in Baldwin, Michigan at St. Ann's Lake County Senior Meals Program. Mabel worked as program director “for many years, sitting on the church's finance board and serving as Lector and Minister of the Eucharist.”1 During my second or third week at the center to meet with and interview Idlewild elders, Mabel invited me to a senior citizen's party at the Henrietta Summers Senior Citizens apartment reception room in Idlewild. As I entered the building that evening, Mabel introduced me to Robert. We shook hands, greeted one another, and briefly chatted. I was impressed by the humble and welcoming demeanor he displayed. I was in awe. I was teaching at West Shore Community College in Scottsville, Michigan, as an associate professor of Communication during fall 1992 and spring and summer 1993 semesters. It was in February of 1993, when I met him a second time. Robert Williams was invited to give an African American History Month presentation at West Shore. David McCullough, a former colleague and professor, who taught sociology courses, extended an invitation to join his class during what was one of Rob's annual presentations in the area. I sat in the front row of the classroom with a notepad and pen in hand eager to actively listen and take notes. I was thoroughly impressed. Rob blew my socks off as he shared stories about his family's travels, his civil rights activism, calls for armed self-defense, NAACP leadership agenda in Monroe, North Carolina, and being exiled in Cuba and China from 1961 to 1969. He also talked briefly about his return to the United States in September 1969. The details were attention getting to say the least. The national impact and international appeal that Robert and Mabel planted left a permanent footprint in American and worldwide history in shaping Black political thought during the turbulent decade of the 1960s and beyond.

Robert Franklin Williams Speaks: A Documentary History is organized into four parts. Part I explores in chronological order the Williams story and the geographical spaces where the family lived, worked, and resided while Robert and Mabel Williams worked in partnership advocating for the civil and human rights of African Americans. It reveals how Williams is and remains a central yet complex figure in the United States. It provides the historical substance and analytical clarity that is necessary for readers to discover for themselves how Williams's messages of resistance, advocacy for armed self-defense, and protests against racial injustice resonate today through “new civil rights movement” causes, efforts, grievances, and protests spearheaded by Black Lives Matter movement activists, proponents, and supporters who continue to dominate the twenty-first-century social justice agenda with renewed liberation demands and themes. In Part II, which follows, the documents illustrate how the Williams couple's activism, travels across continents, and exiled experiences in Cuba and China were flexible and pragmatic. Williams is presented as a defender of African American human rights, fundamental principles and meanings of American democracy, patriotism, armed self-defense, and social justice.

Thank you so much for the invitation to be this year's Jensen Lecturer: it is a great honor to be here at Goethe University and in particular at the Frobenius Institute. And it is a great pleasure, too, to be with old friends and new here in Frankfurt: I have only recently arrived but I am glad to be both at the Institute and in this city, which I have seen sparkling in the distance. I know that the Frobenius Institute has long been at the heart of the intellectual and ethnographic aspects of Frankfurt's cultural offerings.

I am especially pleased to give a set of lectures named for Adolf Ellegard Jensen. In the context of these distinguished named lecture series, it is customary to spend a few moments on the accomplishments and legacy of the person for whom the series is named. Usually the lecturer then moves on to the topic at hand, after some brief niceties and an appropriate homage to a figure of old. But I hope you will excuse me if I spend a little more time with A. E. Jensen than lecturers normally do: I have come to know the work of Jensen over the past few months, and I have become quite charmed by him; Jensen's work is highly significant to the material we consider in the study of religion today. As the advertisers of his most important work, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963 [1951]), put it at the time, Jensen's “sympathetic and richly documented” text is able to “demonstrate the importance of anthropology for the study of comparative religion.” Myth and Cult was published in German in 1951, and translated into English in 1963, but, unfortunately, it soon fell out of fashion: it has not been taught even in Germany in decades. And yet, to my eye, the intellectual project is one whose pertinence powerfully endures after almost seventy years.

So let us begin with a little excavation. In 1951, Jensen takes up the mid-twentieth-century question of religion, and shows how we, as anthropologists, can contribute to studying it. Significantly, he asks both what qualities religion has – that is, what qualities of humanity religion displays – and what form, or forms, religion takes over time.

On the first day of the semester, I walked into my Sociology of Inequality course and told the students to design a new society from scratch. They had complete control over every aspect of the society. The only criterion? They had to make sure that the society was socially, politically, and economically divided by hair color. They were to make it crystal clear that dark-haired people were the valued members of society while fair-haired people counted for nothing. Their assignment was to generate as many strategies as they could to send this message. They could set institutional policies, develop popular culture materials, create laws, limit social interactions, or do anything else that occurred to them. The students bent over their notebooks.

Half an hour later, all four blackboards in the room were full, and my arm was tired from writing down nearly a hundred suggestions. The students’ ideas covered every major social institution, every form of popular culture known to humankind in 2005, and a wide range of interpersonal interactions. They figured out how to make fair-haired people feel inadequate in any social setting, whether dark-haired people were present or not. The students made sure dark-haired people would never be held accountable for their mistreatment of fair-haired people. The students even struggled with how to treat redheads; were they valued or devalued? (Most students went with “devalued.”)

We looked at the four blackboards and everyone took a breath. I told them that they had done a great job and added, “Congratulations—now you understand how racism and sexism work in the United States.” I then handed out a pile of statistics and class went on from there.

I had students complete this exercise on the first day of courses on racism, sexism, heterosexism, and inequality more generally. Year in and year out, it never failed.

At some level, we know more about how systemic inequality works than we think. While the students were always creative, their creativity was fueled by real-life examples: newspaper stories, movies, and conversations they had with friends and family. At the same time, as each course continued after that first day, I noticed the same problem. Students struggled to see how different forms of inequality, such as sexism and racism, were similar to one another.