Includes a collection of writings by and about Robert Franklin Williams as an internationalist, pragmatist, and civil and human rights champion.
Williams was a compassionate man. He was an intelligent American citizen and Korean war veteran, who claimed his right to American citizenship. Acutely aware of the broken promises of the US government, he remained fully invested in the rights, privileges, and responsibilities the Constitution guaranteed all of its citizens. As many of his contemporaries now confess, Williams's strength and appeal, as explained by his second son, John Williams, was his uncompromising stance and determination to act on the American dream he imagined for social, economic, and political equality for African Americans.
The skills he acquired as a journalist and propaganda specialist were key to his political development, evolution, and transnational collaborations with Cuba and China, which he used to challenge domestic policies in the United States, and way beyond the imagination of his supporters in the United States. Williams ultimately used these strengths, strategies, and collaborations to deliver liberating messages of freedom, resistance, and social and economic equality on behalf of the rights of African Americans. Williams significantly contributed to the Black freedom struggle and should not be forgotten. This book includes a collection of writings by and about Williams as an internationalist, pragmatist, and civil and human rights champion.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments; Part I: Robert Franklin and Mabel Robinson Williams: Modeled Black Activist Couple Resistance to Racial Injustice in the United States; Part II: Monroe, North Carolina, 1955–1961; Havana, Cuba, 1961–1966; Peking, China, 1966–1969; Appendices; Selected Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index.
About the Author :
Ronald J. Stephens is a professor of African American studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.
Review :
“Ronald J. Stephens, one of the major scholars of African American life, leisure, and culture, has written a powerful portrayal of a hero of the American ideal. In Robert Franklin Williams Speaks: A Documentary History, we find Stephens’s brilliant analytical mind bringing us an organic and profound narrative of an African American living in resistance and victory.” — Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of Africology at Temple University in Philadelphia
This book promises to be a significant addition to the scholarship on one of America’s foremost freedom fighters of the 20th century. Robert F. Williams is deserving of such scholarly attention. -- Judson L. Jeffries, The Ohio State University
Ronald J. Stephens’s provocative, impressive, exhaustively researched, and thoughtful study chronicles Robert Williams’s life history, protests as a local civil rights leader, and international activist triumphs on the world stage. Williams life’s work demonstrates how to use the lessons of the past to confront continuing issues of today. A must read for scholars and activists alike. -- Jakobi Williams, Indiana University
