Negroes With Guns

Description

The story of a forgotten civil rights figure who dared to advocate armed resistance to the violence of the Jim Crow South.

The Documentary Institute team of filmmakers, Sandra Dickson, Churchill Roberts, Cindy Hill and Cara Pilson, who previously collaborated on the critically acclaimed FREEDOM NEVER DIES: THE LEGACY OF HARRY T. MOORE, announced completion of their latest documentary, NEGROES WITH GUNS: ROB WILLIAMS AND BLACK POWER. Featuring a score by Terence Blanchard, NEGROES WITH GUNS combines modern-day interviews with rare archival news footage to tell the story of Rob Williams, the forefather of the Black Power movement and a complex man who played a pivotal role in the struggle for respect, dignity and equality for all Americans.

Williams, dubbed the “violent crusader” by some, intended his philosophy of armed self-defense to work in concert with non-violent resistance; instead, he became the catalyst for what has been called a national showdown between these two opposing philosophies of the civil rights movement.  In August 1961, Freedom Riders came to Monroe, North Carolina—Williams’ hometown—to assist Williams in his civil rights struggle and demonstrate that passive resistance rather than armed self-defense was the superior tactic in the civil rights struggle. But on August 27^th all hell broke loose.  By the end of the day, Freedom Riders had been bloodied, beaten, and jailed and Rob Williams was on the run from the FBI. 

NEGROES WITH GUNS is not only an incisive look at a truly fascinating man but also a thought-provoking examination of our notions of patriotism and the acceptable limits of dissent.

Credits List

Directed by

Sandra Dickson

Churchill Roberts

Associate Directors

Cindy Hill

Cara Pilson

Writer

Sandra Dickson

Music by

Terrence Blanchard

Editor

Dan Spiess

Digital Lighthouse

Director of Photography

Cindy Hill

Director of Research

Cara Pilson

Chief Project Consultant

Tim Tyson

Additional Project Consultants

Clayborne Carson

Pat Coffey

James Forman

Ron Stephens

Executive Producer and Consultant

Charles Hobson

Lighting Director

Terry Bishop

Additional Lighting

Bill Dougherty

Mark Overton

Additional Photography

Randy Fulp

Allan Furr

Keith Smith

Music Clearance

Nancy Meyer

Bates Meyer, Inc.

Audio Restoration

Mirror Image Sound Studios

TeamAudio

Offline Editor

Cindy Hill

Archival Footage and Materials Provided by

Robert Carl

Cohen Radical Films

www.radfilms.com

Additional Archival Footage and Materials Provided by:

AP Worldwide Photo

Bentley Historical Library

Budget Films

The Charlotte Observer

Charlotte Public Library

Chicago Historical Society

CBS News Archives

Duke University Oral History Collection

Joyner Library, East Carolina University

Greensboro Times

Historic Films

Image Bank Film

ITN Archive Ltd.

KRON-TV

Levine Museum of the New South

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

Monroe Enquirer-Journal

North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

UCLA Film and Television Archives

University of South Carolina Film and Television Archives

The Union County Heritage Room

Univision

WBTV-Charlotte

WGBH-TV

John H. Williams

Mabel Williams

Wisconsin State Historical Society

Research Associate

Pilou Miller

Research Assistants

Monica Bigler

Kristin Davy

Kathryn Frye

Melinda Kahl

Sandra Krasa

ChrisAnn Silver

Production Assistants

Monica Bigler

Anberin Pasha

Suzanne Niedland

Transcriptions

Monica Bigler

Sheila Bishop

Anberin Pasha

High Definition video equipment provided by

HD Cinema

Postproduction Consultant

Jeff Blauvelt

Studio Facilities

Moving Pictures Studio

Stanford Video

WTVS-Detroit Public Television

WETA-TV

WUFT-TV

Special Thanks

Pat Coffey

Tim Tyson

John C. Williams

John H. Williams

Mabel Williams

Additional Thanks

Karen Anderson

Valica Boudry

Aukrum Burton

Frank Counts

Byron Harper

Titus Harper

Winifred Haun

Heritage Room Staff

Bob and Tish Kilpatrick

Steve Massengill

Barbara McKinney

Dick Ridley

Jason Sobczynski

Wyman Taylor

Houston Wells

Reginald Wilson

William Worthy

The Documentary Institute owes a special debt of gratitude to Terry Hynes, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications, The University of Florida.

In memory of Mabel and Robert Williams' son, Bobby (1948-1991)

Production Notes

The Historical Record: The fact that Rob Williams was a pack rat certainly worked in our favor. Simply put Robert Williams kept everything—newspaper clippings, copies of his political pamphlet, The Crusader, photos of his travels to Cuba, China and Tanzania , and letters, and personal writings. In short, he provided us with a great majority of the raw materials we needed to piece together his life story. Our challenge was to wade through the massive amounts of material and cull out the most pertinent aspects. We found it quite amazing that Rob Williams not only compiled all of this material, but that he managed to keep so much of it intact as he trekked around the world.

The “Cutting Room” Floor : Try as we might there were certain intriguing elements of the Rob Williams’ story that we wanted to include but couldn’t for stylistic reasons or time constraints. One of the first things we learned was that Rob Williams’ hometown, Monroe, North Carolina, was also the hometown of former Senator Jesse Helms, Jr. In the fact the two men were contemporaries. The irony didn’t escape us that the forefather of the Black Power movement and one of the staunchest defenders of the “Southern Way of Life” grew up in the same small Southern town. In fact, during the height of the 1961 race riot in Monroe only one reporter was able to interview Williams before he fled Monroe for eventual exile in Cuba—that reporter was a young Jesse Helms. Helms was working for WRAL-TV.

We found among older residents of Monroefeelings still run high and are frequently divided along racial lines. Even whites sympathetic to his struggle for equality are quick to point out his impatience and describe what they see as his penchant for violence. We tried to interview whites who witnessed or participated in events relevant to the Williams’ story but only one agreed to speak with us. One white person agreed to let us use his antique car for a stylization until he found out that we were doing a film on Robert Williams. Ironically, Williams was remarkably restrained in terms of aggressive actions, despite constant threats from the Klan and others.

Music: We were thrilled when we discovered that Rob kept tapes of Radio Free Dixie, a program he produced and broadcast from Cuba from 1961 through 1965. The Radio Free Dixie programs were a combustible mix of fiery rhetoric and protest music by some artists rarely played on radio stations in the United States. Artists featured regularly on Radio Free Dixieincluded performers of classic freedom songs such as Nina Simone, Leadbelly, Odetta and Josh White as well as Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.

The 17 songs featured in our film were pulled from approximately 15 hours of Radio Free Dixie broadcasts. To use this material we had to not only identify the song and the artist, a relatively easy task in some cases and quite a daunting one in others, but also identify the specific album on which the song appeared. In some cases the songs were identified by going back to the old play lists that Rob and Mabel kept along with the recordings. When the songs couldn’t be found due to missing play lists, a number of approaches were used including calling on jazz and blues artists to lend their “listening expertise” in hopes they could identify a potential artists. And last, but not least, desperate phone calls to Mabel Williams to see if one more attempt at digging around in the bottom of the closet might unearth the album in question. True to form, Mabel came through.

The Radio Free Dixie songs provide more than just background music. They serve a vital storytelling function. The songs are used throughout the piece as a narrative device to introduce key turning points in Rob’s personal and political struggles. The impact of the Radio Free Dixie music is made even stronger through the complementary and powerful score provided by Terence Blanchard. Blanchard, an internationally acclaimed jazz composer of chart-topping CDs and award-winning film scores, strikes just the right cord with his score.

Visual Record: From the start we knew one of our greatest challenges would be finding and assimilating archival footage and photographs to construct an accurate and interesting vision of the era in which Robert Williams lived. We desperately wanted to avoid using widely viewed and thus clichéd footage of the civil rights movement that would only serve to keep our viewer’s at arms length. We wanted archival material that related directly to our subjects and their struggles.

Much to our delight, we discovered a wealth of rare film footage and interviews. For example our research turned up a 1964 documentary produced by a Charlotte, North Carolina television station in which Rob Williams is interviewed while living in exile in Cuba. Given the tendency of most television stations to discard outdated materials, we were thrilled to discover the station had kept a copy of the original hour-long film.

As luck would have it, we also tracked down the raw interview tapes of a freelance television journalist who had conducted an on-camera interview with Williams in the late 1960s. We also found photographs taken during the height of civil rights demonstration in Monroe. In all, we worked with close to 50 different film and photo archives around the world as well as members of the Williams family to piece together the visual history of Robert F. Williams.

Aftermath : Shortly after the film was completed, we screened it in Monroe, North Carolina, Williams’ hometown and site of the racial melee. After the screening and to everyone’s surprise, the mayor of Monroe presented Rob’s widow, Mabel, with a key to the city. Forty-three years earlier, Monroe a city official had promised Rob Williams if “he didn’t get out of town, he’d be hanging in the courthouse square by midnight.” The Williams left Monroe, North Carolina that night with city and state officials as well as the FBI in pursuit. However, despite giving Mabel Williams a key to the city, Monroe has no memorial to Rob Williams, not even a street named in his honor. However, there is an avenue named after Dr. King.