3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

1959 (almost an entire year before the March 1960 sit-ins), and local whites undoubtedly
knew of his advocacy of self-defense at that time b~
Williams' philosophy was not complicated . He felt that nonviolence could be
dogmatic, inflexible, and "mechanically deceptive."~ He believed in a flexible approach
to the black freedom struggle, one that utiliud what worked, and events in Monroe
proved to Williams that it was self-defense that worked. "I am not opposed to
nonviolence per se ;' he wrote . "I am opposed to it only when it becomes an object of
dogmatism . I am opposed to it when it denies the logic of flexibility."~'
From the outset of his activism, Williams emphasized that his personal struggle
was white supremacy, not ~I integration . `"The struggles of the Freedom Riders
and the sit-in movements have concentrated on a single goal : the right to eat at a lunch
counter, the right to sit anywhere on a bus," he noted . "These are important rights
because their denial is a direct personal assault on a Negro's dignity." Such protests
against segregation were "an important part of the overall Negro struggle," but useful
only until "they shift attention from the basic evils" of racism and economic injustice.°
6'For more on the sit-ins in Monroe, see Myers, "When Violence Met Violence," 27 .
~Williams, "U.S.A. : Revolution Without Violence?," v 'o (March 1964), 110 .
~Williams, "Reflections of an Exiled Freedom Fighter," unpublished manuscript, Box
2, Undated Folder 1, Robert F. Williams Collection, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan .
~°Williams, NeQr+oes With Guns, 75, 77 . Stokely Carmichael noted in a speech at the
University ofCalifornia at Berkeley in 1965 : "People ought to understand that we were
never fighting for the right to integrate, we weee fia^htina_against white suRrcmacw ." See
Carmichael, Stokely SQeaks : Black PowerBack to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random
House, 1965), 56 .
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