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

As Heaton's letter illustrates, Williams won support at home and abroad, from white and
non-white alike. For example, ten thousand Japanese, from different prefectures all over
the Japanese mainland, joined in a signature campaign to petition President Nixon for
Williams' fair treatment in early 1972 . By that time, Williams had become more
celebrated overseas than at home : numerous, non-English periodicals, from Sweden to
Tanzania, published front-page exposEs about his plight . In the United States, outside
Afro-American circles, Williams remained either relatively unknown or infamously
reviled .
Those students of history who remember Williams and his activism in Monroe
generally tend to remember him "as a transitory phenomenon, a mere glitch in the
chronology of those years--the exception to the rule ." s9 More specialized monographs in
recent years have been kinder to him~° Such revisionist scholarship should secure
Williams' rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century civil rights leaders 9i
'Fred Powledge, Free at Last? , 311 . General histories of the civil rights movement
tend to marginalize Williams . For example, Harvard Sitkoff has provided an accurate
synopsis of Williams' activism, describing both his counterpoint to King and his fearful
image in the media; however, Sitkoff, like most civil rights historians, treats him as
tangential to the larger movement . See Sitkoff, The Struggle for Bl~k Ea~~y . 1954-
141, 143 .
'°A close examination of the Williams case, such as that found in Andrew Myers'
Masters thesis, forces both a rc-consideration of Williams' role in the civil rights
movement and a rctvaluation of prevailing assumptions about this early phase of the
movement. Myers has pointed out that Williams' militant image in the press caused more
moderate civil rights leaders to define their own limits ofacceptable protest, and that the
waves Williams sent through the international community as a dissident helped to
"shame" the United States government into confronting the problem of the color line .
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