There is one, and only one, issue in the Robert Williams case. That single issue is: Shall the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People endorse the advocacy by a local NAACP officer of stopping “lynching with lynching” or “meeting violence with violence”?

—from The Single Issue, a pamphlet distributed at the NAACP national convention in New York, July 1959.

 

For some time now it has been apparent that the traditional leadership of the American Negro community—a leadership which has been largely middle class in origin and orientation—is in danger of losing its claim to speak for the masses of Negroes. This group is being challenged by the pressure of events to produce more substantial and immediate results in the field of civil rights or renounce the position it has long held. The dramatic Tuskegee and Montgomery boycotts, the rash of student sit-ins—none was inspired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, or the established Negro church denominations, but it is to their credit that they hurriedly gave the boycotts and sit-ins their blessing and, as with the NAACP, much needed financial help. They were thereby able to present a united front to their common enemy, the system of white supremacy.

But the challenge to middle-class Negro leaders—including the newer type like Martin Luther King—remains. It is inherent in the rapid growth of the militant, white-hating Muslim movement among working-class Negroes. It can be heard in the conversations of black intellectuals and students from the South who regard the efforts of the NAACP, the Urban League, and most religious and civic leaders with either disdain or despair, in the belief that they are doing too little, too timidly and too late.

Probably nothing more clearly illustrates this challenge, however, than the case of Wilkins vs. Williams. Robert F. Williams is the president of the Union County, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP. Wilkins vs. Williams was a hearing before the board of directors of the NAACP in New York City, which grew out of three criminal cases that were disposed of in one day by the Superior Court in Monroe, the seat of Union County.

Before this court on May 5, 1959, stood James Mobley, B.F. Shaw, and Louis Medlin. Mobley, a mentally retarded colored man, was charged with assault with intent to commit rape on a white woman. (He admitted he had caught her wrist during an argument.) Shaw, a white man, was charged with assault on a Negro chambermaid who claimed he had kicked her down a flight of stairs in the hotel where she worked. The case of the other white defendant, Medlin, was the most inflammatory. He was accused of having entered the home of a Negro woman, eight months pregnant, of attempting to rape her, and, when she resisted and tried to flee across a field, of brutally assaulting her and her six-year-old son. A white woman neighbor had witnessed the assault and summoned the police.

The Union County branch of the NAACP is the only one of its kind now in existence. Its members and supporters, who are mostly workers and displaced farmers, constitute a well-armed and disciplined fighting unit. Union County Negroes have had more than their share of ugly race relations, and by 1959, their experience—which we shall examine in detail later—had taught them to rely on their own resources in their dealings with the white community. After Medlin was arrested, their first impulse was to mount an assault against the Monroe jail, seize the prisoner, and kill him. It was Robert Williams who restrained them. He pointed out that murdering Medlin would place them in the position of the white men who, shortly before, had dragged Mack Charles Parker from a jail in Poplarville, Mississippi, and lynched him. Besides, Williams argued, so much national and international attention was focused on Monroe that the judge and juries would be forced to punish the white men.

But Williams was wrong. Impervious to world opinion, the court freed both Shaw and Medlin, and committed the mentally retarded Negro to prison for two years. (Only the last-minute discovery by his attorney of a technicality, which reduced the charge from rape to assault, prevented the judge from handing down a thirty-year sentence.) On the steps of the courthouse, Williams issued an angry statement to a UPI reporter:

We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court and it becomes necessary to punish them ourselves. In the future we are going to have to try and convict them on the spot. We cannot rely on the law. We can get no justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is done, we must right then and there, on the spot, be prepared to inflict punishment on the people.

Since the federal government will not bring a halt to lynching in the South, and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally, if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method.

Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, called Williams from New York to ask about the statement. Williams confirmed it as his and said he intended to repeat it that afternoon for several radio and television stations eager to interview him. He would make it clear, he assured Wilkins, that he was not speaking for the NAACP but for himself, though he would stress that his views represented the prevailing feeling of the colored people in Union County. Wilkins replied that it would be virtually impossible for the general public to separate Williams’s statement from the policies of the NAACP since he would be identified as an officer of the organization. Williams then made his scheduled appearances, and the next day, May 7, Wilkins sent a telegram directing him to suspend his activities as a local officer pending consideration of his status at a meeting of the Association’s board of directors. Williams answered that he would attend the meeting with counsel.

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Thus the stage was set for a contest between a highly respected leader of a distinguished national organization and a relatively unknown young Southener capable of issuing rash statements on the steps of a courthouse. Wilkins vs. Williams aroused heated discussions in nearly every Negro community in the country, but it was obvious from the beginning that Williams was bound to lose. At a closed hearing in June, before the Committee on Branches, Williams, represented by Conrad Lynn, a veteran civil-rights attorney, asserted that his statement had been made under emotional duress, and that he had not meant to imply that Negroes should exercise anything more than their legal right to self-defense and the right to come to the defense of another party against criminal attack. The committee upheld the action of its executive secretary and suspended Williams for six months. A few weeks later, the delegates to the Association’s fiftieth annual convention voted 764 to 14 against Williams and in favor of suspension.

The one-sided vote should have settled the matter, with Williams returning to obscurity. But the questions raised by Wilkins vs. Williams are profound, and still far from settled. A close examination of relevant documents and newspaper files, and interviews with some of the principals involved, leads one to conclude that the real issue was never raised, and that Williams was slapped on the wrist for having stated publicly what many of his fellow Negroes, even those on the board of directors of the NAACP, felt but did not think it politic to express. Indeed, a statement issued by Roy Wilkins on May 6, 1959, deploring Williams’s statement might well have been written by Williams himself.

. . . At the same time it must be recognized that the mood of Negro citizens from one end of the nation to the other is one of bitterness and anger over the lynching [of Mack Parker] in Poplarville, Miss., April 25, and over numerous instances of injustice meted out to Negroes by the courts in certain sections of the South. They see Negroes lynched or sentenced to death for the same crimes for which white defendants are given suspended sentences or set free. They are no longer willing to accept this double standard of justice.

If Negroes were no longer willing to accept the double standard of justice, what were they to do about it? Wilkins did not say, but one paragraph in the brief Williams submitted to the Committee on Branches provides the answer which he has been expounding ever since and which daily finds wider and wider acceptance:

He [Williams] believes the message of armed self-reliance should be spread among Negroes of the South. He is convinced that a somnolent national government will only take action when it is made aware that individual Negroes are no longer facing the mobs in isolation but are acquiring the habit of coming to the aid of their menaced brothers.

But this was precisely the position which the NAACP could not publicly support. The organization was already being subjected to constant harassment by the Southern states. And to have advocated Williams’s position would have exposed the NAACP to widespread criticism from many of the people who now warmly support it, those who, for the most part, prefer the legalistic or pacifist approach to American race relations. Moreover, the possible resulting violence could have shaken the nation to its very foundation, and caused it intense embarrassment in the conduct of its diplomacy with a largely non-white world. But the situation in the South that provoked Williams’s statement and the ensuing controversy remains unchanged. The NAACP’s rejection of Williams’s position only postponed the crisis facing Negro leadership; it did not eliminate it. Because it seems probable that Williams—and other young men and women like him—will play an increasingly vocal role in the social maelstrom that is the American Southland, a closer look at him, his views, and the environment that produced him, may be revealing.

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I first met Robert Williams at the center of a revolution, and I am certain that this has colored my attitude toward him. It was in Havana in the summer of 1960. Relations between the Eisenhower administration and the Castro government had deteriorated almost to the breaking point. White and black leaders in the United States had already denounced Fidel Castro’s efforts to win friends and sympathy among American Negroes. Adam Clayton Powell, once a warm supporter, had disavowed the Cuban leader. Joe Louis’s public relations firm, under strong public pressure, had been forced to drop its Cuban account, and Jackie Robinson had taken Castro to task in his New York Post column. The prominent Negroes who had flocked to Havana soon after the revolution succeeded had gone home and not returned.

Yet there at the Hotel Presidente, a guest of the Casa de las Americas, a Cuban cultural agency, was Robert Williams, a tall man in his middle thirties, of massive shoulders and thick girth. In Havana he wore the wide-brimmed hat of the guajiro (peasant) and a beard that would have been impressive anywhere else but in the land of Fidel Castro and his comrades. This was Williams’s second visit to the island since the revolution, and he was a celebrity, applauded wherever he went. In personal appearances, and in magazine and newspaper articles, Williams had been excoriating the United States, his main charge being that America talks freedom abroad while denying it to its black citizens at home. Williams and Castro had frequently appeared together on television and a warm friendship had developed between them. The relationship had mutual advantages: the Cuban leader was furnished with a gold mine of propaganda material to use in his clash with the Eisenhower administration, and Williams had a platform from which he could speak and be heard around the world. His attacks on the United States nearly involved him in a fist fight with an American newspaperman who angrily accused him of unpatriotic behavior in airing an embarrassing domestic problem in a country that was hostile to the United States. Unwittingly the reporter had touched on one of the keystones of Williams’s strategy.

“What some people don’t understand,” he told me one evening, “is that in the South we’re fighting for our lives.” He was referring to the broad economic offensive white officials and businessmen have mounted against militant Negroes throughout the South. “I’m in this struggle to win, and I’ll win it any way I can. If somebody gets embarrassed, that’s too bad.”

An opportunity to test the effectiveness of his approach had arisen on his first trip to Cuba. A telephone call from Monroe informed him that his wife and children were receiving threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Furious, he stormed down to the United States embassy, stopping only to pick up a correspondent friend from Prensa Latina, the Cuban News Service. He demanded and received an audience with Ambassador Philip Bonsai with whom he lodged a vigorous protest. The harassed diplomat no doubt realized the potentially explosive propaganda material that could fall into Castro’s hands. He agreed to submit Williams’s written protest to Washington, and within a few hours Mrs. Williams and her children had a guard of several police cars.

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Williams believes that the white supremacist system of the South could not survive very long without the support, or the tacit consent, of various agencies of the federal government. At the same time, he is convinced that the federal government offers the only real hope the Negro has of winning any large measure of his civil rights. But Washington will act only under strong pressure, and this the Negro people must create by a more militant assertion of their rights—including “meeting violence with violence.” The white South, through its traditional alliance with conservative Republicans, subjects the federal government to an enormous amount of pressure and wins appreciable results. Consequently, it has been able to defy the Supreme Court’s school desegregation order for seven years with little federal intervention. Williams concedes that the Negro cannot match the South’s great resources in either money or Congressional influence, despite the best intentions of Northern liberals and even a liberal President. But the Negro does have a formidable weapon in his sensitive position in international affairs. Without the cold war and the competition between the colossi of West and East, it seems doubtful that the many African nations could have gained independence so rapidly. Certainly the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America indicates that the Cuban revolution would not have been permitted to swing so far to the left if not for the extreme degree of United States sensitivity to world opinion today. For the same reason (though he knows it is possible to exaggerate the similarities), Williams believes the American Negro has been presented with the finest opportunity history is likely to offer him to obtain full participation in our national life.

Thus, when President Eisenhower was in India championing the rights of Asians to better housing, Williams wired him in care of Prime Minister Nehru (also an NAACP member) to protest a housing redevelopment scheme, largely financed by federal funds, that Union County officials had designed to destroy the best Negro neighborhood in Monroe. Eisenhower acted with unusual haste, and the project has been stalled ever since.

Nowhere was Williams’s method of subjecting every racial incident to world exposure more effectively demonstrated than in the “Kissing Case.” On October 28, 1958, two Monroe colored boys, James Hanover Thompson and David “Fuzzy” Sampson, eight and nine years old, were arrested and charged with assault on a white female. Earlier that afternoon, in a game with some white children, James had either kissed or been kissed by a seven-year-old white girl. The boys were held incommunicado three days before Williams knew they were under arrest. Ironically, according to Williams, his first intelligence came from the mayor of Monroe who telephoned because he said he knew Williams was a “troublemaker” and he wanted to know if Williams had any ideas about how to handle the case. (The mayor denies he made the call.) It seemed to Williams that the boys required immediate legal aid which was not available in Union County. He submitted a request to the national office of the NAACP; but meanwhile, on the sixth day after their arrest, in a closed hearing, without defense counsel, Judge J. Hamilton Price heard the case and committed the boys to indeterminate terms in reform school.

Williams, through an intermediary, was responsible for Ted Poston’s breaking the story in the New York Post, and from there, it spread around the world with lightning-like rapidity. Demonstrations were staged against American embassies in Europe, outstanding intellectuals protested to the State Department, and Canon L. John Collins of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral became involved in a lively transatlantic feud with Luther H. Hodges, then governor of North Carolina. (The governor, to his embarrassment, was first informed of the “Kissing Case” by a reporter while in the middle of a television interview in Philadelphia.) Eventually the boys were released from the reform school and allowed to go back to live with their mothers who had been forced to move out of Union County. “Without the pressure of world opinion,” Williams insists, “those boys would still be in custody.”

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These stories, which I later verified, were related to me during long nightly conversations in Havana. One evening I asked Williams a question I thought he might not answer. What truth was there in the rumor that had been circulated during the NAACP convention that his men were not only armed (in the South, after all, a surprisingly large number of people keep guns) but that they were in fact a small army, drilled and disciplined, with access to an arsenal?

He laughed. “Hell, man, that’s no secret, and I don’t know why it should frighten the board of directors of the NAACP. Everybody in Monroe knows what we have, that we know how to use it, and that we are willing to use it. The Mayor and the Chief of Police know, and so does the Klan. Come to Monroe when you get back to the States and see for yourself.” This was the same kind of invitation that had taken me to Cuba and two months later I was in Monroe, North Carolina.

Some Southern towns are lovely, with great old houses that slumber on broad streets beneath spreading, ancient trees. In such towns even a Negro writer on a hurried visit can perceive that, although his ancestors only supplied the labor under the ante-bellum system of caste and privilege, at least there was a comprehensive society in which everyone had a place; and, dimly, he can understand why the Southern aristocracy fought so desperately to retain the cruel and dehumanizing system that was slavery. Here, at least, social relations had a symmetry wherein the dark, ugly things were hidden away, in the slave quarter or on the backstairs of the big house.

But Monroe is not such a town. It is ugly. There is little distinction in the architecture of its finest houses; and although it is built on hills, there is a dreary flatness about it. Worse, it is a composite town. Unpainted one-room Negro shacks, which rent for an inflated ten dollars a month, sit within a stone’s throw of the tiny, neat, unimaginative bungalows of the white middle class. One can drive three blocks in any direction and see the graphic reality of race relations in Union County. The Northern visitor, keenly aware that violence always simmers beneath the seeming tranquility, wonders that anybody, black or white, would want to fight over this place.

In the days of the steam engine Monroe was a prosperous railroad maintenance town. A generation ago Robert Williams’s father, along with a significant number of Monroe’s colored men, serviced the trains and earned a steady living at it. They bought their own homes in the colored section called Newtown, sent their children to the colored school most of the year, and saw in their youngsters the hope of a better future. If they were not a genuine middle class, they were better off than the tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the county’s rural population. But the Diesel engine supplanted steam, and the depression and mechanization displaced most of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers; and, though Monroe did not die, it was left severely crippled.

By the time Williams had grown to adolescence, unemployment was a chronic problem in Newtown. He served a hitch in the army, somehow squeezed in three years of college at West Virginia State and Johnson C. Smith College in nearby Charlotte, and then enlisted in the Marine Corps for a tour of duty. On returning to Monroe, he entered the lists of the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Charlotte newspapers and seems to have spent most of his time incensing the local whites by debunking their notions of white supremacy. During this period he married Miss Mable Robinson, a sturdy, tall, attractive woman with whom he has had two children. He worked at his trade of machinist while he wrote his provocative letters to the newspapers. It is possible that no one outside of North Carolina would ever have heard of Williams if the Supreme Court had not ordered school desegregation in 1954.

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It is still difficult to imagine the impact of the Court’s decision on small Southern towns. Intercourse between the races—that is, social intercourse during the Southern day which, as James Baldwin has pointed out, is quite different from the guilt-ridden, integrated Southern night—was the function of the local white officials and businessmen, and colored ministers and other self-appointed spokesmen who purported to represent the views of their fellow Negroes. White lawyers in Monroe often defended Negroes who were in trouble (not too vigorously, to be sure) and were paid by the NAACP chapter. There was an understanding, a working relationship, between the whites who ran the town and the colored ministers. The whites would try to control their extremists, and in return, the black men of God helped to keep the black population in its place.

But suddenly, one Monday in 1954, a long held tradition was struck a deathblow. The NAACP, which had never claimed to be anything but a moderate organization, became the ogre of the Southland. Acknowledged membership in it could mean the loss of job, credit, and physical security. Negro doctors, lawyers, undertakers—whoever had to be licensed by the state—promptly withdrew from membership. When the Union County chapter was apparently in its last throes (with only six members), Robert Williams was drafted for the presidency. (“You’re the only fool left,” said one of those who urged him to accept the position.) Somewhat innocently, Williams set about trying to recruit members among the respectable middle class, and, needless to say, he failed absolutely. In desperation he turned to the lower class of the Negro community. He likes to tell of the day he walked into a pool parlor and asked if anyone there wanted to join the NAACP. The players looked at him in astonishment: “Man, do you mean we can belong to that organization?” From that time on, Williams has had as many members as he could manage, sometimes more. He says of that period, “I made an important discovery. The woman earning ten, fifteen dollars a week as a domestic, the sharecropper, the ditch-digger—they were more loyal to the NAACP than the Negroes who were much better off. They would stick under pressure, probably because they had less to lose and we were the only fighting organization they had.”

As the Union County branch of the NAACP grew, so did the Ku Klux Klan, which had renewed its activity soon after the Supreme Court decision. Most of the Klan’s wrath was directed against Dr. A. E. Perry, one of the six who had remained in the chapter when Williams assumed leadership. The popular young physician, who was fairly prosperous, had built an attractive, ranch-style home overlooking a new highway. The Klan considered the house an affront, and it believed that Perry contributed large sums of money to the NAACP chapter. It publicly announced its intention of running him out of the county.

“When we heard over the radio,” Williams says, “that a Klan meeting had drawn 8,000 people, we figured it was time to take a stand. You see, there are only 13,000 people in the county.” (Klansmen from surrounding counties were swelling the attendance.) The colored men of Monroe armed themselves with the heaviest weapons available, and set up an alarm system that would summon them instantly to the scene of any trouble. A regular night guard was established around Dr. Perry’s home. Trenches were dug, Molotov cocktails prepared, and gas masks and helmets were distributed. At one point during this troubled period the police attempted to seize the weapons, but desisted when Williams and Perry threatened a law suit. (Nothing in the laws of North Carolina and of most Southern states restricts or contravenes the constitutional right “to keep and bear arms, and be secure in one’s person.”)

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A Klan motorcade, sixty cars strong, invaded Newtown on the evening of October 5, 1957. As was their custom, the robed Klansmen fired at the homes of the Negroes as they drove past. Near Dr. Perry’s home they were confronted with the sustained fire of several scores of men who had been instructed by Williams not to injure anyone if it could be helped. At the first sign of resistance the Klan motorcade dissolved into chaos. Panicky Klansmen fled in every direction, some of them wrecking their automobiles. There have been no Klan motorcades in Monroe since.¹

It is interesting to speculate on why this significant event received so little publicity. Monroe Chief of Police Mauney admitted to the Associated Press the next day that there had been a motorcade—he knew because it had included several police cars—but he denied that there had been an exchange of gunfire. Williams invited the press to Newtown to view the bullet-scarred houses and the wrecked automobiles whose owners did not care to come to claim them. Nevertheless, few people outside the state knew that the clash had taken place, and that the Klan had sustained a decisive defeat. Compare this with the nationwide news coverage and wide applause given the Indians in nearby Lumberton County, when they routed a Klan meeting with gunfire a few weeks later. About this Williams says, “It’s as if they were afraid to let other Negroes know what we have done here. We have proved that a hooded man who thinks a white life is superior to a black life is not so ready to risk his white life when a black man stands up to him.” He recalls proudly that in Monroe they have had their sit-ins and wade-ins, but none of their boys and girls has been the victim of violence from racist hoodlums. “They know, don’t you see, that we are not passive resisters.”

The morale of the Negroes in Union County is high. They carry themselves with a dignity I have seen in no other Southern community. Largely vanished are the slouching posture, the scratching of head, and the indirect, mumbled speech that used to characterize the Negro male in the presence of whites. It is as if, in facing up to their enemies, they have finally confronted a terrible reality and found it not so terrible after all.

But they have had to pay a price for their new self-respect. Paternalism has been destroyed in Union County. The leftover food that the colored maid could once carry home is now consigned instead to the garbage pail, and the old clothes that found their way to the colored section are now either sold or burned. The intimate communication that used to pass from mistress to maid, master to workman (seldom in the reverse direction) has largely disappeared. Negroes suspected of belonging to the NAACP are told “Let Williams feed you!” and “Let Williams find you a place to live!” as they are fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes. Northern owners of the new factories, by agreement with the city fathers, hire no Negroes but import white workers from Charlotte, twenty-five miles away. It would almost appear that the rulers of Monroe society had determined to strengthen the Union County NAACP and Williams’s influence on the colored community; and, in fact, that is what they have done.

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But what role is Williams likely to play in the future? Although he has shown great personal courage and demonstrated effective leadership ability in Monroe, he can claim no large following outside his own county. True, he has a scattering of fervent supporters in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, who subscribe to The Crusader, the weekly newsletter in which he flays not only white supremacists but Negro moderates who accommodate themselves to the system. But he is in danger of being driven out of Monroe where his standard of living is close to penury. (No one will employ him in any capacity in Union or nearby counties.) Certainly the present national leadership of the NAACP does not fear that Williams will undermine their position in the near future. The organization is still the most effective civil rights force in the country, and few of its members have shown any inclination to abandon it.

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But sooner than anyone now supposes, three factors may create a social climate in the South in which a Robert Williams will play a leading role. They are the growing militancy of Negro students; the intransigence of the Southern white oligarchy; and the depressed Negro working class and peasantry. The students and the white ruling groups of the South are locked in a struggle that has greater ramifications than perhaps even they realize. At stake is not whether a black child shall sit beside a white child in a schoolroom or at a lunch counter; it is not even whether a black boy sits beside a white girl and one day marries her. At stake is the very existence of the Southern oligarchy, its entrenched power and traditional privileges which rest on a non-democratic political system and an economy based on a plentiful supply of cheap, unorganized labor. Ultimately the struggle in the South will determine who will represent the states and the Congressional districts in Washington, who will sit in the legislatures, the city halls, and the courts, who will operate the industries and the arable land. As the real issue becomes more apparent, two developments seem certain. First, those who now wield power will refuse to yield beyond a minimum of token desegregation and will retaliate, often violently and in defiance of federal law; and second, the students will abandon the technique of passive resistance as it proves ineffectual in seriously disturbing the power structure of Southern society.

The most decisive factor in the conflict will probably be the Negro laboring class, heretofore unheard from. These are the great masses of the unskilled, who belong to no labor unions or civic organizations, whose churches are more concerned with leading their flocks to heaven than to a fuller share of democracy on earth, whose only fraternity is that of the millions of neglected and untrained who have nothing to barter in the labor market but their willingness to work. Only yesterday the man of this class could pick the cotton, run the elevator, pack the crate, but now the machine can do it better and displaces him. Government statistics hardly suggest how great his number is, much less what he is feeling and thinking, but we know he is everywhere. (The industrialization programs of the South almost always exclude him. Fourteen per cent of the black labor force is now unemployed as opposed to 7 per cent for the nation as a whole.) A casual walk through any colored section of a Southern town or city will reveal him, standing on the corner, lounging near the bar, slouched on the doorstep, staring into the uncertainty that is his future. The “they” in his life, those who make decisions that vitally affect him, are not only the governments, federal, state, and local, the captains of industry and finance, but even the Negro middle class and the striking students, all of whom seem to be going someplace without him. It is not his children that all of the school desegregation furor is about; he is lucky if he can keep them in the colored school. No one can presently claim to speak for this man, not church, union, nor NAACP; and just as he does not yet clearly understand the social forces arrayed against him, neither do they understand him or the various stimuli to which he is likely to respond.

Predictions are risky at best, but it seems safe to say that as these forces come into sharper conflict in what is essentially an attempt to overthrow an entrenched political and economic power, the Negro leadership class will be faced with a crisis, for its purely legalistic (or passive resistance) approach will clearly not be able to control the dynamics of the Negro struggle. Then to the fore may come Robert Williams, and other young men and women like him, who have concluded that the only way to win a revolution is to be a revolutionary.

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¹ Dr. Perry has been driven out of Union County. The county's leading Catholic layman, he was arrested in 1958 and indicted on charges of performing an abortion on a white woman. Sole evidence submitted against him was her uncorroborated statement. He was convicted, sent to prison, and barred from Union County. Denied the right to practice medicine, he now works as an assistant to an undertaker in Durham.