Sadistic White Insanity (At Last)

The paradigmatic Spook Who Sat by the Door perhaps, Robert Franklin Williams provides a fairly Freudless socio-diagnostic to combat a sick society of U.S. empire in theory and practice, both locally and globally. Its publication can be found most notably in two “books,” Negroes with Guns (Williams 1962) and Listen, Brother! (Williams 1968), and “USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution” (Williams 1964), maybe the most famous communiqué circulated by Williams’s self-published journal The Crusader. There are in addition two Williams “biographies” which give him ample opportunity to amplify his voice for all time: Radio Free Dixie (Tyson 1999), named after his pirate broadcast from Havana, and Black Crusader (Cohen 1972), named for him, begun as an audio-taped interview in Tanzania. There are also prominent print interviews like the one conducted by The Black Scholar (Williams 1970) after Williams returns from a near decade-long exile: 3 years in Mao’s China, 6 months in Nyerere’s Dar es Salaam and 5 years in Castro’s Cuba. Will it surprise when this whole mind-blowing analytic of praxis pivots around several questions of sex?

Negroes with Guns is replete with “object lessons,” explicitly framed object lessons, or at least one object lesson many times retold. The opening line goes: “Why do I speak to you from exile?” (Williams 1962, 3). Then Williams repeats over and again how he’s got a story to tell, the story of armed self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina and his militant NAACP chapter in Union County. This is why he was so concerned with novelist Julian Mayfield’s eventual escape when racist violence looms largest. This is why he reluctantly escapes Dixie himself, so he can spread the word beyond white media distortions both nationally and internationally. The story is what Williams calls “a dramatic object lesson” that should prophesy Black liberation for sure (12).

Like Malcolm X or El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who’d invite Williams to speak at his Harlem Mosque whenever in New York, Negroes with Guns defines its enemy as a “moral weakling” and a “coward” (Williams 1962, 3) one who is more likely to make concessions when met with Ogun, “God of Steel” (Baraka 2000, 523). Why? Psychologically, Williams writes: “racist consider themselves superior beings and are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity” (1962, 4). Virtually every anecdote here is evidence for this coming to consciousness, writ large in chapter title even after chapter title: “Self-Defense Prevents Bloodshed,” Chapter 1; Chapter 4, “Non-Violence Emboldens Racists”; and “Self-Defense Prevents a Pogrom,” Chapter 5. Williams continues to emphasize why establishment propaganda organs (white and Negro) refuse to publicize perspectives like: “The Klan discovered we were arming and guarding our community [in Monroe, NC]… We shot it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan didn’t have any more stomach for this type of fight” (19). We learn that the psychic values of racism manage to disperse mobs and impose “order” in the face of armed Black resistance. Importantly, this mode of “order” means that courts (and their racist rule of law) step in to achieve what Klan terror could not.

This is Williams’s diagnosis. His Black “Guard” puts into action a psycho-social judgment, a point that’s still lost on readers (and, of course, non-readers) of Negroes with Guns. Yet its insistent, persistent pathologization of white rule is relentless indeed. Williams maps complicity between local, state and federal support for Lynch Law. He methodically connects KKK, Minute Men, and White Citizens Councils, across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, with Monroe’s police chief; state highway patrolmen, Charlotte’s local FBI; Court Solicitor or District Attorney; Northern and Southern Governors; U.S. Department of Justice; President (Eisenhower); and even, after his ultimate escape, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Canada would be no safer than the United States” (64), writes the self-described “fugitive from injustice” (Williams 1970, 9). Williams would have to flee westward, back into U.S. territory and down through Mexico in order to get to Cuba. It is therefore white society as a whole that suffers from “the racist’s mad ideal of white-supremacy” (Williams 1962, 54). Racism is classified as “mass psychosis.” It is not “illogical,” however “comic” and “pathetic” it may be, so much as “logical” according to “a thoroughly diseased mind,” a mind “crazed by hysteria.” Having diagnosed this “mass mental illness,” Williams maintains: “Somehow a way will be found so that these insane people will be made whole and well again” (73). Someday will be after Black liberation. For Williams, prefiguring Bobby Wright’s The Psychopathic Racial Personality (1984), sees “shock treatment” in the form of Black militancy as a big part of the cure (Williams 1962 81).

This “same old racist lunacy” is catalogued in Black Crusader (Cohen, 74), which was to be an “autobiography” till Williams withdrew from the project. It is always catalogued with the sexual violence of race and caste in a society where “[t]he color line in copulation is strictly one way” (115). It’s quite telling that Williams’ first national speaking tour centers around “The Kissing Case” chronicled in detail by Negroes with Guns. The case is a famous one in which a young white girl kisses a young Black boy and two Black boys (ages 7 and 9 years young) are charged with “sexual molestation.” Their mothers, not long after Emmett Till’s more famous case, receive multiple lynch threats themselves. The state Welfare Board later defined them as “unfit” because “divorced” and “unemployed.” Their sons were sent to a reformatory and held incommunicado for 5 full months. The original sentence, although there was no real trial, was for 14 years. Black Monroe would also protest the arrest of Dr. Albert Perry, Vice President of Union County’s militant NAACP. He was imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of “criminal abortion,” after Klan violence failed to terrorize, despite his personal Catholic objections to the practice. Radio Free Dixie notes that white media always phrased this charge as “criminal abortion on a white woman” (Tyson, 101); and that the apparently fictional woman was actually named as “Lily Mae Rape” (90). For Williams, armed self-defense was made necessary by sex’s insanely violent “color line” if nothing else.

Its one-way obsession remains obscure in conventional rhetorics of “segregation” and “integration.” “Comparative race relations” frameworks often contrast societies said to be characterized by “segregation” (read: “USA”), on the one hand, with those said to be characterized by “miscegenation” (read: Brazil, to the total or relative exclusion of Dominican Republic, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador…) on the other. They simply forget about North American slavery, it seems. They fail furthermore to see how Jim Crow or “segregated” societies show no strict segregation of sex at all. Instead, segregation should be recognized as a misnomer, a euphemism which hides sexual violence in racist caste. U.S. “civil rights” frameworks, domestic and domesticated by definition, are no more likely to confront this order than competitive “race relations.” As competitive is what they turn out to be, in truth. They basically compare notes on questions such as: “How much did we fuck them?” “Who fucked them more?” “Should we have fucked them or not, whether or not we admit it in the light of day, past or present tense?”

Violent white male access to Black female bodies was not barred by so-called “segregation.” It is virtually secured by it. What chattel slavery starts, “neo-slavery” continues. Cohen quotes Williams on this subject in Black Crusader: “If every White woman refused to have intercourse with White man who had ever slept with a Black woman, there would be few, if any, White babies born in the South” (Cohen, 116). Similarly, Timothy B. Tyson quotes James Baldwin on “social equality” in Radio Free Dixie : “You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter,” said Baldwin to one Southern white man: “You’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter since the days of slavery” (Tyson, 98). Tyson also quotes W.E.B. Dubois. But it’s Ida B. Wells who gets the job done. The original Crusader, Cyril Briggs and his African Blood Brotherhood aside, Wells testifies: “All my life had know that such conditions were accepted as a matter of course. I found that the rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without let or hindrance, check or reproof from church, state or press until there had been created this race within a race—and all designated by the inclusive term of ‘colored’” (Wells 1970, 70). How in the world “miscegenation” is opposed to “segregation” in North America then?

Predictably, Union County’s “rogue” NAACP could get no support from its national headquarters for “The Kissing Case.” It was dubbed a “sex case” that could not be touched, two pre-teen lives notwithstanding. “Executive Secretary” Roy Wilkins, or “Uncle Roy” as Malcolm dubs him in February 1965 (X 1992, 97), would never confront a certain white male privilege. Black Monroe would. The class formation of its local chapter was radically different from our Brown Elite norm. These normal “social leaders” had been bullied out of office by Klan economics when an out-of-work Williams took over to keep the group going. His recruits were working-class folk who were far more likely to confront Southern sex rules. It was the flip side of that one-way “color line” in sex which would prove fateful in this guerilla history of Negroes with Guns.

“The Kissing Case” was followed by significant court action in Monroe. On a single day, three rulings reinforced the meaning of Judge Lynch for all. Brutus Shaw, a white railway engineer, had kicked Georgia White down a flight of stairs for making too much noise as the mother of five cleaned the hallway in a local hotel. He was acquitted. A white woman claimed a mentally challenged Black had frightened her with a look. He was sentenced to 6 months on a chain gang. Another white man had attacked and attempted to rape a pregnant Black woman, Mary Ruth Reed, after breaking into her home. He chased her onto the highway and was only stopped when her young child hit him over the head with a tree limb. He was acquitted as well. The one way “color line” of psycho sexual violence is crystal clear in Jim Crow, de jure or de facto.

Negroes with Guns casts this last acquittal of a white would-be rapist as the last straw in Monroe’s experiment with “non-violent” reform. Each of these cases hearing Black women assaulted by white men would end up trying Black women themselves. A defense lawyer points to white man and wife and argues: “This woman, this white woman is the pure flower oflife. She is one of God’s lovely creatures. And do you think this man would have left for that?” (Williams 1962, 25). He refers to that same “white womanhood” that white men use for “insulation,” in Williams’s words (1962, 48), when they go on Klan raids. White women ride shotgun for a reason. This way, if a fight breaks out or Black folks retaliate, white men can say they were protectors of “pure flowers” and not purveyors of racist terror. Wells calledthis “insulation” white men hiding behind the skirt tails of white women. Williams, when that last rapist was acquitted after “The Kissing Case,” was immediately accosted and shamed by a mass of Black women who saw the ruling as a declaration of war, a war upon them and their bodies, and they spoke in the language of violence. As a result, outside the court, Williams made his famous “meet violence with violence, lynching with lynching” speech which got him expelled by “Uncle Roy.” Black self-defense cannot be separated from sex; and the sexual warfare of “white-supremacy” is central to guerilla struggle.

Williams will move from armed self-defense to aggressive guerilla warfare in a way that shifts his focus from lynching bees and ritualized rape, for the most part anyway, to white nationalist sadism at large. Negroes with Guns treated racism as a “disease,” a disease which warps the “mind and personality” of a now “mentally ill” population (80). It went further and de-mystified U.S. myths of “democracy” as domestic delusions (85). This line of thought continues in Listen, Brother!, a booklet put together from a radio program Williams would direct to Black troops in Vietnam after his Cuban exile was complete. When Williams was ready to leave Havana, citing chronic racism among “Bourgeois Communists,” and insisting he was “Neither a Capitalist Nor a Socialist Uncle Tom” (Cohen, Chapter 13) it is said Castro would not allow it. Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie contends Listen, Brother! was an idea hatched to get Williams out of Cuba and into China for his exile’s second phase (Tyson, 294). In any case, Williams visits North Vietnam en route to Peking and champions defection as the correct course of action for Black soldiers in the South. He wisely appeals to their intimate knowledge of that other South, and U.S./North America as a whole.

Listen Brother!'s publication includes an interesting visual text that punctuates Williams’s message. The pictures are of white brutalization and Black political protest, beginning with a cover photo called “The Movement.” A stern Black woman faces the camera with Black men in the background at the funeral for “Carole, Cynthia, Addie May and Denise,” Birmingham’s “Four Little Girls,” church-bombed of course. The written text is ripe with sounds of “soul,” a revolutionary soul. If Negroes with Guns was sexually generic in its structure of address for the most part, and maybe surprisingly so, addressing Black males and females as a people, Listen Brother! is remarkably self-conscious in its rhetorical targeting of Black men, Black military men in particular.

Williams shares his voice with these troops, as an ex-Marine himself, arguing the insanity of Black men fighting in the service of white world power. With constant recourse to Lynch Law, not to mention police brutality, Listen, Brother! upholds “the white man’s affinity for terrorizing, maiming and butchering colored people.” Colored people is the term here, not Negro or Black, since solidarity is consistently implied as a righteous ideal. Napalm is the device of “sadistic butchers”; and Brother, Williams states: “you are now a member of the big mob of savage Klansmen who maim and kill in the name of Christian democracy” (Williams 1968, 9). “Democracy” is unmasked as white men’s desire to “make Vietnam the Mississippi of Asia” (21), while “Spooks” get caught up in the rapture of their torture: “that big burly smiling hypocrite of a cracker…just can’t wait to get you back home to cut your balls out and to put old ‘Shine’ back in his place” (17). This “mad dog Chuck,” like “sadistic thug cops” and “trigger-happy [national] guardsmen (25), bombs and tortures “for the sheer thrill of it” (17). Chuck isn’t just psychologically sick either. He’s psychologically crafty to boot. Williams shows how “Mr. Charlie” renames everybody involved in a sick game of projection and perversion: “We have long called him ‘Charlie’ and ‘Mr. Charlie.’ The name carries bad connotations, so what does he do? He starts a campaign to call the Viet Cong Charlie and try to shift your hatred for Whitey Charlie onto the colored freedom fighting Vietnamese” (20). So Williams notes how Black soldiers displace the hatred and anger generated by oppression onto their colored brethren while their white oppressor lays back and watches with joy. Listen Brother!’s polemic against sadistic white insanity closes by reversing conventional rhetorics of madness. We’re told that Whitey says all “non-Tom niggers” are crazy. But Williams says Black men must be “crazy” and a “threat” to themselves if we think we have “any democracy to lose, let alone defend” (30). He says “a scobe’s really got to be a little touched in his head to fight like a loyal dog against his own interest, to fight for everybody’s freedom but his own.” “Brothers, what kind of fool are we?,” asks Williams (38). “I love you madly” is his parting shot (39).

Importantly, Listen, Brother! is connected in strategy to “Radio Free Dixie,” not Tyson’s recent book but Williams’s radio broadcast which was beamed South from Cuba though it reached West and North East coasts of U.S. colonial terrain. The goal is revolutionary uprising. Williams aimed to create “a new psychological concept of propaganda,” or “counter-propaganda” if you like, one that deploys Black cultural traditions like Jazz and Sanctified Church to mesh politics and feeling; to produce programmatic action for Black liberation (Tyson, 287). This affective attention to revolutionary violence (à la Fanon) was visible in Negroes with Guns (Williams 1962, 77). It’s there in The Black Scholar interview, too (Williams 1970, 14). The psycho-political use of music, soulful music moreover, was palpable throughout Listen, Brother!, when Williams tried to subvert white police action from within in Southeast Asia. Yet his “socio-diagnostic” is overlooked, especially in academia’s anti-canonization of early Fanon.

Before Vietnam, Williams wrote “USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution.” He wrote and re-wrote it as a matter of fact, in the pages of The Crusader which Lyndon B. Johnson wanted desperately to ban. August Meier, Elliot Rudwick and Francis L. Broderick reprint it, and rename it, in Black Protest Thought in the 20th Century (1965). There it was dubbed “Effective Self-Defense” in an obvious erasure of its most urgent topic, aggressive guerilla warfare. It is this brand of communiqué on which one could base a novel or film like The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Our ex-Marine wants to mobilize all his U.S. military training against that same colonial-imperial colossus, on colonized “home” ground. There are even recipes for a “poor man’s arsenal” at the end. Warfare remains psychological, whether the war is declared or undeclared. The projections of white national sadism in the international arena are met head on. Williams brilliantly dismantles the myth that revolutionary activity by Black folk in “The Belly of the Beast” is simply “suicidal.” His main point may be: “Our oppressor’s greatest weapon of repression is his psychological apparatus by which he impregnates our people with a defeatist complex “ (Williams 1965, 366). Williams asks, rhetorically: Since when has this oppressor cared whether or not we live or die? Why the sudden concern for Black “mental” health? “Is not a black American just as dead when killed in an international war of conquest as in a national struggle for liberation?” (363).

This question was spat back to “rabid…white power” and its “mercenary running dogs.” See Vernon Jordan. See Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Former Black Panther Elaine Brown names these “New Age House Negroes and Negresses” in The Condemnation of Little B (2002), her phenomenal follow-up to A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992). The pathologization of what Huey P. Newton would term “revolutionary suicide” (Newton 1973) turns out to be just another projection that shifts the site of “sanity” in “USA.” Williams writes again on “race psychosis” and a nation “mentally poisoned by racism” (Williams 1965, 367). He goes on to expose how “America” is “psychologically ill-prepared” for “massive violence” or a “sudden disruption of the essential agencies” of “affluent society” (367): “September 11th,” 2001 in Christian time. This “soft society” (“highly susceptible to panic”) is seen to have “race” as its “Achilles Heel,” its “Maginot Line” (363). “Spook” strikes again with “Socio-Diagnostic” in tow.