Negroes with Guns Quotes

“The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home, and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system - the violence is already there, and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists.”
― Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns

“The abolitionists set it up, the defeat of the Confederacy made it imperative. It was freely admitted that it “confers on Congress the power to invade any state to enforce the freedom of the African in war or peace.”
― Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns

“a land where living is so hard that men want a God so they can hate him.”
― Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns

“The miraculously transforming words of John Brown in his Speech to the Court were based on it. “Had I interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been alright. Every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”
― Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns

“It’s going to be a long row to hoe to bring the white South to any sense of shame, or to make them wake up to the brute fact that the golden age they hark back to and are fighting tooth and nail to perpetuate was a slave-holding, slave-breeding, slave-driving, slave-hunting hell on earth. The crime of the white South is centered in their racist unity of loyalty which blinds them to the real state of their society and its discontents”
― Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns

“violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence.”
― Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns