Forgetting Robert F. Williams: Critical Race Theory’s Long Game
“…how we understand violence, its use, and its place in United States history depends on what sort of violence is being described and who is describing it.” -This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed
In July of 2020 I found myself sheltering from the humidity of a North Carolina summer in the local history room of the Monroe Public Library. I was there to research records of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Robert F. Williams. Just a few months earlier, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I had come across Williams’ name. I learned that Mr. Williams was a little-known civil rights leader whose life and work were integral to Monroe, a small town just forty-five minutes from the larger metropolis of Charlotte. Though I grew up here and visited this same library every Saturday since early childhood, I had never heard Williams’ name.
When I came across “Monroe” in Martin Luther King, Jr’s essay The Social Organization of Nonviolence published in Liberation Magazine, I thought to myself- surely, that cannot be my small hometown in the Piedmont of North Carolina. My hometown had never produced anyone famous, with perhaps the exception of Senator Jesse Helms. It must be another Monroe. A quick Google search told me that, indeed, this was my Monroe, and that this civil rights giant — friends with Fidel Castro and James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Mao Zedong, Ella Baker and W.E.B. DuBois and Amiri Baraka and James Forman- was born, raised, and nearly died in these streets where I learned to drive.
I had no illusions about the place I was raised. I knew that I grew up in a socially conservative community with white supremacist undertones. In 2016, 63% of Union County voted for Donald Trump, and in 2020 that number had dipped only slightly to 61%. Still, it was hard for me to understand how I had never heard of such a major civil rights leader, someone who had been pivotal to an entire liberation movement.
The librarian soon arrived with the materials I had asked for. I already knew that the area was a hive of KKK movement. Infamous Grand Wizard Catfish Cole set up shop one county over in Cabarrus, and though Union County had only 11,000 residents in 1961, Klan rallies could reach sizes of an estimated 7,500. Given this, I expected some robust material. Instead I was handed a slim manila folder with only a handful of records, so thin that the entire folder didn’t need so much as a rubber band to keep it closed.
“This all?” I asked the attendant, perplexed.
“That’s all we got,” she said. “There’s a drawer back there on Rob Williams, but let me see what I can find for you. Pretty sure that’s it, though.” And by the finality in her voice, I knew it was.
It was this cue — this tiny folder of documented KKK activity, a lack of documentation that quite literally erased decades of abuse to the local Black population in Monroe– that told me I was investigating information that was not convenient for me to know. My journey into learning about this man, his life, and his exile brought me closer to my home than anything else. It also thrust me into the middle of the debate on critical race theory in public schools. Just as some school districts are proposing that teachers submit lessons by June to allow parents to review them prior to the following school year, critical stories of resistance are being intentionally erased. The purpose of history itself is at stake: when we peel back the layers of history-they-teach-us to reveal history-as-it-is, we become intimately familiar with our systems, their functions, who they benefit, and who they oppress.
Robert Williams: The Story
“Monroe- For five years this city has been making headlines about racial strife. Nearly every racial incident reported here can be traced to a single source. That source is Robert F. Williams.” -The Charlotte News (Charlotte, North Carolina), 28 August 1961
Driving through historical Monroe is like driving through the pages of a book crumbling on the shelf at the local Goodwill. Frayed at its edges, it smells of forgotten memories and histories past. It is hard to imagine that these streets, with their enduring Confederate obelisk, peeling public courthouse, and aged municipal office building, were the home of Robert F. Williams, one of the most important figures of the Civil Rights Movement.
Who was Robert F. Williams? Who was this man who was chased out of the country, but whom Rosa Parks eulogized? Who was this citizen who desegregated the Monroe Public Library, but militarized his community? Who was this leader who was ranked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, but who has been all but forgotten while the memories of the others endure?
Robert F. Williams was born on February 26, 1925, to Emma Williams, a caretaker, and John Williams, a railroad boiler washer at the train station in downtown Monroe. While Williams was born free, as a young Black boy in the Deep South, he was no stranger to racism and to resistance. His grandmother was a former slave while his grandfather campaigned for the Republican party in the Reconstruction era and published a newspaper called The People’s Voice. Williams, who catalogued his worldview and experiences in Negroes with Guns, records early memories of overt racism. One memory occurs at age 11, when Williams watched police officer Jesse Helms Sr. beat a black woman publicly and drag her bleeding body down the street to the police station (Helms Sr.’s son, Jesse Helms, would go on to become a US Senator).
Eventually Williams joined the military, serving in World War II before returning to Monroe in 1945. He joined the town’s nearly nonexistent NAACP, reviving it over the years and taking formal helm in 1956 — less than a year after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery. Unlike most NAACP chapters in the country at the time, Williams’ chapter consisted of working-class men and women- farmers, factory workers, and domestics. In addition to the NAACP chapter, Williams also filed for an NRA chapter. Knowing that a Black man would never be given authorization for an NRA group, Williams did not disclose his race when filing the application. The application was approved, and the Black Armed Guard was born. Consisting of 50–60 Black men, the Black Armed Guard was organized by Williams, who worked with the community to train in arms and be ready to defend themselves when necessary.
In 1958, Monroe was home to The Kissing Case, where two Black boys ages 7 and 9 were jailed on charges of rape after pecking their white playmate on the cheek. Beaten, threatened with lynching, and prohibited from seeing their parents for six days, it took an international media firestorm and incredible efforts by Williams to mitigate the charges and release the boys months later from the correctional institution in which they had been held.
It is this advocacy for his community and self-defense, as well as his commitment to producing written content for the Civil Rights Movement via his paper The Crusader, that put Williams on the map of the movement leaders. Williams lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of violence advocated, or not advocated, by civil rights leaders of the time — he is nestled somewhere between MLK Jr.’s well-known practice of pacificism and Malcolm X’s more militant views. Robert Heath, a retired citizen of Monroe who worked with Williams as a teenager, joked to me in an interview that there are three differences in the civil rights leaders: “Martin Luther King, Jr would say nonviolence; Rob Williams would say, ‘if he hit you or spit you, you hit or spit him back,’ and then Malcolm X would say, ‘if you think he’s gonna hit you, hit him [first].’”
After the war, Williams spent his years in Monroe as a staunch advocate and activist for integration. He is directly responsible for the integration of the Monroe Public Library, where he often went to research, read, and write- the same one in which I sat in summer of 2020. Williams led the attempted integration of the public pool, an initiative he began after multiple children in the Black community drowned in the local creeks. The frequent counterdemonstrations included crowds of white men who shot at Williams and his group. Rather than integrate the pool — which Williams argued was legally required since the pool was paid for by public funds — the town solved the issue by filling in the pool in with concrete. Demonstrations like this brought in thousands of onlookers from the town and surrounding areas, providing an atmosphere thick with threats of violence.
“Since the city officials wouldn’t stop the Klan, we decided to stop the Klan ourselves. We started this action out of the need for defense, because law and order had completely vanished — because there was no such thing as a Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in Monroe, North Carolina.” -The Swimming Pool Showdown, Robert Williams, 1957
All the while, Williams’ leadership of the Black Armed Guard constituted one of a small handful of civil rights groups in the country advocating self-defense. The theory was not unproven. In 1959, the Klan threatened the Monroe NAACP chapter, including its Vice President, a wealthy Black doctor named Albert Perry. Williams and his team set up sandbags and brought their guns. When the Klan began to fire, they shot right back. After that, the Klan was reticent to engage with the same tactics as other places in the South. Though Dr. Perry was arrested on false charges shortly after and was in jail until 1961, the dynamics of the Klan’s interactions with the Black population changed once they knew there was a credible threat to their own lives.
Williams found many adherents to his cause. Following the Kissing Case, he became a regular figure on the civil rights stage, spending a good portion of time in Harlem cultivating his network. His friends included a distinguished rolodex of cultural figures: Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, W.E.B. DuBois, Fidel Castro (whom he befriended prior to his exile in Cuba), Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. Malcolm X, in fact, was responsible for raising funds to purchase arms and send weaponry to Monroe.
Not everyone agreed with Williams’ methods, though his community benefited from them. In 1959, a white man was acquitted by a Monroe jury for the attempted rape of a Black woman. In response, Williams publicly proclaimed: “It is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.” After this proclamation, the NAACP voted to remove Williams as President of the Union County NAACP chapter.
Martin Luther King Jr. took issue with Williams’ methods in Liberation magazine’s October 1959 issue, citing that “Mr. Robert Williams would have us believe that there is no effective and practical alternative [to nonviolence]. He argues that we must be cringing and submissive or take up arms. To so place the issue distorts the whole problem”. While it is common acknowledgement that MLK Jr. was a threat to the US system of white supremacy, it’s important to note that at the time, MLK Jr. was considered a safer option in comparison to figures like Williams, who had an FBI file from the time he was 16 and who was unable to get work for decades due to direct FBI intervention.
August 1961
Williams’ work and legacy culminated in the events of August 1961, which resulted in his exile from the United States on trumped-up charges of kidnapping and schizophrenia. This exile began his career as an international activist and expatriate. He spent much of the next decade splitting his time between Cuba, where he was good friends with Fidel Castro, and China, where he was personally feted by Mao Zedong.
In August of 1961, a group of Freedom Riders making their way through the South arrived in Monroe for a demonstration. Though the Freedom Riders practiced nonviolence and Williams advocated self-defense, he opened his home and publicly worked with the Monroe Nonviolent Action Committee (MNAC) for the demonstration. The MNAC planned a week of picketing, adhering to the strict guidelines of the Monroe City Council. Recent changes to the regulations dictated everything from the distance apart protesters could stand to the width and height of their pickets. A variety of demonstrators were in attendance, including a young Englishwoman named Constance Lever from the London School of Economics. Though tensions were high all week, things came to a head on the last day of the picketing.
According to reports, about 5000 residents counterprotested the picketers. It was hot, and there were rumors of KKK plans to make a serious move that day. It was also Sunday, what James Forman accurately calls “a holiday down South.” Around 5pm, the crowd became large and rowdy. The picketers tried to return home across the Grand Girder Bridge as scuffles broke out. Forman, the group’s designated leader and one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was smashed in the face with the butt of a rifle as he moved to get into the car with the white Ms. Lever. This act of violence precipitated an all-out mob where the police arrested over 50 Freedom Riders and black participants on charges of inciting to riot, though the instigation had primarily occurred from white onlookers.
That night, across the train tracks in Newtown, the Black community, residents feared for their lives with little information but rumors of mobs and the distant sounds of conflict. After dark was usually the time for Klan members to shed their ties and don their masks, and there was no shortage of hatred in Monroe that day. As the sun set, barricades were set up by Williams and the police separately in an attempt to stop KKK cars from entering Newtown. Williams had no illusions about the kindliness of the police, indicating that the only reason the police were protecting the community was because they knew a lot of lives would be lost if they did not — and those lives might include their own.
Despite the preventative measures, a car rolled through Newtown. According to multiple accounts, it was the same car that had earlier paraded a banner emblazoned with the words, “It’s ‘Coon Season.” The two occupants, Charles Bruce Stegall and Mabel Stegall, were surrounded by Williams’ enraged and frightened community. Williams knew that if left to their own devices, the Stegalls might not get out alive. According to records, Williams instructed the couple to come into his home where they would be safe.
During his interview, Mr. Heath told me how two of his classmates had helped Williams that night: “…they were the ones that took them out the car and brought them up to Rob’s house. In fact, when his father heard he did that, right away he took him and got him out of town.”
The KKK never ended up coming into Newtown that night, largely because they knew that Williams and his group were prepared to fight violence with violence. The KKK was out in wider Union County though, and some records say there were mobs at the courthouse and cross burnings until at least midnight.
However, the Stegalls, who were only in the Williams’ home for a couple of hours, testified that Williams had kidnapped them. By that time, he and his family had escaped, having been informed by Police Chief A. A. Mauney that Williams could expect to be strung up in the Courthouse lawn the next morning for the “race problems” he brought to the town. Williams used his network of contacts to find cover in New York and then Canada, until he eventually made his way to Cuba by pretending to be the husband of Che Guevara’s wife as he boarded a flight to Havana.
The others were left to their own devices. Constance Lever, the visiting white Englishwoman, was arrested for inciting “racial dissension”, and it took acts of embassy to gain her release and return to England. Mae Mallory, a founder of the Harlem Nine and a Black Power movement leader, was put in jail for an extended sentence for her complicity in the “kidnapping” of the Stegalls. Forman, whose near-death experience in Monroe defined his activist role for decades, worked to get all jailed activists out on bail.
Williams and his family would not return to the United States for a long time, and when they did, they settled in Michigan to a relatively quiet life. Though Williams returned to Monroe in the summers and is buried there today, his decade in exile meant an estrangement of sorts from the Civil Rights movement and an intentional erasure of his work from the town for which he fought so hard. As his son John Chalmers Williams put it: “The black leaders our youth know most about — Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers — died young. The message is like, if you choose to follow these people’s path, this is what happens to you in America. My dad chose to live.” In 1996, Williams was laid to rest in Hillcrest Cemetery, at a funeral in downtown Monroe that saw speakers including Rosa Parks, his biographer Dr. Timothy B. Tyson, and an official statement from the Chinese embassy honoring his time spent in China. To this day, there is no memorial for Williams in Monroe, North Carolina. His story resides in the memories of the handful of people who carry his legacy forward.
Where it started: Wadesboro, NC and the Confederate Monument
I began exploring Robert Williams and his life in the summer of 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd and amidst the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was born and raised in Monroe, NC; but just down the way, about 25 miles from Monroe and about 10 miles from Marshville (where the Stegalls of Williams’ story lived), is a town named Wadesboro. Wadesboro, much like Monroe, is a withering town, a community with more history behind it than ahead of it. In the middle of July 2020, Anson County’s Board of Commissioners and its small community were embroiled in a familiar debate: should the Confederate statue in front of the public courthouse be removed, or should it stay?
The statue itself is a Confederate soldier, made of a dark stone and paid for the by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Erected on January 19, 1906, the statue stood in front of the Courthouse until its removal to a private property in July 2020. As the seat of judiciary in Anson County, this courthouse is where every Anson County citizen, regardless of race, has to go for everything from a speeding ticket to voter registration to criminal court.
On that day in July 2020, just a few days after July 4 and brimming with tensions amidst a Trump Presidency during a week of high patriotism, the atmosphere was palpable. Because of COVID, we were not allowed inside the courthouse rooms, but the meeting was still being livestreamed on YouTube and speakers could sign up. Standing outside, groups automatically segregated themselves — white people, mostly elderly, on the left, and Black people, of all ages, on the right. Because my grandparents owned a restaurant for years that served everyone, I had an in on both sides, allowing me to ask questions as people waited for the discussion and verdict. Everyone knew my Mawmaw and Pawpaw, and so almost everyone was willing to talk to me.
For the white group, the answers were astounding. There was genuine anger in their eyes as they talked about their history being removed, about being blamed for slavery when they of course did not believe in it but simply wanted to preserve their heritage- didn’t I see? The sparks flew from their gaze, and it was easy to envision that energy being channeled into much more violent means of coercion, both now and in the past. One woman told me she had been taught to never see color, so there was no point in arguing about race. Another woman told me gravely that the statue was of black stone, and its skin was dark, so how could it be about race, if the statue was the same color as the people saying it was racist? One man told me he was there to preserve his heritage. The last man I spoke with told me the War of Northern Aggression was being taken from our history books, and if you listened to the wrong lessons from people you trusted for too long, of course you wouldn’t see the truth. I asked him if he thought that observation could be flipped- did he think perhaps he had been listening to the wrong narratives? He insisted that no, he could not have been, and that’s why the statue must remain — to preserve the true story of the South.
The stories from the camp that wanted the statue removed were less theoretical. I was told more than once by a Black person that it was hard to expect justice when you were forced to pass a Confederate statue on the way into the Courthouse. They didn’t expect justice on most days, they said– but any remaining hope was snuffed when they had to pass a symbol of their oppression before even walking past the Reception center. When I first began to ask questions, I was asked, “What side are you on?” And I had to insist that I was on theirs, though as a white woman I was in the minority for those wishing for removal. Once I indicated I was in favor of removing the statue, the relief in their eyes was visible. The relief was not just about having someone to agree with– it was clearly an indication of safety. The testimonies at the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, were along similar veins. After debating, the Council decided the statue would be removed effective immediately and placed on a private property where it is visible from the highway, but off of public land.
Though monuments like Lee’s in Richmond, Virginia, received more nationwide attention, the debates that happen in small communities are just as important, if not more so. To understand why, we can look to the work of Dr. Karen L. Cox at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Cox’s groundbreaking work focuses on the role of confederate monuments in Southern memory.
As part of her work, Cox explores how the Daughters of the Confederacy were largely responsible for the marketing of white nationalism and its endurance beyond the years immediately following the Civil War, with the largest impact being the ways in which they embedded their five strategic objectives — as “memorial, historical, educational, benevolent, and patriotic responsibilities”- into the daily fabric of their often-small communities. These women visited places like Richmond, but white supremacy and Confederate memory were solidified more intentionally through those objectives when they arrived home: at the church cookouts over bowls of potato salad, at the kitchen table shelling peas, and at the county parades over peach ice cream and blackberry cobbler. These moments were, and are, what continue to invisibly but finely age the casual supremacist mindset.
The success of the UDC’s campaign to memorialize the Confederate cause “two, three generations beyond” was evident in the City Council room the evening of Wadesboro’s debate to keep or remove the statue. Mr. Rod Davis, an elderly white male, directly cited a March 2000 copy of Our State Magazine, which boasted a multi-part special entitled: The Civil War: Why We Still Care- 135 years post-Civil-War. This magazine was exploring why the Civil War still mattered in the new millennium; two decades after publication, it is still being cited as source material to justify Confederate memorials. Michele Martin, a middle-age white woman, testified to the Committee: “How can anyone attempt to erase these Americans heroes from our history? We’re not even worthy of their sacrifice. They weren’t perfect, but they fought against oppression. I am willing to forgive their transgressions, but I will never forget the sacrifices they made for all of us. You can tear down the statue, churches, graves, the whole town, but these American heroes will always remain in our heart.”
Standing nearly twenty feet tall, the statue has a message inscribed on the front: “These men embraced the principles of their leaders. They believed our social institutions and our right of local self-government imperiled by the avowed hostility of a large section of the Union. They resisted with every device of honorable warfare. The glory and grief of battle won and lost soldiered them.”
The verb “soldiered” here is important: the Daughters of the Confederacy, and the community that funded the message, are endorsing the weaponization of a loss to continue actively pushing through glory and grief for a specific outcome. Dallas Ratliff, an elderly white male, embodied this “soldierization” that night when he testified: “Everything is offensive to somebody now… if you take it down, it’s gonna be…more blood, so, well, I’m hoping y’all have some wisdom that y’all leave it, and let the thin-skinned people live with it too.” Evocations of violence like “more blood” emphasize the active role many white conservative southerners feel they still play in their communities to preserve the memory of white supremacy.
At the meeting, many who were against removal claimed the statue was not racist, and the Confederate War was not fought over racism- but these claims are demonstrably untrue. Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, explained Georgia’s secession in his famous “Cornerstone Speech” by stating that those who believed slavery was wrong and would fade away were incorrect. He went on to say that: “Those ideas were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error…Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
This statement garnered applause at the time. It was the idea upon which the Confederate War was fought, and it was the Confederate War, based on this cornerstone of white supremacy, that the Daughters of the Confederacy were memorializing “two, three generations beyond” when they funded and inaugurated the statue in front of Wadesboro’s courthouse, and hundreds more across the South, including Monroe where Robert Williams fought and nearly died. It is this idea that emanates from stone obelisks everywhere asking white supremacists to be soldiers for glory in a message that Black citizens see first before they even open the doors to the place where justice is promised.
The Debate Over Critical Race Theory
These two stories: the intentional erasure of Robert F Williams from the history of Monroe, and the battle 60 years later in the same place over a confederate monument, bring us to the current debate over “critical race theory” and curriculums in classrooms. As a public school student in Monroe, I can attest that we were not always taught the true history of our state: in all of my time in Monroe, all of my education, all of my experiences, I never once heard of Robert F. Williams- neither had my parents, who were born in Monroe and Marshville only six years after Williams’ exile. Throughout the research for this piece, this fact astounded me at every turn.
I did not learn about the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 until after I graduated from a UNC-system public university and moved away. In high school, we visited Colonial Williamsburg and stopped to pay homage to Stonewall Jackson at his grave in Lexington, VA, without really exploring his true history as a Confederate war hero. North Carolina students regularly visit former plantations for field trips.
In 2021, the North Carolina House of Representatives passed HB324. Though vetoed, this bill aimed to prevent the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) or “any other discriminatory curriculum” in North Carolina schools. North Carolina is not the only state mired in a fight over who will determine history, who can teach it, and how it should be told. Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have fully passed legislation, and similar bills have been proposed in other states. Rob DeSantis, governor of Florida, is one of the latest to enter the fray, revealing last December the “WOKE” Act. Standing for “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act,” it proposes a ban of “critical race theory” (CRT) in K-12 schools. Going a step further, the WOKE Act would prohibit all school districts and institutions of higher learning from hiring CRT consultants.
Created in the late 1970s by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a legal framework positing that racism is embedded in formal institutions and policies. Like any academic framework, it is intended as a context for critical thinking and research. CRT serves as a lens through which to explore a problem, a perspective that might offer new insights to shape a more informed conclusion.
CRT’s primary argument is that because racism is embedded in everyday life in ways that are structural, even people who are not overtly racist can make decisions with racist outcomes. In other words, even if someone makes a decision that does not have disparate treatment — i.e., it treats everyone equally — the outcome may still be disparate based on structural differences in policymaking and execution. Ultimately, some groups of people experience institutional privileges while others experience institutional prejudices.
The claims that CRT is the basis of diversity and inclusion initiatives; that it is a simple divisor into “oppressed” and “oppressor”; and that it is a definition of identity and the cornerstone of social justice, are incorrect. Though with a critical lens it can be argued as adjacent to those things, it is not the definition or the wellspring of them. But “critical race theory” is easier to cite than a compilation of academic abstracts, and the conservative wing has taken that ease and marketed it brilliantly as The Thing That Must Be Fought Against. The Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think-tank, issued a report in 2020 concluding that CRT was responsible for Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, and diversity trainings everywhere.
The North Carolina House Bill 324’s full title, “An Act To Demonstrate The General Assembly’s Intent That Students, Teachers, Administrators, And Other School Employees Recognize The Equality And Rights Of All Persons And To Prohibit School Units From Promoting Certain Concepts That Are Contrary To That Intent” is illustrative of the way the conservative right employs the theory of CRT as a tool against education inconvenient to its aims. The (admittedly much shorter) title of DeSantis’ Act is in the same vein.
The titles of these bills and their requirements indicate a belief held by many that by focusing on a history of oppression, all people descending from oppressors are bad. In short, there is a prevailing belief that white people are being blamed for things they did not directly do. This is not unique to the North Carolina bill. The same Heritage Foundation Report cited that, “CRT underpins identity politics, which reimagines the U.S. as a nation riven by groups, each with specific claims on victimization” and likens CRT to an “effort[s] to subvert society.” They cite Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ groundbreaking work on culturally relevant teaching as problematic and anti-white — a demonstrably untrue claim. But it resonates, and it has taken hold. In fact, CRT does not say that all white people are bad. But the conservative right has marketed this idea into a narrative that CRT discriminates against white people.
Bridging the two and correcting the misconceptions has become almost impossible. The liberal left, more often than not high on horses of education and theory, isolate their position more than they share it. The conservative right refuses to acknowledge their role in the structurally oppressive world that exists today.
I do not think that it is possible or effective to fight a hatred of theory with an arsenal of even more theory. But I do believe in the power of storytelling- and no story is more powerful than that of Robert F. Williams. The truth of history, how we have hidden it and how we must unveil and carry it, is embedded in the story of Monroe, North Carolina, where I was born and raised but about which, it turns out, I knew very little. The lesson here is that this omission was by design.
Structural Oppression Creates Long-Lasting Impact
What we are really fighting is a resistance to revisit history critically. What students need to know — and what they need to be able to think critically about — are the ways in which oppression and history carry into daily relevance hundreds of years later. We can look to the above stories as examples of the long-lasting impact of how history and narrative are controlled to benefit white supremacy and the landed elite.
For example, at the August 15, 1961 Monroe City Council Meeting, among decisions about parking, gas and water pumps, and street pavements, the Council instituted a new ordinance for picketing that made it almost impossible to picket legally. The ordinance required picketers to use sidewalks only; have a maximum of ten pickets in one block of the city portraying the same message at the same time; the picket signs must be 2 feet x 2 feet; picketers must march in single file and not be closer than 15 feet to the picketer ahead or behind them; any clarifications to this law were to be made by the police; and any picketing in contradiction to the ordinance was illegal, to be monitored by the police.
At the time, Monroe’s population was scarcely 11,000 people; but Klan rallies into the 50s exceeded 15,000 attendees, some coming over the border from South Carolina. As late as the 1960s, the Klan was taking out advertisements in The Charlotte Observer and other local publications, with rallies reporting thousands of attendees each time. Robert Heath, the Union County colleague of Robert Williams I interviewed, had an astute observation about what happened after that: “Even in the 70s, the Klan was smart too. They let their people take their hoods off, put a suit and tie on, and get them to vote into the right places. In places with white racist theology, get them into high places in the government…just the right one in the right place…it will continue to happen.” It’s in part due to policies like this — orchestrated efforts to institutionalize white supremacists in lawmaking positions- that have resulted in the possibility of anti-“CRT” legislation becoming reality.
The legacy is not only institutionalization of white supremacists in positions of power, as Heath indicates. A ban of thinking about race critically is the institutionalization of the white supremacist narrative as a history of power, and of history as power.
What we see here is evidence of what we know to be true — white supremacists whose hobby is hatred in turn codify and legalize structurally oppressive practices so that norms become rules. Years later, those impacts remain.
I grew up steeped in this history without ever knowing anything about it. We did not know that the monument in front of the Court House honored the Confederacy- it was a common spot for high school prom pictures, and yet we were never instructed about its legacy. We never knew that Freedom Riders had been interned and beaten in the jail not 50 feet away. From pictures at the statue, we would drive the handful of miles away to Rolling Hills Country Club, where prom was held, not knowing that this was the same private country club founded after the cementing of the public pool Williams had tried so hard to integrate. Newtown, the Black neighborhood across the tracks, does exist- but my first time entering its streets was in the process of researching this piece. It has always been there, but it’s worse than forbidden: it’s completely invisible to anyone who does not call it home.
Aside from histories and stories, there are quantifiable impacts. 88% minority Monroe High School is a Title I-designated school, with 67% of its students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Ranking 2032 out of 2571 schools in North Carolina, its math proficiency and reading proficiency rates rank in the bottom 50% of schools in the state with a graduation rate of just 76%. Meanwhile, nine miles over, Piedmont High School (my alma mater), has a 17% free-and-reduced lunch qualifying student body with an 83% white population. Ranking 267 out of 2571 schools in North Carolina, its math proficiency rates are in the top 5% and its reading proficiency is in the top 20%. As one of the highest-achieving high schools in the county, Piedmont High boasts a 95% graduation rate.
We can look at another example, this time from the story of Robert Williams. Let us remember the correctional facility that housed the two children of the Kissing Case. Now a prison, as of December 31, 2021 it had a 54% Black inmate population. Not only is this a majority of the inmates, it is also 32% over the 22% Black population in North Carolina according to the 2020 Census. According to Michelle Alexander’s work, we should not be surprised by the disproportionate number of Black prisoners. This reality — that the same correctional facility to which two children under the age of 10 were sent for playing, now houses a majority-Black prison population — is an illustration of how white supremacy carries through generations to affect social institutions and practices of justice.
Ultimately, the stories of these small towns and the fabrics that are defined by institutionalized white supremacy reach into the highest echelons of power. The Brown vs. Board of Education case, which legally integrated schools, was decided in 1954; however, ten years after the decision, only one in two hundred black children attended a desegregated school in North Carolina. This is an astounding figure, especially when you take in to account the current demographics of the 117th Congress of the United States. Of the 100 Senators, 45 were alive before 1954 when the decision was implemented; a full 79 were alive before 1964, the ten-year-mark in which only 1 in 200 black students were integrated. The House of Representatives is similar. Of 435 Representatives, 126 were born before the year Brown was decided, and a full 256 were born before 1964 or later. These are the people creating our policy today, and these numbers are mirrored at the state and local levels where even more impactful curriculum decisions are made.
Conclusion
“That’s the tragedy…there’s just so much history. If people study the history and you see the things that your people done, you’re proud. But if you don’t know…if they keep you dumb about your own history, they keep you history-dumb.” (Robert Heath, private interview)
In the United States, racism is embedded in the fabric of the smallest communities. No one would take a second glance at Monroe NC; but even here, much like any small Southern town, there are the stories that are told, and then there are the stories that are hidden. Critical race theory in schools is not truly about critical race theory, but about the power that will be lost at the local town hall when a mirror is held up to the decisionmakers and their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, ad infinitum.
Critical race theory as such is not divisive — but the lessons it teaches and the truths it unearths can be. That divisiveness exists because it makes communities that were built on oppression deeply uncomfortable. It doesn’t make them uncomfortable because their histories are morally wrong, parading bodies and human rights past like so many ghosts to apologize to; it makes them uncomfortable because their security and status quo are identified, defined, and threatened. Just as Robert Williams physically threatened the white community until his exile in 1961, his memory and history continue to threaten it today. In her essay Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination, the late bell hooks discusses the power of “controlling the historical gaze.” By controlling the gaze of history through curriculums and classrooms, the incumbent social structure is preserved, protecting one group of people at the expense of another.
The vitriol from white supremacists and the Confederate memory writ large in part expresses a fear for the loss of what they have always been told makes them special. Good marketing campaigns — like those of the Daughters of the Confederacy, embedded in every classroom, every parade, every public square, every covered dish lunch following Sunday church — will do that. And they will continue to do so until we turn a critical eye upon our history.
What we see is people desperately clinging: Clinging to the days when their towns were more than memories, their lives more than privileged, their day-to-day existence exclusive without any additional fee. You did not have to pay to belong to the Club of White whose dues only required that you honor your privilege above all, no matter how many children died in the creek down the way because their skin might taint your water.
Looking at race critically — and yes, that means in the classrooms, with books that are currently being banned and conversations that are currently being prohibited — allows students and ourselves to change the present by creating new relationships with our pasts. At this point in our history, the establishment can only conceive white discomfort, ignoring the very real presence of black terror. The discourse of curriculums, history, and memory serve to protect white emotions at the expense of the historically victimized.
If after this story you doubt how close to home, how true, this issue is, let me paint a final picture. I’m typing this paragraph from the reading room at the Library of Congress, whose collections began with the donated library of Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner. The Capitol mere steps away — I ate my packed lunch there on its steps — was built by slaves rented from their owners. My graduate school, Georgetown University (you can almost peer its spires from here if you squint), survived only because slaves were sold as collateral to keep it alive. To my left is the Supreme Court, where Black people were considered 3/5 of a human until 1868, and where “separate but equal” was legally allowed until 1954.
Every step we take in the United States of America, whether it is Monroe, North Carolina, Washington, DC, or it is your hometown, is surrounded by stories and histories that are defined by race. What’s at stake is not a reticence to teach critical race theory, but a refusal to look at race critically. It is a human right to be remembered correctly by history — and it follows that it is a violation of human rights to be erased by it. Robert Williams fought every day for the right to live freely, and nearly lost his life multiple times in its pursuit. He catalogued it in his autobiography, Negroes With Guns. I asked his friend, Robert Heath, about that book and that title. Mr. Heath told me, “there’s a white history of Monroe, and there’s a Black history of Monroe. He actually called that book N****’s With Guns, because that’s the word Rob knew best.”
