Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power

A solid documentary that fills a gap often left in streamlined '60s Civil Rights histories (to hear it in most classrooms, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X led, while everyone else followed), Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts' profile explores the life of one of the Black Power movement's most controversial figures, Rob Williams. Called the Che Guevara of America, Williams advocated meeting violence with violence, wore a gun in a holster daily, enjoyed taunting Ku Klux Klan members who made threatening phone calls to his family home, and generally thrived on rocking the boat of a white America that told him he should be like his father, a hard worker who "never gave anyone any trouble." Reliving stories of injustice that incensed Williams (e.g., two young black boys sent to jail for playing a kissing game with a white girl), the film follows him from Monroe, NC, across the U.S. and into political exile in Cuba, where he helped create Radio Free Dixie (modeled after Radio Free Europe and broadcast into America) but also became "more of a pawn than a player in the Cold War." Featuring interviews with Julian Bond of the NAACP, fellow activists, Williams' biographer, and archival video and audio of Williams himself, Negroes With Guns follows Williams' life into the '90s, when he died from Hodgkin's Disease. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Blackwelder)