" ... an eye-opening documentary that examines one of the most significant, yet rarely remembered riots, and its causes, in modern United States history."
Review of
Independent Lens
"Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power"
by
Matthew Whitaker
Assistant Professor
History Department
Affiliate Faculty, African and African American Studies
Affiliate Faculty, School of Justice and Social Inquiry
Arizona State University
JULY ’64 is an eye opening documentary that examines one of the most significant, yet rarely remembered riots, and its causes, in modern United States history. In the summer of 1964, a riot that lasted three-nights exploded in two predominantly African American enclaves in downtown Rochester, New York. The riot, as the producers and directors at IndependentLens demonstrate, was “the culmination of decades of poverty, joblessness and racial discrimination and a significant event in the Civil Rights era.” Using a combination of archival footage, news reports, and rare onscreen interviews with many who were present, JULY ’64 investigate the origins and consequences of these three dreadful nights.
The documentary takes viewers back to a street party in Rochester on “one hot July [25th] night,” when what appeared to be a routine arrest, deteriorated into a violent clash between marginalized, frustrated, angry African Americans, and the local police. The three-night conflict ended when the National Guard was ordered into Rochester to quell the violence, looting and destruction. This was the first time during the Civil Rights Movement that the National Guard was ordered into a northern city to suppress racial violence. This film was released to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the insurgency, and it uses this historical clash to question “why race remains a central issue in America today”.
JULY '64 uses the analyses of Dr. James E. Turner of Cornell University, and national political commentator and former Gannett News reporter Jack Germond, to place the events in Rochester in a national context. Among those who also appear in the documentary are musicians Chuck and Gap Mangione, New York State Assemblyman David Gantt, Rochester Mayor William A. Johnson Jr., Rev. Dr. Arthur Whitaker of Harvard University, Minister Franklin Florence, and Rochester politician and activist Constance Mitchell. Although the footage, particularly the onscreen interviews, are often disjointed in their transition, and unusually long, these somewhat distracting flaws are often off-set by the articulate baritone of film’s distinguished narrator, Roscoe Lee Browne, an Emmy Awarding and Tony nominated actor and orator of much acclaim.
The “Rochester Riot” ignited the “long, hot summer” of 1964, a summer that hosted a number of race riots in small and mid-sized northern cities. Indeed, the three days of unrest and civil disobedience in Rochester drew the gaze of the entire country, which had come to believe that entrenched white supremacy, racial segregation, economic inequality along race and ethnic lines, and police brutality, were somehow to be found only in the south. The Rochester Riot was one of the first northern cities to dispel this myth, as it was exposed as played host to what many now refer to as the “urban crises”.
The Rochester Riot, as JULY’64 illustrates, instigated changes and challenges wrought from the legacy of slavery, the Great Migration, Jim Crow, suburbanization, deindustrialization, and de facto segregation that resound to the present day. It is an illuminating and eye opening film.
IndependentLens’ Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power, is a long-awaited and desperately needed examination of the roots of Black Power in America. It is also a thought provoking examination of one the twentieth century’s most captivating and controversial leaders. Indeed, this documentary sheds light on Robert G. Williams and his trailblazing leadership of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Negroes with Guns illuminates the down-to-earth nature of William’s activism; portraying him as an earnest advocate for racial justice who collaborated with white liberals, Black Nationalists and proponents of non-violence, to engender positive change. During William’s childhood, he observed and experienced the exigencies of white supremacy and racial inequality in the American south. He chafed under the tyranny of Jim Crow segregation and came to detest black vulnerability and deference to notions of so called white superiority.
White supremacy enveloped Williams and other African Americans, and the absurdity and hypocrisy of the sexual politics of race, which sanctioned the most repugnant forms of cruelty, including mutilation, torture and murder, in order to preserve an immaculate, altogether fictitious notion of whiteness and its privileges, ultimately inspired Williams to join the quickening Civil Rights Movement. Williams became the president of the Monroe NAACP, and he molded it into one of the most dynamic chapters in the nation. Monroe activists were, as historian Claude A. Glegg, III has argued, “more attuned to the local conditions that had shaped their particular grievances than the generic dictates of the national office in New York. To them, nonviolent direct action such as sit-ins, marches and boycotts, was useful if it worked, but in the face of cavalcades of Klansmen who periodically terrorized black Monroe, a shotgun was a surer ally, for it bellowed the language of violence, and masculine self-assertion, that even the most vicious of racist respected.” Williams' pronouncements and actions distanced him from nonviolent leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Roy Wilkins, and after racial tensions reached a fever pitch in Monroe in 1961, the Williams family was forced into exile in New York, Canada, Cuba, Vietnam and China. While in Cuba, Williams and his wife Mabel created “Radio Free Dixie,” an on-air anti-racist program that denounced white supremacy and racism in America.
Williams returned to America in 1969, and although he remained active, he shunned the spotlight and opted to contribute at the local level. By the early 1970s he was living in relative obscurity in Michigan. Although he died in Michigan in 1996, his body was returned to his home, Monroe, North Carolina, per his request, for burial. Negroes with Guns is a remarkable story of a largely unknown aspect of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. In many ways, Williams served as a very important, if not necessary link between the periods of nonviolent direct action and Black Power. Those interested in the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, social justice, African American history and American history, will find this documentary edifying and timely. I highly recommend it.
Independent Lens "July '64" airs Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 10 p.m. on Eight.
Learn more, visit the program Web site.
