Abstract

This essay explores the long-range evolution of Robert Williams’s philosophy of self-defense and the relationship this had to the redefinition of self-defense by the best-known and most ambitious theorist-practitioner of the Black Power Movement: Huey P. Newton. Despite his prominence as an ideological rival of MLK Jr.’s program of nonviolence and a militant figure in the Civil Rights Movement, Robert F. Williams has been ignored as a subject of philosophical relevance. But Williams’s program of pre-emptive self-defense not only reformulated Black manhood but matured into a body of ideas grounded in the proposition that violence against whites –organized, armed resistance against a militarized police state— was the key to Black survival. Williams’s ideas were assimilated by the leading theoretician of the Black Panther Party—Huey P. Newton—who adapted it within a broader Black nationalist philosophical system (intercommunalism) which understood self-defense as necessitating the harnessing of violence for revolutionary ends. Rather than an aberration, I argue that Newton’s transformation of self-defense was a natural evolution of the offensive and militaristic essence in the thought and practice of Black nationalist tradition in the US.