Abstract

The scholarship analyzing the political career of Robert F. Williams has either misinterpreted him, minimized his effect, or only provided limited information about his legacy as a Black revolutionary nationalist leader. In Tyson’s biography, for instance, the treatment on Williams in Lake County, Michigan, raises much skepticism when he writes that Williams spent the last 15 years of his life in a quiet place “where he and his family could recover a life of their own. ” Different from Tyson’s assessment, this article argues that while living in Western Michigan, Williams continued to fight for rights that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed him, his people, and his community by staging a one-man protest against the editor of the Lake County Star for refusing to publish a letter he requested to be printed as a paid advertisement and by fighting to eliminate prostitution, police brutal-ity, and political corruption in the area. Williams was one of several people who were responsible for organizing the People’s Association for Human Rights, a grassroots organization in Lake County dedicated to maintaining the human rights of residents.