Founding <cite>The Crusader</cite>
Williams remembers the birth of the newspaper <cite>The Crusader</cite>, which Williams published with Robert when the Monroe paper stopped printing his letters.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Mabel Williams, August 20, 1999. Interview K-0266. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- MABEL WILLIAMS:
-
The kissing case had a lot of momentum to it. And, you know, helped to
move it along. But I'm trying to remember and I'm
not very good at chronological dates and the sequences because now that
I look back over it it just kind of melts together. But, so, I remember
Rob going to Cuba. And he went along with several black writers and
artists: Leroy Jones and some of the other artists. And while down there
learning about what was going on with the Cuban revolution. But then we
had already started publishing "The Crusader" before
then. So I'm trying to remember. I
don't remember if we were publishing "The
Crusader" when the kissing case came along. I think we must
have been because we had good mailing lists that we were able to contact
people all over. The newspapers stopped publishing Rob's
letters to the editor.
- DAVID CECELSKI:
-
I'm surprised they ever did.
- MABEL WILLIAMS:
-
Yeah, yeah. They did, but the closer he came to identifying problems
that [loud buzz] that existed in our
community, the more the newspaper decided that, no, we don't
want to let this—we don't want to publish this. So
after he got to be president of the NAACP, he tried on several occasions
to report things, incidents that were being reported to the NAACP and
all that, and the paper wouldn't run anything. They
wouldn't tell what was going on. And so he—they
came up with the idea that we need to have our own press, something that
we can—so that we can tell the people what's going
on. So that's how we decided we better put out a little
newsletter. And he said, "Well, we'll just make it a
little one-pager or two-pager, you know." And once we started
doing that—. And I guess if I would go back and read some of
the earlier editions I would see exactly why it was that we came up
that, and what the sequence of events were. But, perhaps, you can do
that at some later date.