Conversations with John A. Williams

On Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light

Leigh Crutchley / 1969

Recorded at the BBC-London (November 12, 1969). © Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ltd. Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries.

Leigh Crutchley: John Williams, your book Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light has just been published. It’s your fifth novel and is, as I think you describe it, about selective violence. What is selective violence?

John A. Williams: Well, selective violence is pretty old, I think. It’s political violence. If you want to deal in contemporary history the assassinations of both the Kennedys, if you want to go to World War I the Arch Duke Ferdinand, violence that is calculated to change the course of history.

LC: Why did you use this as your theme?

JAW: Because I don’t really believe given the makeup of humankind in the world that anything else really works but violence, to some degree.

LC: To what are you applying it in your book?

JAW: In this particular book, of course, I’m applying it to the racial situation in the United States. The leading character is a black professor of history. He’s having some family problems, but he’s also largely concerned with what’s going on in the country in this year of 1973 that the book is set in. And it’s his contention that education, nonviolence doesn’t work, so he himself initiates a course whereby the end result is the assassination of a police officer who killed a young black boy.

LC: Why have you come to the conclusion that nonviolence doesn’t work?

JAW: Because I’m pretty much a student of history. I do a lot of historical reading and because I’m very much alive and aware of the situation in America today. I’ve lived through the period of Martin Luther King. I know the period of the abolitionists like Garrison, the Quakers. We’ve had very, very many nonviolent movements in the States that just haven’t worked.

LC: On the other hand, nonviolence was a great help to your particular cause, wasn’t it? As King proved.

JAW: Well, we now have reservations about that. On the surface, I think, this appeared to be true, but in reality we now have very, very severe reservations. We did get several civil rights acts out of the period of Martin Luther King. But the problem with all new acts or laws is that they can be written on the books, but they must, of course, be enforced. Where there is no enforcement, in effect, you have no law.

LC: Whatever we may think about violence as far as a protest is concerned against any political act, it works as particularly well inside a novel. A novel with violence is an exciting novel and yours is an exciting novel, but you have a message. What is the message you’re writing about?

JAW: Well, the message is that in America we will have nothing left but violence, unless we can settle our problems without violence. For me this is a very important message. Because it affects not only America, but the entire Western Hemisphere. We know that most of us are basically violent people. That appears to be our nature according to the studies that have been coming out lately. I think that people who claim to have a great deal of intelligence need not necessarily have recourse to violence.

LC: As a novelist you are believing in your subject?

JAW: Yes, I am.

LC: We’re sometimes frightened by books that have a message. I wasn’t frightened by yours because I think the story stands well on its own, doesn’t it? Fair and square on its own.

JAW: Well, I hope it does. It has been called a melodrama. I’m not sure that it is, but basically, what is life but a melodrama? Dickens, your Charles Dickens proved this. Even with the melodrama there was this great slice of life, which is truth; it’s ugly, it’s sentimental, and everything works out right in the end. In this particular book I’m not saying that everything works out at the end. What happens is that there’s a return to individual considerations, a man patching up a bad marriage with his wife. We must all start from this point.

LC: Have you been accused of incitement through your writing at all?

JAW: Not yet, but I wish I had. I say that with some pride because I would like to feel that my writings were important enough to in many ways influence the course of not only my country’s history, my people’s history, but the world. I suppose every writer would like to be a Dostoyevsky, a Dickens, a Balzac, a Herman Melville, and to this end I feel that I failed.

LC: You’ve named a number of white writers.

JAW: Yes.

LC: Have there been any colored writers accused of incitement and excluded because of their writings?

JAW: Well, I think something of this happened to Richard Wright to a small degree. Of course he had Marxist affiliations, and at that particular time he was writing in the States. I think he left the party in 1940. But he was considered to be pretty much a troublemaker, not only in America, but when he got to France. I think this is all to his credit. I’ve been rereading his work, and I find that it’s stands up even here in 1969–1970. It’ll always stand up.

LC: Publishers aren’t afraid of you because of color?

JAW: I like to think that they were courageous publishers, but that’s a writer’s ego speaking. I think black writers in the main, up until perhaps three years ago, were dealt with rather harshly if at all by publishers in America, but there has been this explosive awareness and consideration of what black writers are saying. Now this means that black writers are getting a greater opportunity in America than ever before.

LC: In Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light you use a kind of Jewish parallel, don’t you, with the colored situation?

JAW: Yes. I’m taking black situations in America in the 1960s and perhaps continuing into the ’70s and relating that situation to the Jews in Palestine in 1948 at the end of World War II. And the reasons I think are fairly obvious. That the Jews gained Palestine, what is now known as Israel, through the employment of selective acts of violence against the British government and army and succeeded in getting the partitioning of Palestine. Now twenty some odd years have passed. I think the parallel to some degree is still valid between their situation and ours.

LC: You subtitle the book A Novel of Some Probability.

JAW: Well, yes, as I said it’s set in 1973. The conditions for what is going on in the States right now will probably exist far beyond 1973. For a people who have tried every avenue there always remains one and, perhaps but one person, to trigger that action. I say it’s still to come. This is why I’ve subtitled it A Novel of Some Probability.

LC: John Williams, what are you going to do next?

JAW: I’m finishing a book on the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, which I like to feel is a critical study of his life and times. Then I’m doing a novel on the Negro soldier in America, a character who is part mythical and part real, who fights in every war from the Revolution through Vietnam. I’m also coeditor of a new magazine called Amistad, a semiannual publication of paperback format, paperback size, two hundred pages.

LC: You feel that through the novel form and through literature you can help the cause of the colored people?

JAW: Not only the colored people, I think—and not many of us will say this or admit it—but basically we must have at the core of our actions, considerations for all humanity. Now I’m not saying it’s because I’m Johnny Niceguy. I’m saying it because simply nothing else works.

An Interview with John A. Williams

The Harvard Crimson / 1971

The Harvard Crimson, May 19, 1971. © 2014 The Harvard Crimson, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

John A. Williams, author of The King God Didn’t Save, was born near Jackson, Mississippi, and like fellow black novelist, John O. Killens, began writing while he was a soldier in a Jim Crow regiment in the Pacific. Williams, along with Killens, Ellison, and others, was strongly influenced by Richard Wright, who was also from Mississippi, and like Wright, Williams has traveled and lived in Africa and Europe. Perhaps it is because of this common background and experience that he has obtained a particular understanding of Wright and is the author of a perceptive biography of him, The Most Native of Sons.

The King God Didn’t Save, a controversial biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is Williams’s tenth book. The others include five novels, The Angry Ones, Night Song, Sissie, The Man Who Cried I Am, and Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light. His last two novels have dealt particularly with the increasing level of violence and irrationality in the attitudes and actions of white America and the effect of this on black people everywhere.

This interview took place at the Boston University Afro-American Studies Department in Brookline where Williams delivered a guest lecture.

Harvard Crimson: You once said, Writing is a craft or profession or rite of stupidity that can bring oblivion swifter than anything else I know. In light of the reaction to The King God Didn’t Save which definition seems the most accurate?

John A. Williams: Well, I don’t know. It’s—some people have called it stupid, and some people have predicted that I was headed for oblivion. What was the other thing?

HC: Craft or profession.

JAW: Well, it wasn’t a profession either. It was something that I felt compelled to do because I see certain things I don’t wish to see in the black movement that people are involved in, and that is to deal with things in the same superficial manner that white people deal with things, to never probe beneath the surface to get at the gear, the mechanisms of things. So I did the book, and it may well be that all of these things will fall upon my head. But I’m only sorry I did it in terms of the unease that it’s caused my family and, I suppose, me too. These are things that pass. It wasn’t as though what has happened is totally unexpected. I expected it to be something about what’s it’s been like.

HC: Could one say that your book is also about the God King didn’t save?

JAW: The God King didn’t save—that’s fair enough. In that section that involved Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, our three major religious organizations, the feeling I tried to set down is that, in spite of all the professions of religiosity, these groups are more politically involved than in any other consideration. I think I did say that this man came along talking about religion, dealing with religion, and he was met with violence. As far as I’m concerned, religion had its last opportunity to flourish or reflourish … when Martin Luther King was alive.

HC: Had King lived, what directions might he have followed?

JAW: I think his last year or so pointed him in the direction of less reliance upon the aid and assistance of the federal government, but more on his own charisma. The Poor People’s March of course is a primary example, and he had been, as James Forman said it, in the armpit of the federal government. Jim had been trying to get him out from under that so he could do his own thing without being monitored and advised. I think he, King, was getting into that. Unfortunately, he was monitored in other ways. And King was not the only one. Since the book has come out, I don’t suppose not a month goes by when somebody doesn’t tell me about some other pictures or some people in pictures that I hadn’t even heard about before. So, apparently the surveillance of King was infinite, let’s say. But I think … well, try to put yourself in the situation. Here you are, a charismatic leader, and perhaps more than that. Perhaps the bona fide leader by virtue of having received the Nobel Prize, by virtue of commanding audiences wherever you go. Here you’ve been doing what any other man does given the opportunity–human response to human invitation, if you will. Suddenly these people come up and say: well, we’ve been bugging you and wiretapping you; we’ve been photographing you, and you better stop it. At that point, the man has to make a choice whether he is going to be concerned about himself, his family, his children—that’s five people—or millions of black people, not only millions of black people in 1967, but millions of black people for all the rest of time. I think he probably made a choice to go with the masses.

HC: Do you see anyone filling his gap today?

JAW: Well, I don’t see anybody. I think I sort of predicted in the book that Jesse Jackson would be groomed next, and last fall or winter Time magazine did a cover story on Jesse. I don’t think we are ever going to have a leader who comes down—I’m using this advisedly because it is totally impossible for black people to have one leader—King was assigned to us by the white power structure, and we took him. We took Malcolm. And they got rid of Malcolm and we were left with King and several other lesser deities. But I don’t think we’ll ever see a leader assigned to us again from that route of publicity … because we’ve learned that when leaders are bred in the fashion of King and Malcolm X that something very terrible happens to them ultimately. They can be assassinated in the press or assassinated for real.

HC: In the book you deal with the power of the media … How are we to deal with it?

JAW: I have to agree with you that the media can make or break or cripple or assassinate anybody it chooses to, not only black but white as well, polkadot. I don’t foresee in the immediate future any high-level black editors on powerful American newspapers or magazines. By that I mean decision-making levels. I don’t see black people getting into that in my lifetime. The system’s so tied up that we almost have to forget it for now. Guys your age and my little boy Dennis’s age may ultimately arrive at those levels, but you have to ask yourselves, what is it going to cost you? What kind of compromise are you going to make? Yet, if we throw television in with newspapers, you see that we’re in a totally untenable position. The black press is nothing, and it’s very difficult to speak to a brother or sister through the white press.

HC: Even with the magazines we have now, we lack a national publishing force.

JAW: That’s really what we need, a national publication—maybe more than one.

HC: What about Muhammad Speaks?

JAW: That’s a treacherous paper in many ways. I’ve known a few guys who worked for them. They’ve never been critical since they left, but I guess I was turned off because of what they did with the King book. I’m not sure that the guy who wrote the piece had ever read the book. I suspect that he hadn’t. When The Man Who Cried I Am came out, I was a saint. I could do no wrong. Now this book—not only do I work for the CIA, but I’m probably just coming back from an all-expense, CIA-paid tour of Europe and sitting down at a gold-plated typewriter. I would hope that the readers would find that a bit ridiculous, but those are the extents that publications of this kind go to when the readers allow them to. Muhammad Speaks and the Panther paper are not the answer to the kind of publications we need.

HC: Towards the end of the book you said, To what Constitutional, to what moral authority do the black, the poor, and the young now appeal? This book is basically addressed to that point … Then a few lines later you said, There is no reliable authority. Do you think there are any useful values that can be derived from the African experience and applied to this moral void?

JAW: Yes, I think that there are values that can come out of Africa, and very positive ones. I would, on the other hand, be reluctant to accept these as the overall cure because I feel we’ve been on this toboggan and you have to get off where the damn thing stops. You know, if it’s fifty thousand miles from Africa then that’s where you have to get off and do your thing. If you can reach back and bring some good from Africa to where this thing has stopped—beautiful.

The authority that people must appeal to, as far as I’m concerned, is totally lacking from contemporary society. It seems to me that we are in a time when before much longer the people must protest. I’m not only talking about black people, but white people who are getting tired of these damn taxes. I’m talking about white people who are getting tired of shaky business ventures because of this silly war we’re in. I’m talking about all kinds of people that are tired of the direction we seem to be moving in. Well, if this means revolution in the streets like the French Revolution, and I’m talking about a real revolution with all of the attendant gore … then it will have to come. What we’ve been trying to do unsuccessfully since before the Civil War … is to create this relationship with the white underclasses, but they’ve been duped away from it. I think that there will probably be some kind of revolution—fractured, with whites doing their thing and blacks doing their things, but all directed toward government, toward change. The terrible thing about that is that when that is done, then you’re going to have the blacks and whites at each other’s throats again because they didn’t unite in the first place. Once more, I think the outlook is very pessimistic.

HC: In an article in the December ’70 issue of Black World you said that the tradition of black communications needed to be molded anew. What forms would you like to see it take?

JAW: I think I’d like to see more rapport between older black writers and younger black writers. I think the publishing industry has had us in such a bag—you know, we’re going to give you this as an advance, but you don’t tell lob how much you got because we didn’t give him this much. The critics like Jimmy Baldwin, but they hate Ernie Gaines. It’d be a disaster if them two cats got together and all the rest of that, which is nonsense. I mean, you view the white literary establishment—Styron, Roth, [unintelligible], Updike, all of those cats—well, maybe they get together and maybe they don’t, but the fact is they got their signals all so together, that it’s not necessary. But we don’t. We need to clean up some of this garbage and verbiage that has been built up between the black generations. We need to explain to ourselves our own writers. Explain that Ishmael Reed is a fantastic satirist as well as brilliantly knowledgeable of all facets of black people. That Bill Kelley has finally come around…. The publicity made it appear to be so impossible that young guys like Kelley and Reed could ever get together because Kelley went to Fieldston School and Harvard or wherever the hell he went. But that’s crap. Kelley is in the same bag with Ishmael Reed, with me, with Baldwin, with Ellison, because we’re black. Our problems deal with our approaches to our experiences, the way we can command or demand advances so we can support our families, and these are way out of line with the advances white writers get. Things of this nature.

HC: There seems to be a movement towards the past afoot, particularly among whites. A return to Jeffersonian concepts of necrophilia. In the past, these periods when America seemed to be doing an intellectual about-face have always coincided with a loss of black people’s rights, a breaking of what seemed to be a progressive trust. Do you see any way of counteracting this trend?

JAW: I really don’t know or foresee any hopeful trends. This is not basically our fault. I think that black people in terms of political clout and education are doing as much as they possibly can because most of these things are dependent upon public money—whether it be state or federal. As always the burden is on white America, and even today white America as a mass is not terribly interested in what happens to us. The business with pollution and environment and so on and so forth—I think white youth veered to this business much too quickly for there to have been any real sincerity in what they seemed to have been involved in with us in the early sixties. And this is where you have to go, to the white youth, because the older people are cliché-set in their ways. All they want to do is just hold the dam until they die and let it become somebody else’s problem. But if they can begin manipulating their children to perhaps necessary, but in terms of the immediate needs of this country, ethereal goals, then when the kids reach their ages, it’s going to be the same thing all over again. I’m just not that hopeful on the white side that anything good is going to come.

HC: In an interview in the Paris Review, Ralph Ellison said the search for identity is, THE American theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are. Do you agree with that, and do you see any particular reflection of it in the situation of black Americans?

JAW: This is most true of black people, and maybe only true of black people. You know, we’ve had a great deal of recent political awareness of ethnic political potential, and I’d say the Jews are a foremost example of awareness of the ethnic limitations and the exercise of that ethnic power. Ellison’s statement is mostly true of black people, and I would disagree with his seeming contention that it’s a problem for all Americans. It’s not. I think that even Indians or Spanish-speaking Americans are more positive of their identity than are we because they have languages to fall back on. We are saddled with this old American English, and that’s all there is to it.

John A. Williams: Agent Provocateur

Fred Beauford / 1971

From Black Creation (Summer 1971), 4–6. Reprinted with permission of Fred Beauford.

John A. Williams is a short, well-built man in his middle forties. He moved easily in his neat book-lined West Side apartment as he excused himself from me to go into the kitchen to check on his lima beans. His wife and young son had left him with the cooking for the afternoon.

She can’t cook lima beans, he explained.

He spoke in a soft, agreeable voice. For a minute, as he strolled out of the room, it became hard to connect this quiet-looking man with the violent storm that was swirling around his latest book, The King God Didn’t Save.

In fact, he had come on a bit defensively when I first asked him about the response to the book.

Most people who are talking about the book haven’t read it, he answered straight out, with a slight touch of bitterness.

The King God Didn’t Save deals with, among other things, the fact that Dr. Martin L. King was a midnight creeper and that J. Edgar Hoover, the stone-faced Emperor of the F.B.I., had found out about it and had used the information to whitemail him.

Look, Williams explained, there’s nothing wrong with what a guy does in his private life. But these were the items that compromised King and compromised the movement.

How could that be? I responded.

He took a few seconds to answer and began to look remarkably like the Williams on the back cover of his book that I had at home: thoughtful and a little distant.

It has become a modern cliché to blame the media for every evil of society from bad breath to neighborhood rebellions. Unlike most critics of the media, however, Williams is in a much better position to see the truth. He has written for national magazines and major newspapers, worked in television, and has traveled to more than twenty-six countries, including stints as a Newsweek African correspondent and Ebony/Jet’s man in Europe.

In addition, he has written ten books and many short stories since leaving Syracuse University in 1950 with his BA. His last novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, was highly acclaimed by both black and white critics.

He returned from his beans with two cans of beer and passed me one. We talked a little about his two grown sons from another marriage. One was working as a school teacher upstate. Williams said the kid was beginning to see how the system was killing our children.

He had said in his book that King was the creation of the white media. This was one of the points that his critics most objected to. I asked him about it to get back to the interview.

The thoughtful face appeared again. I think I said in the book that King received a lot of attention because he had the best show in town. I think I said that to a large degree. But he had all the properties white folks like to see our leaders have. He was the old-time classic black leader. He was a minister. So that made him all the more ready for the production that the establishment went into. To the extent that he used the white media, as some said, that really doesn’t hold water. If so, then why are we in the situation we are in today?

The question was rhetorical, of course. He had already said in the book that King got under my skin because of his political philosophy. But he explained further: The Civil Rights Act was only passed for a five-year period. Now it seems to me that there is an innate agreement which says that all rights that belong to black people are to be viable for only five years. Now we know damn well that these are inherently our rights. So when a man bargains for five years on something that should be ours for life, then I think there is something wrong with the situation.

This disagreement with King’s philosophy, he agreed, was only a minor point in The King God Didn’t Save. But Williams has trouble agreeing with many who say that he dwelled unduly upon King’s sex life.

Well, I think that for anyone who has read the book, he said, the barely detectable edge creeping back into his voice, there is no such thing as dwelling on. I think that if you put together all the passages in the book that deal with King’s private life it would amount to one-and-a-half pages out of the 221-page book …

The major point of the book as far as Williams is concerned was the fact that after J. Edgar called King into his office and told him to cool it or face the badmouth, King began to hold his fire. This caution, Williams noted, cost the movement valuable momentum. Williams also believes that when King did speak loudly again against the War and started planning for the Poor People’s March on Washington, that his days became numbered.

It’s old enough to be almost cliché now, he said, "but as soon as a black leader starts expanding his area of operation outside of just black people, when he starts to deal with all kinds of disadvantaged people—Indians, whites, browns—then his whole operation becomes shaky. Establishments don’t make black leaders so that they can go out and mess with Indians and poor whites and Puerto Ricans.

Now this was something Malcolm was into with his trips to Africa. We can trace this back to Trotter’s (Monroe Trotter, black leader who opposed Booker T. Washington) activities in Europe about World War I; we can trace it to Richard Wright; we can trace it to a lot of people. These things happen, and there are a growing number of people who are no longer willing to believe that these things are coincidences.

A number of people have indeed pointed out that the only people killed in this country (by the same type of lone mental retard), are always those men who have been most capable of organizing a broadly based coalition of the have-nots. I wondered if he thought that there was a vast conspiracy in the land.

Everybody is into this conspiracy thing, he answered, "and these killings may or may not have been conspiracies in the correct sense of the word. A conspiracy means a band of people get together to commit some evil deed. Now it may just be the historical momentum of this country that draws people together, and they don’t have to say one damn word to each other. They all know why they are in the same room; and they all know why they want to do certain things, and how to do them.

I’ve been in touch with some people who see patterns in the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin, but I can’t connect the deaths of all four (the Kennedy brothers and Malcolm and King) any more than anyone else can. But that doesn’t mean that the four deaths were not staged by the same people.

I noted that it would have been ironic indeed since the Kennedy brothers were the ones who had authorized the wiretaps on King.

They were looking for Communists, he answered.

Williams said that he wrote The King God Didn’t Save because he wanted black people to understand just what happens to black leaders in this country when they show signs of stepping out of a given role or what happens if they get too powerful and try to forget their maker as King was trying to do. What enraged him most about the reception to his book is that most people seem to have missed the major