Robert F. Williams, Jr., . . . . had become head of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1957. When threatened by the local Ku Klux Klan he organized a rifle club of sixty members and got it chartered by the National Rifle Association. This was partly to get the free ammunition provided NRA members by a grateful government, partly also, no doubt, a tribute to both groups’ joint faith in self-defense. When the Klan organized a motorcade against one NAACP member’s house, the club drove them off with gunfire. . . He had deeply embarrassed the NAACP. It was bad enough that he rejected the nonviolent ethic, worse still that he did so with such success. His was the only armed NAACP chapter and, for its size, the most effective.

William L. O’Neill
Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s
160-61 (1971)