internal history of the Revolutionary Action Movement. 3 Aside from that unpublished history, the best account of RAM’s origins lay in Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch’s 1998 essay “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.” 4Kelley and Esch trace the organization’s beginnings to 1961. In that year, Robert F. Williams, an NAACP organizer in Monroe, North Carolina, fled the U.S. to Canada then to Cuba to avoid trumped-up kidnapping charges. Williams had established himself as a local and national spokesperson for black self-defense ideology in the U.S., and threw himself into support for Castro’s new revolution once in Havana. Inspired by Williams’s example, black members of Students for a Democratic Society, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality formed“Challenge,” a student organization led by Donald Freeman, a student at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. According to Kelley and Esch, the group was especially taken with Harold Cruse’s 1962 essay “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” arguing for the internationalization of the black U.S. freedom struggle. In 1965, Max Stanford would publish “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American Student” in Daniel Watts’s newspaper The Liberator, one of several vehicles for early writings by RAM members, along with Robert Williams’ newspaper published in exile, The Crusader. 5

Between 1962 and 1966, RAM formed small organizational core groups in Northern California, Cleveland, and its headquarters, because it was Stanford’s home, in Philadelphia. Early members associated with RAM or its periphery included future Black Panther leaders like Huey Newton; future African-American Studies academics