Radio Free Dixie

Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power

By Timothy B. Tyson

416 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 33 illus., notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4923-1
    Published: February 2001

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Awards & distinctions

2000 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

Honorable Mention, 2000 Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

2000 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, Organization of American Historians

This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life.

Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.

About the Author

Timothy B. Tyson is senior scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and adjunct professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story and coeditor of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy.
For more information about Timothy B. Tyson, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Popular and academic cultures share a deeply-rooted tendency to either marginalize or demonize African American self-assertion. This thoughtful, eloquent book, much more than a biography, offers us a chance to re-examine some of the assumptions that have long undermined our national discourse on race. It turns out that Rosa Parks and the gun-toting Robert Williams are not so far apart, a fact that cannot be explained in the context of the traditional civil rights paradigm."—Charles Payne, Duke University I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Freedom Struggle—>

"Timothy Tyson has written a compelling story that needed to be told and now needs to be read by all who care about race, courage, and humanity. Robert Williams was an inspiration to many and a threat to others; Tyson gives him his proper due."—Julian Bond

"A richly researched, carefully written book that provides a compelling analysis of the 1950s roots of Black Power in Monroe, North Carolina. Timothy Tyson's insightful and provocative study of Robert F. Williams's militant resistance to white supremacy is at once complex and straightforward, and yet always profoundly moving. This is an important book, and it makes a valuable contribution to American social history, African American history, and black studies."—Darlene Clark Hine, Michigan State University A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America—>

"Radio Free Dixie is a monumental book. It is impossible to conceive of the postwar black freedom struggle without Robert Williams. And yet, most histories barely mention the man. Timothy Tyson's profound biography rewrites the history of the African American struggle for democracy, unearthing its most militant streams and revealing its deep relationship to revolutions around the world."—Robin D. G. Kelley, New York University Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression—>

"Tim Tyson's Radio Free Dixie is a spellbinding narrative that analyzes the making of black manhood in an era that bridged Jim Crow and civil rights. Through the life of Robert Williams, Tyson provides a stunning reappraisal of non-violence as a civil rights strategy, putting gender and class at its center. Tyson proves the continuity of African American resistance and white supremacy over a century. And he gives us a hero. Robert Williams is a giant abroad in the land of Jesse Helms."—Glenda E. Gilmore, Yale University Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920—>

"Radio Free Dixie is a valuable and needed addition to the literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. For many activists of my generation, Robert F. Williams was a heroic, yet little understood, civil rights leader who attracted controversy when he challenged first the national NAACP leadership and then the United States government. Tyson has ably and vividly supplied the missing chapters of Williams’s remarkable odyssey as an agitator in the South and fugitive rebel in the Third World."—Clayborne Carson, director, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project