Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. (Book Reviews).

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. By Timothy B. Tyson. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1999. Pp. viii, 402. $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2502-6.)

Writing about the civil rights movement has its own peculiar dangers. In the popular imagination, movement leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks have been elevated to the national pantheon of social reformers. The notion that nonviolence impelled social change in the early sixties has become the received wisdom--one that fits nicely into a narrative of national moral redemption. In recent years, however, students of the African American freedom struggle have taken on this conventional wisdom about the decade. Timothy Tyson makes a major contribution to this reevaluation in Radio Free Dixie, which brings to life the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams, a pioneering black nationalist who became, as Tyson writes, "one of the most influential African American radicals of a generation that toppled Jim Crow" (p. 3).

Born in 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina, Williams had a knack for turning up in the most extraordinary places. Traveling north to find work, Williams found himself trapped atop a Detroit bridge, fighting for his life in the bedlam of the 1943 race riot. In the late 1950s he was expelled from the NAACP for publicly vowing "to stop lynching with lynching" (p. 149). By 1962 Williams had formed a small black self-defense group and led a daring desegregation campaign in Monroe. The campaign culminated in a terrifying riot and kidnapping charges lodged against the militant leader. Williams, who had considerable ties with the Marxist left in the United States, escaped to Cuba, where he was embraced as a revolutionary hero. Castro provided Williams with air time for "Radio Free Dixie," a regular radio program beamed to the southern United States that Williams used to broadcast his increasingly revolutionary black nationalist message. Iconoclastic and disputatious by nature, Williams soon became persona non grata in Castro's utopia and fled to the more hospitable environs of China. Within months he was standing alongside Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, making

a speech before one and a half million assembled Chinese. Williams had, in one short decade, risen from obscure community activist to international communist icon and a key leader of the emergent black nationalist movement in the U.S.

Though Williams was not widely known to the general public, he had a profound impact on younger civil rights activists and black nationalists, including many in the Black Panther Party. During the civil rights movement, Williams's overriding theme was the right of armed self-defense. Though this doctrine appears to be at odds with that of nonviolence, Tyson views it as compatible with the wider civil rights movement--merely a different strategy. "The life of Robert F. Williams," writes Tyson, "illustrates that `the civil rights movement' and `the Black Power movement' emerged from the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom" (p. 3).

Here, Tyson is on shaky ground. The civil rights movement had a far greater class dimension than historians have previously allowed. As historians move beyond people and organizations who left written records, recent studies have used oral interviews to reveal the class divisions manifested around issues of armed self-defense and black nationalism. It is true, as Tyson points out, that Rosa Parks attended Williams's 1996 funeral, but it would be a mistake to construe her gracious gesture as evidence of political accord. In 1964 Williams was calling for riots and armed guerrilla warfare in the cities and distributing recipes for napalm firebombs that could be dropped into half-track troop carriers. This was not Rosa Parks.

Enough quibbling, however--Tyson has written, with compelling prose and great insight, an excellent biography as well as a definitive history of armed self-defense doctrines in the civil rights movement. He has produced a fascinating book that is a welcome antidote to the historical pap being spooned out in popular documentaries these days.