Book Review: Radio Free Dixie by Timothy Tyson

Robert F. Williams was suspended and made a pariah by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the organization that had been at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, because he dared speak of the day-to-day, street-level struggle faced by Southern blacks, and encourage that violence upon African American homes and families be met in kind. Afraid of offending their white, northern-liberal supporters, the NAACP cut Williams loose. Disillusioned with the organization's often maddening adherence to pacifism, even in the face of gross brutality and state indifference to justice, Williams took a more militant stance, laying significant groundwork for the Black Power movement. Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie makes great strides in placing the emergence of Black Power in context by focusing on the political evolution of a man at its center. Tyson's Williams emerges as a man who grew up surrounded by the horrors and indignities of Jim Crow but was only radicalized after exhausting every ounce of a considerable faith in the American constitutional system.

As Tyson notes, his work is as much a portrait of a movement as it is pure biography; that "the inner wellsprings of [Williams'] mind and spirit are probably not to be found here." (Tyson, pg. 3) However, the book offers ample support for understanding the transformation of both Williams and the Civil Rights struggle. Williams' hometown of Monroe, North Carolina, was iconic, the very prototype of a Jim Crow Southern town, with the black ghetto of "Newtown" separated by train tracks from Monroe proper, where its white citizens grappled with the "Lost Cause." It was into this backdrop that notorious bigot Sen. Jesse Helms was born, and it was at the hand of his father - a Monroe policeman - that Williams first witnessed the brutality of race hatred. As a boy, Williams saw the elder Helms mercilessly beat a black woman as many looked on, and it was especially the impotence of the black men, their inability to help her, that stuck with him. (Tyson, pg. 1)