Radio Free Dixie, Second Edition: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power

Radio Free Dixie

Radio Free Dixie

Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power

Timothy B. Tyson

SECOND EDITION

With a new preface by the author

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Quadraat type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a

member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover photo courtesy of John Herman Williams.

ISBN 978-1-4696-5187-3 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-5204-7 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the

original edition as follows:

© 1999

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Quadraat type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Publication of this work was aided by a generous grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tyson, Timothy B.

Radio Free Dixie : Robert F. Williams and the

roots of Black power / by Timothy B. Tyson.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2502-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4923-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Williams, Robert Franklin, 1925–. 2. Afro-American

civil rights workers—North Carolina—

Monroe—Biography. 3. Civil rights workers—

North Carolina—Monroe—Biography. 4. Monroe

(N.C.)—Race relations. 5. Afro-Americans—Civil

rights—North Carolina—Monroe—History—20th

century. 6. Black power—United States—

History—20th century. 7. Radio Free Dixie

(Radio program)

1. Title.

F264.M75T97 1999

975.6'755—dc21 99-11981

CIP

For Perri

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: On Trembling Earth

Chapter 1. The Legacies

Chapter 2. Wars for Democracy

Chapter 3. I’d Rather Die and Go to Hell

Chapter 4. The Kissing Case

Chapter 5. Communist Front Shouts Kissing Case to the World

Chapter 6. The Sissy Race of All Mankind

Chapter 7. Crusaders

Chapter 8. Cuba Libre

Chapter 9. When Fire Breaks Out

Chapter 10. Freedom Rider

Conclusion: Radio Free Dixie

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

A section of photographs follows page 165.

Preface to the Second Edition

Writing a book is a bit like setting out in a rowboat to cross the wide ocean. Hauled aboard by some historical enigma or literary passion, I never know quite where I will end up, what I will find on the way, or how I will be received on that distant shore. On my voyage toward the publication of Radio Free Dixie two decades ago, the contending currents that roiled the life of Robert F. Williams changed my course more than once. More-seasoned pilots suggested that I find a topic other than this bizarre black firebrand from North Carolina who fought off the Ku Klux Klan with a machine gun years before chants of Black Power and Black Lives Matter echoed through the land. But Williams was far more than just a black man with a gun, driven to stand up and fight back. Before I pulled the first oar, I sensed profound and daunting depths; this biography promised complexities beyond any normal civil rights story. Something compelled me to launch out nonetheless.

This story, I soon came to understand, was about something deeper than tactical differences over violence and nonviolence. At its heart, it was about a distinctive homegrown radicalism rooted in the unforgettable experiences of the black South. And that was why I knew, by the time I launched out, where my little craft would land: the final word in Radio Free Dixie, I was certain, would be grandmother.

Ellen Isabell Williams embodied that homegrown black radicalism, and she handed it down to her grandson. Born enslaved in 1858, she was sixty-seven when Robert F. Williams was born in 1925, and she lived only two houses down from Robert’s family on Boyte Street in New Town, a black section of Monroe.¹ Just on the other side of Robert’s childhood home lived his grandmother’s lifelong friend, Ella Bell Mama Stitt, who told the Williams children her still-anguished story of the plantation mistress who gave away her three-year-old sister, Mary Bell, as a wedding present.² Early on, Robert hauled in stove wood and hoisted heavy buckets of well water into the house for his grandmother and Mama Stitt; respect and caring for elders was an unquestioned expectation in the Williams family. Ellen Williams repaid him not only with the occasional nickel or with platters of her fried chicken and pots brimming with collard greens, but also with her vivid stories of their family’s past.

In 1875, at sixteen, Robert’s grandmother had married Sikes Williams, an aspiring nineteen-year-old writer and activist, and they both pursued their educations and became schoolteachers. By the 1890s, the couple, now Republicans like most African Americans of voting age, had joined a rising interracial Fusion coalition that endorsed universal manhood suffrage, the removal of property requirements from voting, and a statewide system of free, tax-supported public schools. To support the Fusion cause, Sikes Williams and Darling Thomas, another local black man, founded a weekly broadside, the People’s Voice.³ In the decades after Emancipation, similar interracial coalitions had emerged in every state in the former Confederacy and won control of the state governments in Tennessee and Virginia, so their hope of victory was no mere pipedream.⁴

In North Carolina, the Fusion coalition brought together heavily black Republicans and the mostly white People’s Party, usually termed Populists; the latter had defected from the Democrats to oppose the party’s domination by banks, railroads, and corporations and to push for broader and equal access to the ballot and free, tax-supported public schools for all. In 1894 and 1896, this interracial alliance won every statewide office, swept the legislature and both U.S. Senate seats, and elected its most prominent white leader, Daniel Russell, to the governorship. Though deeply flawed, coalitions across the color line pointed toward a different kind of southern social order.

In 1898, however, the conservative white supremacy campaigns, bank-rolled by the state’s wealthiest interests, organized a terrorist unit called the Redshirts and used intimidation, violence, and fraud to steal the election and overthrow the state government. A well-armed white mob in Wilmington, the state’s largest city and stronghold of Fusionist power, torched the office of the black daily newspaper, shot down scores of black citizens, and compelled the white Fusionist mayor and the interracial board of aldermen to resign at gunpoint. One member of the mob recalled that he would never forget the face of the white Fusionist police chief when they took a rope with a noose in it and threw it at his feet, and [the chief] turned just as white as a sheet. The mob dragged him and many other white Fusionists to the train station amid cries of white nigger and banished them from the city.⁵

In the wake of this counterrevolution, the white conservatives passed a constitutional amendment designed to take the vote from African Americans. Afterward, a pile driver of segregation laws, policies, lynchings, and local customs nailed in place the new social order of Jim Crow. The victory of the white supremacy campaigns and the disfranchisement of black citizens rang in six decades of what Josephus Daniels, one of the architects of the coup, called permanent good government by the party of the White Man. Though the political landscape for black North Carolinians who still aspired to be citizens remained bleak, from his grandmother’s back stoop, young Robert Williams could still see his grandfather’s old iron printing press rusting in the barn.⁶

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Ellen Williams read to Robert and his siblings from the newspapers and provided constant commentary on race and politics. As another world war approached, she saw Fascism, with its theories of racial superiority, imperil the world; ironically, the country that had denied her people’s citizenship on account of race now denounced racist Fascism and portrayed itself as the citadel of universal human rights. When Hitler was coming to power, Robert recalled, she kept telling us the story about Germany and what was going on there. Robert took a special interest and often read the newspapers to the men who gathered at a nearby corner store. From an early age, he became an interpreter of the world after the example of his grandmother, whom he remembered as my greatest friend.⁷

Ellen Williams schooled Robert in an eclectic, improvisational strain of homegrown black radicalism, historically grounded in a politics that refused to compromise in its opposition to white supremacy but was flexible, capacious, and never doctrinaire about tactics. Her vision of democracy demanded first-class citizenship, political self-determination, and black dignity; she instilled race pride in her children and grandchildren. Her view of armed self-defense included a stance toward white people captured by a phrase that I once heard the owner of a black pool hall say: If you don’t start none, there won’t be none. Her fiery but fluid radicalism rested upon a willingness to defend home and community by force but was also open to interracial coalitions under acceptable conditions. Grounded in love, it was also armed for any eventuality.

The agonies and aspirations of the black South, as experienced and interpreted by Ellen Williams, became the wellspring of Robert Williams’s radicalism, not the Soviet Union or Red China, and his radicalism was interpreted by Ellen Williams, not European Marxism. Here on the dark and bloody ground of African American resistance and memory emerged his race pride, his communal sensibility, his humanist values, his ardent internationalism, and his radical vision of what democracy in the United States could be if African Americans could win citizenship in this white republic and white Americans would respect the constitutional rights of black citizens. Before she died, Ellen Williams presented young Robert with the ancient rifle that had belonged to her husband, the crusading editor, a memento that would hang above Robert’s desk for many years.

What strikes me today is how her political legacy, inherited and transformed by her grandson, speaks to the predicaments and opportunities that antiracist rebels, often led by black women, confront in our own time. The life of Robert Williams illuminates issues that still spark debate among contemporary social movements like Moral Monday and the Movement for Black Lives: armed self-defense and nonviolent direct action; voting rights; black nationalism, including questions of economic advance and whether unashamedly black also requires black separatism; the possibilities of interracial coalition politics; and above all, perhaps, the unfinished business of the African American freedom struggle. The central question remains what it was for Stokely Carmichael, Ella Baker, Fred Hampton, and Angela Davis: how to birth a new black sense of self, anchored in age-old traditions of struggle but offering new vistas of self-respect, collective aspiration, and political victory.

Activists today sometimes dismiss the civil rights movement as passive, unrealistic, and outdated, especially in comparison with a romanticized and seemingly far bolder Black Power movement. We misunderstand history, however, if we draw the line too sharply. The problem goes beyond simple schoolyard or textbook binaries of Martin versus Malcolm. Even broader mainstream narratives tend to portray the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement in clashing terms. These clichés hold the former as productive, the latter as destructive. Many paint civil rights as a purely nonviolent, broadly acceptable—even moderate—call on America’s conscience, while they depict Black Power as a violent, fruitless souring of the civil rights dream, a reaction to the plodding pace and plummeting hopes of civil rights, whether tragic, understandable, or premature. Good civil rights, bad Black Power. Another common counternarrative caricatures civil rights as naïve and insufficiently focused on the power to make real change, while Black Power is clear-eyed and pragmatic.

All of these distortions represent intellectual architectures of political convenience, and their sole drawback is that they have little to do with what actually happened. The triumphalist narrative of civil rights idealizes black history, downplays the virulent and violent tenacity of Jim Crow society, and obscures the complexities and continuities of African American political traditions and U.S. racial politics; unwittingly, in fact, this celebratory arc understates the achievements of African American resistance. Knee-jerk negative images of Black Power shortchange the Black Power movement’s crucial role in moving African Americans toward a new sense of self and also overlook the richness of long-standing black political traditions that have incorporated black nationalist elements since the early nineteenth century and perhaps longer.

At any rate, the life and legacy of Robert Williams shows us that virtually all of the elements commonly associated with the Black Power movement—independent black politics, black cultural pride, anticolonial internationalism, black economic advancement, and what Williams called armed self-reliance—resonated in the black South in the late 1950s, blended with conventional civil rights concerns, and drew on still deeper historical roots. And yet Williams was in many respects typical of his generation of southern civil rights leaders. A veteran of both the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, he became the president of a small-town NAACP branch and reveled in the promises of first-class citizenship raised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Williams compared the jubilation he felt watching the televised news reports of the decision on May 17, 1954, with what his enslaved ancestors must have experienced at Emancipation almost a century before. This time, he believed, there must be a new reconstruction that white violence could not overturn. I was sure that this was the beginning of a new era in American democracy, he recalled.⁸

When the white South struck back at Brown with a tornado of terror, demagoguery, subterfuge, and defiance, however, Williams collected military weapons and organized his community to defend itself against a rampaging Ku Klux Klan. On March 25, 1956, he delivered a Sunday sermon to his fellow Unitarians in Monroe that hailed the Montgomery Bus Boycott and celebrated its patriots of passive revolution. The racial crisis in the South was a difficult problem, he conceded, but Americans are noted for being able to solve difficult problems. Invoking the spirit of Concord, Lexington, and Valley Forge, Williams declared from his pulpit that the liberty bell peals once more and the Stars and Stripes shall wave forever. In a South wracked by white terror and backlash politics, Williams still nurtured a measured hope for the possibilities he felt adhered in the U.S. Constitution. Even after he had been hounded from the United States; exiled to Cuba and China; returned home to a nation that remained rife with white supremacy, enduring injustice, and intense racial violence; and achieved a ripe old age, he retained that hopeful if beleaguered faith. I had always considered myself as a patriot, he said. I always stressed that I believed in the American Constitution and that I thought it was the greatest document in the world—the problem [was the government and many citizens] didn’t respect it.⁹

In the late 1950s, the rising independence movements in sub-Saharan Africa inspired Williams, and the Cuban Revolution intoxicated him, especially when he was able to travel to Cuba in 1960 to join its first annual victory celebration.¹⁰ That same spring, when the sit-in movement blossomed from North Carolina, Williams organized nonviolent direct action protests at his local drug-store lunch counters—though he credited the lack of violence to his NAACP branch’s well-known devotion to armed self-defense. In 1961, he welcomed the nonviolent Freedom Riders from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to Monroe, but he ended up having to flee with his wife and two children, a machine gun slung over one shoulder. They landed in Havana, from whence his 1962 book, Negroes with Guns, became the single most-important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, the cofounder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland.¹¹

In my sole similarity to the founders of the Black Panthers, Negroes with Guns astonished me. I took it to be an impressive piece of propaganda, fiery and clear, and perhaps 40 percent true, given the outlandish stories. I located Williams’s debate with Martin Luther King Jr. in Liberation magazine, and Williams reprinted King’s rejoinder in Negroes with Guns, so I believed that part. Oddly, that story had not appeared in a single one of the many and often massive King biographies that I had read. But world famous in 1958 as the president of a small-town NAACP branch who became a successful global advocate for the release of two black schoolboys, eight and ten, incarcerated after a kissing game with some white girls their age? An NAACP president who dispersed Klan attackers with a machine gun? A fugitive hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who fled to Cuba? The cohost, with his wife, Mabel Williams, of Radio Free Dixie, a weekly show from Radio Havana heard in Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, and back home in Monroe?¹² How could Williams’s tales be true and yet have escaped my notice entirely? Why would most historians overlook him entirely and others give him only a few words in passing? And so this book was born.

I drove fifteen miles from Durham to the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh to see if the Governor Luther Hodges Papers had anything on this obscure Williams guy. What those archive boxes held turned out to be a foot-thick stack of folders filled with clippings and correspondence. Headlines emblazoned front pages from the London Times and the New York Times to newspapers from Tokyo, Havana, Moscow, Dar es Salaam, Peking, Rome, Copenhagen, and beyond. It turned out this Williams fellow was not obscure in the least. And his stories were often more dramatic in police files than they were in his own generally unembellished versions.

At first, my research focused mainly on stories of self-defense. To someone whose knowledge of the movement rested primarily on the still-young historiography that centered around Martin Luther King Jr. and the federal government, this was what set Williams apart from all the other civil rights leaders of the 1950s and early 1960s, wasn’t it? I knew that some younger folks after the Meredith March Against Fear in 1966 started chanting Black Power, vowing to defend themselves and their loved ones and sometimes openly brandishing weapons.¹³ Prior to that shift in protest rhetoric, political vision, and generational leadership, I thought, the movement had been almost entirely grounded in nonviolent direct action, which had a deep spiritual cast to it. In fact, I had fallen easily into a deep romance with nonviolent direct action, which gleamed with a politically promising and morally pristine aura—not much like my own experiences growing up. What I had seen growing up in small-town and rural North Carolina told a story that went far beyond nonviolent direct action and, though I would not recognize it for decades, prepared me to hear the voice of Robert Williams and to see the historical record more clearly.

I had been raised in the liberal and loving white family of a public school-teacher and a United Methodist minister in a North Carolina seared by and seething over the clashes and changes of the civil rights and Black Power era, a story that I told decades later in Blood Done Sign My Name. In the small tobacco market town of Oxford in 1970, when I was eleven, the father and two of the older brothers of a playmate of mine murdered an unarmed young black man, Henry D. Marrow, near the family’s crossroads country store because Marrow had said something to a white woman at the cash register—meaning that whatever he had said had been perceived as flirtatious. Marrow was just home from the Vietnam-era army. In the racial upheavals that followed, led by black Vietnam veterans, protestors torched much of downtown Oxford, including the huge old wooden tobacco warehouses through which the town’s economic life-blood flowed. The Raleigh News and Observer reported that a large section of town look[ed] like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II.¹⁴

Soon afterward, our family moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I became a member of the state’s first and fleeting generation to experience fully integrated public school systems. A hate group called the Rights of White People rallied in the park across from the school where I attended seventh grade, the year that African American students first attended in large numbers. We could hear them and see their Confederate flags and military weapons. Racially inspired fistfights and even small riots were commonplace for a couple of years. A hard foul on the basketball court or a harsh word in the boys’ bathroom could turn into a melee in seconds. You either ran or fought; the teams were defined by race, and nobody paused to ask whether you wanted to play or what your political opinions were.¹⁵

By comparison, nonviolence seemed something sanctified and golden and, at the same time, almost unimaginable. When I read about Martin Luther King Jr. and what history books seemed to regard as his nonviolent and triumphant crusade, I thrilled to the thought of interracial nonviolent protest as a light shining out from times and places that seemed much less morally complicated than my own—like Birmingham and Selma, for example. This was ridiculous, of course, and rested upon my vast ignorance of what had happened in those cities in the 1960s. Like many white Americans among those Dr. King called people of goodwill, I was searching for a comfortable place in the American race problem where I could rest peaceably and reconcile my heart and my country with a sugarcoated confection of American history. The arc of my moral imagination was long, but it bent toward innocence. Alas, this vision could not bear the slightest contact with the historical record, let alone the fearful rage, ruthless indifference, and backlash politics all around me—which persists to this day.

I was searching for a happier story. But historians have to follow the facts where they lead us. If we detect in ourselves or our colleagues an impulse to shine up the apple, we have to find the self-awareness to ask why that is the case. Historical happy talk means embracing delusions about who we have been, which inevitably lead to delusions about who we are, and inevitably to mistakes as we ponder who we might become. We may as well hide the empty cake plate and expect to lose weight. An invented past can never be used, James Baldwin writes; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.¹⁶

Fortunately, we do not need to invent a past but only to discover certain truths we have forgotten about our own. The young protesters who rose up all over America in the second decade of the twenty-first century have inspired my hopes with their embrace of Ella Baker, another black radical democrat from North Carolina. What historian Barbara Ransby finds in Baker—and what I see in the life of Robert Williams—speaks to their ongoing legacy: I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause, Baker said—facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you can change that system.¹⁷

Williams, though defiant in his embrace of armed self-defense, helped organize a year-long local sit-in movement in Monroe. The dangerous stool sitter bandit, as he jokingly referred to himself, never felt prouder in my life as he walked down Main Street in handcuffs.¹⁸ Nonviolence is a powerful weapon in the struggle against social evil, he conceded in a public debate with pacifists in New York City. It represents the ultimate step in revolution against intolerable oppression, a type of struggle wherein man may make war without debasing himself.¹⁹

Williams obviously supported nonviolent direct action, but he also insisted on flexibility in the freedom struggle.²⁰ Under Baker’s influence, SNCC’s sit-in insurgents went to the rural black South and embraced its warm, respectful, accepting style and substance, including the ubiquitous willingness to protect home and community with guns if necessary. They absorbed and elevated that organizing tradition, in Charles Payne’s phrase, to a new level of political relevance. Williams’s politics resonated well with Baker’s radical, democratic, humanistic worldview, as Ransby terms it. Their political sensibilities were forged in rural North Carolina, on land owned by grandparents born enslaved, and blended with African American race pride, what Williams called armed self-reliance, a fiercely independent black politics, and the possibility of an interracial southern populism.²¹

In North Carolina and elsewhere, these politics were a legacy of black women born in slavery, inspired by Reconstruction dreams, and victorious in the late nineteenth-century interracial Fusion coalitions. They were then robbed and disfranchised by the ruthless violence of the white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 that constructed Jim Crow. From the 1930s through the 1950s, they passed their vision to the coming generations that would topple that social order. These waters remain deeper, their currents more complex, than the phrase civil rights movement can capture. The traditions they carry include many values that later gathered under the rubric of Black Power. These expansive and many-sided visions remain relevant as we face a world gone mad with delusions about race, violence, and democracy. Fortunately, we already carry within our culture and history the tools that we need to refit the old ship of Zion. My basic sense of it, said Ella Baker, has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice. Robert Williams could not have said it any better.²²

NOTES

1. Henry Elwood Harris, The History of Our Family Reunion, 1989, Williams Family Collection, 1; Crusader 1, no. 4 (July 18, 1959): 2; John Herman Williams, interview with author, October 15, 1997.

2. Robert’s wife, Mabel Williams, interviewed Stitt and published excerpts in Crusader 1, no. 2 (July 4, 1959): 4.

3. Robert F. Williams, interview with Cohen, 11, 50–51; Robert F. Williams, interview with author, March 10, 1993. There are no known copies of the People’s Voice, but its existence and its political content are confirmed not only by Williams family sources but also by references in local white newspapers. See The Oldtimer, The Days of the 1910’s and 1920’s Are Recalled, Monroe Enquirer-Journal, September 1974 Historical Edition, 4b. Once available only at the Union County Public Library but more recently accessed on July 19, 2019, at https://weblink.monroenc.org/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=285050&dbid=0&repo=MNRO.

4. Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1–6.

5. Timothy B. Tyson, Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy, Raleigh News and Observer, November 17, 2006. This account rests upon the work of many capable scholars, including Helen Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951); Jeffrey Crow and Robert Durden, Maverick Republican in the Old North State: A Political Biography of Daniel Russell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina: The Black Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); H. Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Rutherford, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1984); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 88–118; David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and LeRae Sikes Umfleet, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2009).

6. For the Josephus Daniels quote, see J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 76.

7. Robert F. Williams, interview with Cohen, 11–12; Robert F. Williams, Someday I’m Going Back South, Daily Worker (Detroit edition), April 9, 1949.

8. Robert F. Williams, Is Violence Necessary to Combat Injustice? For the Positive: Williams Says, ‘We Must Fight Back,’ Liberation (September 1959).

9. Robert F. Williams, Col. Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Sermon Delivered at All Souls Chapel Unitarian Fellowship, Monroe, NC, March 25, 1956, box 3, Robert F. Williams Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Robert F. Williams, interview with Stephanie Banchero, 1997, in possession of the author, 18.

10. LeRoi Jones, Cuba Libre, in Home: Social Essays by LeRoi Jones (New York: William Morrow, 1962), 11–62; Crusader 1, no. 50 (June 11, 1960): 7–8.

11. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 112.

12. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani & Morsell, 1962), 57–58, 58–60, 86, 117–18, 122–23. See also Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 90–136, 281, 282–89.

13. For the Meredith March, see Adam Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). See also Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 207–28; and Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 132–49, among others.

14. Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004), 220–23.

15. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, 258–59.

16. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; New York: Vintage, 1993), 81.

17. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1.

18. Crusader 1, no. 46 (May 14, 1960): 1–2.

19. This debate took place at Community Church in New York City and was titled Should Negroes Meet Violence with Violence?, with Williams arguing in the affirmative. See George Weissman to Carl Braden, October 20, 1959, box 49, Carl and Anne Braden Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Williams reports on the debate himself in Crusader 1, no. 15 (October 3, 1959). FBI agents describe it in Memo, October 17, 1961, Robert F. Williams Federal Bureau of Investigation Subject File, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

20. Williams, Negroes with Guns, 40.

21. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 79–80.

22. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 93.

Radio Free Dixie

Introduction:

On Trembling Earth

The childhood of Southerners, white and colored, Lillian Smith wrote in 1949, has been lived on trembling earth.¹ For one black boy in the small town of Monroe, North Carolina, the first tremor came on a warm September afternoon in 1936.

Emma Williams had sent her eleven-year-old son, Robert, to the post office downtown shortly after one of the regular Friday prayer meetings that met at her home. He was a thick-chested, round-faced, almost cherubic youngster with chestnut-brown skin and a ready smile. What a Friend We Have in Jesus still echoed in his ears as he walked from Boyte Street toward the railroad. As Robert crossed the gravel railroad bed, he met a black man walking the tracks, clutching a pint of whiskey and singing, Trouble in mind, I’m blue / But I won’t be blue always / Because the sun is gonna shine in my back door someday. The boy smiled to himself and headed on toward the courthouse square in the middle of Monroe, not suspecting that what he would witness there would shake his whole world.²

Walking down Main Street, Williams watched a white police officer accost an African American woman. The policeman, Jesse Alexander Helms Sr., an admirer once recalled, had the sharpest shoe in town and he didn’t mind using it. His son, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, remembered Big Jesse as a six-foot, two hundred pound gorilla—when he said ‘smile,’ I smiled.³ Eleven-year-old Robert Williams looked on in terror as Big Jesse flattened the black woman with his huge fists, then dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey. Williams recalled her tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete. The memory of this violent spectacle and the laughter of white bystanders haunted him for decades. Perhaps the deferential way that the African American men on the street responded was even more deeply troubling. The emasculated black men hung their heads in shame and hurried silently [away] from the cruelly bizarre sight, Williams recalled.⁴

Knowledge of such scenes was as commonplace as coffee cups in the American South that had recently helped to elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the rest of his life, Robert Williams repeated this searing story to friends, readers, listeners, reporters, and historians. In the late 1950s, Williams used the story to help inspire African American domestic workers and military veterans of Monroe to build the most militant chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States. He preached it from street corner stepladders to eager crowds on 7th Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem and to Muslim congregants in Malcolm X’s Temple Number 7. He bore witness to its brutality in labor halls and college auditoriums across the United States. It contributed to the fervor of his widely published debate with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 and fueled his hesitant bids for leadership in the black freedom struggle. Its merciless truths must have tightened in his fingers on the night in 1961 when he fled Ku Klux Klan terrorists and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dragnet with his wife and two small children, a machine gun slung over one shoulder. Williams revisited the bitter memory on platforms that he shared with Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. He told it over Radio Free Dixie, his regular program on Radio Havana from 1962 to 1965, and retold it from Hanoi in broadcasts directed to African American soldiers in Vietnam. It echoed from transistor radios in Watts and from gigantic speakers in Tiananmen Square. The childhood story opens the pages of his autobiography, While God Lay Sleeping, which Williams completed just before his death on October 15, 1996.

To be sure, one moment in one life rarely changes history. But we can find distilled in the anguish of that eleven year old historical realities that shaped one of the South’s most dynamic race rebels and thousands of other black insurgents: African American cultural resilience; white racial violence; the perilous intersection of race, gender, and sexualized brutality; the persistent national failure, a century after the fall of slavery, to enforce equal protection of the laws; and the physical and psychological necessity for African American self-defense. That moment marked Robert Williams’s life, and his life marked the African American freedom movement in the United States.

This is the story of one of the most influential African American radicals of a generation that toppled Jim Crow, created a new black sense of self, and forever altered the arc of American history. Robert F. Williams shadows these pages, a troubled intellectual, a fiery prophet, a courageous grassroots leader whose outbursts sometimes came back to haunt him, but the inner wellsprings of his mind and spirit are probably not to be found here. Though this is a biography, it is as much the story of a political movement—and a political moment—as it is the portrait of a political man. The life at its center is as important for the truths it reveals as for the things it accomplished.

The life of Robert Williams teaches us that the African American freedom movement had its origins in long-standing traditions of resistance to white supremacy. His story underlines the decisive racial significance of World War II. Both his victories and his defeats reveal the central importance of the Cold War to the African American freedom movement, giving black Southerners leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world. Likewise, these struggles reveal the crucial impact of sexuality and gender in racial politics. His defiance—and that of thousands of other black activists—testifies to the fact that, throughout the civil rights era, black Southerners stood prepared to defend home and family by force. The life of Robert F. Williams 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.

As if to dramatize the point, Rosa Parks, whose refusal to surrender a bus seat in Montgomery in 1955 had come to symbolize the nonviolent civil rights movement, mounted the pulpit of a church in Monroe, North Carolina, on October 22, 1996. The body of Robert F. Williams lay before her, dressed in a gray suit given to him by Mao Zedong, his casket draped in the red, black, and green Pan-African flag favored by the followers of Marcus Garvey. She was delighted, Rosa Parks told the hundreds of mourners, to find herself at the funeral of a black leader who had died peacefully in his bed. She told the congregation that she and those who walked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama had always admired Robert Williams for his courage and his commitment to freedom. The work that he did should go down in history and never be forgotten.⁵

1:

The Legacies

The sturdy frame house stood like a haven on a hill, two stories and seven rooms overlooking the dusty lane called Boyte Street that ran through the heart of Newtown, a segregated shanty-town about a mile across the tracks from the business district of Monroe. On February 26, 1925, Emma Carter Williams gave birth to the fourth of five children born in that house and named him Robert.

Like the other houses in the neighborhood, the Williams homeplace had an outhouse in the back, fetid in the summer and frigid in the winter. Women born into slavery still tended vegetable gardens along the street where young Rob grew up. Smoke from the locomotives of the Seaboard Air Line Railway lingered over the clusters of wooden frame houses. On hot summer nights when the windows were open, the tinkling of a juke-joint piano drifted across the honeysuckle that climbed in the hollows. On Sunday mornings, gospel choirs lifted up anthems of redemption that echoed through the scrub oaks around Elizabeth Baptist Church. Most black families in Union County labored as sharecroppers or paid rent to white landlords, but thanks to John Williams’s position as a boiler washer with the Seaboard Air Line, he and his wife, Emma Williams, were fortunate enough to own their home. Seven of us, five children and my mother and father, Williams remembered, and this house belonged to us.¹

Monroe, the small Southern county seat where Robert Williams entered the world, was home to 6,100 people, of whom just under a third were black. Monroe was a good town to grow up in, former mayor J. Raymond Shute recalled. Born in 1904, Shute descended from one of the town’s leading white merchant families, traveled widely, and held liberal opinions. In the decades after World War II, he became an integrationist and one of Robert Williams’s closest allies for a time. Eventually, not even his wealth and prominence would prevent white terrorists from firing guns into Ray Shute’s house to punish him for his heresy. Still, Shute remembered the years before the war with warm nostalgia. There were no social problems that were of any significance, the genial businessman recalled, and no bustle and hustle of the larger city. Everybody knew everybody, and life was good.²

Monroe’s most prominent white conservative, born in 1921, waxed even more nostalgic. I don’t believe I could ever be dissatisfied with Monroe, Jesse Helms wrote in one of his 1956 newspaper columns. I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades.³ Helms cherished his first-grade teacher, Miss Lura Heath, bless her heart, and called her my favorite unreconstructed Confederate.⁴ Miss Heath inculcated in her students views that originated with her father, the Major, who had fought for the Confederacy and later decried the trend toward socialism in this country and the political manipulation of minority groups. Helms would echo this political legacy in his columns that appeared in the journal of the White Citizens’ Council, in his Viewpoint broadcasts on WRAL-TV, and finally from a seat in the U.S. Senate. Nostalgia for the Lost Cause and fondness for the memory of the mythic Old South were central to the political culture of white Monroe. I shall never forget, Helms wrote, the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the courthouse square monument on Confederate Memorial Day.⁵

White citizens who remembered Monroe in the 1920s, one journalist reported, could count five churches, four Republicans, one pool hall and one whorehouse.⁶ The town’s two or three police officers carried keys to Coke Helms’s restaurant on Main Street so that they could help themselves to a midnight snack and leave money on the counter.⁷ White citizens who violated minor ordinances dropped by the office of the clerk of court at their convenience to plead guilty and pay their fines.⁸ White children who lost a dog felt no compunction about calling the mayor, who did not consider impromptu marriage counseling beyond the scope of his duties.⁹ The Chamber of Commerce claimed that Monroe’s lighting plant is one of the most efficient, and illuminates many blocks of white way and even boasted that there were seven miles of paved streets in Monroe in 1925 and that certain of these were paralleled by cement sidewalks. These sidewalks, like so many things in Monroe, did not extend to the black community.¹⁰

Dotted with small farms, more than half of which were operated by sharecroppers and tenant farmers, Union County had a population of 40,979 in 1930. The census that year officially recognized 10,048 inhabitants as descendants of the 1,982 slaves and 51 free blacks reported in the 1850 tally.¹¹ Sweet Union, as North Carolina’s Governor Thomas Bickett had dubbed his home county, rolled down across the peach orchards of the Piedmont just southeast of Charlotte. It jutted into one South Carolina county, Lancaster, bordered on another, Chesterfield, and almost touched a third, York. Union County’s streams had been unsuitable for water power or navigation, and its sandy soil was not the best farmland. Gold mines that had played out before the Civil War promised much but delivered little. The Monroe Chamber of Commerce, hoping to attract outside investors, claimed in 1902 that cotton farmers in Union County frequently found gold, pick[ing] up pure nuggets in the branches or on the hillsides.¹²

Most residents of Union County, black and white, continued to try to scratch a living from the earth, but few mentioned gathering gold or much of anything else in the process. By 1925, soil depletion, boll weevils, and plummeting prices had turned King Cotton into threadbare royalty all across the upper South.¹³ Ain’t nothing but cotton, one black citizen reported, but that was a slave thing, there wasn’t no money in that. White farmers fared only a little better, even though many more of them owned the land they tilled. The first and only year my wife and I farmed, we sold cotton for five and a half cents, recalled Claude Thomas, a white sharecropper in Union County. We didn’t make enough to pay the fertilizer bill and eat. I figured it out like this: wherever I would go, whatever I did, I couldn’t make it any worse than this. Just working like convicts and not making a living.¹⁴

Like hundreds of other hard-pressed farmers in Union County, Claude Thomas ended up in a textile mill. By the time that Robert Williams was born, the Southern piedmont had surpassed New England as the world’s leading producer of yarn and cloth.¹⁵ Hundreds of white men, women, and children moved to houses on Factory Hill and labored in the mills. Despite long hours at low pay, these jobs furnished almost the only refuge for the white laboring people of the South from the strong competition of cheap negro labor, one mill owner wrote. The powerful sexual taboo against bringing black men into contact with white women, he argued, made it wrong to work negroes in association with white women and children. Except for a handful of janitorial jobs, the cotton mills remained lily white.¹⁶

The celebration of white supremacy by the mill owners did not prevent conflict. From 1919 to 1929, violent strikes pitted piedmont millworkers against their employers in conflicts that featured terrorism sponsored by the owners and what Raleigh News and Observer columnist Nell Battle Lewis called lawlessness on the part of the law. Gun battles in nearby Gastonia killed both the chief of police and one of the local strike leaders. In Marion, special deputies opened fire on pickets, killing six strikers and wounding twenty-five more. Authorities arrested Fred Beal, the lead organizer for the National Textile Workers Union, and held him in the Monroe city jail.¹⁷

Though the millhands were white, mill owners and white politicians charged that Communists had targeted the cotton mills in order to advance their radical agenda of race-mixing and social overthrow. David Clark of the Southern Textile Bulletin wrote that the Communists may harangue until judgement day, but they can never convince the cotton mill operators of the South that negroes are their equals. Though Clark spoke for the mill owners, his assessment provides what amounts to a tragic summary of Southern labor history. Karl Marx exaggerated only slightly when he claimed that these hardworking people had nothing to lose but their chains. The links that white supremacy had hammered into those chains bound white working people in Union County not only to their poverty but to an ineffably deep sense of themselves as white Southerners. The bloody history of race and class conflict in the piedmont made it clear that white supremacy and the bitter legacy of slavery divided workers far more powerfully than self-interest could unite them; it was a lesson that Robert Williams learned over and over again.¹⁸

The Williams family was more prosperous than many of the white families in Monroe, but still there were many hardships. When he was about two years old, little Rob contracted pneumonia. Dr. Hubert Creft, the local black physician, thought that it was impossible for me to live, Williams remembered. My mother refused to give up. Emma Williams moved the small iron bed out into the living room beside the fireplace and nursed her son night and day. After two weeks, according to family lore, Dr. Creft heard that the toddler was still alive and dropped by to see how this miracle had come to pass. Emma Williams told the physician that each time the little boy stopped breathing, she would take me and shake me. And then she would start praying. Decades later, Williams only faintly remembered the rancid smell of castor oil and the apples that she fed him during his illness. But the vision of a mother’s unrelenting love, burnished by her steadfast faithfulness to her family, shone brightly in his mind.¹⁹

Emma Williams was a deeply devout Christian and raised her children in the Elizabeth Baptist Church. The church infused Robert Williams with a powerful and distinctive Afro-Christianity whose spiritual essence remained long after he had parted ways with its cautious politics and conservative theology. She always taught us to help people, Robert Williams said, to give them whatever assistance we could, when people were hungry and homeless and that type of thing. The Elizabeth Baptist congregation provided a strong sense of community and a nurturing place for the Williams children to discover and display their talents. We used to get up and recite speeches and verse, Robert recalled. He enjoyed the Easter egg hunts and covered-dish suppers and relished the music. At revival meetings they would have all kinds of singing and people would get happy, and they would sing and shout, said Williams. He never forgot the power of this religious experience and the importance of this spiritual community in his early life.

But for Williams the black church rarely confronted the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South in a way that transcended the politics of accommodation. This preacher would preach and start very emotional sermons, but didn’t say a thing about racial problems, he reflected. Over-simplifying matters somewhat, he claimed that most black preachers didn’t dare speak against the white people because some of the white people contributed money to the churches. Williams never attempted to make the black church the cornerstone of his racial activism, not because he rejected its moral teachings but because, in his eyes, the church did not live up to its own professed ideals. Williams objected to racial injustice out of an African American spiritual sensibility, even though he usually did not articulate it in religious language and often inveighed against the church.²⁰

My father didn’t go to church too much, only occasionally, Williams said. John Williams would always say he was tired. Robert’s favorite uncle, Charlie Williams, spoke more bluntly. You niggers are always on your knees praying, Charlie would say, only half-jokingly. If you believe in God, and God is so good, why don’t you pray to God to free us? Black folks in Monroe accused Charlie Williams of being an atheist, Robert said, and then in a small town it wasn’t considered the proper thing to be an atheist. Emma Williams didn’t like for me to be with him very much, said Robert. His Uncle Charlie jabbed at organized religion in a joking way, Robert recalled, but [Mother] took it very seriously. Plus the fact that he used to drink what they called ‘home brew,’ and she found out that he had been giving me some of it.²¹

If Uncle Charlie liked to pull a cork, he was a handsome and dapper iconoclast, sharp edged and clear eyed, with a penetrating gaze that flashed both insight and anger. A veteran of the First World War, Charlie Williams had come home disillusioned that the war to make the world safe for democracy had done nothing to expand democracy for the black citizens of Monroe. He attended college at Florida A&M and law school at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Setting aside the larger opportunities that might have opened for him outside the South, Charlie Williams came home to teach school in Monroe. Rob’s uncle was instrumental in this community, Annie Bell Cherry, a longtime family friend, remembered.²²

Once when a federal agency was conducting typing tests for young women to work in Washington, D.C., Uncle Charlie apparently carted his typewriter and a female cousin to the place where the local tests were given. She had been very reluctant, the story goes, partly because she could not even type. The woman waited anxiously while she listened to Williams put up a fierce fight for her to take the test. As they walked away, Robert said, "she asked him nervously, ‘What if they had agreed for me to take the test? You know I can’t