Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Summary
This book examines the life of Robert Williams, an African American radical that Timothy Tyson argues “toppled Jim Crow, created a new black sense of self, and forever altered the arc of American history.” Robert Williams’ life reveals that the African American freedom movement “had its origins in long-standing traditions of resistance to white supremacy.” His victories and defeats reflect the importance of World War II and the Cold War to the freedom movement, as it gave black Southerners “leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world.” (3) Tyson argues that “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 question for African American freedom.” (3) Williams’ book, Negroes with Guns, became “the single most important influence on Huey P. Newton” and the Black Panther Party; yet, Williams in the early 1960s had already influenced many within SNCC and CORE that by 1962 many CORE field secretaries rarely talked about non-violence (290-1). When Williams returned to the United States in the late 1960s, he found the violent rhetoric of the Black Power Movement contrary to his own beliefs. He believed in the constitution and saw the weapon as the last alternative, rather than the first. Thus, the story of Robert F. Williams shows how the popular narrative of the civil rights movement characterized as nonviolent prior to 1965 “obscures the full complexity of racial politics.” (307) All of the elements most associated with Black Power “were already present in the small towns and rural communities of the Southern where the civil rights movement was born.” (308) Black political action, cultural pride, and what Williams called armed self-reliance “operated side by side in the South, in uneasy partnership with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.” (308) *Black militancy and the moral example of non-violence was always in tension and in tandem throughout the black freedom struggle.