ABSTRACT
Robert F. Williams was the president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP in 1959, when he was thrust into the national spotlight. In his response to the acquittal of a white man who had assaulted and attempted to rape a local black woman, Williams publicly asserted to black folks that “we must be willing to kill if necessary. We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court and it becomes necessary to punish them ourselves. In the future we are going to have to try and convict these people on the spot.” 1 In classic “old-school Negro” form, the NAACP, under the leadership of Roy Wilkens (Who? as my students would say), moved to suspend Williams from his post. By the summer of 1960, Williams, by then the most radical voice within a burgeoning protest movement, was a fugitive, in flight in response to trumped-up charges of kidnapping. Seemingly “silenced,” Williams and his wife, Mabel, reemerged in Cuba as the guest of Fidel Castro. It is there in Havana, Cuba, that Williamss voice would be heard every Friday night at 11:00 as the host of the “guerilla” radio broadcast Radio Free Dixie. Initially broadcast from a five-thousand-watt station, Williams and his wife could be heard as far away as Seattle, Washington. According to Williams, the program was “aimed at the south primarily … because the black people in the south didn't have any voice. This was really the first true radio where the black people could say what they want to say and didn't have to worry about sponsors, they didn't have to worry about censors.” 2 Williams was supported in his efforts of resistance by friends, including poet Amiri Baraka, who sent the couple copies of new music. In one broadcast in 1966, Mabel Williams suggested that black soul singers were the “epic poets” of the black movement. Williams's Radio Free Dixie (also the title of Timothy Tyson's straight gangsta biography of Williams) remains one of the greatest examples of the power of black radio.
