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THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION Freedom Fighter, Revolutionary, and
Propagandist: Rediscovering an African American Hero
Diane S. HopeTimothy B. Tyson.
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 308 pages. Notes,
bibliography, index, photographs. $29.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). On August 8, 1963, “a highly unusual . . . formal statement” by Mao Zedong was distributed internationally by Hsinhua news agency. Reporting on the front page of the New York Times, Tad Szulc wrote, “Experts in Chinese affairs here said that as far as it was known, this was the first time that Mr. Mao had issued a formal statement over his signature” (1963). The New York Times headlined the story, “ANTIWHITE DRIVE BY PEKING IS SEEN”, and described Mao’s statement as “the kickoff of a racial campaign . . . to make the leadership of colored peoples in the world one of the mainstays of [China’s] foreign policy” (Szulc, 1963, p.1). Aimed at the Soviet Union as well as the West, Mao’s statement coincided with mass demonstrations in China denouncing the Kennedy Administration for “fascist atrocities” against “American Negroes” and linked racial discrimination to class struggle worldwide: I call upon the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened personages of all colors in the world—white, black, yellow, brown and so forth—to unite against the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and to support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. (Szulc, 1963, p. 21) As newsworthy as the signed declaration was Mao Zedong’s claim that the message was inspired by “two requests from Robert F. Williams” (Szulc, 1963, p. 21). Williams, a 38-year-old African American, had long insisted that ‘Negroes’ had the right to armed self-defense and had acted on that belief against the Klan. He left North Carolina in fear of his life in 1961. Escaping to Cuba, Williams learned of an FBI manhunt for him in a poster that described him as an armed and dangerous “schizophrenic.” Williams lived in Cuba for five years before moving to China in 1966. He returned to the United States in 1969 as the only passenger in a TWA jet to face FBI charges of kidnapping a white couple in Monroe, North Carolina. Shortly after his return, Williams obtained a Ford Foundation-funded position at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan and briefed Henry Kissinger’s state department on Chinese diplomacy. The charges against him were eventually dropped. The horrendous events leading up to Williams’s flight from the United States, his sojourn as the cold war “guest” of both Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong, and the conditions of his return establish him as an especially important figure in U. S. history. Yet Williams is frequently ignored in what Timothy B Tyson aptly calls “our cinematic confections of the civil rights movement” (1997/98, p. 14). In Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, Tyson focuses on Williams’s story of resistance and leadership in the United States prior to his life as an expatriate. It is a story of bold resistance to the Klan and of wide support for Williams’s call to armed self-defense—a story largely overlooked in civil rights histories. Tyson’s work seeks to demythologize conventional histories of U.S. freedom movements and to restore Williams as a significant figure of African American resistance. Using Williams’s life to illustrate his claims, Tyson’s primary argument is that historians too frequently separate the “civil rights movement” from the ‘black power movement’ and in so doing ignore “long-standing traditions of resistance to white supremacy” (3). Tyson presents Williams as a charismatic hero born into a tradition of resistance whose prideful “manhood” propelled him onto the world stage after his return from military service. Williams’s personal and public reaction to the injustice of segregation anticipated the popularized rhetoric of black power by many years. Tyson documents “the central importance of the Cold War . . . [and] . . . the crucial impact of sexuality and gender in racial politics” as “truths” revealed by Williams’s experiences (3). As a boy, Williams witnessed a public and brutal humiliation of an African American woman with her dress pulled over her head dragged raw through the streets by Monroe police officer Jesse Alexander Helms, father of the senator. “The memory of this violent spectacle and the laughter of white bystanders haunted [Williams] for decades,” writes Tyson (2). Williams’s own bitter recollection reveals his life long attitude towards male passivity: “The emasculated black men hung their heads in shame and hurried silently [away] from the cruelly bizarre sight” (2). In 1958, when two boys, black children aged 8 and 10, were summarily jailed in Monroe for having been kissed by a 7 year old white girl, the African American community exploded in outrage and turned to Williams for leadership. With the help of the Socialist Workers Party, Williams made the infamous “kissing case” an international issue. Despite the initial failure of either the state or the national NAACP to assist his efforts, the branch president in Monroe became a determined one-man press office for the cause of freeing the Monroe boys. Throwing all of his energies into the campaign, Robert Williams issued press releases, called the television networks, hounded the national wire services, and sent yet another angry telegram to President Eisenhower. (110) The Militant, SWP’s newspaper, “carried dozens of articles about Williams and Monroe—twenty-five on the ‘kissing case’ alone” (Tyson, 1998, p. 554). Tyson points out that Williams did not share the national NAACP’s reluctance to tackle “ sex-cases,” nor was he particularly sympathetic with Roy Wilkins’ public anticommunist stance (Tyson, 1998, p. 556). Williams had few reservations about tactics and few allies in his fervent devotion to the elimination of racial injustice. Especially outraged by a system that sanctioned sexual terror and the casual degradation of black women by white men, Williams again made national headlines after two white men were acquitted (both on the same day, in the same Monroe court) in two separate cases of assault against black women. In the case of Lewis Medlin, accused of beating and sexually assaulting a pregnant Mary Ruth Reid in front of her children, the winning attorney argued in defense that Medlin had been “drunk and having a little fun” (Tyson, 1997/98, p.2). Since Williams had persuaded his community to abandon a violent act of revenge in favor of seeking justice in the courts, he describes his “shame” as the courtroom crowded with African American women exploded in rage (148-149). In a highly publicized press release that would result in his public suspension from the NAACP, Williams declared, “it was time to meet violence with violence” (“NAACP Leader,” 1959 p. 22; Tyson, 1999, p. 149). That Williams was already a controversial president of the local NAACP, an army veteran, and the leader of a National Rifle Association rifle club emboldened his protest and lent credibility to his threat. It was 1959. Radio Free Dixie documents Williams’s turbulent years as the leader of the local NAACP in his hometown of Monroe from 1957 to 1961; Williams’s own voice dramatizes Tyson’s account. Quoting generously from Williams’s unpublished papers and from interviews, Tyson details Williams’s numerous confrontations with local segregationists, his insistence on the right of armed self-defense, his subsequent battle with the NAACP, and his public challenge to Martin Luther King’s strategy of non-violent resistance. A final confrontation with the Klan forced Williams to flee from Monroe with his wife Mabel and their small children, “a machine gun slung over one shoulder” (Tyson, 1999, p. 2). Writing in the Journal of American History (1998), Professor Tyson explores the apparent dilemma in establishing Williams’s place in the history of African American movements: “A careful sifting of historical evidence from across the South reveals the widely held distinction between the civil rights movement and Black Power as largely an intellectual architecture of political convenience” (p 544). While standard histories and popular media create two differing movements distinguished by chronology, geography, strategies, and leaders, Tyson argues that Williams exemplifies a tradition of southern African American leaders who resisted the abuses of violent segregationists with armed self defense, even during the era of non-violent civil disobedience. [Williams’] 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 (3). Histories focusing on the “civil rights” movement generally emphasize the years 1954 through 1968 and follow significant legal victories, as well as the dramatic mass actions of protest, sit-ins, and freedom rides carried out in the South. Such studies often ignore Williams (and others) who worked outside the civil rights establishment of the NAACP and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council. Movement studies focusing on “black power” generally start chronologies after 1965, long after Williams left the United States for Cuba, and focus frequently on urban violence. As examples, of “some of the best” texts that make no mention of Williams, Tyson (1998, p. 542) cites David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (1990) and, notably, Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 (1988). Branch terms his Pulitzer Prize winning study a “narrative biographical history” and argues that, “King’s life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years (xii).” In so far as Branch is right, his omission of any discussion or reference to Robert F. Williams is indeed mystifying. Tyson’s work establishes that Williams was a public irritant to King’s rise in prominence, and perhaps a serious challenge to the fragile structure of non-violent coalitions. As early as 1957, Williams and his “rifle club” of black veterans greeted an armed Ku Klux Klan motorcade with “a hail of disciplined gunfire” when the Klan attacked the home of a fellow NAACP official after attempts to integrate the local swimming pool (Tyson, 1998, p. 551). In 1959, when Williams used the media to claim the right of armed self-defense, The New York Times carried a number of stories about the NAACP ouster of Williams (“NAACP Unit leader,” 1959; NAACP upholds stand,” 1959; “NAACP action upheld,” 1959). Tyson reports, “When the words, ‘meet violence with violence’ arrived by courier at national NAACP headquarters in New York, Roy Wilkins immediately telephoned Robert Williams and recorded their conversation” (150). In Chapter 6, titled “The Sissy Race of All Mankind,” a quote from Williams, Tyson describes Williams’s outrage at Wilkins’s approach to Klan violence. Williams appeared at the 50th annual convention of the NAACP to publicly fight his suspension: “We as men should stand up as men and protect our women and children, . . . I am a man and I will walk upright as a man should. . . . I WILL NOT CRAWL!” (p. 164, original caps). Martin Luther King was one of 40 speakers to denounce him and support Roy Wilkins. With Conrad Lynn, Williams debated Bayard Rustin (King’s close confidant), David Dellinger, and A.J. Muste on the strategy of non-violent resistance. The same year, in two issues of Liberation magazine (September/October, 1959), Williams and King wrote dueling essays on the subjects of armed self- defense and non-violent resistance. King discussed Williams’s position in his Liberation essay and was careful to acknowledge the appeal of Williams’ argument ( p.6). But Williams continued to agitate: In June of 1961, learning that King refused to accompany a group of freedom riders, Williams published in The Crusader the text of a telegram he sent to King: . . . RIDE THE BUS AS THE STUDENTS HAVE ASKED YOU TO. IF YOU LACK THE COURAGE, REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE VANGUARD. I PERSONALLY CHALLENGE YOU TO RIDE FOR FREEDOM. NOW IS THE TIME FOR TRUE LEADERS TO TAKE TO THE FIELD OF BATTLE.
Even after Williams fled to Cuba in 1962, he continued to refute King by reprinting King’s “The Social Organization of Non-Violence”(1959) as an introductory point of departure to Negroes with Guns (1962). Declaring that “the truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies,” Branch (1988, p. xii) describes his approach to a history with King at the center. There are only speculative explanations for Branch’s omission of Williams. It is quite possible that FBI files on Williams, like those of Stanley Levison, were closed to Branch. Williams himself may have contributed to Branch’s blackout. After his return from China, in the early 1970s, Williams politely refused to give approval for a publication that might call attention to his past, as he wanted to “live quietly” in Michigan without publicity during the legal battle for his possible extradition to North Carolina (Hope, personal interview). For whatever reasons Branch chose to omit Williams from King’s history, Tyson is right to insist that the silence contributes to a collective memory loss. Without the presence of Robert F. Williams and others similarly ignored, we are left with a mythical and distorted understanding of the “civil rights era,” bereft of diverse and concurrent strategies of resistance to white supremacy. Although Williams is sometimes associated with “black power” movement studies and Negroes with Guns is often excerpted in anthologies (Bush, 1999; Katope & Zolbrod, 1970; Franklin, 1971), Tyson argues that Williams’s significance is understated. He cites David Levering Lewis, Herbert Shapiro, and Harold Cruse as scholars who discuss Williams as “a harbinger of clashes to come” (1998, pp. 543-545). But there is little question that Williams was more than a forerunner to black power advocates; through his writings, speeches and reputation he was an influential model for those who would have a dramatic impact on racial politics. Williams spoke frequently at Temple no. 7 in New York where Malcolm X was minister. Malcolm said that Williams was “just a couple of years ahead of his time; . . . and he will be given credit in history for the stand that he took prematurely” (quoted in Tyson, 1999, p. 297). Although absent from the United States for eight crucial years of racial struggle, Williams was not silent and his writings and voice were known in African American communities. In 1962, from Cuba, he published the puissant Negroes With Guns, and from Radio Havana during 1962-1965 broadcast “Radio Free Dixie,” the title source of Tyson’s work. Taped copies of the show were circulated on both coasts of the United States (285-288). In 1968, from China, Williams wrote and distributed Listen, Brother, an anti-war pamphlet aimed at black soldiers fighting in Vietnam, and beamed occasional radio broadcasts from Hanoi. And throughout his exile Williams continued regular publication of The Crusader, the newsletter he started in Monroe, N.C. in 1959. Both Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panthers, credit Williams with influence (298). Seale claims Williams gave him the understanding that “every black man who has a shotgun in his home has a right to defend himself ” (Hampton and Fayer, 1990, p. 356). Eldridge Cleaver reported that Williams was one of the three most influential men in his life (298). Lesser known resistance figures who attest to the far-reaching influence of Williams include Martin Sostre, owner of a radical bookstore in Buffalo, New York (Schaich & Hope 1977). Sostre was convicted of a drug possession charge and unjustly imprisoned in 1967, two weeks after Buffalo’s urban black ghetto burst into riot. The one witness to testify later recanted and admitted he had perjured himself in a deal with the police. Sostre was granted clemency by Governor Hugh Carey on Christmas Eve, 1975. In letters written from prison Sostre wrote of the centrality of Negroes with Guns and the Crusader pamphlets in his efforts to create “freedom fighters” from his community bookstore (Schaich & Hope, p. 285). For Sostre, Williams was a hero whose life was a testament to the right of self-defense, the power of resistance, and the possibility of survival. Tyson builds a strong case that Williams deserves a major place in the history of African American freedom movements for his early and heroic insistence on the right of armed self-defense and his refusal to compromise on issues of injustice. But there are other sides to Williams, explored less fully in Radio Free Dixie. The Crusader writings and cartoons became increasingly militant as Williams moved from Monroe to Cuba and finally to China. Frustrated by his distance from the United States, Williams espoused a didactic and frequently graphic rhetoric of black revolution while desperately wanting to return home (Hope, 1970). Tyson writes, “Like the Black Power movement itself, as Williams got farther from his roots in the South, he sometimes drifted into apocalyptic visions of black revolution” (1999, p. 299). By 1967, Williams was writing detailed instructions for sabotage. He provided long dissertations on how to cripple the “automated society” of urban cities in the United States through organized “guerrilla warfare” with directions for the making of Molotov cocktails and procedural outlines for the military organization of “fire teams” (Williams, “U.S.A.,” 1967, pp. 1-2). In an echo of the extremism of the times, Lewis M. Killian (1968) concluded that urban disorders gave an aura of authenticity to Williams’s visions. “Every time a Negro throws a Molotov cocktail in a Negro ghetto, every time the National Guard must be called in to put down a riot, the credibility of Williams’ appeal increases” (164). Williams’s revolutionary tracts vibrated with a militaristic romanticism regarding the reality of an African American revolution (Hope, 1970). Indeed, Tyson acknowledges a disturbing strain of machismo that runs through Williams’s historic justification for armed self-defense. Tyson’s book includes photographs of Williams with his guns, with Mabel, teaching her to shoot, of his family and their rifles, and of community leaders exhibiting the weapons used to resist the Klan. The images are antecedents to the Black Panthers’ costumed theatrics of revolution and reflect the soldier’s faith in weapons as identity. Although Williams saw vast differences between his “veterans who had been trained to use military equipment,” and “a lot of teenagers . . . who get combat boots and berets and they grab a gun and go out and say ‘Off the Pig.’” (Tyson, 1999, p. 304), at least some of those booted young men found their inspiration in Williams’s life and words. With Clayborne Carson, Tyson laments the “illusory revolutionary rhetoric” espoused in the late 1960s, and the deadly force that suppressed the militants (299). Williams himself acknowledged to a reporter that had he not left the country he would be dead. Radio Free Dixie unquestionably supports Tyson’s thesis that Williams’s militant role in the “civil rights” era is central to the emergence of “black power.” But Williams belongs in our histories for reasons beyond these. Regrettably it is only in his concluding chapter that Tyson analyzes yet another important dimension of Williams’ life in the wider context of the Cold War. Throughout the text, Tyson cites Williams’s role in manipulating international media politics, yet he does not explore the full impact of Williams’s role as an advocate for racial justice during the Cold War: The story of Robert Williams’s years abroad—in Cuba in the years following the Cuban Revolution, in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, in China during the Cultural Revolution, to say nothing of his travels in Africa—would make an interesting book in itself. But such a work would be more about the many-sided international complexities of the Cold War than about Williams himself or the African American freedom struggle. (300) But Williams as propagandist is worthy of our serious attention. Like Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Williams understood the power of the international press. Unafraid of the taint of communism, Williams early used the cold war to intensify the fight against segregation. Tyson reviews and details Williams’s support and fundraising among New York intellectuals and dissidents, (black and white), who found a just cause in the struggles of Monroe, N.C. The FBI also took an interest in Williams and his association with known socialists, nationalists, and communists. (208-209). Williams’s relationship to Castro marked him an easy target for the FBI. He twice visited Cuba in 1960, and he and Castro enjoyed a relationship of mutual exploitation in Cold War propaganda efforts. Yet the excesses of rhetorical hyperbole always punctured the effect of Williams’s pragmatism. In an August 13 issue of The Crusader, after his return from a Cuban visit, Williams drew a picture of Castro looking remarkably Christ-like, with the written legend, “Fidel Castro: Spirit of Christ” ( p. 1). A few weeks later he wrote, “ I consider it the greatest honor of my life to have heard the greatest humanitarian leader of this age deliver the new Sermon on the Mount” (“Sierra Maestra,” p. 1). When Williams escaped to Cuba he used “Radio Free Dixie” to continue his persuasive campaign for justice in the American South. The show, a program mix of news, music, inspiration, readings, and editorial comment, found an avid audience of African Americans, to the consternation of the FBI (287). Williams wrote, “This was really the first true radio where the black people could say what they want to say and they didn’t have to worry about sponsors, they didn’t have to worry about censors” (288). Each show ended with Mabel Williams’s sign-off: “ You are tuned to Radio Free Dixie, from Havana, Cuba, where integration is an accomplished fact” (Tyson, 1999, p. 286). Not until Williams experienced Cuba’s color-based racism for himself did his enthusiasm for Cuba and Castro diminish. “I find many of [the Cuban Communists and Communist Party USA members in Cuba] to be very notorious racists” (294). Williams always found issue with Marxism for subsuming race to class and maintained his position that, “I am not cut out to be an Uncle Tom no matter who it’s for” (294). Williams’s career of resistance, his revolutionary rhetoric, and his prolific propaganda are most astounding when placed in the context of his final negotiations with Richard Nixon’s State Department. In 1969, in a quiet agreement with Federal authorities, Williams and his lawyer were flown home to the United States as the only passengers in a TWA jet (Johnson, p. 1). Through Allen S. Whiting, a former State Department official, Williams briefed Henry Kissinger on the “pitfalls” of diplomacy during China’s Cultural Revolution (Tyson, 1999, p. 303). That Williams was able to bargain his way home attests to the sophistication of his understanding of diplomatic relations, the cold war, and the politics of race. Tyson only hints at the possible deals and negotiations that enabled Williams, a FBI fugitive and paper-revolutionary, to end up as a funded China consultant to Kissinger, but it is a story worth our knowing. Tyson has written an informative and overdue history of part of the life of Robert F. Williams and his heroic role in resisting racial injustice. But Williams’s life invites a close reading of the relationship between race, the Cold War, and international propaganda, a task Tyson begins in his concluding chapter. As Professor Tyson demonstrates so strongly, historical myths blind us to the complexities of racial politics. Understanding of the relationship between race and international relations needs the kind of historical documentation Tyson can provide. There are many strong arguments to be made that racism in the United States has been and continues to be implicated in human rights violations (Hope, 1985). A State Department study of race in the United States, released on September 21, 2000, provides an analysis of U.S. compliance with an international treaty to eliminate racism. The study stops short of declaring racism in the United States to be a human rights concern. Yet many organizations will seek that determination at the United Nations conference in South Africa, scheduled for fall 2001, where the report will be debated. Robert Williams would have been right at home—arguing, advocating, and seeking to reach as many world citizens as possible with his words, not a gun. I hope that Professor Tyson will continue to explore this extraordinary life as a significant voice in a neglected area of twentieth century discourse—the propaganda wars that made USA racial politics central to international diplomacy. Diane S. Hope is the William A. Kern Professor in Communications at the Rochester Institute of Technology. ReferencesBranch, T. (1988). Parting the waters: America in the King years 1954-1963. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bush, R. (1999). Black nationalism and class struggle in the American century. New York: New York University Press. Franklin, B. (1971). From the movement: toward revolution. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. Hampton, H. and Fayer, S. (Eds.). (1990). Bobby Seale (p.356) in Voices of Freedom: An oral history of the civil rights movement from the 1950 s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books. Hope, D. S. (nee Schaich, D.H.) (1970). Robert F. Williams: a rhetoric of revolution. Unpublished master’s thesis. State University of New York at Buffalo. Hope, D. S. (1985) Communication and human rights: the symbolic structures of racism and sexism. In Benson, T. W. (Ed.). Speech communication in the 20th century. (pp. 63-89). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Johnson, T. A. (1969, September 13). Williams seized on return to US. The New York Times, p. 1. Katope C. and Zolbrod, P. (Eds.). (1970). The rhetoric of revolution. Toronto, Canada: Macmillan. Killian, L. M. ( 1968) The Impossible Revolution? New York: Random House. King, M. L. Jr. (1959, October). The social organization of non-violence. Liberation, pp. 5-6. NAACP Leader urges violence. (1959, May 7). The New York Times, p. 22. NAACP Unit leader fights his suspension. (1959, May 8). The New York Times, p. 16. NAACP upholds stand by Wilkins. ( 1959, May 12). The New York Times, p. 36. NAACP action upheld. (1959, June 9). The New York Times, p. 33. Schaich, W. & Hope, D. ( 1977). The prison letters of Martin Sostre: documents of resistance. Journal of Black Studies 7 (3): 281-292. Szulc, Ted. (1963, August 13). Antiwhite drive by Peking is seen. The New York Times, p. 1. Tyson, T. B. (1999). Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tyson, T. B. (1998) Robert F. Williams, black power, and the roots of the African American freedom struggle. Journal of American History 85 (1), 540-570. Tyson, T. B. ( 1997/1998 ) Robert F. Williams, NAACP: warrior and rebel. The Crisis. 104 (3), 14-15. Williams, R. F. (1960). Fidel Castro, spirit of Christ. The Crusader. 2, no. 5, 1. Williams, R. F. (1960). Sierra Maestra: the face of Cuba. The Crusader, 2, no. 6, 1. Williams, R. F. (1961). Telegram to MLK. The Crusader, 2, no. 31, 1 Williams, R. F. (1962). Negroes with Guns. New York: Marzani and Munsell. Williams, R. F. (1967). U.S.A. The potential of a minority revolution. The Crusader, 9, no. 2. Williams, R. F. (1968). Listen, Brother. New York: World View Publishers.
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