Tyson, Radio Free Dixie - Robert F. William & Roots Of Black Power

Abstract

Timothy Tyson frames his prize-winning first book with two images. In 1936 an eleven-year old African-American boy in Monroe, North Carolina, witnessed a white police officer, Jesse Helms, Sr., physically assault a black woman and then drag her, dress up over her head, along the pavement to the local jail. White bystanders laughed. African American men hung their heads and hurried away. Sixty years later Robert F. Williams, that black boy who became an advocate of "armed self-reliance," was laid to rest, his body carefully dressed in a gray suit given him by Mao Zedong, his coffin adorned with a red, black, and green pan-African flag, and his eulogy given by Rosa Parks, the embodiment of non-violent resistance.