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

This chapter deals largely with the growing militant resistance to racism in the South. Tyson opens the chapter by describing one of the incidents that exemplifies this change. In March of 1946, a group of Black WWII veterans successfully staged an armed defense against a KKK motorcade that planned to steal and desecrate the corpse of a Black veteran named Bennie Montgomery. Years later, Williams recalled this act of resistance as “one of the first incidents…which started [Black Southerners] to understanding…that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups, and…with guns” (50).

During WWII, the promise of factory jobs drew millions of Black Southerners to urban centers in the North, shifting the balance of voting power toward the Northern states. Abroad, burgeoning Cold War tensions continued to make the issue of American racial discrimination a worldwide talking point. In 1947, President Harry Truman acknowledged that “[America’s] civil rights record has become an issue in world politics” (52). In 1954, the Supreme Court passed the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled separate-but-equal education unconstitutional.

Returning from his first tour of duty, Williams met 16-year-old Mabel Ola Robinson. They were married within a year, and Mabel became Williams’s lifelong ally in the fight for Black liberation. When Mabel became pregnant with their first son, Williams moved to Detroit, where he worked briefly for Cadillac. The racism he encountered from his white managers chafed at him; Williams’s FBI file notes that he was let go after an unspecified “racial incident” in 1949. Williams was unable to secure another job—unbeknownst to him, the FBI had been advising potential employers against hiring him. He joined the US Marine Corps hoping to secure a role in information services but was told that Black marines were barred from the position. In response to this latest denial of his rights, Williams sent a string of fiery letters to then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower and others, prompting the Office of Naval Intelligence to characterize him as a radical agitator. By May of 1955, Williams was undesirably discharged and sent back to Monroe.

Williams was initially optimistic on return to Monroe due to the passage of Brown v. Board of Education. Across the South, however, attempts to integrate schools were swiftly blocked by bureaucracy and violence. Then-governor of North Carolina, Luther Hodges, instituted the Pearsall Plan, which significantly delayed desegregation attempts. The KKK escalated their activities, carrying out several high-profile kidnappings and murders of Black citizens. White Southerners also used subtler social threats to discourage resistance; any Black citizen who openly aligned themselves with the NAACP, for example, risked being fired and denied services. Since the NAACP was largely comprised of the Black middle class with much to lose, this tactic effectively reduced membership in the Monroe chapter to zero. Williams took over as leader of the Monroe’s NAACP and focused on recruiting members from the Black working class. Within a year, his leadership grew the Monroe NAACP to a hundreds-strong organization.

In an announcement in the Monroe Enquirer, Williams formally extended an invitation to the NAACP to anyone interested in the fight for freedom, regardless of race. He courted allies across racial lines, aligning himself with prominent white statesman J. Ray Shute and Black physician D. A. Perry to found the Union County Council on Human Relations, an interracial activist group committed to promoting “tolerance, democracy, and orderly discussion of common problems” (83). The alliance was short-lived, however. In 1957, Perry and Williams launched a campaign to integrate the Monroe Country Club pool after a young Black boy drowned in a local swimming hole, the latest in a string of tragic drownings due to Black children being forced to swim in unregulated bodies of water. This campaign swiftly alienated most of Williams’s white supporters in the Union County Council.

The pool protests drew the ire of Monroe’s KKK chapter, which targeted Perry’s family home. Grand Wizard James “Catfish” Cole led several motorcades in a harassment campaign, firing shots into Perry’s house while his family was inside. Williams organized 60 members of the NAACP, armed with guns, to defend the Perry home. When the next KKK motorcade approached, they met a volley from Williams and his men. The motorcade retreated, and the following day the Monroe city council passed an ordinance banning further motorcades.