About the Author

Winner of the 2000 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians Co-winner of the 2000 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, Organizati of American Historians Timothy B. Tyson is associate professor of Afro-American studie at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

A book that powerfully conveys the life and voice of one of the key personalities of the modern civil rights struggle. ("American Historical Review")

Tyson has written, with compelling prose and great insight, an excellent biography as well as a definitive history of armed self-defense doctrines in the civil rights movement. ("The Journal of Southern History")

Tyson sharpens our historical focus, demonstrating just how crucial self-defense, guns, and nonviolence were to the successes of the black freedom struggle. ("Village Voice Literary Supplement")

Tyson's firecracker text crackles with brilliant and lasting images of black life in the Carolinas and across the South in the 40s, 50s and 60s. ("Publishers Weekly")

Written in lucid and confident prose with a solid reliance on first-hand accounts, "Radio Free Dixie" presents an engaging portrait of one man's continuous struggle to resist political and social oppression. ("Emerge")

A book that powerfully conveys the life and voice of one of the key personalities of the modern civil rights struggle. ("American Historical Review")
Tyson has written, with compelling prose and great insight, an excellent biography as well as a definitive history of armed self-defense doctrines in the civil rights movement. ("The Journal of Southern History")
Tyson sharpens our historical focus, demonstrating just how crucial self-defense, guns, and nonviolence were to the successes of the black freedom struggle. ("Village Voice Literary Supplement")
Tyson's firecracker text crackles with brilliant and lasting images of black life in the Carolinas and across the South in the 40s, 50s and 60s. ("Publishers Weekly")
Written in lucid and confident prose with a solid reliance on first-hand accounts, "Radio Free Dixie" presents an engaging portrait of one man's continuous struggle to resist political and social oppression. ("Emerge")

Tyson (Afro-American studies, Univ. of Wisconsin) has transformed his graduate research into an important study of a forgotten Civil Rights leader. After helping to organize one of 1950s America's most militant NAACP chapters (in Monroe, NC), Robert F. Williams found himself at odds with the national Civil Rights leadership. Rejecting King's nonviolent approach, he began calling for black self-determination and armed self-reliance. In 1962, when his radical ideas got him into trouble with the KKK and the FBI, Williams took his family to Cuba, where he began beaming his influential "Radio Free Dixie" over Radio Havana's wires. Using a wide variety of primary sourcesÄespecially oral-history interviewsÄTyson resuscitates Williams as an important forefather of Black Power. Moreover, Tyson concludes that Williams's life shows how Black Power "emerged from the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom" as the nonviolent Civil Rights movement. This groundbreaking, skillfully written revisionist monograph (the first full-length study of Williams ever published) is intended primarily for an academic audience.ÄCharles C. Hay, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Richmond Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.