The Roots of Black Power? Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement

The publication of Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power represents a milestone in Black Power scholarship. Tyson recounts in vivid detail how North Carolinian civil rights activist Williams emerged in the late 1950s as one of the most ardent advocates of “armed self-reliance.”1 As Peniel Joseph has pointed out, Radio Free Dixie laid important groundwork for “reperiodizing” the black freedom struggle “by examining the ways in which black radicals influenced black politics during the ‘heroic period’ of the Civil Rights movement.”2