This essay discusses lynchings and sexual violence.
As Black revolutionary communists at the height of the Cold War and the Black freedom movement, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams' story is a microcosm of our collective struggle against capitalism and white supremacy. While exiled in Cuba, the Williamses launched Radio Free Dixie, a weekly radio show dedicated to broadcasting radical Black music and agitprop—a portmanteau of "agitation propaganda." The station—and the Williams' political work beyond it—is part of a long tradition of radical Black internationalism and solidarity.
The grandson of enslaved Africans, Robert F. Williams, was born in the small city of Monroe, North Carolina and was raised in the Jim Crow era, when Monroe's racial segregation laws were viciously enforced by legal state and extrajudicial vigilante violence.
The specter of this violent enforcement constantly hung over the heads of the city's Black residents, motivating many of them to join their Southern counterparts in the Great Migration out of the South. At 18, Williams moved to Detroit, where he witnessed the city's 1943 race riot, which further radicalized him. He was drafted into the Marine Corps shortly thereafter and, after a brief term of service, married Mabel Ola Robinson in 1947.
In 1955, Williams returned to Monroe and joined the local chapter of the NAACP, which he described in his 1962 memoir, Negroes With Guns, as a small, toothless organization ill-equipped to mount the kind of militant struggle required to meet the demands of the moment.
He wrote, "The Union County NAACP was a typical southern branch—small, not very active, dominated by and largely composed of the upper crust of the Black community—professionals, businessmen, and white-collar workers."
Hindered by the weak NAACP chapter, Monroe was particularly ripe for the political conflict that would come to define the Williams family's legacy. Not only did the average white citizen and city police brutalize Black people, but Monroe was also the home of the Southeast headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. When Robert Williams was elected as head of the fledgling Union County NAACP chapter in 1955, Monroe's Black residents were regularly subject to lynchings, rape, arrests, and other violent assaults.
In this new role, Williams immediately went to work and instituted a program of direct action aimed at breaking down the structural segregation that had prevailed in Monroe since the onset of Jim Crow. The direct action strategy of the Monroe NAACP was initially non-violent, but the hostility and increasing aggression of the Klan and Monroe's white citizenry caused Williams to transform the NAACP chapter by adopting a policy of armed resistance. In 1959, a Black woman named Mary Ruth Reid was sexually assaulted by a white man named Lewis Medlin, who only stopped the assault when Reid's four-year-old son struck him in the head with a stick. Williams, the NAACP, and Monroe's Black community packed the courts for Medlin's trial. An absurd and deeply racist farce from the beginning, Medlin was acquitted after his defense attorney argued that he "was just drinking and having a little fun." With Monroe's Black community outraged that a white man could viciously attack a Black Woman with no consequences, Williams stepped up and made a brief statement to the press that directly contradicted the philosophy of non-violence that many of his peers in the Civil Rights movement had embraced:
"This demonstration today shows that the Negro in the South cannot expect justice in the courts. He must convict his attackers on the spot. He must meet violence with violence. Lynchings with lynchings."
In the wake of Williams' speech and the NAACP chapter's anti-segregation organizing and direct action, the Klan began riding through Monroe's Black community, shooting at homes and terrorizing residents. Tensions were rising, and a violent clash between the Klan and Monroe's Black community seemed inevitable.
Today, there is a crucial need for radio and journalism that is unfettered by capitalist money and influence.
In June 1961, the NAACP began picketing the segregated pool in Monroe, resuming its direct action campaign for pool access that began in 1957. This action agitated the Klan along with Monroe's white citizens, like local car dealership proprietor Bynum Griffin, who tried to kill Williams by ramming his car and running him off the road. The tensions in Monroe came to a head when another white man attempted to run Williams off the road, with a mob of white racists swarming the scene of the ensuing crash. Luckily, a member of Monroe's city council arrived and ordered the police—who'd been standing around waiting for the mob to kill Williams—to clear a path and let Williams go.
The Klan and Monroe's white population had effectively put a target on the Williams family, and the next clash would dramatically raise the stakes of this conflict. On August 27, 1961, a white man named Bruce Stegall and his wife were driving through Monroe. The couple had previously been seen driving through the city with a banner that read "Open Season on Coons." Fearing that the Stegalls were colluding with the Klan, they were stopped by a crowd of Black residents, apprehended at gunpoint, and taken to Robert and Mabel's home. A crowd of angry Black residents gathered at the Williams' home, prompting the Stegalls to demand an escort. Fearing that the crowd would turn violent, Williams brought the Stegalls into his house, but the Stegalls later accused him of kidnapping them. A federal arrest warrant was issued for Williams, with the Stegalls claiming that "Williams only pretended that he was trying to help us." Facing a kidnapping charge, Robert, Mabel, and their children, Robert Jr. and John, fled Monroe for Canada. From Canada, the family eventually made their way to Cuba, where they were granted political asylum by the Castro-led government.
Williams, who had previously visited Cuba, was well aware of the country's track record of publicly condemning the United States' racist apartheid system and welcoming Black radicals like Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Kwame Ture, and Paul Robeson.
Despite being exiled to a foreign land a thousand miles from home, Robert and Mabel Williams continued their revolutionary work. In addition to publishing their own newspaper, The Crusader, Cuba's communist government permitted Robert and Mabel to launch Radio Free Dixie.
A weekly radio program broadcast through Cuba's Radio Havana station, Radio Free Dixie circulated radical Black agitprop and music rooted in a broad framework of revolutionary internationalism and spoke directly to America's Black working class.
In the book Robert F. Williams: Self-Defense, Self-Respect, Self-Determination, Mabel Williams explained the origins of Radio Free Dixie:
"We always had shortwave radio. Listening to the radio Robert kept thinking 'Well, there's nothing coming out of the U.S. officially that is really telling our story, telling about what's going on with the Black people in the United States.' So, he approached Fidel Castro with the idea of establishing a radio program. Rob had decided that we wanted to have a musical program but at the same time, use the music to attract the attention of the people. Jazz, protest music that came out of our struggle so we could get people's attention and then we could be able to give them the message of what was happening to our people in the United States…in the struggle."
Before every broadcast, a State-crafted address was played in which Radio Havana—and, by extension, the Cuban government—expressed its solidarity with the plight and struggle of Black people in America and oppressed peoples everywhere.
"The following program is brought to you as a public service. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy of this station. The facilities of this station have been made available in hope of promoting a better understanding of the Afro-American and his struggle for freedom in North America. The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice. It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers."
Radio Free Dixie aired every Friday night from 11 p.m. to midnight. The show could be heard across airwaves as far away as New York and Los Angeles. Williams had a vision for a radio show that spoke to the material conditions and political ambitions of Black people in America. Dubbing itself "The Free Voice of The South," the show aired crucial, radical commentary on the 16th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, citing the incident as further evidence of the need to take up arms against racists. Mabel read weekly news items for the show while Robert read his own political editorials and they played popular songs like Little Milton's "We're Gonna Make It." Taped copies of the show circulated in Black enclaves like Watts and Harlem, proving that the show was reaching hearts, minds, and ears on both coasts.
A key element of the philosophy that made Radio Free Dixie important was the understanding of the interconnectedness of global struggle. The show made it clear that the same capitalist forces that killed and brutalized people around the world were the same that made life miserable for Black folks in the U.S. In Robert F. Williams: Self-Defense, Self-Respect, Self-Determination, Mabel framed the attacks on Black folks in the U.S. as genocide, using the same descriptive language to describe violence faced by the oppressed in the third world.
"Robert was fearing that if some worldwide attention wasn't brought to bear on what was going on that it was going to become a genocide maneuver against our movement and the movement would be crushed and genocide would take place against our people."
Radio Free Dixie ended in 1964, and the Williams family spent five years living in China before returning to the U.S. to live in Detroit. Robert came back to the U.S. in 1969, ready to fight the kidnapping case from 1961. The kidnapping case was eventually thrown out in 1976, and Williams was relieved of the looming threat of arrest and federal prosecution.
Sixty-four years after Radio Free Dixie first aired, the show is still a shining example of a truly revolutionary cultural institution. Today, there is a crucial need for radio and journalism that is unfettered by capitalist money and influence.
As media outlets and publications are gobbled up by venture capital and multinational conglomerates, we need more media and cultural outlets that are aligned with the interests of the working class and global anti-imperial struggle. Radio Free Dixie is not merely a fascinating relic of radical political history, but a model for the type of revolutionary media that we'll need today and in the years to come.