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

In 1944, Williams was drafted into the US Army to fight in WWII. He served for 18 months, spending much of his time in the brig for fighting back against racism. While at war, Williams concluded that white supremacy was founded on “fragility” and fear; for the first time, he saw the vulnerability of the racial hierarchy. Williams returned to North Carolina in 1946, with a new resolve to fight for Black freedom. Williams’s mindset reflected a larger shift in the tide of racial dynamics across America in the postwar years. WWII had exposed the “distance between democratic rhetoric and American reality” (29). The Axis powers, keenly aware of this, highlighted American hypocrisy in their war-time propaganda. America’s need to present a unified front gave Black American activists unprecedented leverage in pressing for social reform.

Black residents in the Jim Crow South particularly felt this change. Membership in the North Carolina branches of the NAACP doubled during the war, and Black residents across the South organized protests to demand an improvement in their status. This new wave of activism fueled white reactionary paranoia, stoking racial tensions to a boiling point. Violent clashes between Black and white people erupted all over the South, with white-on-Black violence going largely unpunished by law enforcement.