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Chapter 10 - Radio Free Dixie, Black Arts Radio, and African American Women’s Activism

from III - Beyond the Canon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

By
Cheryl Higashida
Edited by
Shelly Eversley
Shelly Eversley
Affiliation:
Baruch College, The City University of New York
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Summary

From 1962 to 1966, exiled African American revolutionaries Robert and Mabel Williams broadcast a weekly English language radio program from Havana, Cuba. As its name suggests, Radio Free Dixie was aimed primarily at African Americans in the U.S. South, for whom radio, of all the mass media, was key for information sharing and consciousness raising. But the show’s potent blend of music, news, literature, and commentary quickly garnered audiences throughout the Americas. Scholarship on Radio Free Dixie has focused on Robert Williams’ printed or transcribed editorials while marginalizing Mabel Williams. By studying the program as both text-based archive and performative repertoire – drawing on performance studies scholar Diana Taylor – I amplify the Williamses’ overlooked Black radio arts. Moreover, I show that Radio Free Dixie’s women co-hosts, Mabel Williams and Jo Salas, ostensibly relegated to minor roles, in fact maximized radio’s capacities to re-articulate revolutionary internationalism through Black women’s histories and experiences.

Keywords

Black womenradioCubainternationalismrevolution
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics
 , pp. 253 - 275
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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