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

At the tail end of 1957, the KKK staged cross-burnings across Roscoe County, targeting the area’s large Indigenous Lumbee population. During these attacks, they accused Lumbee women of having “loose morals” and engaging in race-mixing with white men. On the night of a planned KKK rally in Maxton, North Carolina, more than five hundred armed Lumbee men repelled the KKK with rifle fire in an event known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.

Tyson explains how the Battle of Hayes Pond played into the existing racial and sexual hierarchies of the time. Violence meted out in defense of womanhood was a key aspect of defining Southern white masculinity, while Black men were denied the right to defend Black women against white men. Tyson includes a quotation from Williams, describing his fear that Black men would be seen as “the sissy race of all mankind” (141). By successfully defending their women, the Lumbee distinguished themselves from Black men in the eyes of white society.

On April 25th, Mack Charles Parker, a Black man accused of raping a white woman, was dragged from his jail cell in Poplarville, Mississippi, and lynched by a white mob. The state declined to prosecute Parker’s killers.