On the Documentary Recommendation Tip

NP: Moving Units -- Emancipation

So I haven't recommended anything for your viewing pleasure in a long time. Rather than hitting up the latest sci-fi movie or tonight's 90-minute season 5 finale of the Shield (10 pm ET on FX, check your local listings), I come before you to point out a rarely-seen historical documentary.

Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power (2004). It was produced out of the UF documentary institute and tells the story of Rob Williams, a North Carolina NAACP leader who fought discrimination by arming himself and his organization and resisting segregationist violence through civil defense. One of the talking heads in the piece is Timothy Tyson, who chronicles Williams rise and fall as a civil rights leader in the book _Radio Free Dixie_. The title of the book comes from Williams' pirate radio show that he broadcast out of Cuba, after he fled the country. I'm using the book in an "America in the 1960s" class that I am trying to teach next fall.

Williams left a lot of audio and vide recordings, so the documentary is often told in his own words. If you can snag a copy, or catch it when it comes on PBS again, it is worth watching.