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"The childhood of Southerners, white and colored," Lillian Smith wrote in 1949, "has been lived on trembling earth." For one black boy in Monroe, North Carolina, the earth first shook on a Saturday morning in 1936. Standing on the sidewalk on Main Street, Robert Franklin Williams witnessed the battering of an African American woman by a white policeman. The policeman, Jesse Alexander Helms, an admirer recalled, "had the sharpest shoe in town and he didn't mind using it." The police officer's son, Sen. Jesse Helms, remembered "Big Jesse" as "a six-foot, two-hundred pound gorilla. When he said, `Smile,' I smiled." Eleven-year-old Robert Williams watched in terror as Big Jesse flattened the black woman with his fist and then arrested her. Years later, Williams described the scene: Helms "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey." He recalled "her tortured screams as her flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete." The memory of this violent spectacle and of the laughter of white bystanders haunted Williams. Perhaps the deferential way that African American men on the street responded was even more deeply troubling. "The emasculated black men hung their heads in shame and hurried silently from the cruelly bizarre sight," Williams recalled.1 Knowledge of such scenes was as commonplace as coffee cups in the South that had recently helped to elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. For the rest of his life, Robert Williams, destined to become one of the most influential African American radicals of his time, repeated this searing story to friends, readers, listeners, reporters, and historians. He preached it from street corner ladders to eager crowds on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem and to congregants in Malcolm X's Temple Number 7. He bore witness to its brutality in labor halls and college auditoriums across the United States. It contributed to the fervor of his widely published debate with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 and fueled his hesitant bids for leadership in the black freedom struggle. Its merciless truths must have tightened in his fingers on the night in 1961 when he fled a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dragnet with his...