Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  HILLBILLY NATIONALISTS, URBAN

  RACE REBELS, AND BLACK POWER

  “Hillbilly Nationalists recovers the voices of white, working-class radicals who prove abolitionist John Brown’s legacy is alive and well. Over ten years, Sonnie and Tracy have collected rare documents and conducted interviews to fill a long-missing piece of social movement history. Focusing on the 1960s–70s and touching on issues just as relevant today, these authors challenge the Left not to ignore white America, while challenging white America to recognize its allegiance to humanity and justice, rather than the bankrupt promises of conservative politicians.”

  —ANGELA Y. DAVIS, AUTHOR OF ABOLITION DEMOCRACY:

  BEYOND PRISON, TORTURE AND EMPIRE

  “This book is, without question, the definitive resource for scholars, students, and activists interested in some of the most innovative and understudied coalitional politics of the New Left.”

  —DARREL ENCK-WANZER, EDITOR OF

  THE YOUNG LORDS: A READER

  “In our world, ‘white, working-class anti-racism’ is considered an oxymoron, or at best a pipe dream. Amy Sonnie and James Tracy prove these assumptions wrong, excavating a forgotten history of poor white folks who, in alliance with black nationalists, built a truly radical movement for social justice, economic power, and racial and gender equality. They have written a beautiful, powerful, surprising account of class-based interracial organizing; I expect Hillbilly Nationalists to inspire a new generation of activists who understand that a true rainbow coalition is not only desirable but our only hope.”

  — ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, AUTHOR OF FREEDOM DREAMS:

  THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION AND THELONIOUS MONK:

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

  “Sonnie and Tracy are master storytellers whose stories of working-class, interracial solidarity chart a new direction in the history of the modern freedom movement. Based on dozens of oral histories and previously untapped personal records of movement activists, this book offers an inspiring and largely invisible history of poor and working-class whites who built a ‘vanguard of the dispossessed’ with Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others in the radical movement for racial and economic justice. Written with nuance and power, this is a major contribution to the study of civil rights, social justice, working-class communities, and the politics of whiteness in the United States.”

  —JENNIFER GUGLIELMO, AUTHOR OF LIVING

  THE REVOLUTION AND ARE ITALIANS WHITE?

  “Hillbilly Nationalists is the story of reformers and revolutionaries, dreamers and doers, who remind us of a transformative organizing tradition among white, working-class communities. Inspired by Black Power and global events, these organizers did what only poor folks can do: they pooled their resources to build a vibrant social movement that escapes easy classification. Sonnie and Tracy combine first-rate historical research and extensive oral histories to capture the legacies of those unsung heroes and heroines who battled for the hearts and minds of working-class Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.”

  — DAN BERGER, EDITOR OF THE HIDDEN

  1970s: HISTORIES OF RADICALISM

  AMY SONNIE is an activist, educator and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social justice movements for the past 17 years. She is co-founder of the national Center for Media Justice. Her first book, Revolutionary Voices, an anthology by queer and transgender youth (Alyson Books, 2000), is banned in parts of New Jersey and Texas. Her work has appeared in the San Franscisco Bay Guardian, Alternet, Philadelphia Inquirer, Clamor, the Oxygen Television Network, Bitch magazine, and The Sojourner.

  JAMES TRACY is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press: The Civil Disobedience Handbook and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, and Contemporary Justice Review.

  ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ (Foreword) grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and a half-Indian mother. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University East Bay, and author of numerous books on Indigenous peoples’ histories, as well as three acclaimed historical memoirs: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie; Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War; and Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980.

  Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power:

  Community Organizing in Radical Times

  © Amy Sonnie and James Tracy

  Foreword © Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: September 2011

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-008-2

  Cover photo: the original Rainbow Coalition on April 4, 1969, at a press conference urging interracial unity on the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Standing, from left to right: Andy Keniston, Hi Thurman, William Fesperman, Bobby McGinnis, Mike James, Bud Paulin, Bobby Rush, Elisa McElroy and Alfredo Matias. Seated: Junebug Boykin, Nathaniel Junior, Luis Cuzo. Courtesy of Michael James Archives.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  List of Abbreviations

  Foreword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Common Cause Is Freedom: JOIN Community Union and the Transformation of Peggy Terry

  Chapter 2 The Fire Next Time: The Short Life of the Young Patriots and the Original Rainbow Coalition

  Chapter 3 Pedagogy of the Streets: Rising Up Angry

  Chapter 4 Lightning on the Eastern Seaboard: October 4th Organization and White Lightning

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments & Interviews

  Notes

  List of Abbreviations

  BYNC Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council

  CFM Chicago Freedom Movement

  COINTELPRO Counterintelligence Program [of the FBI]

  CORE Congress of Racial Equity

  ERAP Economic Research and Action Project

  HRUM Health Revolutionary Unity Movement

  JOIN Jobs or Income Now

  LID League for Industrial Democracy

  NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

  NWBCCC Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition

  NWRO National Welfare Rights Organization

  O4O October 4th Organization

  PFP Peace and Freedom Party

  PL Progressive Labor [Party]

  RYM / RYM II Revolutionary Youth Movement

  SCEF Southern Conference Educational Fund

  SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference

  SDS Students for a Democratic Society

  SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

  UPWC United Parents Who Care

  Foreword

  BY ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

  I first met representatives of the New Left at San Francisco State College (now University) in the Spring of 1961, my first semester there. I was twenty-two years old, having moved to San Francisco from Oklahoma with my husband. During 1960, my first year living in San Francisco and working full-time
in an office machine repair factory, I followed the television images of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the South and all over the country and I was ripe for recruitment to the Movement. In particular, I closely watched the local anti-death penalty sit-ins at San Quentin prison to prevent the execution of author-inmate Caryl Chessman, and followed the student demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall as police attacked hundreds of students with batons, blasting them with fire hoses and arresting dozens. I wanted to meet those brave young people.

  I had long hungered to go to college and now it seemed like a way to get involved with the Movement too—I was thinking less about the risk and more about my excellent typing skills. So, that day on the San Francisco State campus when I saw an information table about the Mississippi Freedom Rides, I thought, “Finally!” After a full year in San Francisco, this was the first seemingly public invitation to join.

  Back in Oklahoma I came from a childhood of rural poverty. For my last year of high school I moved from “the sticks” to work full time in Oklahoma City, which meant I attended the trade high school, secretarial track of course. It was the first year of school desegregation in Oklahoma, a year after the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public schools. I attended the first public school in Oklahoma to integrate. It was no accident that the single wholly working-class white school received that honor. Predictably, there were acts of white racist violence against the few Black students. I began to pay attention to the sit-ins at local drugstore counters. I read the local extremely right-wing newspaper, because that was the only one available, but the photographs spoke for themselves about the violence being meted out against Black people all over the South. Then, I married into a family that abhorred racial discrimination. My father-in-law, a New Deal Democrat, had been a leader in efforts to desegregate the local crafts unions. From my in-laws’ point of view, “lower-class” whites were the racist culprits, the kind of people I came from. I nearly held my breath for three years until I could leave Oklahoma and my past forever. I hoped San Francisco would be free of “racist low-class” white people.

  In San Francisco everything seemed possible. Attending college was a dream come true and here, during my first semester, I found the noble activists I hoped had all the answers. Without knowing it, they intimidated me to the core. Behind the table sat two handsome young white men wearing jeans and plaid shirts. Standing behind them were two young women with long, straight blonde hair, dressed in black turtlenecks, skirts and leotards with shiny black boots. They were all laughing and talking with each other. I felt thrilled, as if a whole new world lay before me. I was also panic-stricken, not knowing what to say. (I look back and see, through their eyes, this working-class young woman dressed in the style of the new first lady, Jackie Kennedy, in a pastel linen shift and matching cardigan sweater with matching purse and medium high heels, panty hose, of course, and a bouffant hairdo. And then, out came the pronounced Okie accent when she got up the nerve to speak). I fingered a flyer on the table that asked for donations to send freedom riders—Black and white students on northern buses—to Mississippi to protest segregated interstate transportation. It seemed a brilliant but dangerous program. They also had a sign-up sheet for volunteers. How I wanted to sign!

  Suddenly, I heard my voice asking if they were going to talk to poor whites in the South. They seemed stunned by the question, perhaps thinking I was joking. But, my surely terrified face and trembling hands must have made clear that I was serious, and that I was myself one of the poor whites. Immediately, I wished I could take back the question and start over. Then, one of the young men said, “No,” and added that they weren’t recruiting them either. It seemed I had spoiled my attempt to somehow join the cause.

  It took several years before I tried to get involved again—only after I had successfully gotten rid of my accent, changed my way of dressing, grown my hair long and driven the working-class rural Okie girl underground in order to be accepted by the Movement. My experience is perhaps exceptional, but only because most individuals from my kind of background instinctively avoided putting themselves in positions of such humiliation and rejection.

  I am glad I persisted in my radical commitment, but the truth is that the Movement was, and still is, mired in class hatred. One of my mentors, the late Anne Braden, related to her biographer a new problem facing white organizers who had “gone South” for the freedom rides and voter registration drives in Black communities. Once they were asked to address racism in their own white communities, they balked: “They just didn’t like white people!” said Braden. “You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.”1 Braden thought it was because they had seen so much white violence against Blacks and fellow white activists in Mississippi, but I think it was class hatred. As an early leader in the Women’s Liberation Movement, I soon felt the same stifling around feminist activists as I did from the young man at that table. I realized that the absence of class consciousness was a fatal flaw of the New Left. I became aware that the experience these now-feminist women had gained in the southern Civil Rights Movement was based on a class privilege that I could not even imagine.

  Yet this was not the whole story of the Movement. It was with great excitement in 1968 that I heard about organizing projects with Appalachian migrants in Chicago: JOIN Community Union and the Young Patriots. I spent a few days in August 1969 talking with Peggy Terry, one of the remarkable leaders featured in this book. I had not before met anyone in the Movement from a rural, poor white background like mine. Not only that, Peggy originally was from Oklahoma and part Cherokee like me. She opened a whole new world of possibilities for me. Peggy introduced me to one of the young SDS organizers she mentored to show me around the neighborhood. The young white woman, Gerry, impressed me with her organizing skills and her ability to relate to the poor white youth. She seemed to know and be respected by everyone. It was quite a contrast to the SDS project I’d visited in Cleveland where the SDS organizers seemed completely isolated from the impoverished Black community in which they had lived for several years. Gerry took me into a pool hall filled with unemployed young white Appalachians who wore their hair in ducktails and pompadours. I talked to them about their organization, the Young Patriots, and its relationship with the local Black Panther chapter, led by Fred Hampton, who would be murdered by the Chicago police only four months later. The young white men were also harassed by the police and had organized neighborhood patrols. To find poor whites organized in an alliance with poor Blacks was thrilling.

  A few months later, I moved to New Orleans to organize poor white and Black women into a labor consortium, while my companion at the time worked to set up a Patriots chapter. We invited the Chicago Patriots to send a delegation to help us get started. When William “Preacherman” Fesperman arrived, he commented, “Who’d ever have thought the Patriots would get hitched to a women’s lib outfit. Regular bunch of Mother Joneses. Now don’t get me wrong. Wait till you meet my wife—she’s a women’s libber all the way.”

  I told Fesperman and the other Patriots I met that I objected to their use of “Patriot,” explaining it was reactionary and supported a racist mythology dating back to Andrew Jackson and Indian killing. To me, the very definition of patriotism was patriarchy. I asked if they were teaching their members about past white populist movements in which anti-government sentiments were merged with Jew hating and racism. They argued that getting the poor white kids hooked up with Blacks and Puerto Ricans and Indians dissolved their racism. The historian in me knew that this was the same argument made by the Progressive Party until political expediency became a reason to ignore racism. However, I felt that things might be different this time. The Patriots represented the first poor white organization I knew of who took their cues from Black leaders.

  We organized a meeting of Movement organizers, including members of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), for the Patriots
delegation. At the time, the New Orleans chapters of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and the RNA were working together supporting a strike by pulp mill workers in Laurel, Mississippi, not far outside New Orleans. Virginia Collins, the local RNA leader and one of the organization’s founders, told the Patriots about the white and Black workers who had been enemies before the strike but were now working together. She shared that the local Klan actually provided security for the SCEF and RNA organizers when they came to hold meetings, and that sometimes they met in the Black Baptist church, sometimes in the white Baptist church.

  A few weeks later, I visited a new Patriots chapter in Eugene, Oregon, where the members were mostly descendants of migrant “Okies,” very dear to my heart. I had relatives who worked as loggers in nearby Cottage Grove. I stayed in the Patriots house, in a rather tense atmosphere, as the police had recently raided it. I stayed up most of the night talking with angry young white men and women whose families had migrated from the Southwest during the Dust Bowl. They were extremely alienated from their families and the rural, poor white culture in which they’d grown up. They were angry that the only work available to their fathers was cutting down the ancient redwood trees. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” played repeatedly on the stereo. I heard myself, saw myself, in them. It gave me hope and a mission, which I have never abandoned, to organize poor whites, however difficult.

  The men and women we meet in Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power weren’t the first working-class radicals to grapple with the racism’s roadblocks. Hundreds of workers’ movements have crumbled because of it. As Karl Marx famously explained, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.” But this insight was not original or new with Marx. It was first enunciated decades earlier by Scots-American socialist, labor organizer, abolitionist and feminist Fanny Wright in the 1820s, as well as the abolitionists who multiplied a decade later. However, what neither Marx nor the abolitionists nor later leftists and oppressed nationalities in the United States have fully grasped is the reality of the United States as a colonizing state in which, as historian William Appleman Williams phrased it, empire has always been a way of life.