Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power Page 6

  Along with other emerging leaders, she helped JOIN set itself apart as a real force for change in a neighborhood. People were fed up, but suspicious of newcomers promising solutions. Joining the mix of existing agencies pacifying needy migrants in Uptown, President Lyndon Johnson had just declared an all-out “War on Poverty.” The war came with an onslaught of new government services like Job Corps, Head Start, and Volunteers in Service to America.33 Under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Johnson promised a participatory role for poor people in decision-making through local Community Action Centers—exactly what SDS demanded in Port Huron. Unfortunately service agencies usually confined this input to informal, non-binding dialogue. In Chicago politicians channeled these funds into existing agencies leaving the bulk of decision-making in the hands of administrators and social workers, not community representatives.

  This came as no surprise to most Uptown residents. Chicago was ruled by the iron fist of six-term Mayor Richard J. Daley—whose intense political machine was efficient and everywhere. Democratizing city services wasn’t exactly his style. The elder Daley created a legacy of gerrymandered school districts, segregated housing, and separate and completely unequal access to public resources. Few Chicagoans missed the message about Daley’s tyranny. His grip extended into the ballot box, too. In neighborhood after neighborhood, precinct captains doled out patronage and failure to support Daley or his anointed candidates could cost a resident “a job, a needed license, intense inspection by city building inspectors, or other municipal punishment.”34 Precinct captains had a foolproof method of knowing how a citizen had voted: They, or a lackey, accompanied citizens to the polls. In one of the worst and most public incidents, the West Side’s first Black alderman, Ben Lewis, was shot execution style after showing political independence from Daley on issues like housing policy, garbage collection and school segregation.

  Given the fact that the federal government was intensifying poverty by destroying thousands of homes through urban renewal programs, Uptown residents had long known “The Great Society” was a charade. So, in 1965, when JOIN launched a “community school” including a class on the city’s corrupt political ecology, members filed in, albeit cautiously. Among them, Mary Hockenberry and a very hesitant new member: Peggy Terry.

  Peggy Terry had only come to a few JOIN meetings. As her friend Monroe Sharp pointed out, she still had a great deal to learn about herself and her own people before she could hope to organize anyone else. She was skeptical until JOIN’s community school cut through her apprehension. Run by gifted educator Richie Rothstein, the community school covered the gamut of local and national issues, from urban renewal to the Vietnam War. More importantly it revealed the breadth of JOIN’s analysis (and SDS influence) in connecting Uptown’s problems to the forces driving national and foreign policy. Terry was impressed. The JOIN Community School put theory and words to the causes she cared about: the industrial automation that hurt the southern economy and city practices that created de facto segregation. Rothstein’s class on Chicago’s political corruption cemented her decision to get more involved. Terry had her own experience being roughed up by Daley’s minions. She was once attacked on a street corner while conducting voter turnout for a candidate who hadn’t received Daley’s endorsement. Two men jumped out of a car, stole all of her flyers and knocked her to the ground. If JOIN was willing to stand up to Daley and address both racism and poor people’s concerns, she might just stick around.

  Weeks later Terry found herself in a car with Rennie Davis on the way to a large rally on the South Side. Though she doesn’t remember what the rally was for, she distinctly recalls the moment Davis told her she’d be the one taking the stage. Terry protested. There was no way. She’d never spoken in front of so many people before. In her prior political work she remained comfortably in the background. What did she know about public speaking? Davis retorted, “What the hell do you mean you can’t? You do it every day.” Just as she recalled Sharp “dragging” her to JOIN, she insisted Davis “shoved” her up on stage. It didn’t matter what she said or whether she said it right. What she remembers is how she felt afterwards: Like people valued what she had to say and folks on the South Side seemed to understand that they had some important things in common. She finally understood what it meant to speak from her own experience. It was the first time she publicly claimed her southern heritage and talked about her struggles with poverty.

  After that Terry found herself in a flurry of work at JOIN. She and other new members—Little Dovie Thurman along with her aunt Big Dovie Coleman, Mary Hockenberry and a woman named Virginia Bowers—had each taken up leadership roles. When SDS organizers asked them to create the agendas for weekly meetings and write demands for a protest at the welfare office, none of the women knew where to start. Despite her experience at CORE, Terry felt frustrated around some SDS leaders who seemed to take much for granted. Education made them more comfortable discussing history and theory, as well as writing things that would be shared in public. Terry and the other women became fast friends by helping each other figure out what the “SDS kids,” as they called them, were talking about and openly discussing their own problems.

  One of those problems was the mistreatment many of them faced at the welfare office. So when JOIN started a welfare committee, the five women formed its backbone. Most recipients had no idea they were entitled to reliable payments, basic household items and some amount of medical care. Committee members understood most caseworkers were simply overworked, not malicious. But well intentioned or not, the system was dehumanizing. The Montrose Urban Progress Center in Uptown operated a particularly invasive war on poverty program. Recipients were made to meet unreasonable requirements, they routinely had their homes inspected, and were denied important information and threatened with losing their aid or their children if they didn’t comply. One member received a letter demanding she immediately go back to school or lose her benefits. She had attended three years of high school and just finished two years of night school. The letter was a mistake, but her caseworker told her there was nothing she could do about it. It didn’t matter that she had no money for childcare or transportation. JOIN helped her appeal the requirement and the demand was withdrawn.

  Cases like these helped members build their political confidence one small victory at a time. When necessary, the welfare committee, along with JOIN staff, marched right into the welfare office with their demands. During one march Rennie Davis announced they wouldn’t be leaving unless caseworkers agreed to log grievances from each recipient. Knowing they needed more than the caseworkers’ word to follow through, the welfare committee organized another march soon after. This time they commandeered the caseworkers’ welfare policy books. “The policies were hidden from the public,” Hockenberry recalls. “So we walked out with about twenty books, and we danced and sang in the street.” Soon after, Terry began writing a regular column on welfare rights in JOIN’s newsletter and welfare committee members authored a 10-point Welfare Bill of Rights demanding, among other things, a right to write the rules of welfare dispensation, privacy, an end to threats against their children, and the right to organize without fear their aid would be revoked.

  A few months later JOIN members picketed at the welfare office demanding protections for day laborers as well. Terry considered this one of the “most far reaching and important” actions because they actually won a day laborer center in the Montrose Urban Progress Center. In contrast to predatory labor placement agencies like Manpower that took half of workers’ pay, the welfare committee organized for months to convince Montrose not to charge a fee at all. Agencies like Manpower were also in the habit of yanking workers just before they logged enough time to qualify for a job site’s union. The Montrose day labor program was one of the few times poor residents ended up having a say in how city and federal dollars were spent. The campaign helped expand the welfare committee, which boasted dozens of active members and gave each of its founding members a sen
se of leadership and purpose.

  Coming into her own confidence, Terry began helping other poor whites wrestle with the fear of losing what little they had. For folks in Uptown, this was very, very little. Politicians stoked poor whites’ fears that any gains for people of color would come at the greatest loss to them. The Cold War added even greater trepidation that social change meant austerity and sacrifice. Terry brought the sophistication to navigate these anxieties. For many of her neighbors she was the first person in the movement they could trust. At the time the Left was notorious for its esoteric debates about what people should be willing to give up for the revolution. Terry knew these arguments turned people off and, like Hockenberry, she understood her role as a bridge between the sometimes-alienating rhetoric and real values of the Left.

  Conversations like these made all the difference. Terry spent hours in her kitchen just talking to people—a tactic far more effective in bringing poor people into the movement than any SDS manifesto. One evening Terry went to visit neighbors who had been around JOIN but reluctant to get involved. The Lalys lived in a tiny Quonset hut with salvaged furniture, including a very treasured teapot that someone passed down to them. Mrs. Laly confessed her reluctance about coming to meetings. She had heard people should be willing to give up their teapot if the people’s army needed the scrap. Terry patiently listened before replying, “No dear, you don’t have to give up your teapot. This isn’t about you giving things up, it is about making more so everyone can live in dignity.” With honesty and humility, Terry triumphed at a politics of the kitchen table at a time when the middle-class Left’s messages failed miserably with most poor whites.

  JOIN’s success in changing individual attitudes was, of course, relative. Poor whites in Uptown experienced a tenuous security as insiders and outsiders in the United States. For Appalachian migrants, in particular, their outsider status was reinforced by dire poverty and harsh media stereotypes that trickled down to job sites, welfare offices and schools. A good number of Uptown’s white poor succumbed to the double-edged sword of white supremacy, understanding themselves as more deserving than Blacks and Latinos, but also as victims—of police, bosses, politicians, the draft and, most divisively, of the economic promise civil rights seemed to offer communities of color. More than one JOIN member came into the organization railing against uppity Blacks who were looking for a free lunch, then showed signs of changing attitudes before ultimately retreating back to the safety of white superiority. There were notable exceptions, though, as dozens of residents made JOIN their political home and with it embraced coalition politics.

  For many whites, the group provided their first direct exposure to Black and Latino experience. For Virginia Bowers, an active member of the welfare committee, Chicago had been the first place she ever saw Blacks and whites living and working together. “I didn’t know what prejudice was,” she recollected. As some of the few Blacks to live in Uptown, Dovie Coleman and her niece Dovie Thurman had a big influence on everyone at JOIN. Raised in the Pruitt-Igoe Projects in St. Louis, Thurman moved to Chicago when she was eighteen while her husband was in Vietnam. Like the poor white Appalachians who came to Uptown to live with extended family (someone knew someone who lived there), Little Dovie came to live with her aunt.

  The Dovies, as they were known, provided dozens of their neighbors with their first chance to meet, let alone befriend, a Black person. For better or worse, these personal relationships often went the furthest in changing people’s minds. One of the young guys from the neighborhood, eighteen-year-old Bobby Joe Wright, recalled how the Dovies and his new friendship with local Black youth cemented his growing repulsion at racial violence. “I started findin out all these things about black people bein’ really fucked over for so many years, you know, and I also started findin’ out about my own people bein’ fucked over as much as they was, and like it changed my whole view about things.”35 The Dovies were highly respected among JOIN’s members, both young and old, and it was their leadership in the welfare committee that turned it into one of the group’s most lasting and fully community-led projects.

  Despite this headway, some SDS leaders were questioning the success and sustainability of projects like JOIN. By 1965 the Vietnam War pulled organizers’ attention to the national arena and created new challenges in working-class communities. In just two short years draft calls quadrupled, pulling nearly half a million young men, mostly from low-income families, into the fray. SDS played a defining role in organizing the anti-war movement’s mass mobilizations and campus actions, which grew in frequency and scale, eventually attracting hundreds of thousands of people. Split in too many directions, JOIN’s parent program, ERAP, dissolved in the lead up to those first anti-war demonstrations. According to SDS’s Tom Hayden the political potential of pro-active community organizing was doomed by escalation of war in Vietnam. “Once again the government met an internal crisis by starting an external crisis,” Hayden observed.

  Even without the anti-war effort, coordinating a national network of local projects proved challenging. In each city, local priorities were shifting constantly. Organizers tried to balance people’s needs with shorter, winnable campaigns. But even those proved challenging. Some student organizers reported they felt “demoralized” in their attempts to organize the poor. Others were more blunt. They deemed ERAP a failure. Failure depended on how groups measured their goals, though. Richie Rothstein, who had spent two years at JOIN, authored a thoughtful examination of ERAP’s limits. In creating the project, he wrote, “SDS people were convinced that their movement must be one that could end racist exploitation and imperialism, collectivize economic decision making, and democratize and decentralize every political, economic, and social institution in America.”36 Two years into the experiment, the projects had clearly failed to fulfill expectations on this scale. Yet they had started to produce important results, particularly in Chicago where JOIN built lasting alliances with labor—United Packinghouse Workers and the Independent Union of Public Aid Employees—as well as local Black and Latino community groups.

  If the tumultuous Sixties proved anything it was that no single issue could feed the radicalism sweeping the country. While many Chicago activists stayed on, JOIN faced a crisis of purpose and undeniable opportunity after ERAP dissolved. The organization would continue and expand. In Uptown it wasn’t enough to focus on welfare or even on poor women. Jobs, housing, police violence, racial tensions and the escalating war in Vietnam all begged equal attention. Out of necessity, political optimism and some degree of confusion about direction, JOIN tried to move on all fronts.

  Where the welfare committee had been the group’s center, JOIN’s housing rights campaigns soon provided a crosscurrent connecting people across the city. JOIN evolved into a “union in the community,” taking residents as its rank-and-file the same way a union would workers, and forming a steering committee of resident-leaders to govern the organization and plan actions. This idea translated well in a city long familiar with union activism and the tactic of the strike. Instead of withholding labor, organizers encouraged tenants to organize each building and collectively withhold rent monies when landlords failed to address housing violations. JOIN’s first rent strike in April 1966 resulted in an historic collective bargaining agreement with notorious landlord Richard Gutman. Twelve of the fifteen tenants in the Gutman building were JOIN members, including Mary Hockenberry. After picketing for a week, tenants won a contract recognizing the union as the collective bargaining agent for the building. The agreement outlined a detailed grievance process and ordered Gutman to make more than a dozen immediate repairs. The contract was the first of its kind in the city’s history.37

  Two subsequent strikes also resulted in bargaining contracts. When landlords failed to uphold the agreement, JOIN supported tenants to take over the buildings. The tactic spread like fire as more tenants began organizing their own strikes. Some strikes ended poorly when landlords retaliated or, worse, when the person in ch
arge of collecting tenant money to make their own improvements decided to take off with the cash. Cheated residents had little recourse for tracking the person down and there was only so much JOIN could do to hold each landlord to task. Still, those who participated in the Uptown rent strikes consider them some of JOIN’s biggest successes because they so effectively built a sense of power for poor residents. Dozens of people came to see JOIN as their organization—building by building, block by block.

  JOIN also made headway building multiracial solidarity through its housing campaigns. An estimated fifteen million people nationwide lived in deteriorating, overcrowded or undersupplied housing.38 In Chicago these conditions created a public health crisis for the poor. Infant mortality, disease, lead poisoning and sanitation all presented urgent problems for Uptown residents, just as they did for surrounding communities of color. Because the landlords JOIN confronted often owned buildings across the city, there was clear cause to build coalitions that transcended neighborhood and racial divides. Implicit in JOIN’s mission was its aim to prove that poor whites could become partners in class-based coalition with communities of color. By working with the Latin American Defense Organization, The Woodlawn Organization on the city’s South Side and Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, JOIN was able to coordinate bigger rent strikes demanding building improvements from slumlords. The groups often crossed town to support one another and, when urban renewal turned their neighborhoods into a game of dominoes, they were better positioned to jointly assert a voice for the poor.