Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power Page 7

  Unlike community organizations reluctant to push urban whites on the race question, JOIN’s organizers pressed the point at every opportunity. The group even mobilized members to support Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to desegregate housing in Chicago in the summer of 1966. The Chicago Freedom Movement marked the most ambitious civil rights campaign above the Mason-Dixon and may have been the first time since the unemployed workers’ movements of the Thirties when a large section of a city’s Black community focused its political attention on housing inequalities. Calling Chicago “the most segregated city in the North,” King saw Chicago as the best place to call the Democratic Party to task for its inaction around racial discrimination. JOIN agreed. Peggy Terry, the Dovies, Jean Tepperman and other members marched in almost every one of the Open Housing Marches beginning July 10 when sixty thousand people marched to City Hall.39

  Just over two weeks later, civil rights protestors marched through the all-white area of Gage Park to draw attention to real estate brokers’ pattern of housing discrimination. A crowd of whites attacked the marchers in a hail of bricks, bottles and projectiles. Rather than back down, they held a second march in Marquette Park, just to the southwest. There, King was hit in the head with a rock thrown from among the jeering white crowd. Again, they pressed on. A third march was announced for late August to the suburb of Cicero, Illinois, notorious for its racial violence. After a closed-door meeting with Mayor Daley, King called off the march. Suspicious of King’s compromise, local organizers carried on the Cicero march anyway. Peggy Terry, the Dovies and other Uptown organizers joined three hundred marchers who faced another angry white mob. Even though law enforcement officers outnumbered protesters ten to one, white reactionaries again attacked marchers at will. This time it was Big Dovie who was hit in the head with a brick. As Rev. King said, Cicero was indeed “the Selma of the North.”40

  While JOIN failed to mobilize more than two dozen or so supporters for the housing marches, those who did participate found a great deal of validation in the Chicago Freedom Movement’s focus on local reforms and interracial coalition. For JOIN, the housing marches had been a chance to highlight alliances with Black and Latino groups and draw attention to the roots of reactionary white violence. JOIN soon began using its mimeographed newsletter to carry stories about the Black Power Movement, the war’s impact at home, liberation movements in the Third World and the anticolonial struggle in Ireland.

  Even more effective than the newsletter or community school was JOIN’s community theater, which involved just about everyone in the organization at some point. Through drama, JOIN members sharpened their analysis of sociopolitical problems and brought humor and flair to a community hard hit by the draft and urban renewal. Theater student Melody James came to Chicago in 1966 to visit her brother Mike. During her visit she spent hours at the JOIN office debating theories of change with SDS leaders. “Does social revolution have to be violent?” she asked of Rennie Davis. He never answered the question but asked one back: Would she move to Chicago to help build a popular theater project? Maybe, there, Uptown residents could wrestle with those questions together. Melody agreed. She found a job at the Montrose Urban Progress Center, a target of JOIN criticism but also one of the few ways organizers could get paid for political work. Little Dovie Thurman joined Melody as the project’s co-director. Mary Hockenberry’s daughter joined in and soon even neighborhood “tough guys” became regulars on stage. While some JOIN organizers thought the project would pull members away from “real” organizing, the theater built such momentum that it was eventually accepted as one of the group’s most potent tools for political education.

  Celebrating working-class culture also proved central for JOIN’s growth. Over time JOIN evolved its own blend of southern, city-born and student customs. People sang protest songs and southern spirituals alongside classic country tunes. Favorites included Merle Haggard, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and, of course, Bob Dylan. Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game” about the murder of Medgar Evers pretty much summed up people’s frustration about their social status and politicians’ self-interested lip service to civil rights. Rennie Davis adapted the lyrics of the song “Good Old Mountain Dew” to reflect the hard times most residents faced in the North while paying homage to the trade unionism people took pride in from back home. The song became a kind of anthem for JOIN members and eventually inspired the name of JOIN’s tabloid newspaper, The Firing Line, with Peggy Terry as its editor.41

  The radical renaissance in Uptown wasn’t limited to meetings and marches either. A culture of independence was emerging among Uptown’s longtime residents. For all of JOIN’s participatory politics many longtime residents started to feel SDS organizers were still generally calling the shots. Some activists in JOIN, like the New Left overall, had yet to fully understand the impact of classism within the movement and in their own work. In JOIN, power struggles bubbled up over who got paid staff positions, how decisions were made and where funds got spent. Most Uptown residents felt SDS volunteers and students in JOIN, even new arrivals, dominated decision-making and the organization’s public profile. Residents also sensed some SDS activists’ impatience with the pace of change in their community, and ultimately there was no overlooking the obvious contradiction that most middle-class organizers could leave whenever they wanted. In trying to build an interracial movement of the poor, many SDS leaders lacked a realistic plan for dealing with their own class privilege and the power imbalances it created.

  Class tensions were only exacerbated by the fact that women, both longtime residents and student volunteers, started to have discussions about how they were treated by men in the organization. As early as 1964, JOIN women produced flyers calling attention to the treatment of women in meetings and the devaluing of welfare rights work. According to organizer Marilyn Katz, JOIN women were the canaries in the coalmine whether the issue was male dominance inside the organization, unemployment, substandard housing or the police violence impacting Uptown’s sons. Women lacked access to birth control, legal abortions, childcare and health care. Naturally, women in JOIN talked about their troubles, but they soon created a women’s group that met formally. Within JOIN and the community, this created conflicts as women’s organizing threatened male control. Women students bore the brunt of the criticism and some men accused them of dividing the organization or pushing “college bullshit.”

  While young men from Uptown were generally the most vocal about this, their concerns weren’t solely about women’s liberation. Many were rightfully “peeved with the way the students were running JOIN.” In July 1966 a group of them decided to carve out a space with some autonomy. Naming themselves the Goodfellows, the youth group was a cross between a street gang and a loose-knit radical social club. Founded by Jimmy Curry, the group drew in Peggy Terry’s son Doug Youngblood, Bobby Joe Wright and a talented local leader named Junebug Boykin, and the young men opened up a band hall and local youth hangout. They also made their political mission known: They intended to unite local gangs by turning street youths’ attention toward the “real enemy.” At a general level, this meant corrupt politicians, the war and capitalism, but the Chicago cops made for a more tangible and immediate target.

  Jimmy Curry was a lifelong resident of Uptown who spent most of his teenage years in conflict with the police over loitering, curfew violations and just about any other infraction they could find. “The police just came here and beat people up for fun. Beat us up just as bad as the Blacks,” says Curry. Jimmy Curry had a well deserved reputation as the “toughest guy in Uptown,” a fact that landed him in jail on more than once occasion. When he was seventeen, he was walking his girlfriend home when two police officers stopped the couple for being out after curfew. After one of the officers insulted his girlfriend, Curry “picked up a bottle and whacked him right in between the eyes.” His partner responded, “You’re dead,” and Curry took off running. Police chased him into a dead-end ally behin
d an apartment building. Standing there with nowhere else to run Curry heard the officer’s gun click. Suddenly, the building’s landlord came out the back door. The police must have weighed the complication of having a witness, because they took Curry to jail instead.

  Most young men in Uptown had been hassled by the cops, and so the Goodfellows became JOIN’s de facto anti-police brutality committee, drawing support from local leaders Ralph Thurman, Bob Lawson and Nanci Hollander who’d already started a police watch. One night the three JOIN activists came across police beating a teenage kid. Police confronted the nineteen-year-old and his mother as the two walked to the back of their apartment building to put away his bike. Shortly thereafter, officers entered the family’s apartment to “see who was there.” When the teenager gave the police some attitude, he was removed from the apartment, pushed down the outside stairs, beaten and arrested. His mother was also hit by the police. The JOIN activists on the scene wrote down badge numbers and took photos. Lawson was arrested. After that, the youth’s mother got involved with JOIN and activists started a regular police watch. Armed with cameras and notebooks, they canvassed the neighborhood and collected affidavits from residents.

  In many ways what happened in Uptown was nothing compared to the level of brutality in Black and Latino communities. As the Goodfellows sat down with local gangs to talk about unity, they heard story after story about brutal police violence in other poor neighborhoods. In June 1966 police shot and killed a young Puerto Rican named Cruz Arcelis, setting off the Division Street Riots in Humboldt Park, west of Uptown. Throughout the Sixties riots erupted as a particularly potent expression of urban outrage and desperation. JOIN’s idea for its police watch was even borrowed from Black activists in Los Angeles who launched one after the 1965 Watts Riots that left thirty-four dead. The lore of urban unrest, particularly among Black communities, often stoked white anxiety about racial tensions, even though the worst damage from the uprisings occurred within communities of color. Media coverage did little to help. By dubbing uprisings “race riots,” mainstream media made incidents sound unprovoked. While some seemed to spring from “nowhere,” the media spin obscured people’s demands for an end to slum conditions, police brutality and racial discrimination. JOIN’s Bob Lawson and Mike James attempted to reframe the uprisings as examples of class struggle in an article for JOIN’s newsletter, as did Peggy Terry who penned her own piece. But the message didn’t carry as far as they hoped.42 The Goodfellows took a different approach: They decided to launch a kind of street corner education project, reaching young men on the streets, in bars and in local pool halls.

  By August 1966 JOIN and the Goodfellows came up with a way to focus people’s outrage and bring them together. A march on the local Summerdale police station would draw Black, Puerto Rican and white youth, along with mothers, fathers, local religious leaders and all of JOIN. Jimmy Curry helped activists Ralph Thurman and Bob Lawson drum up support by talking to guys on street corners and reaching people coming out of neighborhood bars. They figured out which guys were most influential on each block and invited them to a sit down. Each agreed to tell their crew.

  The protest demanded an end to police brutality, a citizen review board to address complaints and the removal of officer Sam Joseph, a particularly brutal cop. News reports announcing plans for the march—in supposed editorial oversight—erroneously conflated their message with that of angry white mobs in Gage Park protesting Dr. King’s Open Housing Marches that summer. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the march to the Summerdale police station was to be a protest against police mistreatment of white counter-protestors who had hurled bricks at civil rights marchers.

  The Goodfellows message, while lost in the city press, was not lost on neighborhood residents who watched in horror as police violence and intimidation increased in the days before and after the march. It represented a different flavor of business as usual for the Chicago police, but something had to give. Like Terry’s epiphanous moment watching Rev. King attacked outside a Montgomery jail, some of the young guys in the neighborhood began to see white racial violence and police brutality as mirrors of the same systemic problems. While police intimidated many residents not to attend the march, nearly three hundred people gathered at the JOIN office for the Summerdale march. The moral imperative of stopping police harassment had united families from different parts of town, rival gangs, young and old. Young men with nicely greased pompadours took the lead greeting neighborhood mothers, student activists and local youth, gathered together to demand “community control of the police.”

  The day also marked a turning point for internal tensions between SDS organizers and Uptown’s longtime residents. In the hours before the march, several students sat around a table at a local bar discussing whether the community members were aware of the danger they were walking into. Goodfellows members, along with Peggy Terry and other local JOIN leaders, were done being underestimated. Not only had they already seen warning signs in the days before the march, they were fully aware that political organizing had consequences. Summing up the sentiment, Terry retorted, “Who knows better what the Summerdale cops will do to you than the people they been killing.” The Goodfellows made the call to start the march without the students. “We just marched off and left them discussing whether they should tell us we might get killed,” Terry said.

  Despite the internal fissures widening within JOIN, all sides had been right about the threat that came with their more confrontational organizing. The expansion of their work into other neighborhoods and the Summerdale march focused police attention on the organization with dire consequences. Two weeks later police raided JOIN’s North Sheridan office, along with the office of United People, a local organization that supported the march. Organizer Pat Sturgis walked into JOIN’s office in the middle of the raid. Theater coordinator Melody James was on her knees with a cop holding a gun to her head. The office was destroyed. Police confiscated letters, files and newspapers. Before they left they arrested James, Richie Rothstein and Mickey Birger for drug possession. Across town at United People, police arrested Rev. George Morey, a Presbyterian minister, and local resident Jack Hollenbeck on similar charges. According to JOIN, police planted the drugs, including various narcotics, needles and syringes. Police turned the allegedly “anti-government” literature over to federal authorities. Everyone affiliated with the organization was “gripped with a paranoia,” according to Sturgis, who had only recently arrived and felt some people held him suspect.

  Two days later police shot and killed Uptown resident Ronnie Williams, brother of Goodfellow Kenny Williams, who was running from the cops after a fight with his brother. After shooting him several times, witnesses reported “an officer put a bullet in his head point-blank.” As witnesses rushed up, one demanded an explanation. The officer responded, “Just another dead hillbilly.” A half-dozen witnesses said Ronnie never fired at the cops. At the funeral home, the undertaker told JOIN organizer Nanci Hollander he found four bullet wounds: one in the arm, two in the back, and one in the head.43

  This was only a small taste of what would come as Mayor Daley’s contempt for New Left activists mixed with the FBI’s push to dismantle dissent in the United States. Retaliation after the Summerdale march foreshadowed an all-out war on the Left from all levels of law enforcement. In fact, at least one informant was already hovering around JOIN and the Goodfellows. Raised in Uptown, Thomas Edward Mosher received a scholarship to attend Stanford University in 1962 but dropped out to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Mosher claimed he genuinely sympathized with the New Left’s goals until later in the Sixties, but no one knows for sure exactly when he started spying on his former friends. Most JOIN activists remember Mosher as an extremely intelligent, charming and destructive individual. According to JOIN organizer Steve Goldsmith, Mosher was never up front about having gone to college, passing himself off instead as a regular “neighborhood guy” and frequently starting fights. Regardless of the cha
in of events, it’s clear Mosher kept his ties to JOIN and the New Left until he testified about his activities before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1971, just as the extent of the government’s program to discredit the Left was being uncovered.44 In 1967 only one thing was clear: external forces were wreaking havoc on the movement. Few foresaw how much worse things would get.

  Still reeling from the office raid and growing surveillance around their activities, organizers in Uptown were facing an uphill struggle. Events in the national arena only steepened the grade. Anti-war efforts had drawn the student movement’s attention away from local projects, government crackdowns on radicals increased and civil rights organizations were facing tough internal questions. By 1966, members of the highly organized civil rights movement began more formally insisting white activists leave civil rights groups like SNCC and “organize their own.” The racial division of labor Carmichael had suggested to ERAP’s founders was no longer a suggestion, but an instruction.