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

  The division of radical labor evoked controversy on all sides. Black civil rights leaders debated the costs and benefits of a racially integrated movement, with Rev. King standing staunchly opposed to the separation and Carmichael adamantly for it. It played out as a clash between old and young, calling into question whether the movement should maintain nonviolence and integration or claim a right to self-defense and self-reliance. As King later wrote, “I should have known that in an atmosphere where false promises are daily realities, where deferred dreams are nightly facts, where acts of unpunished violence toward Negroes are a way of life, nonviolence would eventually be seriously questioned.”45 For him, abandoning nonviolence marked a fatal misstep for the cause. For Black leaders on the other side of the debate, the question was not whether to endorse violence; it was whether Blacks could build any meaningful political and economic power without first defining their own needs and demands. Everyone agreed that uprooting racism in the U.S. required white communities to confront its source—in the minds, hearts and establishments of white America. This was an especially difficult new directive for white activists who had spent the better part of the Sixties working in integrated organizations like SNCC. Many felt the decision was wrong; others called out the ways gender and male dominance informed these internal power struggles.46

  For JOIN’s Peggy Terry, now fully aware of what Monroe Sharp meant when he dragged her to JOIN, the strategic separation made sense. Peggy Terry’s experience at JOIN gave her a rare vantage point. She knew and respected King, but she easily related to the idea that Blacks weren’t given the respect they deserved in integrated organizations. Watching middle-class radicals get the final word on everything in SDS and even JOIN had shaped her understanding of organizational power relations. More importantly, Uptown’s small experiment in community organizing proved that it was possible to help whites see a vested interest in ending racism.

  Peggy Terry was also one of few white activists to witness the birth of the Black Power Movement firsthand. In June 1966 a white vigilante shot and injured a Black activist named James Meredith who had set out on a solo “March Against Fear” in Mississippi. In the days that followed a dozen civil rights organizations gathered to continue Meredith’s march. The event marked a turning point in the Black freedom struggle as leaders got into heated debates about whether whites should be allowed to join the march. At King’s urging, the march proceeded under the banner of nonviolence and the united chorus “Freedom Now.” White allies joined the procession, including Peggy Terry who had traveled down from Chicago to meet longtime friends from CORE and SNCC.

  Once the marchers arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, though, this chorus changed. Local police arrested SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael for trespassing at the local school where activists had set up camp. As marchers waited, debates about the movement’s direction and values reignited. The night of his release, Carmichael spoke to the crowds gathered in Greenwood and changed the course of the movement with a simple question. “What do you want?” he asked the crowd. Picking up on a phrase suggested by SNCC organizer Willie Ricks, they answered with a roaring “Black Power! Black Power!”47

  Peggy Terry knew she’d been witness to an incredible moment. “We reached a period in the civil rights movement when Black people felt they weren’t being given the respect they should have and I agreed. White liberals ran everything.” She remembers heated debates in the marchers’ camp at night, while she sat there wondering what all the fuss was about. “There was never any rift in my mind or my heart. I just felt Black people were doing what they should be doing.” For the majority of JOIN organizers, the division of labor made sense. They were, in fact, already a model for what it looked like to organize your own. Shortly after the Mississippi march, JOIN’s Mike James penned a message to fellow white radicals: “Given Black Power’s challenge to white activists to go organize their own communities, JOIN provides an example to be emulated, for it is unfortunately one of the few attempts being made to organize permanent bases of radical opposition among whites in general, and poor whites in particular.”48

  The Goodfellows and the welfare committee, along with The Firing Line and aspects of the theater, each served as emblems of JOIN’s success. And there was still plenty of work to do. JOIN’s second and third rent strikes were successful in winning collective bargaining agreements with landlords and bringing in new members. At the same time, organizers were making plans to build a new council based on block clubs (with stewards elected from the community), open a food co-op, get the city planning commission to fund a playground on Clifton Avenue and turn their full attention to fighting urban renewal.

  According to Gayle Markow, a white student who first visited Uptown through a federal VISTA program, “JOIN was where the action was at. In the movement, there was no one else that I knew of that said that poor whites weren’t automatically racist.” Like many volunteers who came to JOIN, Markow had no understanding of poor white poverty before she came to Uptown. She shared the common “suspicion that poor whites were probably the enemy of civil rights,” but her experience at JOIN changed that perception immediately. JOIN’s unique experiment proved that poor whites could be a part of social change and modeled an explicit commitment to race and class politics that attracted a dozen new volunteers.

  SDS member Diane Fager planned to join the civil rights movement in the South after graduation, but as she wrote her final paper on the topic of Black Power, she couldn’t escape the fact that the civil rights leaders she most admired were urging white progressives to organize working-class whites. She heard about JOIN from friends in SDS, but couldn’t find any contact information, so in early 1967 she just packed up her VW and drove from New York City to Chicago. She arrived shortly after the police raid and JOIN was in chaos. Marilyn Katz offered her couch as a place to sleep, but one organizer cautioned Fager that there were already “too many students at JOIN.” Most were aware that class differences between newcomers and longer-term residents caused ongoing tensions. New volunteers like Fager came into the organization with this in mind, bringing valuable experience and a good deal of humility. For a year Fager, along with Jean Tepperman and other white activists steered away from the South, delved into tenant organizing and supported the welfare rights committee.

  Within the year, the balance between locals and students tipped. While many community residents held staff positions at one time or another, SDS still largely controlled the group’s resources and major decision-making. The welfare committee struggled to set their own direction and Peggy Terry accused women students at JOIN of “mother henning.” In May 1967, welfare recipients decided it was time to break away from JOIN. Dovie Thurman and Dovie Coleman led the effort to create an independent organization and the committee was officially renamed Welfare Recipients Demand Action with local women working to bring in new members from the South Side and other parts of Chicago.

  The move alleviated some of the pressure and many of the women remained members, pressing for more resident participation in JOIN’s other projects. Honest about their growing pains and responding to mistakes they saw among other radicals heading into white communities to “organize their own,” several JOIN leaders published an article called “Take a Step Into America” cautioning activists to expect some culture shock and assume a period of learning from the community. “Take a Step Into America” made the immodest proposal that the Left needed to be relevant to the everyday needs of everyday people. Those everyday needs were not trivial, they argued, no matter how un-revolutionary it seemed to clean up garbage or address the need for health care. Moreover, they assessed that the role of community organizers in 1967 was to help working people develop political consciousness and confidence, however long that took. “Let’s get it straight: all of us understand U.S. imperialism and we hate it,” they wrote. “Those of us who didn’t learn about it while sitting on the terrace at Berkeley … learned about it because we were organized.”49 The revolution was
not going to happen just yet, they argued, but it could come if organizers now readied new leaders for tomorrow.

  While the broader Left may have underestimated poor whites’ readiness for radicalism, the SDS organizers who spent time in Uptown gave lie to this. Their mistake was in forgetting one of the main tenets of participatory democracy: the outside organizer should “be a catalyst, not a leader.” Ultimately, the power struggles in JOIN proved irreconcilable. In December 1967, shortly after the “Take A Step” article was published, local leaders asked SDS students and other outside volunteers to leave. Accounts from all sides point to the fact that poor white Chicagoans felt this was the best way to assure an organization that truly reflected their own leadership. The Black Power movement provided undeniable inspiration. At the December 1967 SDS national convention, Peggy Terry delivered a blistering critique of SDS, informing student leaders that she and her neighbors would be relying on themselves and entering into alliances with student organizers very rarely. Under the banner “Tellin’ It Like It Is,” Terry stated, “We believe that the time has come for us to turn to our own people, poor and working-class whites, for direction, support and inspiration, to organize around our own identity, our own interests.”

  Beyond local control, Terry and other local leaders were hoping a working-class led organization could make a bigger impact on the national stage. Few political organizations spoke to poor and working-class whites’ concerns and aspirations in any positive way. The KKK, White Citizens’ Councils and reactionary politicians like Alabama’s George Wallace stood among the few directly promising solutions to their problems. JOIN’s new leadership hoped to make an intervention. “We believe that, given the understanding that comes only with working-class oriented organizing, we can change the direction in which many of our folks now seem headed,” said Terry.50

  JOIN’s local leaders had no intention of isolating themselves from the broader movement, though. Peggy Terry’s son Doug Youngblood actually dedicated himself to taking JOIN’s lessons nationwide through a training program for middle-class organizers and campus activists. Youngblood reasoned that middle-class students weren’t to blame for their inexperience working with poor people, but that students simply needed more training if they wanted to be effective. Hoping to prevent misunderstanding and offer concrete lessons, Terry and Youngblood carefully explained the reasons for the split. “No matter what background a person comes from, when he or she takes on the role of organizer their primary job is to find people to whom they can pass on their abilities, their skills. The job of an organizer is to organize themselves out of a job.”51 A poor-people-led JOIN, they argued, was proof that SDS organizers had accomplished their job. It was simply their “unwillingness, or inability, to fade from the scene” that caused tensions.

  Terry and Youngblood also challenged the verbal separation between “organizers” (meaning students) and “community people,” offering that all those in the new JOIN were community people and organizers both. Students genuinely willing to live as part of the community for the long haul would eventually have a place in the new organization. But ultimately, the split with SDS marked the beginning of the end for JOIN. Like the separation of white activists from civil rights groups a year earlier, the demand that outside organizers leave JOIN opened up both interpersonal and political contradictions. For many of the women student organizers, gender bias along with class tensions and issues over money—mostly controlled by male leaders—seemed to precipitate the split. The class questions were real, but the ejection of student organizers struck them as far more complicated.

  JOIN organizer Pat Sturgis agrees that gender played a big role in the power struggle, but believes the decision to eject SDS organizations was based in an honest belief that working-class whites had to build their own base. With Peggy Terry as the community’s spokesperson, few protested the extenuating dynamics. As Sturgis put it, Terry was an extremely smart woman who read just about everything coming out of the movement. She, along with Uptown’s radical hillbillies, street youth and welfare recipients, found inspiration in the Black Power model and believed there was only one path forward. That path would be short but very eventful.

  JOIN kicked off 1968 with its first solo endeavor, the national Poor People’s Campaign established by Rev. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to address economic injustice. The campaign had been a contentious topic in JOIN prior to the split. Several SDS organizers felt the campaign reflected the kind of soft, reformist politics the movement could no longer afford. This was somewhat true given the growing state repression against the movement. But while King thought the “Black Power” slogan sent the wrong message, he was also taking increasingly radical stances on issues like Vietnam and the economy. King agreed with one of Black Power’s basic tenets—the need for economic self-sufficiency—though he never embraced the racial division of labor. In a telegram inviting nearly eighty leaders to a planning meeting in Atlanta, King wrote, “The time to clearly present the case of poor people nationally draws near. I hope you will agree with me that this can only be done effectively if there is joint thinking of representatives of all racial, religious and ethnic groups.”52 Peggy Terry joined representatives from some of the nation’s largest membership organizations—César Chávez for the United Farm Workers, Reies López Tijerina of the Alianza de Pueblos Libres, Tillie Walker representing the Plains tribes of North Dakota, and Big Dovie Coleman on behalf of the National Welfare Rights Organization, among others—on the steering committee. Most everyone involved had high hopes about the project’s potential. Before anyone made it to Washington, DC, however, those hopes and dreams were shattered.

  On April 4, just weeks before the launch, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at his Memphis motel. Peggy Terry heard the news on the television. She picked up her pen and recorded Uptown’s heartbreak. “Big Dovie is moaning and crying. Doug is chewing his fingernails and I sit here in shock trying to capture this feeling of a moment in history so painful I will feel it for all my days.”53 More than one hundred cities erupted in protest and mourning, including Chicago. Three hundred thousand people attended King’s funeral in Atlanta, Georgia. Former JOIN organizer Fran Ansley witnessed the heartbreaking scene at the airport as she, and thousands of others, arrived for the services. Writing to Peggy Terry, with whom she remained close even after the students’ expulsion from JOIN, Ansley captured the moment’s painful contradictions: “Two different hillbilly families sending boys off to Vietnam (the women crying, and the boys all in pimples trying to look brave). And then four beautiful black women from SCLC, with signs pinned on their blouses, greeting the black people who were arriving—at least one every five minutes. Black armbands. TV cameras. Hostile whites.”54 Grief, hostility, war and protest defined 1968.

  In the wake of King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign steering committee decided to go forward with the gathering in Washington. SCLC’s vice president Ralph David Abernathy took the helm. On May 12, Mother’s Day, the National Welfare Rights Organization kicked off the convention with a march that drew six thousand people. Soon, nearly three thousand poor people from across the country arrived to set up camp on the lawn of the National Mall, dubbing their new home “Resurrection City.” They slept on the lawn for six weeks and held a massive Solidarity Day rally on June 19 that attracted fifty thousand people. Terry was asked to represent poor whites by giving a speech. She was still a reluctant speaker, but she recognized the rare chance to give poor whites a voice on the national stage. Even more, it was a chance to share JOIN’s message, a message she had first learned from Rev. King when she finally met him at CORE—that ending poverty was part of that movement’s goals and that poor whites had an important role to play in the struggle. That message transformed her life as it did the lives of thousands of others. So she did what she learned at JOIN and spoke from her own experience: “We, the poor whites of the United States, today demand an end to racism, for our own se
lf-interest and well being, as well as for the well being of black, brown and red Americans who, I repeat, are our natural allies in the struggle for real freedom and real democracy in these, OUR, United States of America.”55

  Much of what’s been written about the convention focuses on the infighting, SCLC’s mismanagement and the utter misery in the rain-soaked camps. Several civil rights scholars have written it off as the end of the civil rights golden era and even the press at the time largely ignored the event or grossly exaggerated the crime and tensions.56 Power struggles aside, the JOIN members who attended considered the experience transformative. In that moment all JOIN’s drama in the prior year fell by the wayside. It was not a revolution, but it was theirs. “The important thing that is happening is going around the campfires,” Youngblood wrote. “What I mean is that poor people from all over this land are sitting down together and talking about their lives and some of the things they’ve done and want to do about changing them for the better.… It may not be radical enough for some but to me it is one of the most radical events I’ve ever been a part of.”57 Youngblood acknowledged the campaign’s limitations in a letter he wrote to The Movement newspaper, but shared the feelings of Uptown residents who felt they had participated in something rare and beautiful. The student movement, he argued, had gotten too far ahead of the people. Youngblood closed his letter with a direct challenge to elements of the New Left moving away from the masses: “Because I have faith in people I am willing to walk, work, sleep, fight, and even die at the pace they set.”

  The Uptown organizers returned home energized but under pressure to rebuild the infrastructure they had lost with SDS. Terry’s apartment served as JOIN’s office. A small group of local organizers kept up work to stop city urban renewal projects and started a health clinic. But after funds dried up and rumors circulated that monies earmarked for the Poor People’s Campaign in Chicago might go to one of Saul Alinsky’s projects instead, JOIN’s fate seemed sealed. In August 1968 JOIN suspended its local work to take on one last campaign: Peggy Terry’s run for vice president of the United States.