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Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
THE STORY OF SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND LITTLE-KNOWN ACTIVISTS OF THE 1960s, IN A DEEPLY SOURCED NARRATIVE HISTORY
The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a group of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by.
James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups:
+ JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .
+ The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .
+ In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .
+ In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor.
Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.
The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a group of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by.
James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups:
+ JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .
+ The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .
+ In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .
+ In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor.
Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
September 28, 2012
i really enjoyed this book a lot. i am a huge fan of movement history and this is a great companion to many other good books on the 60's. i had read books that dealt with sds's foray into poor white communities in its erap project but nothing that went into any detail about the groups and projects they were involved in. i think, as the authors state, there are real lessons to be learned by these experiences. paradoxically, when sncc moved to a black only organization and the black panthers became the revolutionary vanguard telling whites to 'organize their own' it actually created much stronger interracial solidarity in a lot of cases - and especially within the groups profiled in this book. and while some groups became sort of black panther support groups, others found real success in organizing rent strikes and welfare office pickets right in their own neighborhoods. also many of these groups found great success (albeit short-lived) by meeting people where they were and in some cases adopting a 'radical cool' which connected with the disaffected working poor youth and made politics something personal and something desirable. i think we could use a lot more 'radical cool' today.
October 28, 2011
Given today's various "occupy" movements and the overwhelming amount of White privilege (and perhaps class privilege), a book on Whites organizing against both racism and classism is really sorely needed.
September 5, 2013
This is really two books. The first 3/4 of the book os a detailed examination of attempts to organize poor white people living in the Uptown neighborhood on the north side of Chicago for a few years in the late 60's and early 70's. The last section is a much briefer, less detail rich account of similar work in New York and Philadelphia at about the same time. These latter sections lack the rich local detail of the first part of the book, and the reader gets the feeling that the authors did not have nearly the same number of interviews and documentary record that they had for Uptown.
The first portion of the book--focused on Uptown was both fascinating, and disappointing. Roger Ebert once said that no one can enjoy a movie shot in their own dining room because all they will see is the flaws in the wallpaper. Maybe that was my problem with Hillbilly Nationalists.
I have worked in Uptown since 1978--a few years after this account stops--at the Uptown People's Law Center, a store-front legal clinic much like the one described in the book. I know several of the people from Uptown described in the book. The history of JOIN, Rising Up Angry, and associated organizations is certainly fascinating, well written, and full of detail. a good story.
But his presentation of the so called fracturing of the left in Uptown--which is where the book stops its account--is woefully incomplete. Many people picked up the struggle right where the book stops--and are still there today. Dozens of activists have now lived and worked in Uptown for 30+ years, struggling in one structure or another to maintain a progressive position in a racially, economically, and ethnically diverse community, and continuing to link the local struggles with multiracial citywide coalitions, national movements, and the international anti-colonialism/anti-war movements. This effort has reshaped Uptown, with a core of progressive, low income people of all races and ethnic groups (and sexual orientation), all willing and able to fight for their community.
Just this past weekend, the community banded together to fight against school closings. The group included students, artists, teachers, and poor people, Black, White, Latino, Asian, African, and many more. Many had lived here for decades, and in some cases families included three generations who attended the same local school. This history of struggle has resulted in a community unique in Chicago--if not the entire country.
The few short years described here were only a beginning, not an ending. The remainder of the story needs to be told.
The first portion of the book--focused on Uptown was both fascinating, and disappointing. Roger Ebert once said that no one can enjoy a movie shot in their own dining room because all they will see is the flaws in the wallpaper. Maybe that was my problem with Hillbilly Nationalists.
I have worked in Uptown since 1978--a few years after this account stops--at the Uptown People's Law Center, a store-front legal clinic much like the one described in the book. I know several of the people from Uptown described in the book. The history of JOIN, Rising Up Angry, and associated organizations is certainly fascinating, well written, and full of detail. a good story.
But his presentation of the so called fracturing of the left in Uptown--which is where the book stops its account--is woefully incomplete. Many people picked up the struggle right where the book stops--and are still there today. Dozens of activists have now lived and worked in Uptown for 30+ years, struggling in one structure or another to maintain a progressive position in a racially, economically, and ethnically diverse community, and continuing to link the local struggles with multiracial citywide coalitions, national movements, and the international anti-colonialism/anti-war movements. This effort has reshaped Uptown, with a core of progressive, low income people of all races and ethnic groups (and sexual orientation), all willing and able to fight for their community.
Just this past weekend, the community banded together to fight against school closings. The group included students, artists, teachers, and poor people, Black, White, Latino, Asian, African, and many more. Many had lived here for decades, and in some cases families included three generations who attended the same local school. This history of struggle has resulted in a community unique in Chicago--if not the entire country.
The few short years described here were only a beginning, not an ending. The remainder of the story needs to be told.
September 29, 2011
An important and timely history of poor white activists working to bridge racial and economic barriers in the prime of the civil rights movement.
It's hard to imagine a time where impoverished and geographically displaced Appalachian whites were able to set-aside centuries of institutionalized racism in order to work alongside groups like the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords.
Hillbilly Nationalists is thoroughly researched and annotated, yet still provides exactly the kind of inspiration working class Americans need to reform their misplaced faith in Tea Party politics.
It's hard to imagine a time where impoverished and geographically displaced Appalachian whites were able to set-aside centuries of institutionalized racism in order to work alongside groups like the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords.
Hillbilly Nationalists is thoroughly researched and annotated, yet still provides exactly the kind of inspiration working class Americans need to reform their misplaced faith in Tea Party politics.
October 26, 2012
Highly recommended! I learned a ton about 60s and 70s activism that focused on class, in addition to race and gender, issues. Chicago peeps, did you know Uptown was known as Hillbilly Harlem and considered one of the city's most dangerous post-WWII slums? If you have even the slightest interest in social justice but have never heard of Peggy Terry, Dovie Coleman, or Mike James (as I had not), you gotta read this.
October 27, 2011
This was great, and fills a pretty critical vacuum. But it felt rushed at times, and I feel like I finished wanting a similar-length book that could be focused just on the history and internal dynamics Rising Up Angry.
October 30, 2017
I had seen the white dudes with confederate flag patches hanging with the Panthers in the film "The Murder of Fred Hampton" and I knew that they were Okies and Hillbillies living in Chicago slums and that was enough to make me want to read this. But there's way more to this small book than just those cats, the Young Patriots. We also learn about their political ancestors, the Jobs Or Income Now organization that came out of SDS's ERAP, and white working class rebels in related groups in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Bronx. These kinds of groups, hopefully this time without the confederate flag, are exactly what the US needs now: radical, anti-racist, class-based community organizations that can reach the people that liberals have written off and left for the "deplorables." Radical histories like this one have so much to offer activists today: not just the lessons of the past but also some relief from that feeling of isolation. It's all so damn important and yet so freaking invisible!
September 28, 2021
4.5. A highly readable study of five radical white organizations in the 60s and 70s which organized the white working class of their neighborhoods in solidarity with nonwhite radical organizations. There are many lessons to glean from this book and more than a few concerning instances where one can see history repeating itself with contemporary radical organizations.
Overall, a book worth reading if you’re looking to learn about creating Rainbow Coalitions today.
Overall, a book worth reading if you’re looking to learn about creating Rainbow Coalitions today.
March 24, 2023
Hillbilly Nationalists is a book about a lesser known aspect of political organizing that happened within the US during the 1960s: Working class whites.
I've been familiar with the subject of organizing around this time before, but most of it was centered around the BPP, and so many folks may not even think about the organizing of working class whites. This book is an antidote to that problem, and fills the vacuum. Furthermore, it details the Rainbow Coalition (albeit this part is a bit short) and the solidarity that these organizations (like the Young Patriots) had with nonwhite radical groups like the BPP and the Young Lords. I thought a lot about the power of solidarity while reading this, and how important it must've been in these types of situations. It is a wonderful read for those interested in the history of radical organizing, and brings a refreshing take.
I've been familiar with the subject of organizing around this time before, but most of it was centered around the BPP, and so many folks may not even think about the organizing of working class whites. This book is an antidote to that problem, and fills the vacuum. Furthermore, it details the Rainbow Coalition (albeit this part is a bit short) and the solidarity that these organizations (like the Young Patriots) had with nonwhite radical groups like the BPP and the Young Lords. I thought a lot about the power of solidarity while reading this, and how important it must've been in these types of situations. It is a wonderful read for those interested in the history of radical organizing, and brings a refreshing take.
March 19, 2012
I really enjoyed this book, not least because it provides a history of white working-class radical organizing across racial divides - but also because it was, by and large, situated in Chicago, although the book also discusses organizing that went on in Kensington, PA, Oregon, and to a lesser extent, New York. Uptown was the home of the Patriots and JOIN (Jobs or Income Now!), both of which formed alliances with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and centered around Uptown's at that time vibrant hillbilly community. Rising Up Angry, which came later, was an explicitly multi-racial working-class community organizing effort, and also organized folks from the Northwest Suburbs, and explicitly celebrated rather than denigrated working-class culture surrounding cars, dress, and thought. I didn't know that Mike James (the owner of the Heartland Cafe, my first Chicago haunt) was a former member of Rising Up Angry and JOIN, although it makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it, given the culture and structure of the place. I take a certain amount of pride in the knowledge that Chicago was, in many ways, at the forefront of multiracial working-class organizing, and am happy to know that there is a book that documents this history. At the same time, the book recognizes that the Black Panthers and Young Lords were subject to much greater levels of repression, and that tensions between white middle-class organizers and white working-class organizers were always present even within working-class community organizations. This should be required reading for white, middle-class leftists who deride the white working-class as hopelessly racist and/or apolitical - or really, for anyone interested in radical politics, Chicago history, or the '60s. While the organizing model used had its limitations and flaws, it is critical that we recognize the linkages and common humanity of all people in any organizing project. This work is important in the sense that it recognizes the efforts of those whom it is usually presumed had no interest in radical struggle, and were focused solely on their own communities and advancement within the capitalist system. This book complicates that narrative and provides grounding for current movements and work.
August 3, 2016
I found this book on recommendation about works that articulate connections between racism and classism in America and found so much more--Sonnie and Tracy's well-researched history of community organizing that united working-class people with undermining racism in the 60s and 70s. This history of the Young Patriots, JOIN, White Lightning, Rising Up Angry, and October 4th Organization is def recommended reading for contemporary organizers, dreamers, and folks working for social justice. Helped me understand the origins of 'radical/racial division of labor' (currently, Black Lives Matter and SURJ, among others) with the Panthers and civil rights movement; and so much of the New Right and Donald Trump's populism and 'law and order' rhetoric is reflected in the same kinds of tactics and behaviors by government and leaders thirty and forty years ago and more--Rizzo in Philadelphia, George Wallace in the South, Nixon, and Daley in Chicago, among others. This book is deeply inspiring and exciting. Highly recommended.
April 25, 2019
An incredibly well-written book on white working class leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Amy Sonnie put together a very thoroughly researched piece that examines the social, political, and economic dynamics of these movements and offers a very frank account of their strengths and shortcomings. It's hard to find a lot of information online about many of these movements, which were repressed or divided in the 1970s, so this is easily one of the best sources if you're interested. Also, the epilogue is awfully forward-thinking, especially considering it was written in 2011, 5 years before the failure of the left to engage the white working class became apparent. Hillbilly Nationalists is a crucial work in the history of the American left.
January 13, 2014
amazing. One of the most important books I have read in a long time.
December 29, 2014
You won't get this stuff anywhere else. You can tell a lot of research went into it.
Read
January 17, 2017303.48409 S6993 2011
November 11, 2019
Best read with a side of “American Revolution 2” and “Medium Cool.”
September 29, 2017
The blurb on the back starts with, "Given the invisibility of this history. . ." And I agree this history has been largely invisible. But upon reading, it strikes me that one of the reasons for this lack of visibility may be the overall lack of effectiveness of these movements, especially when compared with larger, longer-lasting efforts like Black Panthers, SNCC, and SDS.
I'm not saying it's not valuable to learn about the small, predominantly poor white urban movements of the 60s and 70s. I am saying that their historical obscurity doesn't quite reach the level of "injustice," just because the movements themselves were not extremely significant outside of a few important qualities.
Moreover, there's a fine line between recognizing the efforts of unsung white folks on one hand, and on the other trying to center whiteness in what has historically (and deservedly) been a minority movement. This book mostly stays on the proper side of that line, but it appears to slip over at times.
However, there are important lessons to learn from such a history, most of them describing intra-movement conflicts: the tension between forming interracial coalitions and "staying in your lane;" the disconnect between academics/theoreticians and the community they're attempting to serve; and the importance of reaching out to "lost cause" communities because you can occasionally shift their perspectives on race.
I really liked the bit at the end about O4O taking poor communities on field trips to the neighborhoods of their landlords and employers, in order to drive home the reality of their economic exploitation. It's a brilliant tactic that could still serve us today.
Overall, I'm glad I read it and I'll keep it on my shelf just to be able to reference JOIN, Rising Up Angry, October 4th Organization and White Lightning when I'm pondering community organizing. I do wish Sonnie and Tracy might have offered more straightforward analysis on the dissolutions of these groups. They discuss each one individually but only in passing. Some of the questions I would have been interested to see addressed in a concluding chapter:
-Why did they stop connecting with their communities?
-Why weren't they able to keep fresh blood cycling into the organization as staff?
-What, if they had done it differently, might have enabled them to continue?
Obviously all of these questions are applicable for people who would like to build successful movements in the future. The work of these groups is definitely inspiring, but it takes the wind out a bit that they were all so uniformly ephemeral. How can we prevent the same thing from happening the next time around?
Overall I'd recommend it if you're more than passingly interested in the Civil Rights era and 60s/70s activism. It's a short, engaging read and provides a different angle to round out your knowledge. It doesn't reach "crucial" reading status, but then again not everything has to.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
I'm not saying it's not valuable to learn about the small, predominantly poor white urban movements of the 60s and 70s. I am saying that their historical obscurity doesn't quite reach the level of "injustice," just because the movements themselves were not extremely significant outside of a few important qualities.
Moreover, there's a fine line between recognizing the efforts of unsung white folks on one hand, and on the other trying to center whiteness in what has historically (and deservedly) been a minority movement. This book mostly stays on the proper side of that line, but it appears to slip over at times.
However, there are important lessons to learn from such a history, most of them describing intra-movement conflicts: the tension between forming interracial coalitions and "staying in your lane;" the disconnect between academics/theoreticians and the community they're attempting to serve; and the importance of reaching out to "lost cause" communities because you can occasionally shift their perspectives on race.
I really liked the bit at the end about O4O taking poor communities on field trips to the neighborhoods of their landlords and employers, in order to drive home the reality of their economic exploitation. It's a brilliant tactic that could still serve us today.
Overall, I'm glad I read it and I'll keep it on my shelf just to be able to reference JOIN, Rising Up Angry, October 4th Organization and White Lightning when I'm pondering community organizing. I do wish Sonnie and Tracy might have offered more straightforward analysis on the dissolutions of these groups. They discuss each one individually but only in passing. Some of the questions I would have been interested to see addressed in a concluding chapter:
-Why did they stop connecting with their communities?
-Why weren't they able to keep fresh blood cycling into the organization as staff?
-What, if they had done it differently, might have enabled them to continue?
Obviously all of these questions are applicable for people who would like to build successful movements in the future. The work of these groups is definitely inspiring, but it takes the wind out a bit that they were all so uniformly ephemeral. How can we prevent the same thing from happening the next time around?
Overall I'd recommend it if you're more than passingly interested in the Civil Rights era and 60s/70s activism. It's a short, engaging read and provides a different angle to round out your knowledge. It doesn't reach "crucial" reading status, but then again not everything has to.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
May 30, 2017
Sonnie and Tracy seek to uncover the history of leftwing poor white activism and community organizing within poor white communities, whom are typically a blind spot for middle class white organizers, whom see poor whites as brainwashed pawns of conservative unions and politicians. While the historical memory of white workers during the 1960s-70s was that of white union workers confronting anti-war protestors and condemning black power, Sonnie & Tracy instead refocus on the countercurrent in poor white communities, especially in Chicago. The book’s focus is on the rise of the Young Patriots in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, recently populated with thousands of Appalachian Southern whites whom had fled long neglect, and living in neighborhoods that were quickly torn apart by Urban Renewal programs. The Young Patriots became the poor white part of the original Rainbow Coalition between the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican power group, in promoting community self-reliance and cross racial solidarity against police brutality and for community control.
The book is broken down into four chapters, three of which concentrate on Chicago organizing. The first touches on the construction of JOIN city union, originally by SDS in poor white neighborhoods but quickly became an organization of poor whites as SDS splintered into factionalism. The organization focused on building against police brutality and housing, and is told through the eyes of Peggy Terry. The second chapter moves to the Young Patriots, who emerged from JOIN’s anti-police brutality committee. It deposits that poor whites were just as likely to oppose racism as middle class whites, and that class specific organizing must be infused with a race understanding as well to build across color divides. The third chapter looks to Rising Up Angry, which took it to another level as it began to organize with gender at the forefront as well as race and class, meaning that women were key parts of the day to day work instead of in the back. Chapter four moves to organizations in other cities, namely the October 4th Organization in Philadelphia, organizing in Kensington and Fishtown amongst poor whites to counter Frank Rizzo, and White Lightening in the Bronx, which organized against drug sentencing laws.
Key Themes and Concept
-A defining image that the authors return to is at the United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland 1969, where Young Patriots with stitched on Confederate flags stood side by side with Black Panthers, watching each other’s backs. This symbol of racism became a symbol of defiance by Southern whites against middle class whites in the North, and the Black Panthers accepted that.
-The groups used the Black Panther strategy of “Organize Your Own” for organizing direct services in their own community, such as breakfast programs, anti-drug clinics, and abortion services.
-Class must be informed by race and vice versa, and organizing that ignores working class whites will ultimately be short sighted.
The book is broken down into four chapters, three of which concentrate on Chicago organizing. The first touches on the construction of JOIN city union, originally by SDS in poor white neighborhoods but quickly became an organization of poor whites as SDS splintered into factionalism. The organization focused on building against police brutality and housing, and is told through the eyes of Peggy Terry. The second chapter moves to the Young Patriots, who emerged from JOIN’s anti-police brutality committee. It deposits that poor whites were just as likely to oppose racism as middle class whites, and that class specific organizing must be infused with a race understanding as well to build across color divides. The third chapter looks to Rising Up Angry, which took it to another level as it began to organize with gender at the forefront as well as race and class, meaning that women were key parts of the day to day work instead of in the back. Chapter four moves to organizations in other cities, namely the October 4th Organization in Philadelphia, organizing in Kensington and Fishtown amongst poor whites to counter Frank Rizzo, and White Lightening in the Bronx, which organized against drug sentencing laws.
Key Themes and Concept
-A defining image that the authors return to is at the United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland 1969, where Young Patriots with stitched on Confederate flags stood side by side with Black Panthers, watching each other’s backs. This symbol of racism became a symbol of defiance by Southern whites against middle class whites in the North, and the Black Panthers accepted that.
-The groups used the Black Panther strategy of “Organize Your Own” for organizing direct services in their own community, such as breakfast programs, anti-drug clinics, and abortion services.
-Class must be informed by race and vice versa, and organizing that ignores working class whites will ultimately be short sighted.
November 7, 2017
Unearthing dusty pieces of history more relevant now than ever, Sonnie and Tracy craft a cogent history of four major community organizing efforts that brought poor Whites into radical solidarity with people of Color.
Major takeaways:
- Culture is a key site for organizing and can sustain movements. The White Southern communities discussed in this book - those that became fertile grounds for radicalization - were strongly defined by a cultural heritage transplanted to the urban North from Appalachia. These communities already came together around a shared sense of identity, which proved exceedingly useful in organizing them. (I feel like this is one of the reasons middle to upper-class White people seem so unorganizable. We never get together anyway - around anything.)
- Solidarity is something you can hold in your hands. It wasn't rhetoric that bound the Young Patriots to the Black Panthers - it was tangible commitment to mutual survival. E.g. when a crowd of Young Patriots swarmed a pair of cops trying to arrest Bob Lee and prevented his detention. In fact, the rhetoric - or the optics - explicitly didn't matter - I mean, the YPs had a Confederate Flag as their logo, for goodness sake... On that moment, Lee said "'I'll never forget looking at all those brave white motherfuckers standing in the light of the police car staring in the face of death'" (77).
Interesting things of note:
- SDS had some strange community organizing politics. Sonnie and Tracy detail the falling out between JOIN and SDS after Uptown residents became fed up with middle-class White organizers' patronizing attitudes. I hadn't fully understood the tension during this era between poor White radicals and elite, educated White radicals.
- COINTELPRO explicitly targeted JOIN and the Young Patriots. CPD routinely raided their offices (not unlike the Black Panthers) and literally killed a vocal Uptown activist, Ronnie Williams (50).
- Peggy Terry, one of the prominent JOIN activists profiled in the book, actually ran on a presidential ticket with Eldridge Cleaver.
- Gender justice was a huge part of poor White radical organizing in Chicago! Heck yeah!
- The Young Patriots even drafted their own Ten-Point Program. And they opened their own health center, mimicking the Panthers' survival programs.
Questions I'm asking:
- What does this mean for now? The material conditions faced by poor Appalachian Uptown residents, for example, are so wildly different that experiences of poor White urban dwellers today - in terms of treatment by police, quality of housing, etc. If the root of solidarity was collective shared experience that transcended race (not saying the conditions among communities of Color weren't worse - they were), what does that mean for the possibility of similar coalitions today?
- What does poor White self-determination look like now in a neoliberal capitalist landscape?
- Many more...
Major takeaways:
- Culture is a key site for organizing and can sustain movements. The White Southern communities discussed in this book - those that became fertile grounds for radicalization - were strongly defined by a cultural heritage transplanted to the urban North from Appalachia. These communities already came together around a shared sense of identity, which proved exceedingly useful in organizing them. (I feel like this is one of the reasons middle to upper-class White people seem so unorganizable. We never get together anyway - around anything.)
- Solidarity is something you can hold in your hands. It wasn't rhetoric that bound the Young Patriots to the Black Panthers - it was tangible commitment to mutual survival. E.g. when a crowd of Young Patriots swarmed a pair of cops trying to arrest Bob Lee and prevented his detention. In fact, the rhetoric - or the optics - explicitly didn't matter - I mean, the YPs had a Confederate Flag as their logo, for goodness sake... On that moment, Lee said "'I'll never forget looking at all those brave white motherfuckers standing in the light of the police car staring in the face of death'" (77).
Interesting things of note:
- SDS had some strange community organizing politics. Sonnie and Tracy detail the falling out between JOIN and SDS after Uptown residents became fed up with middle-class White organizers' patronizing attitudes. I hadn't fully understood the tension during this era between poor White radicals and elite, educated White radicals.
- COINTELPRO explicitly targeted JOIN and the Young Patriots. CPD routinely raided their offices (not unlike the Black Panthers) and literally killed a vocal Uptown activist, Ronnie Williams (50).
- Peggy Terry, one of the prominent JOIN activists profiled in the book, actually ran on a presidential ticket with Eldridge Cleaver.
- Gender justice was a huge part of poor White radical organizing in Chicago! Heck yeah!
- The Young Patriots even drafted their own Ten-Point Program. And they opened their own health center, mimicking the Panthers' survival programs.
Questions I'm asking:
- What does this mean for now? The material conditions faced by poor Appalachian Uptown residents, for example, are so wildly different that experiences of poor White urban dwellers today - in terms of treatment by police, quality of housing, etc. If the root of solidarity was collective shared experience that transcended race (not saying the conditions among communities of Color weren't worse - they were), what does that mean for the possibility of similar coalitions today?
- What does poor White self-determination look like now in a neoliberal capitalist landscape?
- Many more...
January 16, 2022
Focusing on the poor white radicals inspired by the call from activists of color to “organize their own,” we learn about recently laid off coal miners and single mothers on welfare, recovering addicts and members of street gangs, all who became leaders of various leftist community organizations. In Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City in the 1960s and 70s they organized their white, working class neighbors around a sense of progressive populism to seek material improvements to their immediate living conditions, combatting greedy landlords, sadistic cops, and corrupt politicians, all while standing in solidarity with nonwhite organizations and advocating for antiracist, anticapitalist ideals.
While they undoubtedly had a short term impact on some of the most run-down neighborhoods in their cities, these groups all struggled to translate on-the-ground community organizing into any long lasting revolutionary change in line with their Marxist ideals. Working as a part of various multiracial coalitions, they hoped to confront racial capitalism and imperialism around the world, but it turns out there are a lot of powerful people interested in maintaining the status quo. These groups were often heavily monitored and sabotaged by various governmental agencies, and the ones that weren't actively subverted by the feds dissolved into a mess of directionless splinter groups and endless debates over theory and strategy.
A quick and provocative read that had me considering the difference between passive allyship and active solidarity, as well as the still untapped potential of a white working class that has been written off by the majority of middle-class leftists as unreachable. Good stuff with a ton of fascinating anecdotes and references to writing on other groups that made up these radical multiracial coalitions, this is going to be one I’ll be referring back to for a while.
While they undoubtedly had a short term impact on some of the most run-down neighborhoods in their cities, these groups all struggled to translate on-the-ground community organizing into any long lasting revolutionary change in line with their Marxist ideals. Working as a part of various multiracial coalitions, they hoped to confront racial capitalism and imperialism around the world, but it turns out there are a lot of powerful people interested in maintaining the status quo. These groups were often heavily monitored and sabotaged by various governmental agencies, and the ones that weren't actively subverted by the feds dissolved into a mess of directionless splinter groups and endless debates over theory and strategy.
A quick and provocative read that had me considering the difference between passive allyship and active solidarity, as well as the still untapped potential of a white working class that has been written off by the majority of middle-class leftists as unreachable. Good stuff with a ton of fascinating anecdotes and references to writing on other groups that made up these radical multiracial coalitions, this is going to be one I’ll be referring back to for a while.
December 28, 2019
This is a history of several groups of white working class radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom were part of a genealogical tree going back to the Students for a Democratic Society’s efforts to organize among poor whites in the slums of Chicago. The most spectacular of these groups was the Young Patriots Organization, the titular “hillbilly nationalists.” They adapted the Black Panthers’ analysis of oppressed groups as internal colonized nations to poor white Appalachians (both those in Appalachia and those who moved to cities) and formed a key part of the short-lived original “Rainbow Coalition” with the Chicago Panthers and the Puerto Rican nationalists in the Young Lords. Lacking some of the charismatic dimensions of the Patriots but lasting longer were groups like Rise Up Angry, the October 4th Organization in Philadelphia, and White Lightning in the Bronx. Sonnie and Tracy chart all of these groups in less than two hundred pages, including undergrad-friendly explanations of well-trod historical territory such as the breakup of SDS and the rise of black power as a frame for action.
This is a very interesting and little-known history, though impressionistically it seems that accounts of the Young Patriots, at least, have entered radical lore since 2011, probably in no small part due to this book. Then and now (one wonders what the hillbilly nationalists in YPO would make of “Hillbilly Elegy,” or maybe one doesn’t), there was significant doubt about whether the white working class can radicalize or whether it’s worth anyone’s time to try. People have developed whole theories, from “Settlers” to certain applications of privilege-thought (maybe not that far of a range, now that I think of it), to answering in the negative.
The groups in this book were determined to prove the nay-sayers wrong and to doing so on their own terms. Just as the radical end of the civil rights movement was debating what to do with white middle-class student organizers, white working class organizers in Chicago were debating the same thing, and came to a similar decision- they needed to go it alone. At first, this led to a more-or-less mutually agreed-upon take over of Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), originally an SDS organizing project, by the poor whites it was meant to mobilize. JOIN spun off and/or inspired the other groups in the book.
These groups faced similar arrays of problems, from the practical to the conceptual. Assuming they weren’t a lot of racist yokels and/or Archie Bunkers, just what was the relationship between white working class radicals and the larger movement? The YPO, which coalesced from local youth gangs that had been involved in JOIN, provided one answer- they would be emulators of groups like the Panthers, and provide backup for them. By most accounts, the Patriots did pretty well at the latter. This despite their cringe-worthy name and even more cringe-worthy decision to try to redeem the Confederate flag! Fred Hampton, Cha Cha Rodriguez and the other Rainbow Coalition leaders accepted the Patriots at a time when they had every reason — other than effective organizing — not to. The YPO did its own community projects to go with the berets and the guns. A favorite of mine was “Hank Williams Village,” a model community for Appalachian migrants to replace the slums they lived in. They even raised funds for it before the city reneged on their promises and shut the whole thing down.
The other groups profiled had their own approaches — October 4th’s focus on workplace organizing in the industrial Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, White Lightning’s organizing of addicts against both the heroin trade and dehumanizing treatment approaches — but I want to concentrate on the conceptual issues they shared and to which the YPO provided the most extreme answers. Ok, emulate the Panthers: serve the people, take no shit, wear cool outfits. The Panthers and groups like them — increasingly, the Black Power movement as a whole — was based on a theory of revolution adapted from Mao, Fanon, and other sources. What it amounted to was an application of the politics of decolonization — the big change between the end of the Second World War and the rise of neoliberalism — to the American scene. Oppressed nationalities were to be the vanguard of the revolution. American groups like the Panthers (mostly) underplayed the territorial aspects of nationalism — most of them weren’t looking for borders, a capital, an Olympic team, etc — in favor of political self-determination within the larger polity.
No one definitively answered how exactly this would work. They also didn’t answer who exactly counted as an oppressed nationality and why, or what the relationship between oppressed nationalities and the oppressed within privileged nationalities (i.e. the poor) would look like. Somewhere between the confusion on the latter two questions you got answers like “hillbilly nationalism,” which seems to our ears (well, mine anyway) on first hearing like a baroque way of not making sense. People have been trying this from the right lately, after all. You can see other gradations of solution to the question of who is the revolutionary subject in the efforts to get at a way to define the white poor and working class by some kind of identity tag- White Lightning and its efforts with those living with and around the effects of the heroin trade come to mind.
Fred Hampton, chief architect and theorist of the Rainbow Coalition, seemed to have been working his way towards a theory of revolution that placed capitalism at the center, rescuing unified working class organization from the student groups and the big complicit labor unions of the time. But then the Chicago police assassinated him. That’s another thread that runs through the whole thing, and they’re related. Massive police violence derailed all attempts to work through the questions of organizing the one way that works- through organizing. That’s hard to do when your people are getting killed, jailed on trumped-up charges, and endlessly surveilled.
We know that the Rainbow Coalition concept in specific scared J. Edgar Hoover and the Chicago red squad, and they came down on its constituent parts, including the white parts, like a ton of bricks. The same thing with less severity occurred in Philadelphia and New York. What the police didn’t do, urban renewal did, like through the destruction of much of neighborhood Bronx and Uptown in Chicago, the Appalachian neighborhood. Sonnie and Tracy don’t exactly put it this way, but for kids learning the ABCs of radicalism, wrestling with knotty questions of interracial solidarity that still bedevil movements, and facing massive repression, that they did anything at all was an accomplishment. This book is an accomplishment, too, for raising questions if not necessarily for answering them. *****
This is a very interesting and little-known history, though impressionistically it seems that accounts of the Young Patriots, at least, have entered radical lore since 2011, probably in no small part due to this book. Then and now (one wonders what the hillbilly nationalists in YPO would make of “Hillbilly Elegy,” or maybe one doesn’t), there was significant doubt about whether the white working class can radicalize or whether it’s worth anyone’s time to try. People have developed whole theories, from “Settlers” to certain applications of privilege-thought (maybe not that far of a range, now that I think of it), to answering in the negative.
The groups in this book were determined to prove the nay-sayers wrong and to doing so on their own terms. Just as the radical end of the civil rights movement was debating what to do with white middle-class student organizers, white working class organizers in Chicago were debating the same thing, and came to a similar decision- they needed to go it alone. At first, this led to a more-or-less mutually agreed-upon take over of Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), originally an SDS organizing project, by the poor whites it was meant to mobilize. JOIN spun off and/or inspired the other groups in the book.
These groups faced similar arrays of problems, from the practical to the conceptual. Assuming they weren’t a lot of racist yokels and/or Archie Bunkers, just what was the relationship between white working class radicals and the larger movement? The YPO, which coalesced from local youth gangs that had been involved in JOIN, provided one answer- they would be emulators of groups like the Panthers, and provide backup for them. By most accounts, the Patriots did pretty well at the latter. This despite their cringe-worthy name and even more cringe-worthy decision to try to redeem the Confederate flag! Fred Hampton, Cha Cha Rodriguez and the other Rainbow Coalition leaders accepted the Patriots at a time when they had every reason — other than effective organizing — not to. The YPO did its own community projects to go with the berets and the guns. A favorite of mine was “Hank Williams Village,” a model community for Appalachian migrants to replace the slums they lived in. They even raised funds for it before the city reneged on their promises and shut the whole thing down.
The other groups profiled had their own approaches — October 4th’s focus on workplace organizing in the industrial Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, White Lightning’s organizing of addicts against both the heroin trade and dehumanizing treatment approaches — but I want to concentrate on the conceptual issues they shared and to which the YPO provided the most extreme answers. Ok, emulate the Panthers: serve the people, take no shit, wear cool outfits. The Panthers and groups like them — increasingly, the Black Power movement as a whole — was based on a theory of revolution adapted from Mao, Fanon, and other sources. What it amounted to was an application of the politics of decolonization — the big change between the end of the Second World War and the rise of neoliberalism — to the American scene. Oppressed nationalities were to be the vanguard of the revolution. American groups like the Panthers (mostly) underplayed the territorial aspects of nationalism — most of them weren’t looking for borders, a capital, an Olympic team, etc — in favor of political self-determination within the larger polity.
No one definitively answered how exactly this would work. They also didn’t answer who exactly counted as an oppressed nationality and why, or what the relationship between oppressed nationalities and the oppressed within privileged nationalities (i.e. the poor) would look like. Somewhere between the confusion on the latter two questions you got answers like “hillbilly nationalism,” which seems to our ears (well, mine anyway) on first hearing like a baroque way of not making sense. People have been trying this from the right lately, after all. You can see other gradations of solution to the question of who is the revolutionary subject in the efforts to get at a way to define the white poor and working class by some kind of identity tag- White Lightning and its efforts with those living with and around the effects of the heroin trade come to mind.
Fred Hampton, chief architect and theorist of the Rainbow Coalition, seemed to have been working his way towards a theory of revolution that placed capitalism at the center, rescuing unified working class organization from the student groups and the big complicit labor unions of the time. But then the Chicago police assassinated him. That’s another thread that runs through the whole thing, and they’re related. Massive police violence derailed all attempts to work through the questions of organizing the one way that works- through organizing. That’s hard to do when your people are getting killed, jailed on trumped-up charges, and endlessly surveilled.
We know that the Rainbow Coalition concept in specific scared J. Edgar Hoover and the Chicago red squad, and they came down on its constituent parts, including the white parts, like a ton of bricks. The same thing with less severity occurred in Philadelphia and New York. What the police didn’t do, urban renewal did, like through the destruction of much of neighborhood Bronx and Uptown in Chicago, the Appalachian neighborhood. Sonnie and Tracy don’t exactly put it this way, but for kids learning the ABCs of radicalism, wrestling with knotty questions of interracial solidarity that still bedevil movements, and facing massive repression, that they did anything at all was an accomplishment. This book is an accomplishment, too, for raising questions if not necessarily for answering them. *****
May 15, 2021
Fascinating deep-dive into the lesser-documented history of radical community organizing in the mid-to-late 20th century, with a focus on how multiracial coalition work materialized and the obstacles encountered.
Beyond its merit as an educational and informative resource, provides a roadmap of sorts, or set of ideas, for launching similar community-based organizing campaigns and strategies.
Beyond organizing one-off demonstrations, or tweeting about injustices occurring domestically or abroad, it’s finding common ground with your neighbors, finding and utilizing the language of the people, and building a movement of solidarity from the ground-up. It’s time-consuming work with no promises for what the end result might be.
All in all, a necessary reminder that radical organizing, particularly in poor white, brown, and Black communities, need not be a forgotten history. Through documentation and real-life examples of change enacted through this work, the bravery, passion, and grit of the radicals before us (including those who are still alive today) lives on.
Beyond its merit as an educational and informative resource, provides a roadmap of sorts, or set of ideas, for launching similar community-based organizing campaigns and strategies.
Beyond organizing one-off demonstrations, or tweeting about injustices occurring domestically or abroad, it’s finding common ground with your neighbors, finding and utilizing the language of the people, and building a movement of solidarity from the ground-up. It’s time-consuming work with no promises for what the end result might be.
All in all, a necessary reminder that radical organizing, particularly in poor white, brown, and Black communities, need not be a forgotten history. Through documentation and real-life examples of change enacted through this work, the bravery, passion, and grit of the radicals before us (including those who are still alive today) lives on.
June 26, 2021
A Great Foundation to Build On
The authors draw extensively on interviews and scarce primary documents to help us understand how working class white communities organized at a pivotal moment in American history. Their writing captures important insights about the racial division of labor on the left and they wrestle with the tension between organizing neighborhoods while trying to dismantle capitalism and materialism. Most refreshingly, they write about the people who did this work with tremendous empathy and humanity without giving in to romanticism that so often accompanies other scholarship about organizing and movement work. This is a slim volume and there is more to do to build on its insights. In particular, I remain curious about how the efforts documented in this book relate to current efforts to organize a multiracial working class, especially among progressive unions and projects like the Working Families Party.
The authors draw extensively on interviews and scarce primary documents to help us understand how working class white communities organized at a pivotal moment in American history. Their writing captures important insights about the racial division of labor on the left and they wrestle with the tension between organizing neighborhoods while trying to dismantle capitalism and materialism. Most refreshingly, they write about the people who did this work with tremendous empathy and humanity without giving in to romanticism that so often accompanies other scholarship about organizing and movement work. This is a slim volume and there is more to do to build on its insights. In particular, I remain curious about how the efforts documented in this book relate to current efforts to organize a multiracial working class, especially among progressive unions and projects like the Working Families Party.
October 20, 2020
I have to admit that I hadn't heard (or hadn't heard much) about any of the groups profiled in this book. JOIN, the Patriots, October 4th Organization, Rising Up Angry, and White Lightning were all activist groups that focused on working class neighborhoods and issues (housing, health care, employment) - often poor white neighborhoods that were often dismissed by the Left. This book is definitely trying to make a point that not all poor white people were/are racist or anti-civil rights, but that the government sure as hell will try to squash any attempts at coalitions between white working class activists and groups such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. A worthwhile supplement to anyone's history of the 1970s/post hippie political movements.
October 6, 2021
This was a great book - well written, interesting, and a quick read. While it has a narrow focus and leaves out a lot of adjacent stories, it throws out lots of threads that you can pull on to find out more. I've already learned more than what was included in the book by wondering about something they covered and how it might have intersected with other events I knew of and googling the people and places involved. There's also a couple of films mentioned (American Revolution 2 and Trick Bag) that I found online and promptly streamed and that also added more texture to the stories in the book.
I hope that longer and broader histories of each of these organizations and their work in their respective communities are written, fleshing out the struggles and challenges they went through.
I hope that longer and broader histories of each of these organizations and their work in their respective communities are written, fleshing out the struggles and challenges they went through.
November 26, 2021
Excellent introduction to little-known history, showcasing five revolutionary groups of primarily white, poor and working class urban people who worked in coalition with groups like CORE, SNCC, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. It's in the sweet spot between academic (being well-researched and footnoted) and with a readable narrative (which sometimes goes too far into narrative for my taste, but not here). Lots of interesting personalities and info about how the groups formed to address multiple issues, and the reasons the groups eventually fell apart (often due to government persecution). Lots of ideas about the failure of the Left to reach poor white populations and encourage solidarity between racial groups. Definitely a good read!
April 30, 2021
The first half of this book, focusing on community based organizing among poor, Southern-born whites in Chicago is excellent, an important addition to the story of Sixties activism. The portrait of Peggy Terry, who ran for Vice President (in some states) on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket headed by Eldridge Cleaver, is compelling. The last half of the book is less sharp, losing the focus on community mobilization and spending more time with the fairly well-known rhetoric of leftists working among, but not necessarily connected to, whites in cities. If you've seen Judas and the Black Messiah, this fleshes out the story of the Black Panther, Young Lord, Young Patriot alliance.
December 1, 2021
This is a fascinating book that I’ll be mulling over for a while. The whole time I kept thinking: What would (does ?) this kind of organizing look like today. It’s not quite what SURJ is doing, at least in my understanding. How has the (post)Trump era shaped/limited/enhanced the opportunities to organize poor/working class whites around race? The question they pose at the end is so key: “What do you see in these historic Rainbow Coalitions that can help you confront racial capitalism to build a politics of solidarity today?
February 24, 2023
Hey! Political change movements are made up of people who sometimes don't remember that the struggle looks different for them but that when they cooperate they can DISMANTLE THE BAD MACHINE that isn't working for anyone.
This was a pretty good overview/history of some less well know forces in the movement and I enjoyed it for the most part. Sometimes it bored me in the same way that radical politics can: attention to in-fighting and disagreements was hard to follow while I am battling a virus. So I just skipped those parts.
This was a pretty good overview/history of some less well know forces in the movement and I enjoyed it for the most part. Sometimes it bored me in the same way that radical politics can: attention to in-fighting and disagreements was hard to follow while I am battling a virus. So I just skipped those parts.
October 21, 2021
This book was much more informative than I was expecting. I almost didn't continue reading it at first; it covers such an unknown segment of activist history, but I'm glad I kept reading. It gave a very interesting look at how racial groups could combine to work towards common goals and support each other. It says a lot about all the attempts to alienate poor whites and distract them from their troubles by giving them a scapegoat to focus on.
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