Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

by Amy Sonnie

  Combining the energy of the civil rights movement with a thorough analysis of mid-century ills, SDS outlined a platform for a wholesale transformation of purpose and values in the United States. The nuance and political import of their arguments might have been obscured by the decade’s numerous manifestos if their proposal hadn’t been so politically insightful. In a document dubbed The Port Huron Statement, SDS leaders argued that industrial automation, foreign competition and Cold War military spending set in motion fast rising unemployment and the need for perpetual war to spur the economy. As solution, they proposed federal expansion of public sector employment and public housing as remedies for poverty, and called for the complete elimination of racial inequity. To finance social welfare, they called on the U.S. to abandon the arms race. Their analysis combined the wisdom of the Left’s old guard and labor movement with the participatory vision and unflinching humanism of the civil rights movement.

  While the document became one of the most well known of the decade, SDS struggled during its early years to show its theories had traction beyond the green lawns of the university. For a handful of students, campuses began “to feel like a cage.”18 Despite serious internal conflict over the group’s focus, a vocal set of SDSers argued for a community action project. With upwards of thirty million people living in poverty and an estimated one-third facing substandard housing conditions, proponents of the move off campus felt organizing the urban poor provided a logical next step. Port Huron opened the door to such a strategy. In it, SDS adopted the principle of participatory democracy as both guiding theory and practical model. This commitment led to notoriously long debates—on everything—but it also laid a footpath toward the kind of broad participation modeled by the civil rights movement. If participatory democracy was praxis, wasn’t it necessary to include the people most disenfranchised by the current political system?

  In a way, the impulse toward community organizing also resolved longer-term plans for student radicals who only temporarily enjoyed membership in a campus community. Some SDSers never attended college in the first place, and others were dropping out to enlist themselves in the vocation of radicalism fulltime. Among those who completed their degrees, there was campus work during the year and then movement work to do each summer. A Harvard-Radcliffe student named Jean Tepperman took this decision very seriously. Even before she joined SDS, she recognized an important fork in the road ahead of her. The moral example of civil rights workers had curbed any possibility that she’d spend a leisurely summer near her parents’ home in Syracuse, New York. She couldn’t imagine just standing by.

  Tepperman was a shy eighteen-year-old when she traveled with a college friend to the 1963 March on Washington. The two had seats on a bus departing from Manhattan with dozens of seasoned radicals, “old people” to her, mostly in their fifties and sixties. Tepperman looked around at everyone who seemed so comfortable and settled into their roles as lifelong activists. She wanted to be like that, but wasn’t sure how to get there. Later, as she stood there listening to Josephine Baker, Bob Dylan, SNCC’s John Lewis and finally Rev. King, she was struck by the astounding commitment people had made to the cause. When one of the speakers asked the crowd to take a collective step forward if they would commit their lives to the struggle, Tepperman hesitated. Could she really make that promise? She recalls the color and texture of the pavement under her feet as she paused, then stepped forward. That step ultimately led her to SDS’s community organizing project.

  Students for a Democratic Society dubbed its new effort the Economic Research Action Project, or ERAP. The group was hopeful, if not naïve, about its capacity to engage the poor masses and redirect both attention and resources toward domestic policy change.19 Young SDS leaders envisioned, at first, an interracial organization of unemployed workers ready to demand federal economic reforms. One of their chief goals would be shaking up “quiescent populists in the ranks of labor-liberalism.”20 Proponents of the ERAP project understood that economic resentment provided a powerful catalyst for white reaction, a reaction trade unions and liberals at best ignored and at worst encouraged. As the pace of desegregation proceeded, there was obvious potential for a permanent and deepening animosity between Blacks and whites, not just in the South but also across the nation. In a pamphlet circulated to announce the ERAP program, Tom Hayden and a Swarthmore student named Carl Wittman offered a clear prognosis: “The alternative [to an interracial movement] is more likely to be fascism than freedom.”21 A program for economic changes of tangible benefit to Black, Brown and white workers provided the best tool to unite the working class and win real changes.

  The ERAP concept emerged during a pivotal moment for the New Left, as members of a highly organized Black struggle started to wonder aloud whether integrated organizations must wait. Just two days after the March on Washington, Tom Hayden and SDS member Lee Webb met with SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael to talk about their strategy for building an interracial movement of the poor. Carmichael expressed enthusiasm for the concept with one caveat: SDS should focus on mobilizing the white community, in particular poor whites, around their own demands. The “organize your own” message reflected the informal beginning of a racial “division of labor” within the Left that eventually marked the tactical difference between the civil rights and Black Power movements.22

  The strategy addressed two problems facing the Black movement during the mid-Sixties. First, SNCC had supported projects to organize poor whites in the South, but found it took energy away from their work.23 They also had trouble convincing white volunteers to live in white communities where the pace of change was far slower and it was increasingly difficult to keep civil rights workers safe anywhere, let alone outside the fold. Second, the growing presence of white volunteers in Black-led organizations was starting to take a toll. The practice of integrationism inside the movement reflected a tentative hope in the possibility of unified struggle, a transformation of society modeled within the movement itself. Since the number of white volunteers never exceeded 20 percent during the movement’s early years, the balance of whites to Blacks remained in check. But by 1963-64 the racial composition of volunteers in the South started to change. Good intentions notwithstanding, Black movement leaders started to wonder if the presence of so many white volunteers was robbing southern Blacks of the movement’s more implicit goals: dignity and self-determination.

  It was on the porches of Southern Blacks that the chasm between a better world and the immediate one became most apparent. Both Black and white organizers discovered quickly that white supremacy existed as a psychological construct as much as a legal one. Student organizer Carl Davidson, then just twenty years old, recalls one time an eighty-year-old man he registered to vote called him father. SNCC leader Charles Sherrod highlighted one concrete cause for fellow Black activists’ frustration over the deference given to white volunteers. Black organizers devoted months, sometimes years, trying to get people to come to a meeting, then watched in frustration as white kids with little experience came in and filled a church hall after one conversation.24

  There was no denying the fact that an interracial movement required a deliberate attempt to address white anxiety and interest. As Richie Rothstein wrote of the ERAP concept, “What better allies are there than those organized around their own needs and demands, a functional and not merely charitable alliance?”25 But this was easier said than done. Without sacrificing ERAP’s broader goals, the students agreed that white radicals had an important job to accomplish, and they would try. Organizing poor northern whites toward a lasting interracial coalition could address a major gap and provide the surge of SDS volunteers with some meaningful work of their own. Since ERAP’s leaders hadn’t intended to limit which population of unemployed workers they would reach, they had to rethink locations and make an effort to reach populations of disenfranchised whites.26 They used unemployment and poverty data, local connections and a bit of guesswork, much of which proved unreliable since urban de
mographics were changing so rapidly. Chicago, however, was a clear choice.

  ERAP opened its flagship office on Chicago’s North Side just a few doors away from the city Unemployment Compensation Office. The chapter called itself Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), a name that succinctly focused attention on their demand for full employment or guaranteed wages. SDS member Joe Chabot dropped out of the University of Michigan to become the project’s first paid organizer in 1963 and was soon joined by New York organizer Dan Max. The pair planned to focus attention on unemployed young men, figuring their alienation and frustration might easily translate into collective action. Youth across the country, after all, were emerging as clarions for cultural change on and off campus. Among white working-class youth that cultural rebellion had started in the 1950s and usually involved fast cars, street gangs (often more social than criminal), and a hardened distrust of police, government and liberals. As the decade progressed they added “freaks” and hippies to that list. Whether the arriving SDS radicals were friends or foes depended on whom you asked. While not all of North Chicago’s white youth fit this mold, it’s not hard to imagine how a new organization might struggle to build trust amidst the region’s growing list of speculators and do-gooders.

  During its first few months JOIN struggled but managed to reach several hundred men, some of whom took on leadership roles.27 They established a grievance committee to hear individual problems and solved them through collective action. When one man had his unemployment check withheld from him, an entire delegation went to the unemployment office to demand it. Still, joblessness failed to rouse mass interest. For one, the promise of government-guaranteed employment evoked suspicion among the disenchanted young men Chabot and Max talked to. They were, after all, not used to seeing anyone around them achieve the security of a steady job and the prospect of government job programs seemed dicey. On the flipside, many older white workers still had faith that the system would eventually work in their favor. Even if they doubted this, the shame of being out of work inhibited many men from organizing in full public view. Most showed up to JOIN once and never came back.

  The focus on federal job guarantees also offered few opportunities for women in the community. While poor women were no strangers to paid labor, they often worked domestic and temporary service jobs for which there was no guarantee of state benefits or job security in the first place. And more importantly, joblessness hadn’t reached the staggering levels SDS predicted for the early part of the decade, especially among white workers who were faring far better than workers of color—even if they didn’t know it.

  Joe Chabot’s patience for immersion organizing wore thin. Reporting back to SDS, he wrote, “Just to understand the slang would be a matter of probably six months. If I try to be accepted by some gang, it would probably be a process involving at least a year, and needless to say I don’t have time for any such luxuries.”28 A year into the ERAP experiment Chabot left Chicago deciding that the task of organizing poor whites beyond their immediate needs was an impossible dream. Intentional or not, his decision reflected the student Left’s struggle with its own identity and a failure to define short- and long-term successes for its organizing experiments. Faced with the failure of a liberal administration to pay more than lip service to civil rights and the sixfold increase of troops in Vietnam, the movement for peace and justice seemed poised for rapid growth or major setbacks. No one knew which yet. Whether in meetings or more subtly, Chabot and others questioned whether the cycle of poverty and entrenched racism created too great an undertow for any meaningful organization of the white poor in that moment.

  Fortunately not everyone shared Chabot’s sentiments. The volunteers Chabot left behind refocused their efforts, coming back to the heart of participatory politics. Could middle-class organizers build a movement of the poor without believing in the people they were organizing? The answer was, unquestionably, no. Would it take time to gain people’s trust? Yes, but it was possible. No one believed this more than ERAP’s national coordinator Rennie Davis who moved to Chicago to head the chapter. Under Davis ERAP had become a hub of constant activity and Davis earned a reputation as one of SDS’s most tireless leaders. His enthusiasm for expanding the movement’s grassroots base proved infectious and soon dozens more organizers joined the community projects. In Chicago, organizers realized that fulfilling the potential of their project required a shift in both location and strategy. In early 1964, JOIN moved its office to Uptown and dropped the single-issue focus on unemployment. The students moved in too, sharing railroad flats in Uptown’s neglected buildings. Over the next several years some of the Sixties’ more infamous radicals spent time in Uptown, including actor Harry Belafonte who paid the group a visit in Spring 1965. More importantly the organization gave dozens of members a chance to cut their political teeth.

  Out in California student Mike James heard good things about the effort to organize white southerners in Chicago, but he was skeptical too. The year before, James grabbed a summer opportunity working for an anthropologist studying white migration from Appalachia. James moved into a one-room apartment in the heart of Uptown and spent the next few months hanging out on street corners and front stoops. With guitar in hand, he learned some country tunes—a badge of entry to the neighborhood—while learning to roll cigarettes and cook a mean southern biscuit. Mike James was just one of Uptown’s newcomers who saw a deep appreciation of local culture as a hallmark of good organizing.

  James was planning to join one of the ERAP projects once he graduated, but he wasn’t totally sold on returning to Chicago. There were projects in Newark, Cleveland, Baltimore and elsewhere, though most were located in predominately poor Black neighborhoods. At a benefit concert in San Francisco, James casually mentioned to Stokely Carmichael that he would either end up with Tom Hayden in Newark or with Rennie Davis in Uptown. Carmichael gave consistent advice. “Work with white people,” he said. Given James’ experience in Uptown the prior year, this made sense. He’d seen the conditions there and made a few friends. After college graduation, he drove east.

  JOIN’s first notable success came from really listening to poor whites’ concerns and turning them into actionable projects. Organizers spent weeks surveying Uptown residents about priorities. Confronting intrusive welfare agencies and greedy landlords rose to the top of agenda, along with poor housing conditions, day care and the need for community parks. This strategy drew criticism within SDS. Critics derided the new approach as “GROIN,” a snide acronym for “Garbage Removal or Income Now.” They argued that JOIN’s original demand of “full employment” was being watered down by narrow local concerns disconnected from a national program.29 Others worried this approach, coupled with JOIN’s base in a white community, would go the path of Saul Alinsky’s Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, which centered on community decision-making but steadfastly avoided issues of integration and civil rights.

  A major force in progressive Chicago, Saul Alinsky was widely regarded as the godfather of community organizing. In 1939 he founded the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), so named for its location behind the former Union Stock Yard and meatpacking plants. He spent the next several decades building his archetype for a progressive populism in the neighborhood author Upton Sinclair had branded “The Jungle” in his 1906 novel.30 Alinsky believed in people’s fundamental decency and understood their alienation from politics as a symptom of machine politics, not inherent laziness. This was something New Leftists agreed with, but the Back-of-the-Yards version of participatory politics put process ahead of outcomes, even if that process yielded racist and reactionary results. In the late 1950s, Alinsky balked when asked to take a firm stand around integration. Ever cautious, he proposed a quota system to slowly integrate Blacks into white neighborhoods and circumvent violence. This proposal never gained traction, but Alinsky’s decidedly non-ideological style clearly left wide gaps when it came to addressing racism in white communities.

  By the mid-Sixti
es this approach became a dividing line between Alinsky’s projects and younger radicals. Many saw Alinsky’s belief in democratic reform as a problem. By 1964 members of the New Left began to view democratic politics and simple “American Dream” patriotism as an endorsement of a corrupt system that required radical reinvention rather than reform. The young radicals accused Alinsky of being stuck in the past, failing to confront racial discrimination among whites. Alinsky, meanwhile, viewed many in the New Left as hopelessly idealistic and out of touch with the desires of people whose neighborhoods they occupied. Adding to the generational divide, the New Left’s beginning flirtations with communism and Third World Marxism angered Alinsky who had been critical of Stalinism for decades, not just ideologically but also for its corrosive and regimenting grip on the United States Left.31

  In JOIN’s early days labor leader Ralph Helstein brought the student leaders to meet Alinsky. The intergenerational confab was a disaster, ending with Alinsky harshly ridiculing the students for their criticism of the consumerist aspirations of everyday people.32 Both sides had a point. JOIN would eventually confront this culture clash when neighborhood leaders started to challenge SDS control within the organization, but for the time being JOIN set out to prove that poor and working-class whites could jointly address poverty and racism. An alliance with Alinsky was out of the question, despite the respect most had for his other successes. Organizers did establish partnerships with Alinsky-affiliated projects, though, most notably Helstein’s United Packinghouse Workers and The Woodlawn Organization, one of Chicago’s leading Black community groups.

  During JOIN’s first few months in Uptown, a few progressive residents helped the neighborhood’s newcomers gain a foothold. Mary Hockenberry raised all six of her children in Uptown. She’d never been directly involved in politics but sympathized with progressives ever since Eleanor Roosevelt spoke up for civil rights and women workers in the 1930s and 1940s. It helped that SDS members brought incredible knowledge to their efforts. This was clear from the first day Mary Hockenberry met Rennie Davis at the welfare office. Davis asked her if she knew her family was entitled to medical care along with a welfare check. She didn’t, of course, since few recipients got this kind of helpful information from their caseworkers. When Davis asked if she wanted to do something about it, Mary Hockenberry felt valued, relieved and newly hopeful. Within two weeks she was helping plan meetings and knocking on her neighbors’ doors with Davis and other staff members. Hockenberry literally opened those doors for JOIN. The year of state college she’d attended as a teenager made her a good bridge between Uptown’s residents and SDS activists. She understood the students’ rhetoric well enough to translate it for neighborhood people, and her neighbors trusted her enough to check out at least one meeting.