Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

by Amy Sonnie

  Despite its timeliness and dramatic footage, every major movie theater in Chicago refused to screen American Revolution II thanks to Mayor Daley’s influence with the Screen Projectors Union. The filmmakers turned to one of the few theater owners in Chicago audacious enough to tell Daley to go jump in Lake Michigan. In April 1969, the film premiered at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Theater. The film caught the immediate attention of the mainstream media, earning a positive review in the Chicago Tribune and accolades from famed reviewer Roger Ebert, a former student radical himself, who believed the movie was necessary for every Chicagoan to see in order to make sense of the events of 1968.

  For all its brutal honesty, American Revolution II got mixed reviews among its own subjects. Bob Lee thought it was an accurate snapshot of the complexity of the times, but also feared that it would attract the attention of law enforcement eager to shut down any viable alliance. Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale was more disturbed by what he saw. In between images of poor whites and Blacks finding common cause, a few Panther rank-and-filers went on the record advocating violence against white people—any white people. According to Seale, “These were the expressions of nonmembers or new members who hadn’t learned of the party’s guiding philosophy.” Seale felt the main value of the film for the Panthers was to learn “how to combat this kind of thinking.”15

  For the most part, these debates stemmed from ideological differences among radicals of color about the kind of nationalism they felt they needed. While none of these organizations advocated random violence against white people, tensions flared over the question of working with white leftists. Some members disagreed with the organization’s cozy relationship with white liberals; others questioned whether an alliance with the Patriots so soon would compromise the organization’s nascent sovereignty. Even those who agreed that nationalism was a first step toward class-based unity debated the time and effort required to build such an alliance.

  For both Panthers and Lords this proved divisive. Bob Lee knew fallout was inevitable and, as American Revolution II foreshadowed, the decision had consequences. Both the Panthers and the Lords lost members after the Rainbow Coalition was announced. For Cha-Cha Jiménez these exits were sobering. “There’s nothing wrong with the process of building pride in yourself, your community, your culture and people,” he says. “However, some people got stuck in that phase and never moved beyond it.” Bob Lee was more blunt about it. “Some didn’t like the Patriots; some just didn’t like white people in general,” he says. “To tell the truth, it was a necessary purging. The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.”

  The Patriots agreed, but respected their allies’ need to go through this process with their membership. Reading Fanon and Mao themselves, they agreed with the Panthers’ line on revolutionary nationalism wherein ethnic groups self-organized but collaborated, and given the history of white domination within Left movements, they understood why some members might hesitate. Being revolutionaries, though, they minced no words condemning pure cultural nationalism as self-interested and a boon for a capitalist system that now “makes millions on love beads, afro-shirts, and cowboy hats.”16

  Despite its process-filled beginnings, the Rainbow Coalition did manage to put its vision into practice across Chicago. It became common to see Fred Hampton “give a typically awe-inspiring speech on revolutionary struggle, while white men wearing berets, sunglasses and Confederate rebel flags sewn into their jackets helped provide security for him.”17 Members of the Panthers, Lords and Patriots routinely provided protection for each other at public events, collaborated on political education classes and launched a “Rainbow Food Program” distributing free meals to thousands of families in Illinois.

  Rainbow Coalition members also worked together on several local campaigns and informally drew new organizations into the fold. Under the banner of “rainbow politics,” the Patriots and Lords organized alongside a broader Poor People’s Coalition to halt the expansion of McCormick Theological Seminary, which required the demolition of nearby homes.18 In protest they occupied several college buildings on Belden Avenue and demanded more than a half-million dollars to build low-income housing along with university support to build a daycare center. McCormick’s president ponied up $125,000 to end the building takeover. After the university dropped the court injunction levied against protesters, the coalition members cleared out.

  In Uptown, the Patriots applied the Rainbow Coalition’s solidarity model to their other local work. They reached out to activists in Uptown’s growing Native American community and linked their efforts to stop urban renewal. The neighborhood’s Native American population had grown to well over a thousand residents by the end of the Sixties. In an effort to link newer urban displacement with ongoing Native sovereignty issues, American Indian activists from the neighborhood occupied a piece of vacant land near Wrigley Field where they wanted affordable housing built. Dubbed the Chicago Indian Village, groups eventually took over a vacant city-owned apartment building on North Broadway too. The Patriots put out a handbill explaining their support for the cause: “For years now we have seen buildings being torn down. We are glad to see these rat holes being demolished, because they are not fit for human beings to live in.… At the request of the Chicago Indian Village, the Young Patriots Organization has assisted in occupying this building, and their action is the same as ours. We are not going to move until something is done about the problem of housing in Uptown.”

  Some of the Patriots’ longest lasting campaigns centered on community health care and urgent care access at city hospitals. In the tradition of the Panthers’ survival programs, the Patriots opened their own health center staffed by dissident doctors. For most residents, it was the first time they really understood what dignity and self-determination could mean for their daily lives. In their clinic, poor people were “treated with all the courtesy and dignity of a society matron going to the highest priced doctor you could find anywhere,” recalled Peggy Terry who visited the clinic regularly and acted as a kind of mentor for Young Patriots on the community campaigns. “The doctors and nurses devote their time to the clinic. They fund us, they pay our rent, they pay the utility bills, things like that out of their own pocket.” This might have seemed condescending at any other point, but these clinics weren’t run on charity. They were run on mutual aid and everyone pitched in.

  The independent health care centers faced constant harassment and the Patriots worked alongside other Rainbow Coalition members to defend their citywide network of free medical clinics. Police stopped patients exiting the buildings and took prescribed medicines from them. Sometimes they booked patients on illegal narcotics possession. Police disrupted meetings between medical volunteers and Patriots organizers, and one landlord was pressured into evicting the clinic and a Patriot-affiliated day care center. The Chicago Board of Health then moved to close the clinics through legal channels. The city adopted new rules mandating all free clinics to submit to stringent licensing requirements and provide immediate access to patients’ personal medical records. One city official asked, “How do we know the Young Patriots aren’t using their medical service at 4411 N. Sheridan to treat gunshot wounds, hand out drugs irresponsibly, perform abortions or give shots with unsterile needles?” At the time, Chicago boasted dozens of unlicensed free clinics. The volunteer-run clinics couldn’t handle the barrage of new paperwork and most closed their doors. The Patriots’ health center and the Jake Winters Clinic, run by the Panthers, refused to submit to the new regulations. In one clinic defense action forty-one Rainbow Coalition supporters landed in jail. The groups fought to keep their clinics open for more than a year, but eventually the city succeeded in shuttering the programs.

  The free breakfast programs faced similar challenges. Like many survival programs, the actual services they offered existed elsewhere in the neighborhood. The Montrose Urban Progress Center had a food pantry, for instance, but the intake process was extensive. Recipients were e
ven required to let social workers into their homes to prove there was no food. In the Serve the People programs, residents faced no bureaucracy and no judgment. Between them, they fed thousands of children each morning. With such high demand, the programs needed to be held in locations big enough for the crowds. The Patriots partnered with the local Hull House, a social service agency with roots going back to Jane Addams’s settlement house movement. At its peak the Patriots’ breakfast program served more than four hundred families per week. Initially the Hull House director was enthusiastic about the partnership. After several months, however, he called the Patriots in and simply said, “Can’t do the breakfast program.” According to Patriot Carol Coronado, someone had likely scared him away. It was a blow for the Patriots and their allies. “These programs meant the most to us,” Coronado explains. “Even more important than the politics. They gave us a chance to serve our people and learn how to work with other communities.”

  Members of the Rainbow Coalition were facing several uphill battles, not least of which were threats to their programs and even their lives. Uptown organizer John Howard had been active in JOIN from its inception, serving as one of the few men on the group’s welfare committee; he was a bit older than most Patriots members but sympathized with their goals. It was Howard who appeared in the film American Revolution II as one of the first community residents to express support for the Panthers. That appearance got him killed. On a trip home to Georgia in 1969, he was recognized as “the guy who works with niggers in Chicago.” He was found the next day with his throat slit.19

  And just that fast, the other shadows that followed the coalition from its beginning started to loom much larger. By the end of their first year, things devolved into the worst kind of nightmare.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation had the Panthers in their crosshairs from day one. That scope also included their close allies in the Rainbow Coalition. While the FBI kept files on almost everyone in or remotely associated with the New Left, Director J. Edgar Hoover nurtured a special animosity for the Panthers. In Hoover’s own words they were, “The greatest single threat to the internal security of the country.”20 According to Bob Lee, “Once the [Black Panther] Party departed from the hate whitey trip” and got serious about real politics, Hoover clearly saw them as a far bigger threat. The Bureau’s documents reveal a paranoid, almost apocalyptic quest to prevent the rise of a potential Black “messiah” who could “unify and electrify” not only the Black movement but the entire progressive Left.21 “The Rainbow Coalition was their worst nightmare,” says Lee. This scrutiny would soon prove lethal.

  The aging Hoover had decades to perfect his craft. During World War I, Hoover collaborated with Attorney General Alexander Palmer to organize the “Palmer Raids,” a targeted attack on literally every single left-of-center organization of the era. The raid resulted in the deportation of every non-citizen activist, including renowned anarchist Emma Goldman. Beginning in 1956 Hoover channeled his ability to disrupt social movements into the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Hoover’s brainchild distinguished itself through relentless attempts to frame, arrest and discredit dissidents, including a young Rev. King. Under Hoover, COINTELPRO wreaked havoc on progressive organizations. Today there are hundreds of thousands of pages in the public domain detailing the federal government’s targeting of the Civil Rights, New Left and Third World Liberation Movements. Catholic draft resisters, the Berrigan brothers, labor organizer César Chávez, Quakers and even the National Council of Churches all endured Hoover’s constant gaze.

  The Bureau’s repertoire included brute force and more covert disruption. Infiltrators joined organizations specifically to propagate disinformation and exacerbate disagreements between individuals and groups. Agents planted false media stories, created fraudulent anonymous leaflets, and visited activists’ parents, clergy, landlords and employers in what amounted to low-tech psychological warfare on the Sixties Left. The police and FBI targeted movement figures on false charges, both petty and serious, while the seemingly endless court trials reinforced the public perception of a movement populated by dangerous criminals. Whether or not there was an acquittal on the charges, the FBI’s tactics drained personal and organizational coffers and sapped the energy of activists who built one of the most notable populist movements of the 20th century.

  In Chicago, police repression kept Rainbow Coalition members on the defensive from the beginning. On May 4, 1969, off-duty policeman James Lamb shot and killed Manuel Ramos, a teenage member of the Young Lords, and critically wounded member Ralph Rivera. Lamb maintained that Ramos initiated the attack, but witnesses and the medical examination disproved his version of events. Within a week, the Rainbow Coalition mobilized three thousand people to march to the police station on Chicago Avenue demanding a new investigation. The group also demanded Officer Lamb be charged with murder. State Attorney Edward Hanrahan initially agreed to meet with a delegation from the march but later cancelled. During the march members of a local gang called the Cobra Stones began tailing protestors, taunting them and waving weapons. When marcher Hilda Ignatin approached them to explain the goals of the march, one of them responded, “The police told us the Young Lords were helping the Panthers take over our projects.” Realizing local police had intentionally lied to them the group joined the march as did other passersby and other local gangs. Local authorities weren’t done spreading inflammatory rumors though. Following the Ramos slaying, word got around that police were going to attack the Rainbow Coalition. Members holed up in the rectory of a Lincoln Park church overnight, armed and fearful. The raid never happened, but the stress and paranoia continued to haunt the alliance.

  It’s impossible to know whether or not the Ramos killing was meant to curb the growing unity of Rainbow Coalition members. Activists certainly thought it was. According to Jiménez, “Repression certainly came down much stronger after the Rainbow Coalition was formed.” While those incidents gave them something to rally around, government scrutiny—both through legal and illegal means—put a stranglehold on their efforts. Seemingly groundless rumors festered into long arguments. Accusations were sometimes petty, and other times they were deadly serious. A whisper campaign against the Patriots accused them of links to the Ku Klux Klan, and a steady stream of anonymous letters cast aspersions on political loyalties and interracial liaisons, and turned personal disagreements into deadly conflicts. Still, nothing prepared them for the fact that one of the decade’s most public assassinations was about to take place in their backyard.

  On December 4, 1969, the State of Illinois committed a now-infamous double murder in the city of Chicago. To do so State Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan convened a collection of federal, state and local law enforcement agents aided by an informant. The day began with an early morning raid on the Panther Party office. Before sunrise, two Panther leaders, Chairman Fred Hampton and eighteen-year-old member Mark Clark, lay dead. Four other Panthers were shot: Ronald “Doc” Satchel, Blair Anderson, Verlina Brewer and Brenda Harris. Police arrested all survivors including Hampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson, who was sleeping next to him and eight months pregnant. At a press conference following the murders, Sergeant Daniel Groth maintained that he knocked on the door several times and identified himself as a police officer. When the Panthers failed to open the door Groth said he gently shoved the front door open as shots were fired from inside. Over the next several days, independent crime scene investigators easily debunked Groth’s story. More than eighty bullet holes were found in the apartment. All but one came from police weapons. The lone bullet coming from Mark Clark’s gun hit at an upward angle leading investigators to wonder if he fired as he fell to the ground after being shot once in the heart. Hampton was shot twice in the head, at point blank range. According to his fiancée, he never woke up.

  Hanrahan held a press conference defending Groth’s version of events and using the incident to further criminalize the entire Panther Party. “The immediate, violent criminal
reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party,” he said during a televised press conference. The Panthers responded by conducting public tours of the blood-soaked rooms. Thousands of people arrived to see with their own eyes. Reporters, legal experts and neighbors found a scene of unprovoked slaughter. One Chicago Sun-Times reporter quit his job after his editors initially buried his story about what he saw inside that apartment. An elderly woman visiting the scene named it for what it was, “a Northern lynching.”22

  An independent autopsy later found barbiturates in Hampton’s system. Everyone close to Hampton insisted he never did drugs. A sense of despair gripped the neighborhood surrounding 2337 West Monroe. Spray-painted messages of revenge sprung up on walls. For days hundreds kept vigil near the home. Speaking later, Deborah Johnson underscored the state of siege surrounding the Panther membership at the time. “They had destroyed our movement, not just in Illinois,” she said. “Just like this [snapping her fingers].”23 But the event also brought the Black community together. In the wake of Hampton’s blatant murder, the Panthers gained even more supporters.

  The Patriots were expanding too, but for some, Hampton’s assassination cemented the need to break away from Chicago community organizing and build a stronger national presence. Without a strong national network, and without more members, some Chicago Patriots wondered whether the group would survive. The snail’s pace of community services and local campaigns started to seem trivial in the face of such deadly repression. Local work remained important, but attack and infiltration were guaranteed. Chicago lawyer Jeffrey Haas, who worked closely with Rainbow Coalition members, recounted how the groups’ joint efforts against urban renewal had suffered. “This project, which had been many months in the making and had successfully brought together black, Latino, and white community groups, suddenly seemed distant and insignificant.”24 The group’s original founders, though, who’d seen the changes JOIN had inspired in their neighbors, disagreed with the idea of abandoning community work and suspected there was more ego involved in the suggestion than strategy. Another split was in the making.