by Amy Sonnie
By early 1970 the Young Patriots Organization severed into two groups. The Young Patriots remained in Chicago to continue local organizing, while the newly formed Patriot Party, under the leadership of William Fesperman, took the Patriots’ message to the national stage. The group’s newspaper explained the division as an ideological disagreement between those who supported community organizing and those who felt it was time to build a Left Party. Such divisions were nothing new, but Andy Keniston was disturbed by the events surrounding the Patriots split. Fesperman had disappeared for a few weeks, returning with a man named Arthur Turco whom none of the Chicago Patriots had ever met before. The two men convened the Patriots, telling everyone the West Coast Panthers were displeased with the Chicago branch and expected the Patriots to distance themselves from it. “This was extraordinary,” explained Keniston. “We had a very good method of communicating with the Panthers through Bob Lee.” Since there was never any reason for leaders to rely on information from anywhere else, Keniston felt certain the group had been infiltrated and remained suspicious of Turco. To him the Patriots’ fate had been sealed. “From that moment on, I felt as if the deed had been done—that we were pawns in a drama we had little control over.”
Keniston stayed in Chicago with Youngblood and the original Young Patriots members. With Chuck Geary they continued fighting urban renewal in Uptown, and several put their energy into a new group called Rising Up Angry, another JOIN spin-off started by Mike James. As for the Patriot Party, Fesperman and Turco franchised the group in a half dozen new cities and, for a short while, boasted dozens of new members. In 1970 they established headquarters in Manhattan and set up small branches in Eugene, Oregon; New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C., and other cities. The group made a strong start on the East Coast, attracting two hundred people to a meeting against urban renewal in Yorkville, New York. The momentum proved hard to maintain, though. FBI files assert that their John Howard Free Breakfast Program in New York fed less than a dozen children daily. Poor white families seemed to be staying away from the program and operations were soon turned over to the New York Young Lords. Similarly, a free health clinic offered by the group received few visitors because other local clinics provided identical vaccinations for free if parents were unable to afford the service. Soon the group’s housing campaigns in New York were confined to showing up at meetings organized by pre-existing resident advocacy groups. By spring 1970, Patriot Party efforts in New York were mainly confined to selling copies of their newspaper.
Internal strife also dogged the Patriot Party from the start. In New Haven, Connecticut, police targeted Patriot Tom Dostou while he was trying to set up a breakfast program. He was charged with possession of drugs (the Patriots maintained it was a bottle of vitamins) and non-support of his family, despite that fact that his wife and two children were in the car at the time of his arrest. With little explanation other than the claim Dostou was “provacateuring,” the Patriot newspaper announced that Dostou along with four other members had been expelled. In the coming year, Patriot activities focused almost entirely on legal battles, both their own and those of Black Panther leadership. The Patriot Party, like the rest of the movement, found it hard to carry on any proactive organizing with so many disruptions. Today, COINTELPRO documents available under the Freedom of Information Act confirm their suspicions. The FBI tracked every move the Patriots made from the moment they started working with the Panthers. In one agency document, the list of informants stretches for three full pages, line after line of redacted names, addresses and phone numbers. For a good portion of the Patriots’ existence, there were actually more people watching the group than there were members.
In the District of Columbia, activists attempted to build a Patriot Party chapter, but it was quickly swallowed by the campaign to defend the local Panthers from the ongoing FBI crackdown. Bob Simpson was born in D.C. and got involved with Students for a Democratic Society while attending the University of Maryland. Simpson was the product of a working-class family that moved to the suburbs during the first wave of white flight. At the University of Maryland he submerged himself in solidarity work with the southern civil rights movement, which eventually put him into the orbit of the Patriots and the Panthers.
As the global tumult of 1968 unfolded, the University of Maryland chapter of SDS turned its attention to supporting the campus workers’ union of mostly Black low-wage employees. In Maryland, still very much a Jim Crow state, mutual distrust had prevented lasting collaboration between white and Black students. The same went for the workers. Most white employees enjoyed higher wages and occupied white-collar positions. Blacks worked in the cafeteria and janitorial jobs. One dorm housekeeper, Gladys Jefferson, a leader in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1072, was known for both her organizing savvy and patience in building alliances between campus radicals in SDS and the Black Student Union. Through Jefferson’s example, Simpson found a practical way to address civil rights locally and undermine racism on his own campus.
Energized by the planned arrival of the national Poor People’s Convention in the capitol, Simpson worked behind the scenes building the stage that Martin Luther King was to speak from. King was assassinated before he could deliver that speech. Simpson was devastated. The murder let loose a dam of hopelessness. Many, like Simpson, retreated from activism in the months that followed. Some never found their way back. Fortunately, Simpson did. Fred Hampton’s assassination and the national outrage that followed convinced him that they had been on the right path. They needed a much stronger multiracial movement. The Rainbow Coalition was a sign that the civil rights movement’s vision of the beloved community was still possible, if in a different formation. He was less certain, though, about sticking to the path of nonviolence.
Simpson contacted Dick Ochs, a friend from Maryland SDS, to ask how white radicals could best support the Panthers. Through Ochs he learned that a new Patriots chapter was starting in Washington, D.C. The small chapter mixed some familiar SDS members with working-class whites from the area including Danny Embry, an ex-Marine, who had survived Vietnam without a scratch. He walked with an intense limp, though, after being tossed around a police van. Embry had been arrested while supporting picketing furniture workers and was handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon when the vehicle flipped over due to heavy rain. His wife, Elise, was from Kentucky. Like so many other activists who’d grown up in poor and working-class communities, her firsthand experience made her confident white southerners could get onboard a revolutionary movement, if only the movement spoke to them. The Patriots were still one of the only organizations in the nation trying to do this.
Crafting such a message to the white working-class took a backseat for obvious reasons. Locked into a constant dance with local authorities that regularly raided their offices, arrested members and disrupted activities, activists were on permanent defensive. In the wake of Hampton’s and Clark’s murders, the Panthers’ strategy of armed self-defense seemed the only realistic option to the D.C. Patriots. They remained a small cadre, operating independently of the original Chicago chapter and its hillbilly origins. This had one upside. Bob Simpson couldn’t reconcile himself to the use of the Confederate flag, and the relative autonomy of the new Patriots chapters meant he didn’t have to. That mischosen symbol was also the least of their worries. Several Baltimore Panthers had just been arrested on suspicion of killing a snitch and the Patriots’ Arthur Turco was also implicated.25
In 1970 many Panther leaders were still on the run or in court. The prior spring in Manhattan, police had rounded up twenty-one New York Panthers accusing them of a plot to use explosives to destroy police stations, high schools and even the Bronx Botanical Gardens. It took two years, but eventually the Panther 21 were all acquitted.26 In New Haven, police alleged that Bobby Seale ordered the murder of a suspected informant, Alex Rackley. His trial began at the same time that the U.S. started bombing missions in Cambodia to destroy Nationa
l Liberation Front outposts. In order to reach out to white people in the area, the Panthers asked the Patriots to come to New Haven for the “Free Bobby Seale and Stop the War” rally. The National Guard brought a full force to control the rally. That evening, a fundraising dance was scheduled for a local skating rink. As Simpson and his wife napped in the parking lot, an explosion rang out. The bomb went off before the dance had officially started. No one was seriously hurt, but the Panthers were blamed for the blast.27
Panic descended on the Panthers and the Patriots. The number of movement people shot or in prison piled up. Both groups assumed there were informers in their midst, but they were hard to identify—some members’ disruptive nature seemed just as likely to be personality or a medical issue. At many points it was impossible to tell friend from foe. It was also impossible to sustain any real community programs. Activists were always coming in and out of hiding. The D.C. Patriots’ dream of creating breakfast programs, health clinics and liberation schools was overshadowed by the need for their own survival. One afternoon Simpson arrived at the 17th Street Patriot-Panther offices to discover police had the offices on lockdown. Most members were arrested. A few weeks later, Patriot Party member Jenny Stearns finally decided to call things for what they were: The Patriots had become “The Committee to Defend the Panthers.” After less than a year the D.C. Patriots were no more.
Back in New York, fortunes were no better. For the majority of the Patriots, their own experience with political repression was nowhere near the punishment meted out upon Black radicals. Still, a mass arrest of the entire Patriots central committee led to the dissolution of the organization. On February 22, 1970, New York police raided the group’s 2nd Avenue headquarters. According to witnesses, officers held guns to the heads of children, threatening to kill them if they didn’t stop crying. William Fesperman and Larry Moore were taken downstairs. Simultaneously, police stopped a carload of Patriots traveling across town. They arrested twelve Patriots and charged them with illegal possession of weapons and guns as well as interfering with arrest. Police hinted to the press that the Patriots had a hand in the bombing of a judge’s house and assorted sniping of police. The twelve were held on bail totaling $34,500. While the charges were eventually dropped, the bust just added to mounting legal troubles for Oregon-based Patriot Chuck Armsbury who was in town visiting. After spending weeks in a New York jail his legal counsel, lawyer-turned-tabloid-reporter Geraldo Rivera, who also represented the Young Lords, simply handed him over to federal officers to face firearms charges pending in Oregon.
The Eugene, Oregon, chapter of the Patriots was fairly new, but West Coast activists had their own share of problems. Two weeks earlier an armed gunman had attacked the Patriot Party office and targeted individuals. “He had shot openly at a young Black student, shot openly at a white woman in our party, right near the campus,” Armsbury explained. According to former Black Panther Jaja Nkruma who relocated to Eugene as a youth from Southern California, the Panther presence in Eugene was virtually responsible for the creation of a Black community in the town and not everyone was happy about it. Seattle Panther chair Aaron Dixon hoped to consolidate alliances up and down the West Coast. To do so, he had several dozen Panthers relocate from Compton, California, combining with a small group of Black students there. Howard Anderson, who previously worked in Mississippi and Alabama with CORE and SNCC, became captain of the Eugene Panther branch. The Panthers created a breakfast program and a liberation school, with Armsbury and his wife helping out and building a new Patriots chapter.
It didn’t take long for local racists to stake their opposition to the alliance. Shortly after the targeted shootings, another assailant fired on Patriot Party headquarters. To Armsbury, the reason was self-evident. “Back then, there were the Minutemen militias who weren’t too happy about whites and Blacks in a rural area cooperating with one another.” In Eugene, whites opposing racism were considered race traitors, making them open targets for white vigilantes. Crossing the color line had pronounced consequences. Since the 1920s, several of rural Oregon’s mayors and police chiefs had connections to the Klan. White supremacist organizations lay in wait for opportunity, confident in the relative protection of local law enforcement. Soon after the attack on Patriots headquarters, an “unknown punk” assaulted ten-year-old Lani Wright, daughter of a Patriots member, in a local drugstore. The child was knocked unconscious and spent multiple weeks in the hospital.
Peggy Terry on Clifton Street, Chicago, Illinois, Summer 1967.
(Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society)
Actor Harry Belafonte visits JOIN, from left to right: Ralph Thurman, Evelyn Arnold, unknown, Harry Belafonte, Virginia Bowers, Dominga Alcantar, Peggy Terry, Spring 1965.
(Photo by Nanci Hollander, courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society)
Dovie Coleman at the JOIN office.
(Photo by Burton Steck, courtesy of Mike James)
JOIN march against urban renewal, 1966.
(Photo by Nanci Hollander, courtesy of Bob Lawson)
Organizer Bob Lawson gives Mayor Richard J. Daley a copy of JOIN’s paper The Firing Line.
(Photo by Nanci Hollander, courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society)
Jimmy Curry and Junebug Boykin at Goodfellows’ march to the Summerdale Police Station, 1966.
(Photo by Nanci Hollander, courtesy of Mike James)
Poor whites at Resurrection City, Washington, DC, June 1968.
(Courtesy of Highlander Research and Education Center)
Young Patriots members outside their free community health clinic, 1969.
(Courtesy of Mike James)
Junebug Boykin outside JOIN’s office.
(Photo by Nanci Hollander, courtesy of Jean Tepperman)
Doug Youngblood at a rally for a new playground in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
(Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society)
William “Preacherman” Fesperman, Patriot Party.
(Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society)
Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, speaking at rally to support the Chicago 8, October 29, 1969.
(AP Photo/Staff)
Puerto Rican activists and members of the Rainbow Coalition take over a building to honor Young Lords member Manuel Ramos, who was killed by an off-duty police officer in May 1969.
(Courtesy of Mike James)
In Chicago, the Young Lords lead residents in a march against police brutality and the local Red Squad. Cha-Cha Jiménez, bottom right, wearing beret.
(Courtesy of Mike James)
Eugene, Oregon, Patriots and Panthers at a protest again conditions at Attica State Prison.
(Courtesy of Chuck Armsbury)
Patriots and Panthers family photo in Eugene, Oregon.
(Courtesy of Chuck Armsbury)
Just months after the Rainbow Coalition formed, William L. Olsen, commander of the Chicago “Red Squad,” tells a Senate investigations subcommittee that the Black Panthers have created similar groups among Puerto Rican and poor white radicals. July 1, 1969.
(AP Photo/Henry Griffin)
Mike James in Fairborn, Ohio, on the day Rising Up Angry got its name from the theme song of the film Wild in the Streets.
(Courtesy of Mike James)
Rising Up Angry’s first group photo, 1969.
(Courtesy of Mike James)
Anti-war rally supported by Rising Up Angry as part of the national “People’s Armed Farces Day,” May 1972.
(Courtesy of Bob Lawson)
Neighborhood kids volunteering at the Rising Up Angry health clinic, circa 1973.
(Courtesy of Bob Lawson)
Rising Up Angry members hold pictures of housing violations in the home of Margaret Burton. The action helps Burton win her case at Chicago’s housing court, October 1972.
(Courtesy of Bob Lawson)
Rising Up Angry’s Diane Fager, Victory Kadish and Norie Davis at a Chicago Women’s Liberation Union / Rising Up
Angry abortion rights rally.
(Courtesy of Bob Lawson)
October 4th Organization protesting a Philadelphia city council bill allowing a Model Cities housing site to be used as a truck-loading terminal, Kensington, 1971.
(Photo by H. Earle Shull Jr., courtesy of Temple University, Urban Archives McDowell Collection)
Final issue of JOIN newspaper, The Firing Line, during Peggy Terry’s campaign for vice president of the United States, Fall 1968.
The Patriot, volume 1, number 1. March 21, 1970.
Rising Up Angry, volume 5, number 11. February 1974.
Rising Up Angry, volume 6, number 13. March–April 1975.
October 4th Organization’s A Single Spark!, Fall 1973.
A Single Spark!, Winter 1974.
White Lightning newspaper, 1970.