Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

by Amy Sonnie

  White Lightning, number 23. March 1974.

  When the Black Panthers began asserting their “right to bear arms,” the gesture had been equal parts symbolic and defensive. In rural Oregon, Second Amendment protections evolved far beyond symbolic meaning. Self-protection was a necessity, but it also made radicals immensely vulnerable and provided a distraction for reporters who wanted to write about violent radicals rather than studied revolutionaries. Just before Armsbury’s trip to New York, local police stopped a car carrying six Patriots, ostensibly for a noisy exhaust. Officers noticed two firearms on the floorboard of the backseat. Police ordered Armsbury out of the vehicle and asked him to pull back his jacket, revealing a .45-caliber pistol. According to the police report, the confiscated weapons were fully loaded and a notebook belonging to Armsbury was full of “Revolutionary Theory.”28 Police arrested the driver of the car for driving with a defective muffler. The Patriots maintained the guns were solely for self-defense and warranted given the recent attacks on them, which included two attempted murders, an assault and attacks on their office. It did no good. The bust started a multi-year prison odyssey for Chuck Armsbury.

  Only a few years earlier Armsbury seemed destined for academia, not prison. Born in Kansas, and raised by a single mother in Eastern Washington, he worked as a meatpacker before attending college at the University of Oregon, Eugene. It was there that he met his first wife, Sonja Brooks, a Black woman who later joined the Panthers. Armsbury was one of those working-class organizers who could move easily between Eugene’s poor white community and the town’s university. Although he earned a degree in sociology and came to the University of Oregon to teach, he was always more at home with fellow workers. His early political action included a run for mayor of Eugene in 1968. Soon after, Brooks took him to a Panther convention. The Black Panthers’ vision transformed Armsbury’s politics, and the Young Patriots he met at the convention completed them. Listening to William Fesperman address the crowd, Armsbury felt there was finally someone in the movement who not only wanted to reach poor whites, but also could do so. “There really wasn’t much encouragement from most of the Left for poor white people to do much about their situation,” Armsbury recalls. The Patriots filled that gap and Fesperman seemed a reliable leader.

  Armsbury had no way of knowing that his new affiliation would lead to a ten-year prison sentence. At the trial for the Eugene weapons charges, the arresting officer showed up to testify in full Marine Corps uniform; he had returned to the Marines after being discharged from the police force for failure to turn in confiscated property. The proceedings were also marred by a series of bombings in the Portland and Eugene areas. The judge allowed speculation about Armsbury’s involvement in the blasts to come up in court. Some activists suspected authorities might have perpetrated the attacks themselves, but they could never prove it. Throughout the trial, no evidence surfaced that Armsbury took part in any bombing. Nonetheless, in August 1970 U.S. District Judge Alfred T. Goodwin sentenced Armsbury to two concurrent ten-year prison terms. At sentencing, Goodwin said he anticipated the conviction could be reversed on appeal and so, he reasoned, giving Armsbury the maximum sentence would assure jail time but give the court flexibility to alter the sentences—that is, if Armsbury showed signs of rehabilitation.

  Sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in the southern Puget Sound, Armsbury immediately mounted an appeal and petitioned for bail. Judge Goodwin denied his bail request stating, “I think Armsbury is a little unstable. I was worried that he might decide to blow up something.” Goodwin also accused Armsbury of writing him threatening letters, something the judge later downplayed when questioned about it by the press. Goodwin justified his actions by citing a pre-sentencing investigation alleging Armsbury’s links to other bombings in Eugene during May 1969. The unsubstantiated bombing allegations resurfaced throughout his appeal and parole efforts. Both Patriots and Panthers suspected the judge may have been playing a waiting game, giving prosecutors time to put together a case around the bombings. Richard J. Oba, who was convicted in the bombings, received an immunity offer in exchange for testimony against Armsbury. Rejecting the offer because he believed immunity laws too new and untested, Oba was sent to jail. Arthur Cox, an expelled member of the Panthers, was the one to testify that he had been at a meeting where Oba and Armsbury conspired about the bombings. Cox himself had been convicted of two unrelated felonies.

  For Armsbury organizing didn’t end at the prison gates. Rainbow Coalition politics were just as necessary inside prisons, maybe even more so, and Armsbury began organizing fellow prisoners immediately. The conditions at McNeil Island led prisoners to believe they were part of a controlled social experiment designed to amplify inmate-on-inmate violence.29 The fall of 1970 was particularly brutal at the prison, with inmates suspecting guard collusion in a hit-squad death, several stabbings and deteriorating conditions. Things came to a boiling point in November following the fatal stabbing of prisoner William Carter by fellow inmate Eddy Sanchez. Inmates and guards all knew that Sanchez had a poorly treated mental illness and was prone to sporadic violence. In this instance Sanchez announced his intent to commit murder merely two hours prior, but guards made no effort to separate him from other prisoners. Armsbury sought the collaboration of Paul Bailleaux, an inmate litigator, to craft a response. The duo met in the Portland U.S. Marshall’s office. Bailleaux was a lifer in transit to federal custody from Oregon State Prison. President of the lifers’ club there, he had earned the ire of prison officials for his steady stream of lawsuits challenging prison conditions. The Old Con and the Young Radical became solid friends. Throughout December, the two drafted a lengthy document they named “The Genocide Complaint.”30

  Neither Bailleaux nor Armsbury had illusions that any court of law would side with prisoners alleging genocide by the federal government. Rather the suit was an attempt to build multiracial prisoner unity and galvanize support from outside the walls. “Rarely had writ-writers purported to file a cause of action alleging the whole damn top-down management of McNeil Island prison was hell-bent on our common destruction,” Armsbury later wrote. To bolster their charge of “terrorism and murder” at McNeil, the plaintiffs pointed to several other suspicious inmate deaths, including Larry Mastne, Troy White and Roy Rodriguez. Arguing that prison officials had ample knowledge and opportunity to prevent each death, the complaint urged officials to segregate violent, mentally ill inmates from the population. The Genocide Complaint went further, too, as its authors outlined racially based “divide and conquer” tactics used inside prisons. The complaint described the engineering of racial hostility through “racial name-calling and the granting of preferred treatment based solely on skin color and nationality.” They also deconstructed the prison’s two-tiered system of favoritism. McNeil paid an hourly wage for prison industry labor and none to dining room, kitchen, laundry and maintenance staff. Pointing to prison officials’ own public assertions that they were fully in control of everything that happened inside, the lawsuit argued that officials were clearly responsible, then, for the abhorrent conditions, favoritism and deaths at McNeil.

  At first, it seemed some of the lifers had a better chance of leaving McNeil than seeing the Genocide Complaint succeed. Guards in the visiting room prevented the complaint from reaching a Portland attorney who planned to file it in a Tacoma court. A prison counselor offered to mail it through the formal prison mail system, but the complaint was promptly lost. Bailleaux had anticipated this and prepared a facsimile, managing to sneak the document to supportive lawyers on the outside. When finally filed in January 1971, the suit assembled a rainbow coalition of its own with six lead plaintiffs. Willie Brazier, a Seattle Panther member, Gerald Thompson, Larry Crews and Armando Vargas joined Armsbury and Bailleaux in charging federal officials with a thinly veiled genocide behind prison walls.

  According to Armsbury, prisoner reaction to the complaint was a victory in and of itself. The suit opened a space to discuss racial unit
y and divisive favoritism. Small indignities, like not being able to kiss your wife more than once during a visit, were linked to larger ones, such as guards’ lethal decision to release Sanchez back into the general population. One evening, while Armsbury studied in the writ room, he was summoned to the warden’s office and presented with a letter allegedly signed by “real inmates” condemning the plaintiffs for working with “pinko fag” lawyers. It included a death threat against Armsbury. He laughed it off and returned to the writ room, secure with the fact that McNeil’s prisoners stood behind the Genocide Complaint.

  As preparations for court proceeded, McNeil whirred with rumors of an unrelated labor strike. McNeil prisoners were paid wages for their work assembling cables for Polaris submarines used by the U.S. military. Though initially planned as an anti-war action, those prison workers added the Genocide Complaint issues to their list of demands. Bailleaux recoiled at the thought of a strike. He believed that any sort of work stoppage, especially one linked to the anti-war movement, would bring greater repression than the inmates were prepared for. Armsbury concurred. He had come to think that explosive and chaotic actions were ultimately futile and allowed provocateurs the opportunity to attack. The strike went ahead anyway. For ten days prisoners refused to leave their cells. During the strike all prison staff, including the prison chaplain, wore full riot gear. Guards eventually broke the strike through a combination of intimidation, bribery and loss of privileges. In the end, giving inmates access to the more desirable two-man “flat” cells, broke the strike faster than brute force.

  Shortly thereafter, the Genocide Complaint was unceremoniously dismissed. Even though Armsbury actually counseled against the strike, the Genocide Complaint was viewed as its catalyst. When the strike failed, the momentum died, and Armsbury was sent to isolation for orchestrating the events. Then one morning a guard took him to the waiting area with no explanation. He was abruptly transferred to the Marion Penitentiary. To his surprise Eddy Sanchez was there too.

  Armsbury’s supporters continued a public campaign for his release. In spring 1971 the 9th Circuit Court upheld his conviction, but just before Christmas, Judge Goodwin ordered his parole. The judge set a five-year parole and prohibited Armsbury from possessing firearms. In 1974, Armsbury returned to prison once more for harboring escaped convict Carl Cletus Bowles, in prison for a double kidnapping and murder, who had escaped while on a social pass and killed Deputy Carlton Smith in Eugene. Armsbury admits to being blinded by his own feelings at the time that all prisoners were simply victims of the government and capitalism. He had underestimated Bowles’ potential for violence. “He was completely raised by the state, and I didn’t understand what that could do to someone.” For this, Armsbury served four years of another ten-year sentence before being paroled in 1978.

  By the time Armsbury was released, the Patriots and the Rainbow Coalition had long since passed. While Armsbury remains involved in community politics along with Bob Simpson, now a history teacher, and Andy Keniston, few other Patriots have stayed involved with progressive activism. William Fesperman returned to China Grove, North Carolina. Doug Youngblood and fellow Patriot Carol Coronado started a family and, along with Junebug Boykin, mostly retreated from public organizing. They remained in occasional contact with former JOIN members and in 2005, at his mother’s memorial, Youngblood spoke favorably about their years of work in Chicago. He focused mostly on the JOIN years. The Patriots era left deeper scars. Like many of the people who lived through this time, privacy became a treasured possession. Youngblood remained in Illinois until his death in 2008.

  In 1972 Raymond Tackett, a Chicago Patriots member, had described the devastation that shattered the organizations in the Rainbow Coalition. “Every time one of us were arrested, we could see our pictures hanging on the wall of the police station and the pigs aiming darts at them.” Tackett also worked with the Patriots sister group, Rising Up Angry, and did his own stint in prison. “All there was left was the power structure of the pigs who had destroyed everything else,” he wrote.31 Tackett was killed in 1973. Under circumstances eerily similar to John Howard’s murder, Tackett returned to his home state of Kentucky to organize in the mining town of Evarts. He was in the process of starting a Serve the People–inspired free clinic when he was killed. Although the police arrested a suspect in his murder, Tackett’s family alleges he was killed by a hired assassin, paid for by the police.32

  While the Young Patriots and Patriot Party only receive passing mention in most histories of the New Left, their alliance with the Panthers has been held up as proof of the era’s revolutionary vision.33 A group of poor white guys—some former gang members—working alongside the Black Panthers and Young Lords contradicts biased notions about poor whites as either hopelessly racist or reliant on the Left intelligentsia for a radical reeducation. To Jaja Nkruma, the Patriots were obvious allies because they were truly grassroots. “In order to be grassroots you have to reach your community in the beauty shops, barbershops, grocery stores, factories, sawmills and cabinet factories,” he said. To outsiders the Patriots–Lords–Panthers partnership may have seemed unlikely, but to its founders it was an inimitable political alliance—unique and difficult, but necessary. Theirs was a project molded in the image of other multiracial uprisings in U.S. history, and like the work of Carl and Anne Braden in the South and JOIN Community Union in Chicago, the Patriots boldly suggested that the white children of the Southern Diaspora might claim an identity separate from the legacy of racism and help realize the promise of rainbow politics for the entire nation.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pedagogy of the Streets:

  Rising Up Angry

  There’s a new sun / Risin’ up angry in the sky

  And there’s a new voice sayin’ / “We’re not afraid to die”

  Let the old world make believe / It’s blind and deaf and dumb

  But nothing can change the shape of things to come

  —Davie Allan and the Arrows, “The Shape of Things to Come”

  On December 6, 1969, five thousand people filed into the First Baptist Church to pay respects to murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton. It was unusually warm for a December weekend in Chicago. One of the mourners, fifteen-year-old Paul Wozniak, felt his anxiety level rise when he entered the church. As a white kid from Northwest Chicago, Wozniak had only a few Black acquaintances at his Jesuit high school and none from the all-white, blue-collar neighborhood where he grew up. The 41st Ward of the Far Northwest Side was the only ward with a Republican city council member and was home to Chicago’s cops, sanitation workers and firefighters. They lived on the farthest possible edge of the city, penned in by a law requiring municipal workers to live within city limits. Wozniak’s neighbors in Norwood, Jefferson and Edison Park adopted a fierce protectionism typical among residents in the city’s white enclaves. If they were being forced to stay, they planned to police their borders and keep out the riffraff, by which they meant hippies, commies, spics and negroes.

  For these residents, putting the fear of God in their children seemed a good way to erect the barbed wire fences they couldn’t build down Montrose Avenue. Many of Wozniak’s childhood friends were sons of police officers. The boys spent their time recounting stories they heard from their fathers about violent, wanton Blacks and Puerto Ricans. They had been told how one guy stabbed a friend over a cheap bottle of wine; another guy committed suicide with a shotgun in the mouth. Wozniak and his friends took such stories as proof that “those people” lacked common sense. To them, they were just as crazy as the monks in South Vietnam who protested the war by burning themselves in the street. Pointless, they thought. But something in Wozniak’s worldview started to shift by his teen years. Some of his newer friends were considered the bad kids, the motorcycle-riding greasers and dropouts who made up Northwest Side gangs. They raced cars, shot pool and listened to soul, Motown and the Rolling Stones. Depicted most famously in books like The Outsiders, greasers got their name from the pomade sh
een of their slicked back hair. They dressed in three-quarter-length black leather jackets and baggy blue or gray work pants and earned their reputation from hanging out on corners, smoking, shooting the shit and fighting whenever someone threatened them. The first time Wozniak saw pictures of the Black Panthers he noticed that they wore the same black leather jackets and heavy boots as the white greasers he knew. By the time he met the Panthers in person Wozniak realized they shared more than a working-class sense of style.

  Wozniak first heard Hampton speak at a Federal Building rally just months before his murder. The gathering attracted thousands calling for the release of the Chicago 8, including JOIN’s Rennie Davis and Panther Bobby Seale, on trial for conspiracy to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. From the platform, a twenty-year-old Hampton laid out the vision of the emerging Rainbow Coalition. The message drew in Wozniak, who arrived at the rally that day after meeting members of a new organization called Rising Up Angry, launched in summer 1969 by ex-JOIN Community Union members. Where the Young Patriots set a bar for revolutionary swagger among already-political poor whites, Rising Up Angry set its sights on reaching the young and disenfranchised across the city, many of whom didn’t identify as poor or share the southern heritage that united the Patriots. For radicals seeking new directions, Rising Up Angry provided a way to carry the best of JOIN’s politics beyond Uptown. They intended to build an organization rooted in working-class culture and recruited a cadre of working-class radicals that could help see the radical vision of social transformation to fruition. Their first endeavor was a professional-looking newspaper that brought Left politics to the neighborhood level, featuring blurbs about rock concerts, cars and parties book-ended by articles about liberation fronts in Africa, the United Farm Workers and, of course, pictures of greaser youth hanging out.