Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

by Amy Sonnie

  One evening Rising Up Angry founder Mike James approached Wozniak while he was hanging out in nearby Monument Park with some greasers who had a reputation for violence. As James walked toward them one of Wozniak’s friends hurled an empty bottle at him, shattering glass everywhere. James walked right over to the kid and retorted, “Hey, that’s not cool. Even pigs don’t shit in their own beds.” James’s confidence and bravado made an impression, so when he came back around a few days later Wozniak took a newspaper from him and said he’d try to come to the Federal Building rally. It was Angry’s first issue and the cover depicted a woman on the back of a motorcycle holding an M-16. The masthead read, “Rising Up Angry, To Love We Must Fight.” One read through the paper showed Wozniak that there was far more going on with the world than he’d known. He decided it was really his family and neighbors who had lacked common sense.

  A few days later Wozniak headed out to the rally. Before leaving his house he painted “Free the Chicago 8” on a four-foot-wide banner made from bed sheets he’d found in his mother’s closet. He added the subtitle, “Northwest Side Greasers Support the Conspiracy 8.” When he got there he met dozens more Angry members, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Young Patriots and, of course, the Panthers. Hampton’s fiery oratory roused the crowd, but for Wozniak it was the vision, not just the timbre, Hampton put forth that opened his eyes. Rising Up Angry had turned out almost one hundred people for the rally and when a group of local neo-Nazis showed up across the street, Angry amassed its forces to confront them, successfully chasing them away. Before the rally was over, Wozniak agreed to be a Northwest correspondent for Angry’s paper.

  When the radio reported Fred Hampton’s death on the morning of December 4, 1969, Wozniak sat at his parents’ breakfast table in shock. Instinctually he knew it had to be a police murder, but that hardly prepared him for the gruesome images soon plastered across newspapers. When he looked at the broad mocking smiles of the cops in those photos he recognized the “telling criminal smirk” he’d seen time and again on his neighbors’ faces as they bragged to their sons about the day’s patrols. He contemplated the gravity of the situation. How would people react? Was Chicago on the verge of a race war? Where did that leave him and his newfound comrades?

  That morning he tied a black armband around his arm and went to school. His silent memorial didn’t go over well and marked the beginning of regular school discipline for his political activities. The following Saturday he took rapid transit to Hampton’s wake on the West Side of Chicago. Almost all of the mourners were Black and Wozniak’s panic set in. It was one thing to go to a rally at the Federal Building, but seemed another to arrive at a murdered Panthers’ funeral in an all-Black neighborhood knowing emotions were running so high. After he accidentally stepped on the patent leather shoe of a young Panther, Wozniak awkwardly begged forgiveness and braced for retaliation. The tall teenager just looked away.

  When Wozniak returned home that afternoon, he found the back door to his parents’ housed was locked, something they never did. As the door opened his father came out and started pummeling him, something he never did. Small for his age, Wozniak immediately fell to the porch as his mother yelled hysterically, “Where were you? Where were you?” They already knew. A police officer in the neighborhood had scared the elder Wozniak with a phone call asking why his son was at a Black Panther’s wake. As the leader of the local Red Squad, the unit of the police dedicated to surveilling and disrupting Left organizations, it was only a matter of time before Wozniak’s neighbor knew about his comings and goings. Wozniak was busted. When his radical politics got him kicked out of his Catholic school, he transferred to the local public high school and kept on passing out copies of Angry’s newspaper, talking to other students about the Free Huey campaign and what really happened to Fred Hampton. Rising Up Angry became his new home.

  As it had been for new radicals in JOIN Community Union and the Young Patriots, the moral and political demands of Black Liberation supplied the catalyst that called Paul Wozniak to activism. Fred Hampton’s murder only proved the brazen lengths the State would go to silence dissenters. Visible and violent police retaliation against the Left only pushed him toward deeper radicalism. It did the same for millions of others who, equally opposed to U.S. military action abroad, felt a revolution was necessary.1 With people’s lives on the line, more and more young leftists realized there could be no neutral stance. Of course there was no universal agreement about how to proceed. For all the outpouring of revolutionary sentiment, fault lines widened on the Left as radicals debated how masses of North Americans could be stirred to action. Even more, serious questions emerged about exactly how white activists should act in solidarity with liberation movements—both movements abroad and those in the U.S. whose leaders faced the imminent threat of jail, infiltration and execution.

  The debate about the direction of the U.S. Left had come to a head in June 1969 at the Students for a Democratic Society convention in Chicago. There, in the dingy Chicago Coliseum, the largest student organization in the U.S. broke into factions that disagreed bitterly over interpretations of Marxist-Leninist theory and who exactly would be the leading force in making a revolution. Prior to the convention, competing factions had published arguments and counterarguments in movement publications under bylines that became permanent monikers for their ideological positions. The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM, pronounced “rim”) argued that SDS should take a militant approach to active solidarity with Third World politics by supporting the self-determination of the Black “internal colony” in the United States and national liberation struggles abroad. RYM then split into two sections: The Weathermen proposed immediate, armed action to confront the machinations of imperialism and racism on U.S. soil; while the newly minted RYM II asserted that a new communist political party could be built by organizing workers in U.S factories. Despite their tactical differences, both RYMs came to the June 1969 convention united against a third faction: the Progressive Labor Party. PL, as it was known, opposed any form of nationalism on the grounds that it divided workers. PL argued that class struggle was the primary struggle, the demands of Black nationalists were divisive and the only place for students in the movement was in an alliance with workers.2

  With Weather and RYM II on one side and PL on the other, leaders came to the convention ready to battle for control over the future of SDS. Each side wanted the other expelled, and both vied for the votes of SDS’s national members—upwards of 100,000 in 1969, about two thousand of whom were at the convention. The threat of expulsions and counter-expulsions were a long time coming, which attracted a fair number of media reporters there to document the conflict, but most SDS members across the country had no idea what these factions were talking about. After an extremely contentious series of debates (and fistfights), RYM activists expelled the Progressive Labor Party. The conference signaled an unfortunate fact: SDS was, in effect, dead, its leaders divided over questions of class, race and strategy.3

  It was a disorienting moment for the group’s rank and file, who failed to see the point of the endless debates. It was even more frustrating for radicals outside the student movement who watched as ideological infighting consumed meetings, drew attention away from local work and slowed movement building. There were important ideological differences to discuss, but for Chicago’s working-class radicals it seemed like a lot of middle-class intellectual bullshit. Many former JOIN members felt both remaining factions failed to address the permanent underclass living in neighborhoods like theirs—the greasers, domestic workers, dropouts, welfare recipients, addicts and under-the-table laborers. For them, the choice between organizing in factories and building a radical army left out key terrain: the struggle against racism, poverty and imperialism rooted in their communities. All sides diagnosed imperialism as the disease, but they prescribed vastly different medicine.4

  In the ashes of SDS the white New Left faced a three-way fork: one path led to direct, armed insurrecti
on; the second toward a national party built from the shop floor; and the third, less-traveled among the era’s revolutionaries, veered toward the community. These activists had, in many ways, grown up politically together. Some understood that these leftists were trying to work out strategies for real problems of movement building. Many remained friends as they argued out their tactical differences. Still others, like Uptown’s Young Patriots, who never felt part of the student movement anyway, sidestepped the ideological infights by forming their own community organizations and mocking middle-class leftists for excluding the very masses they were arguing about. Of course, there was a thread of reactive anti-intellectualism in this, but for ex-students like Mike James the idea of anti-imperialist neighborhood organizing simply looked like the best path given the headway JOIN made in the preceding years. It wasn’t the only path, but for JOIN’s seasoned organizers it was an equally important one that few others were willing to try.

  Prior to the SDS convention James already sketched out the first issue of Rising Up Angry. For him, the political chasms mattered less at the community level where it was usually a mistake to come on too strong with a political line anyway—at least at first. One of James’ first new recruits to the project was Steve Tappis, an SDS member who was also one of the original authors of the Weathermen’s manifesto. Tappis moved to Chicago in 1968 to work at the national SDS office and organize in a local machinery factory. While his own family enjoyed some class mobility from blue-collar Brooklyn to New York’s suburbs, he was different from most SDS members in that he never attended college. After high school, he took a job as a janitor because the pay was good and allowed him to do movement work in his spare time. After moving to Chicago to work with SDS, he was able to live on savings and part-time work.

  Tappis’s identification with the community, workplace and the militant strains of the student movement gave him a unique vantage point. He supported the thinking that gave rise to the Weathermen, and later the Weather Underground Organization, but by the close of the 1969 SDS convention, Tappis realized something important: Rebellions rarely come when scheduled and often seem farthest away when material conditions would seem most ripe. The revolution they wanted was going to take some time. So, when Mike James proposed an alternative to the RYM II versus Weathermen debate, Tappis decided to focus on neighborhood organizing. Unceremonious as his decision was, it was notable during an era of bombastic fights. Tappis could have walked down any of the paths tunneled from the SDS convention floor. Rather than reject RYM II or the Weathermen, Tappis felt that all three roads needed paving and his best work could be done at the community level.

  For the former JOIN leaders Tappis met in Chicago, the question of radical community politics cut especially deep. Together, they had demonstrated, perhaps only to themselves, that the very people the government counted on for consent could be moved to dissent. Dozens of them had accompanied Peggy Terry on her vice presidential tour across the U.S.; others like Diane Fager and Bob Lawson tried to take JOIN’s lessons on the road in cities like Detroit and Cincinnati before returning to Chicago. They knew it would not be quick work, but the promise of JOIN’s model inspired them to apply the insights of the preceding years without making the same mistakes. The first thing they needed to acknowledge was the role class had played in fracturing JOIN. Rising Up Angry, they decided, should be built from the ground up with folks from working-class communities. Angry’s original members included James and Tappis with local activists Mary Driscoll, Stormy Brown and Norie Davis, JOIN alum Pat Sturgis, and Jim and Lisa Cartier. Others soon joined them, including Paul Wozniak, Peter Kuttner, Angry’s resident filmmaker, and Aaron Fagen who drew the newspaper’s popular comics. After returning from Detroit, Diane Fager and Bob Lawson joined too. Each played a formative role in building an organization where people felt involved and respected. For Mary Driscoll everything about Rising Up Angry was unique because working-class people were the ones organizing other working-class people. “It was the approach of people who have the same needs.”

  Janet Sampson joined Rising Up Angry because the group validated what she’d always felt in her gut: she and other working-class people were not to blame for their troubles. Sampson had arrived in Chicago at age sixteen after her mother left her father. The experience jarred her and got her asking questions about the world around her. She’d grown up in a large working-class family where the specter of Vietnam and the very real possibility that a relative could be drafted loomed large in her mind. The nightly body count on the news increased her anxiety, and she began to notice the hypocrisy of newscasters and politicians as they declared “progress” when only a few thousand, instead of many thousand, troops died in a given week. She was asking other questions as well. Why was her mother looked down upon by friends and family for leaving her abusive, alcoholic father? Why did some members of her family hold deeply racist views, even though they knew firsthand the injustice of working hard but getting nowhere? “I was told by my mother that if you worked hard you would eventually move up the ladder. But I looked at her and saw this wasn’t the case. She worked just as hard as anyone yet never moved up.” Rising Up Angry’s Norie Davis was the first person to point out to Sampson that this wasn’t her fault. Sampson had just moved in with her boyfriend, already a member of Angry, and felt immediately at home among Angry’s radical family. Over the course of six months, at a series of “rap sessions,” parties and women’s meetings, she began to understand many of her problems within the context of imperialism, which, as New Left logic went, carried on two wars: one abroad and the other at home. To Sampson, this explanation and Angry’s balance of theory and action clarified her life experience and gave her a way to change things.

  From its inception, Angry set out to create a culture of radicalism rooted in working-class life. Through his work with JOIN, Mike James developed a knack for seeing where people might go politically. He also grasped the importance of celebrating, instead of condemning, working-class culture. For James, fast cars, rock music and softball games blended easily with the struggle against empire. Rising Up Angry was founded on a serious belief that political transformations were just as likely to begin at a weekend softball game as they were at a meeting or rally. Taking their name from lyrics in a song in the bizarre youth power flick Wild in the Streets, Angry canvassed Chicago as a whole searching for the best locations to reach people that the broader Left had ignored: white gang-affiliated youth. In working-class Chicago, almost every corner had a gang, usually named after their particular section of town: Brainerd Park, C & D (Clark and Devon), CORP, the Gaylords, the Simon City Royals, Bel-Airs and the PBC (Paulina Barry Community). Some gangs boasted more menace, but most were simply social. None, though, shied away from a turf battle if provoked.

  Angry viewed gang kids and greasers as part of a potentially radical underclass. They adopted the Panther view that the “lumpenproletariat”—the most marginally employed or disenfranchised—would become the vanguard of the revolution. As Left logic went, they needed to cool the infighting and “fight the pigs” instead. Angry’s members, as Steve Tappis put it, were “hassled by the pigs, fucked with by [their] bosses, channeled into bullshit jobs, drafted into the Army, lied to by the politicians, and ripped off by the stores and businesses.” At least in theory, the rap about unity made sense to kids who distrusted police and policymakers more than they distrusted each other. Still, Rising Up Angry needed a solid opener before greasers would be lining up for political education classes and turf-neutral sports. Following Lenin’s maxim that revolutionaries should also publish newspapers, James assembled a team to put together the first issue of Rising Up Angry, a semi-weekly paper that showcased local culture interspersed with politics. Steve Tappis ran the printing press and JOIN alums Diane Fager and Bob Lawson signed on to write the content. Angry made its first inroads with greasers by taking their pictures and publishing a neighborhood happenings section. James would travel around snapping photos of the kids on th
e corner and put them on a page called the “Stone Grease Grapevine.” As community members saw their images respected in print they started asking for stacks to pass out around town. Initially, it was more about the small-time fame, but for a growing crowd the paper also became a grassroots university. Rising Up Angry placed community concerns in a national and global context, validating people’s financial struggles, then agitating them to stand with workers of color. There was no particular political line, but Angry’s founders did meet to talk about ideological issues and plan ways to discuss them. They added coverage of Irish nationalists struggling against English rule in order to encourage whites to make the connection to anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World, especially Cuba, Guinea Bissau, China, Vietnam and Puerto Rico.5

  Grabbing the attention of greaser youth like Paul Wozniak, Rising Up Angry articles pointed to Chicago’s ghettos as the local trenches in a Global Left war for independence. They asserted freedom from empire building and colonial occupations, from U.S. liberalism and capitalism, from police harassment and job discrimination. When Angry’s leaders rapped with neighborhood residents about “the war at home and the war in ‘Nam,” they took the time to listen to people with respect. Residents could join Angry regardless of whether they were for or against the war. The group knew people’s reasons for joining the military were complex. One of Angry’s early members, Rich Kroth, knew firsthand that any gang kid hauled before a judge got two choices: join the Army or go to jail. The ultimatum was its own kind of draft, but given what Kroth and his peers dealt with in the neighborhood, the Army didn’t seem like such a raw deal. It was a way out. For Kroth, Rising Up Angry was the first Left organization he knew of that validated the realities facing working-class youth.