Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

by Amy Sonnie

  At the neighborhood level, Angry organizers emphasized that condemning the war did not mean condemning enlistees. As with most issues, Rising Up Angry took the slow road, providing opportunities for returning vets to talk to youth in the neighborhood. As Angry organizer Pat Sturgis put it, “There were some who chose to serve in the military, but were against the war and chose to resist from the inside. There were others who didn’t go but were very staunch supporters of those who did.” Angry recognized that the decision about whether or not to go to Vietnam was independent of a person’s opinion about the war itself and invited veterans to speak about their experiences, the good and the bad. Returning GIs were blunt about the realities of war and the hurdles they faced back home.

  One soldier, Fritz Kraly, joined the anti-war movement as soon as he was discharged from the Marine Corps. He took up the cause of a good friend, Al Metzger, who had gone AWOL from the military. By working with the Chicago Area Military Project, Kraly helped to secure Metzger a reasonable deal. Soon after Kraly joined Rising Up Angry’s newly minted volunteer legal team, which regularly counseled AWOL soldiers and draft resisters. When Angry organizers were arrested at Great Lakes Naval Training Center for “entering a military reservation for a purpose prohibited by law” (that is, to invite service members to a Fourth of July picnic), the legal aid team took up their defense. Kraly was impressed with the group and the alternatives they showed young vets, and he quickly decided the group represented the best way for him to help other young soldiers.

  By the early 1970s direct resistance by enlistees spiked dramatically. In addition to hundreds of cases of individual desertion, fragging and sabotage, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began organizing veterans and supported the emergence of public actions by soldiers. The Stop Our Ships Movement saw fifty thousand San Diego residents sign a petition to prevent the USS Constellation, docked there, from going to Vietnam. Soldiers made numerous attempts to sabotage the ship’s seaworthiness, and white and Black sailors joined together in a sit-in protesting the dishonorable discharge of several Black sailors. The commander of the Constellation returned the ship to San Diego for fear of mutiny at sea. In Oakland, more than half the crew of the USS Coral Sea signed a petition to prevent that ship, too, from sailing to South Asia. Angry supported the action by publishing an open letter to service members railing against the “imperialist military system” and comparing their difficulties to the struggles waged in the “neighborhoods, factories, and schools.” Rather than turning enlistees off, Angry’s stance on the war appealed to returning vets and the group’s newspaper became one of the best sources of news on the GI Movement, so much so that some Vietnam Veterans Against the War chapters distributed it as their own monthly paper.6

  As the older siblings of Angry’s new recruits came home from Vietnam, they joined Angry too. In a sense, this represented a reversal of the fortunes that had diffused SDS’s Economic Research Action Project. Where escalation in Vietnam had shifted that group’s attention away from community work and projects like JOIN in 1965, Rising Up Angry managed to link the local and the international in a way that made sense to everyday people. In spring 1971, the national anti-war movement launched a “Spring Offensive”—a series of actions supported by former and active service people. Angry’s members travelled to a May Day rally in Washington, D.C., taking part in multi-day street actions that resulted in seven thousand arrests. During the protest sympathetic locals organized food and blanket drop-offs for the protestors and guards allowed them to distribute the supplies at makeshift detention centers.

  Rising Up Angry also hosted large anti-war events of their own in Chicago neighborhoods. One rally at the Church of the Holy Covenant featured George Smith, a former Green Beret and prisoner of war, as the keynote speaker. Smith claimed that the National Liberation Front had released him as a good faith gesture when Norman Morrison, a Quaker, immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in 1965 to protest the war. Hundreds of community residents attended the rally, signifying to Angry that anti-war dissent had finally reached a visible and sustained fever pitch among working-class communities. Soon enough, vets were bringing their wives, mothers, uncles and neighbors to the rallies. Rising Up Angry also turned out thousands to a Chicago protest against national Armed Forces Day (also dubbed “Armed Farces Day”). According to Angry about three thousand people showed up. Veterans drove in from as far away as Milwaukee. Parents brought young children, and young people brought their parents. In contrast to the popular Sixties profile of protesting students, rock musicians and Yippies, Chicago’s early Seventies anti-war movement had become a family affair.

  Not all of Angry’s early recruits were enticed by anti-war rallies, guest speakers and veterans meetings, though. As part of its commitment to cultural work, Angry also organized dances and music performances to bring working-class youth together around something positive—with political overtones of course. While some organizations tried to draw a sharp line between political and cultural activism, Angry members were inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on culture and consciousness. They saw culture as both an organizing tactic and a weapon.7 In fact all their early programs aimed to build a revolutionary counter-culture with its own language, traditions and discipline rooted in the hearts of working-class Chicagoans. Their role was to make radical politics “common sense.” Acts such as MC5, Fast Eddy, Aaron’s Rod, Weapons of Peace, Taxi and Bran Spankin’ performed at Angry’s weekend dances. While most of the music itself was apolitical, band members expressed their sympathies by playing fundraisers and using their notoriety to aid the cause. MC5’s lead singer Rob Tyner often stopped their sets to urge support of Panther political prisoners and resistance to the Vietnam War.8 The draw of popular bands also gave Angry added leverage to set some rules for attendance: no gang fights. The dances served as safety zones where rival gangs were expected to leave their beef at the door. It mostly worked, but a citywide gathering of gang-affiliated youth occasionally had its hazards. To quell disruptions, Rising Up Angry’s women leaders served as a security force for each event. They decided to use the macho posturing as an opportunity to lay down a rap about building unity and shatter assumptions about women’s roles. Diane Fager arrived to one dance to find a line of people winding completely around the block. When a fight broke out, she and the other women in Angry walked right into the middle of the brawl. They physically separated rival members and reminded them they were on “the People’s Turf.” Shocked by the intervention, the gang members stopped in their tracks.

  Beyond turf battles, Rising Up Angry also spent many of its early months quelling racial skirmishes. A few joint events with the Black Panthers and Young Lords showed the possibilities of racial unity, but it was one thing to reject racism in words and another to do so in deeds. When white high school students accused a Black male of attacking a white female, several of Angry’s new recruits seemed torn between their new anti-racist beliefs and what they thought it meant to survive in their own neighborhoods. Suddenly, members who had renounced racism were arming themselves for the expected race riot. Sitting in a coffee shop with Steve Tappis, one young member asked, “Hey, can you help me out?” When Tappis asked him what he needed, the kid blurted out, “I need a gun, we are going to fight the nigs.” Tappis pointed to the clenched fist button pinned to the kid’s jacket and asked what happened to the rap about racial unity. “Oh yeah,” the kid replied.

  Angry decided it was time for a direct appeal to gang leadership. Organizers knew there was a disconnect for many young folks between their ideals and who they thought they needed to answer to. Even a decade after JOIN tried to seed “an interracial movement of the poor” in Chicago, Angry was challenged to create a culture where it wasn’t seen as a weakness to walk away from a racial fight. In reality, no one was really pushing for a race riot, and Angry knew if they could reach enough gang leaders they would each tell their crew to cool it. Angry organizers went block-to-block talking to the more levelheaded guys o
n the street. A week later, they pulled together a meeting of white gang leaders. It was agreed, “If they don’t mess with us, we won’t mess with them.” Angry spread the news; the fight was off and Angry had garnered some legitimacy as a broker for neighborhood beefs.

  Incidents like these illustrated the frailty of diminishing racial tensions. One member, who went by and still only goes by the name Stone Greaser, recalled that Angry’s enthusiasm for increasing the peace was well intentioned but sometimes dangerous. While leaders chilled more than one inter-neighborhood fight, they only narrowly averted a few major disasters, like when Angry published a false story about a truce between the Gaylords and the Simon City Royals. According to Stone Greaser, the false information came close to getting people killed.

  Rising Up Angry was still finding its way, taking great leaps forward then stumbling a few steps back. One of the most difficult challenges for the group was what to do about the more hardened racists they came across. For a while the group accommodated a tier of members who stuck around for the fun, but resisted the more radical politicking. There were also plenty of people who resisted the group altogether. It wasn’t exactly in Angry’s interest to attack the people they were trying to organize, but for all the peacemaking Rising Up Angry wasn’t opposed to a little street fighting of its own, especially if it meant a scuffle with fascist sympathizers.

  Lane Technical High School in Chicago was an all-white school that started to desegregate. Racial tensions ignited. One Angry member, Tom Gilchrist, attended Lane Tech and started receiving near-constant threats for selling Angry’s papers at the school. Then, Rising Up Angry members heard that the owner of Lenny’s, a nearby snack-shop and school lunchtime hangout, had provided baseball bats to white kids during a racial skirmish to “beat the blacks with.” When another Angry member was assaulted by a group of neo-Nazis, Angry decided that it would destroy the organization’s credibility if they let the incident go. About twenty members visited Lenny’s. Leaflets with swastikas printed on them had been left all over the tables. One Angry member took a leaflet from a neo-Nazi and then immediately hit him in the face. In this moment, all political theory boiled down to the simple fact that their members had been threatened and massive retaliation was in order. Pandemonium bloomed as the factions clashed. Diane Fager was knocked to the ground, boots pelting her sides; Gilchrist singled out the Nazi leader with an old-fashioned challenge, “You and me, outside, one on one.”

  In the realm of high school fights, it lasted an eternity: three or four minutes. As the sirens approached, Angry members retreated to cars parked around the campus. The incident established that the organization would fight against organized racism, but the fact remained: Angry was physically fighting a part of the community the group saw as its base. The incident was bittersweet. It established street credibility, but also tampered with the group’s revolutionary confidence. Reflecting on the incident, Angry’s newspaper explained that the group believed most of the folks they fought had simply been caught up in the melee and that only a small group of them were “Right-wing Nazi-type, racist idiots in Lenny’s whose fathers and brothers are pigs and they want to become pigs too.” Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact was that uprooting racism among Chicago’s working-class white youth might have as many “fight the people” moments as “fight the real enemy” transformations. Ironically, Weather Underground member Bill Ayers was widely criticized for a speech in Cleveland in 1969 in which he suggested “fighting the people” might be necessary. Ayers and Rising Up Angry’s organizers may have opted for different paths, but both groups demonstrated they ultimately believed in some level of direct confrontation with racist elements.

  Through incidents like these, Angry drew a long, deep line in the sand between its organizing framework and Saul Alinsky’s approach, which saw no role for explicit anti-racist confrontation. Instead, Angry treated everyday life as a teachable moment and organizers worked hard to balance their Marxist-Leninist influence with an open culture where residents could come into the organization, get exposed and maybe develop more radical politics over time. One of Angry’s best attempts to propagandize against racism appeared in the concept for a film called Trick Bag, directed by one of Angry’s founding members, Peter Kuttner. Kuttner was a Chicago-born filmmaker who helped found the Newsreel documentary collective (today, Third World Newsreel). As a teenager he had attended a Chicago public high school with sharp class divisions. Every day at school, he watched students and teachers dole out privileges and punishments along class and race lines. The experience taught him more about the world than he ever learned from history or economics textbooks.

  Before joining Angry, Kuttner had traveled to New York City to find work as a cameraman under the British Broadcasting Service’s Richard Liederman. He tracked the filmmaker down at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel but arrived just as the film crew left to shoot an anti-war protest at the Pentagon. He headed straight to D.C. It was October 21, 1967, nearing the pinnacle of the radical Sixties, and the protest attracted more than 70,000 people. Kuttner arrived as protestors broke past the military barricades, ascended the Pentagon stairs and occupied the upper terrace. He filmed the whole thing. Following the Pentagon protests, he met up with other filmmakers who agreed to pool their footage. From that point forward, the Newsreel collective made it their mission to document and promote the New Left’s activities. With chapters across the country Kuttner was dispatched to his hometown where he joined Rising Up Angry.

  Kuttner and James came up with the metaphor of a “trick bag”—a purchase of bad drugs—to explain the raw deal of racial superiority for whites. A mix of cinéma vérité and Studs Terkel’s man-on-the-street testimonials, the short film featured working-class Chicagoans talking honestly about the costs racism exacted on their lives. Most everyone believed the United States could erupt into a race war at any time. Trick Bag was intended to redirect the white community’s blame away from people of color and turn attention toward their own responsibility. As Angry’s logic went, racism was as bad a deal for whites as it was for people of color. The message was simple: Don’t buy it.

  With projects like Trick Bag, Angry demonstrated its analysis. However, it was another matter to take the dialogue past testimonials and street fights. By the early Seventies, the group had grown far beyond the point of a radical newspaper. Angry’s experienced organizers had always wanted to build toward a revolution, but without losing their hard-earned base in the community. They launched a women’s discussion group and regular study sessions to engage members in deeper dialogues about the history and dynamics of U.S. empire, women’s liberation and class oppression. More importantly, they launched two community service programs that ultimately went the furthest in training neighborhood residents in both the politics and practice of radical self-governance: a legal program tackling housing, crime and veterans’ issues, and a community-run health clinic. Involvement in these programs introduced new recruits to the organization’s politics and Angry began experimenting with ways to move members toward a broader understanding of political problems and solutions. It was soon resolved: “Rising Up Angry is neither a Leninist party nor a mass organization. We are half of each. The programs are our vehicle for organizing the people and involving the people.”

  Initially made up of five lawyers under the leadership of a steering committee, the Rising Up Angry legal program trained neighborhood people to perform intakes, write legal briefs, and handle basic “know your rights” counseling on immigration, police brutality, housing rights and the draft. The legal program helped potential draftees with conscientious objector claims, ironed out welfare denials and defended kids who otherwise would have been stuck with a distracted public defender. In its first two years the legal program helped about five hundred people and boasted twenty-five volunteer lawyers. The program complemented almost every aspect of Angry’s work; it generated projects new members could get involved with and gave organizers a chance to keep their finge
rs on the pulse of community issues. The most steady of those issues for working-class Chicagoans was housing rights. While the war and police harassment certainly touched most residents in some way, dilapidated housing, slumlords and urban displacement impacted everyone. With the expansion of the community programs, Angry also returned to one of JOIN’s strongest suits: tenant organizing. Organizers converted a donated van into a mobile lead-testing lab after a substantial number of neighborhood children tested positive for lead poisoning. With landlords determined to ignore the problem, Angry decided to embarrass city officials by picketing outside the American Academy of Pediatrics Conference in Chicago. One protester held a sign reading, “Lead in the Ghetto, Napalm in Vietnam.” It wasn’t totally an exaggeration. Lead poisoning was a dangerous epidemic in low-income neighborhoods.

  When half of Margaret Burton’s eleven children tested positive for lead poisoning, more than seventy-five people marched to the Chicago Civic Center Housing Court. They carried striking pictures of dozens of housing violations her landlord simply refused to fix, from cracked ceilings to peeling paint, leaking pipes and broken windows. Complaints to the court resulted in eviction proceedings against the Burton family, supposedly so the landlord could begin repairs. Given just three weeks and no financial support to find a new home, Mrs. Burton was accused of turning down housing that had never been offered to her in the first place. A judge reprimanded her stating, “You can’t be choosey—you better take what they offer you. It’s summertime, you can live in the streets.” After withholding her rent until repairs were complete, she was threatened with jail time. Once again Rising Up Angry flooded the courthouse with supporters and succeeded in convincing the judge to let her apply her back rent toward a home of her choice.

  To draw publicity to the hundreds of North Chicago homes with conditions like these, Angry hosted a series of “People’s Tribunals”—mock trials against notorious slum landlords—bringing out residents and a wide range of community groups during 1972. By deliberately targeting landlords who had buildings across the city, Angry established a common cause among multiracial neighborhood groups. Tenants from the South Side and Lincoln Park testified at the tribunals alongside Uptown’s Appalachian, Latino and Native American residents. Together they organized a massive campaign to put notorious slumlords the Gutman brothers on trial after three people died in their dilapidated buildings. A child, Jennifer LaBarge, was decapitated when she poked her head inside an elevator shaft that lacked safety glass. Another child, Eric Roy, was killed when an uncapped radiator turned on for the first time in winter. In another building, tenant Bill Stein died while trying to escape an electrical fire. The rear fire exit had been nailed shut by management to keep out vagrants. City officials never investigated the deaths. An Angry-led investigation uncovered that the Gutmans owned almost one hundred and fifty buildings across Chicago. Home to the city’s poorest residents, the buildings were in a universal state of disrepair with falling plaster, inaccessible fire escapes, high levels of lead paint and unchecked infestations of rats and roaches.