by Amy Sonnie
The Gutmans didn’t take kindly to the charges. When Angry’s tenant organizers showed up at the Gutmans’ buildings, they were greeted by hired thugs wielding baseball bats, knives and other weapons. Tenants began sneaking organizers into the buildings for meetings and inspections. Nonetheless, two Angry organizers were eventually arrested for trespassing while conducting outreach at a building on Magnolia Street. They later learned that a neighborhood woman who lost most of her belongings in a fire was offered money by the Gutmans on the condition she discourage neighbors from attending the People’s Tribunals.
Unsurprisingly, the mock trial convicted the Gutmans, although no actual court of law would hear criminal charges against the brothers. Following the tribunal a barrage of lawsuits and withheld rent payments did motivate the Gutmans to begin a clean-up campaign, but Angry was quick to publicize that most of their repairs amounted to little more than a coat of paint slapped over lead-tainted walls the city had ordered removed. In what seemed like one of the first real citywide victories in years, the Angry-led coalition eventually succeeded in pressuring the City of Chicago to enforce code violations against the Gutman brothers. Soon after, the Chicago Tribune ran a six-part exposé on slum housing, which blasted Chicago’s temporary villain: “They commute daily from their comfortable Northwest Side homes to oversee their empire. Much of it is like a fortress with heavy, wire-backed doors and lobbies of forbidding cages in which tenant-managers dispense the mail and police the arrival of unwelcome visitors and inspectors.” The slumlord made a nice scapegoat for city developers speculating cheap land for urban redevelopment.
While Rising Up Angry’s original focus had been on young working-class men, the housing activism and other community programs provided women new opportunities to take on a central role in the organization. Initially, women functioned like an auxiliary; they shaped the politics and did the same behind-the-scenes work, but on the streets they usually focused on building relationships with the wives, girlfriends, sisters and mothers of greaser men. They linked young women to family planning and health information, and passed out the first stapled and bound newsprint copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves to working-class women across Chicago.9
Sharing a practical commitment to women’s health concerns, women in Rising Up Angry developed a close collaboration with the abortion counseling service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union—known as “Jane,” the code name women would ask for when calling the hotline. Prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, women seeking abortions relied on a clandestine network of illegal and sometimes mafia-connected clinics. These backroom stalls were often dimly lit, unsanitary and unsafe; even the most competent clinics lacked counseling or a humane atmosphere for patients. It is impossible to know exactly how many abortions Jane’s volunteer doctors performed as an underground service. Anecdotal evidence suggests that hundreds of women made the call. “Our society’s version of equal opportunity means that lower-class women bear unwanted children or face expensive, illegal and unsafe abortions,” Jane’s founders wrote, “while well connected middle-class women can frequently get safe and hush-hush ‘D and C’s’ in hospitals.”10
The affiliation with the women’s movement helped reinforce the leadership of women within Angry. Under the leadership of Diane Fager, Norie Davis, Janet Sampson and longtime Chicago residents Stormy Brown, Christine George and Mary Driscoll, Angry evolved a version of feminism uniquely rooted in working-class women’s needs. In theory, most of Angry’s male leaders were on board, but the deliberate focus on women’s issues didn’t come easy. What was Angry’s role when organizers found out a man was abusing his wife? Would they help a woman who wanted an abortion when her husband forbade it? What would they do about male leaders less eager to share control of the organization? Judith Arcana, a founding member of Jane, worked closely with the women in Angry as they grappled with how much to assert women’s liberation politics. In Arcana’s opinion, the conflict seemed rooted in the often unspoken “stand by your man” ethos in oppressed groups. Few organizations reached the communities Angry did; and challenging sexism drew accusations from some men that the women were creating another, divisive kind of “fight the people” moment. Both tough and smart, women in Angry pressed the point over a number of years and Arcana watched as the women got stronger and more insistent on adding sex and gender as central tenets of the group’s analysis. It was simple: A working-class people’s organization needed to address and reflect working-class women as well as men. Standing by your man meant struggling with him.
In an era when some feminists started to advocate separatism, women in Rising Up Angry made a conscious choice to stay in a mixed-gender organization. To them, separating made no sense in the context of neighborhood organizing. Like the Black feminism that emerged from within the Panthers years earlier, they pointed out that the revolution they wanted involved the liberation of everyone and was not truly revolutionary unless women’s equality was won. Over several years they pushed for women’s issues to be more than an “add on” to the work with local men, and pushed men to participate in the health and housing work. Naturally, they argued, men in Angry should become feminists—or at least walk the talk. When a friend from one of Angry’s sister organizations in Philadelphia came to visit, the women put him to work in the health clinic by day and took him out spray painting “Fuck the Patriarchy” on buildings at night. Angry’s women leaders made a huge impression on him. He returned home ready to support women in his own group, October 4th Organization, who were starting a women’s committee.
Rising Up Angry’s commitment to co-ed organization also meant they could reach working-class women who felt invisible in the broader feminist movement. Angry’s community health clinic represented the best of the group’s feminist politics, Panther-inspired service provision and community education. Mary Driscoll was one of the Angry leaders who helped establish the clinic in the Lakeview–Lincoln Park neighborhood. Today, that neighborhood is the heart of gentrified Chicago, but in the late Sixties and early Seventies it was solidly working-class white and Puerto Rican. Driscoll grew up in a working-class family of staunch Chicago Democrats. While away at college, she was radicalized by the anti-war sit-ins against napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical Company. Like many other first-generation college students who got involved with the movement, radical politics clarified Driscoll’s childhood experiences around class and focused her outrage about the war, racism and economic injustice.
In Lakeview–Lincoln Park, many residents depended on local hospitals providing free and reduced-cost services. This was before Planned Parenthood and before community health centers for the uninsured. Residents without health care had nowhere to go but the emergency room. This became a shell game, as it was common for hospitals to abruptly announce they had reached their quota of indigent care. One hospital, Augustana, announced that it would no longer accept any patients who were on public aid or who were otherwise unable to pay the full fees. In response, a group of neighborhood residents staged an impromptu demonstration and Angry members rushed down to support the action. Sitting down in the front lobby, they demanded that all free services be continued. The campaign proved successful; the hospital agreed to fund a community clinic in the basement of a local church. The Fritzi Englestein Free Health Clinic, named for a member of the congregation who helped establish the clinic, became an integral part of neighborhood life as volunteer doctors and nurses trained community volunteers to perform medical intakes, take pulses and serve as nurses’ assistants. The clinic offered three main services: pediatrics, venereal disease testing and gynecology.
Beyond helping community members get proper diagnoses and medical attention, the clinic also provided clients with emotional support, documentation needed to get time off work and urgent care. Neighborhood resident Soledad Rodriguez was instrumental in getting the clinic started. Her husband, José, had a full-time job as an auto mechanic and Sole worked on and off outside of her home to help make ends meet f
or their six children. The Rodriguez family members were among the most active neighborhood residents in the service programs. The older Rodriguez kids worked in the lab, and José did fix-it jobs around the clinic while volunteering with Angry’s legal program. Sole devoted her days and nights to keep the clinic going.
When a woman who lived two blocks from the health clinic was denied insurance coverage for basic tests and medication, Rising Up Angry’s all-volunteer staff, including doctors from the county hospital, were able to help her. It turned out she had cancer. She was taking care of her ailing mother and was terrified about what would happen to both of them. With the help of clinic doctors acting as advocates, Angry got her into Cook County Hospital for treatment. A few months later she was in remission. The Fritzi Englestein clinic expanded from two nights a week to a full-time program that took the model of the Black Panthers’ “survival programs” a step further.
As Angry’s service programs expanded to meet the needs of women and families, the group became less one note. At a time when many radicals argued whether gender, race or class was the “primary contradiction,” Angry had integrated all three into the fabric of their activism. When it came to the group’s longevity and impact, Angry’s embrace of feminism, and subsequent expansion into community programs, became one of its greatest strengths. The participation of families, especially organizers’ own children, hastened this culture shift. Angry organizer Stormy Brown, a single mother of two, met Mike James through a friend while working at the 3 Penny Cinema in Lincoln Park. The couple began dating and soon had a child. Mary Driscoll and Peter Kuttner along with Janet Sampson and Rich Kroth had children soon after. As the Angry family expanded, more neighborhood families joined the organization and organizers invited their parents and extended families to events.
When Angry hosted a Mother’s Day luncheon honoring more than a hundred women from the health and legal clinics, Rising Up Angry’s Christine George decided she would bring her aunts with her. It was a first. Born in Chicago to a working-class Greek family, Christine George spent the majority of her youth in the Austin neighborhood on the Far West Side. Her family was apolitical but leaned conservative, so it wasn’t until a classmate’s father introduced to her to radical politics that she started to grapple with her own positions. Her friend’s father was active in the unsuccessful fight to save Italian and Greek neighborhoods from University of Illinois expansion. Entering into the University of Wisconsin in 1964, George originally saw herself becoming a diplomat, but a campaign to prevent the university from turning over information to draft boards drew her into campus activism. Later that year, she was elected secretary of SDS.
Like many first-generation college students who joined the movement, she was teasing out the impact of race, class, ethnicity and gender on her own life. While her parents were conservative, her own upbringing inspired her commitment to organizing in working-class communities. In Rising Up Angry she found a Left project where her white ethnic identity, radical politics and commitment to reaching working-class community members weren’t in conflict. When George brought her family members to Angry’s events, she knew women like her aunts still didn’t see leftists as normal, but for George the family-friendly and truly working-class culture in Angry provided a necessary bridge between the excesses of the Sixties and the practical politics of the Seventies.
With all the changes, the organization had broadened from a cadre structure to an elected leadership, which brought in significantly more community members, but only for a short time. As the war in Vietnam wound down, so did many movement organizations. The war and the draft had been a focal point for recruiting. Its enormity and brutality, along with the fact it had lasted through both Democratic and Republican administrations, had given credence to the idea that war was part of a larger system of imperialism. Without the war, organizations failed to grow at the same pace.
Rising Up Angry wasn’t the only organization finding it hard to adapt. Like other Left formations of the Sixties and Seventies, Angry had asked core members to become full-time revolutionaries. This model made sense to those who expected a socialist revolution in the United States before 1970. But such a victory seemed all but impossible by the mid-Seventies. Many organizers, some in the struggle for nearly two decades, started thinking about building careers and devoting more time to their families. Steve Tappis moved on after Angry’s first few years. Bob Lawson and Norie Davis went to work on SDS founder Tom Hayden’s senatorial campaign, and then to support the United Farm Workers. Mike James remained involved, but no longer in leadership.
Despite its steady base in the community, the organization’s focus waned by the mid-Seventies. In 1976, Diane Fager and others started a process of bringing Angry to an end. Fager was painfully aware of how other radical organizations were parting in acrimony and she wanted better for her friends. She had heard about groups that ended in fistfights and bitter accusations. Together, Angry’s leaders decided to hold a series of meetings for the community members involved in the programs to decide next steps and possible dissolution. Following months of discussions, the group came to consensus that Rising Up Angry should end with its reputation intact.
After seven years, Rising Up Angry’s organizers concluded that there were many places they could continue to work for social change. Members went on to organize in the labor movement, and work in social and health services, universities, the National Lawyers Guild and the environmental movement. José and Sole’s daughter used her training at the health clinic to get into medical school. Fager began working for Chicago’s Department of Education. Mike James opened and still runs Chicago’s Heartland Café and weekly radio show. More so than the Patriots or even JOIN, Rising Up Angry’s members remain a close-knit family supporting each other in ongoing work for social justice. In 2009 they came together for a forty-year reunion and art exhibit showcasing hundreds of photos and more than one hundred issues of the Rising Up Angry newspaper.
Undoubtedly, Angry’s connection to the community was a predictor of its endurance during a period when other New Left organizations either went underground or died out. Angry’s insistence on putting down roots in working-class communities and its fights around housing and health care reflect the better strands of the American populist project. While their work did not transform the nation or end imperialism, Rising Up Angry represents a unique and important moment in the history of the North American Left. They espoused a version of socialism as much rooted in U.S. working-class experience as in the inspiration of Third World revolutions. Part of their strength was their commitment to apply radical ideas in new and flexible ways. Leaders read Mao’s Little Red Book and were deeply influenced by the writings of SNCC organizer James Forman and Guinea Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral, whose own organizational practice prioritized culture, literacy projects and grassroots community campaigns. But Angry also existed as a living experiment in how an organization can address various concerns without dogmatism.
This maturity can only come when radicals learn how to listen to people’s needs. Angry, at its very best, knew how to listen: to the boys-on-the-block, young mothers, servicemen, kids hanging out in pool halls, the unemployed and the overworked. They practiced popular education long before the term became widespread on the Left. Through their journey, they discovered two important truths: Revolutions are elusive even in a nation’s most tumultuous decades, and yet the pillars of oppression are not immovable. With little more than a dedicated cadre rooted in working-class Chicago, some of these pillars shifted and many even crumbled. They accomplished their work by taking a long-term approach—the kind of organizing that cultivates radical families as much as it cultivates radical change. “That was one of the things about Rising Up Angry,” Mary Driscoll recalls. “We were part of the community we were organizing.”
CHAPTER 4
Lightning on the Eastern Seaboard:
October 4th Organization and White Lightning
Working class communities ha
ve been slow to anger, but we’re angry now.… We’ve been slow to take to the streets, but we’re learning from our Black sisters and brothers. Kensington [Philadelphia] today is like a time bomb. And if you refuse to hear the ticking, you’ll have to hear the explosion.
—October 4th Organization, Philadelphia, 1972
The Sixties were a shockingly violent decade for activists in the United States, yet it was the Seventies that ushered in a deeper systematic retaliation against civil rights and social justice. It was a sobering decade. Twenty-five years after World War II boosted the nation’s economy, the post-war decline of manufacturing jobs coupled with urban planning disasters and depopulation, blighted northern cities. Urban centers experienced a spiral of disinvestment as suburban sprawl continued drawing wealth away from the city. Businesses buckled and northern factories scurried south in search of cheaper labor. In 1973 the rising cost of oil spiked the U.S. trade deficit and consumer prices rose to the highest point since the end of the Korean War. By 1974 more than 7 percent of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Black workers were hardest hit with unemployment levels surging to 15 percent. Even workers who had enjoyed a degree of security in the past were in an unfamiliar position—uncertain where the next paycheck would come from and in danger of losing their homes. Once comfortably blue collar neighborhoods like Chicago’s Southwest Side, Philadelphia’s Kensington, and New York’s Mott Haven section of the Bronx started to show more obvious signs of decline: adults milling around at midday, boarded up row homes and tenements, shuttered factories, mysterious fires and block after block of abandoned cars. It was exactly the economic crisis Students for a Democratic Society had predicted when it founded Jobs or Income Now; it just peaked ten years behind schedule. Just as SDS leaders Tom Hayden and Carl Whitman warned in “An Interracial Movement of the Poor,” the document laying out the vision for projects like JOIN, it would take strong, permanent bases of unity among white workers and workers of color to curb rising fear that racial equity came at their own expense.