Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power
Page 17
Progressive organizers faced a different terrain than the one they had seen in the radical Sixties. It was shaped, among other things, by severe economic recession, the splintering of New Left community organizations and mounting right-wing backlash. An overall job shortage combined with white workers’ perception of favoritism toward workers of color created the conditions for resentment. In 1971 new affirmative action policies fueled this fire as Nixon’s Labor Department passed legislation to correct the “underutilization” of minorities in federal contracting.1 Politicians looking to fortify a conservative “law and order” agenda fomented white chauvinism for their own gain by exploiting people’s fear of economic insecurity. They were part of a New Right taking shape in the United States. Broadly defined this movement included traditional Republicans, libertarians and conservative Democrats among its foot soldiers.2
The New Right’s ascendance began in the final days of the McCarthy Era as politicians and pundits saw new ways to consolidate right-wing political influence in the United States. At first the movement argued for an alternative to economically conservative, but socially liberal, northern Republicanism by returning to the fervent states’ rights and anti-interventionist foreign policy outlook once found in the Grand Old Party. At a glance, this movement resembled a discordant collection of organizations with little else in common. Soon, the emerging New Right made sense of its patchwork by articulating a cogent criticism of New Deal-era social welfare, government bureaucracy, communism and civil rights. The New Right fostered an ethnocentric nationalism and began harnessing social anxieties about the emerging countercultures of beatniks, student leftists and organized people of color.3
In the late Fifties, economic conservatives such as William F. Buckley and the intellectuals surrounding the National Review magazine vocally embraced racism, arguing that white southerners had the right to forcibly resist integration because whites represented the era’s advanced race (though Buckley later changed his tune). As the movement grew, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president pushed a platform of states’ rights and shrinking federal government. He and other New Right politicians rejected Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and any efforts to expand social welfare. When Goldwater lost, his supporters turned inward and spent the better part of a decade perfecting their strategies. At the end of the Sixties the spinal column of the Democratic Party was forcefully realigned as the Dixiecrats fled the party and joined the Republicans. By the start of the Seventies, the U.S. looked more conservative than the post-war social order Sixties activists had rebelled against.
On the East Coast, two groups inspired by Chicago’s Rising Up Angry emerged to harness the era’s revolutionary aspirations and address the unique conditions of their working-class neighborhoods. Philadelphia’s October 4th Organization (O4O) and New York’s White Lightning each played David to the Goliath of organized political backlash and economic decline. In Philadelphia, Goliath was cop-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo, who harvested the anxieties of Italian, Irish, Polish and Greek communities to secure his throne at City Hall. “Tough on crime” barely described a mayor wielding the police force as shock troops against neighborhoods of color and the Left. For Rizzo the mounting financial crisis provided an opportunity for fearmongering, but industrial collapse and a widening wealth gap proved a Goliath of its own for Philadelphia residents.
In the Bronx, White Lightning faced off against the behemoth of New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, named after then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Among other changes, the laws spelled major prison sentences for minor possession. Rockefeller’s “mandatory minimums” marked a decisive early battle in the War on Drugs. The state spent more than $76 million locking people up for drug offenses between 1973 and 1976 alone, ignoring the fact that hard drug use actually increased during the same period. Blacks and Latinos composed more than 90 percent of drug convictions over the next two decades and incarceration rates soared to record levels. As New York went, so went the nation. State after state echoed Rockefeller’s harsh punishments for nonviolent offenses and the U.S. prison population more than doubled by 1980. Over the ensuing two decades it quadrupled.4 Implicit in White Lightning’s fight against harsh drug penalties, though, was another Goliath at work in their communities: addiction.
O4O and White Lightning had chosen formidable targets. Rizzo and Rockefeller emerged as just two figures providing tempo for the New Right’s dance to power. They did so with support from both sides of the political aisle. Rizzo, a right-wing Democrat, refined the language of white ethnic resentment and acted out his special hatred for the radical Left. Rockefeller, although considered a liberal by GOP standards, drafted the blueprint for the wholesale warehousing of the poor, especially Black and Brown nonviolent drug users. And yet O4O and White Lightning emerged not to weaken a particular opponent, but from the best impulses of the revolutionary moment: the belief that social transformation was not only necessary, but also possible. For the better part of the Seventies, October 4th Organization and White Lightning built on the progressive traditions in Kensington and the Bronx. Like JOIN, the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry, they built a small but notable cadre of white radicals by providing direct community services and organizing against racist policy, the “war on the poor” and the seemingly endless war in Vietnam.
Founded in 1971 by a small group of working-class radicals and ex-students, October 4th Organization took its name from an uprising during the American War of Independence. On October 4, 1779, a throng of Philadelphians stormed the warehouses of merchants and businessmen that hoarded food and clothing in order to inflate prices. The original O4Oers seized supplies and redistributed them to the hungry.5 The new O4O took this example as an inspiration. With an aim to “unite the people against big businessmen, merchants and politicians,” the group’s program reflected a spirited progressive populism and the “rising dynamism” of the revolutionary moment.6 In this moment few organizations felt like a lone David facing off against Goliath. They had the power of numbers, moral purpose and optimism on their side.
Founding member Marilyn Buggey had grown up poor in Philly’s Germantown neighborhood. As a teenager, her father would remove the light bulb from her room so that she couldn’t study, insisting she work rather than go to school. The family needed the money, but she eventually got herself into Temple University and left home. Her fiancé, Jack Whalen, drove a cab for a living. In a short amount of time he had gone from a quiet adolescence in Union, New Jersey, to become a student activist at La Salle University. He might have preferred to stick with his original interests—baseball, girls and playing drums in a rock band—but politics found him. La Salle required students to complete Army ROTC coursework in order to graduate. With a moderately sized anti-war contingent, campus activists protested the requirements and won. Tame compared to the demonstrations that year at Columbia University, the La Salle campaign nonetheless garnered two thousand signatures on a petition and culminated with a 250-person sit-in, which ended compulsory ROTC. Their victory opened a floodgate for on-campus political activity.7 Yet Buggey and Whalen grew frustrated with the insularity of campus activism. Both dropped out of college and moved to the Kensington neighborhood to live near the headquarters of the Free Press movement newspaper. There they met Robert Barrow,8 Dan Sidorick, Chris Robinson and several others who became the nucleus of O4O. The organization provided a refuge for radicals alienated from the middle-class student movement. O4O activists shared the belief that a large portion of the student Left was divorced from the realities of U.S. workers.
At Goldman Paper Company in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia these harsh realities were visible everywhere. Deindustrialization had taken a heavy toll in Kensington. Dozens of mill workers were laid off with just three days’ notice. Company owners threatened remaining workers with termination if they took sick days and harassed them into surrendering vacation time to avoid further layoffs. Instructed to operate large sheet-cutting machines alone, workers wer
e told to ignore the dangerous labor shortage. The United Paperworkers International Union proved only marginally helpful, so Goldman workers like Dan Sidorick began organizing Kensington’s at-risk and unemployed workers under the banner of October 4th Organization. They heard the same story from everyone. Out-of-work men were being redirected to local Navy recruiters. Up until the Vietnam War ended in April 1975 the military remained the best bet for a steady job—that is, if they hadn’t already been drafted. Women were told to find domestic work or low-wage clerical jobs, as if the pay and insecurity of those jobs made up for the lost factory work some had done for decades. In response workers rallied outside the unemployment office at 5th and Olney just about every week demanding, as JOIN had, “Jobs or Income Now.”
With this early action, O4O set itself apart from other Left organizations by uniquely combining labor activism and community-based organizing. In Kensington there was no separating the two. Originally founded as an industrial township, outside the original borders of Philadelphia, Kensington was first settled by English, German, Irish and Scots immigrants. The population expanded during the twentieth century with new arrivals from Poland, Italy and Eastern Europe, including a substantial number of ethnic Jews. Journalist Peter Binzen’s description of the neighborhood in 1970 reads a lot like Harper’s sensational portrait of Uptown. “Kensington’s air is polluted, its streets and sidewalks are filthy, its juvenile crime rate rising, its industry languishing,” he wrote.9 According to Binzen, bars and dingy row houses provided the backdrop for idle youths hanging out on street corners, ready for trouble. Fabric mills and machine factories spanned the skyline. Many were boarded up. While an accurate description of some blocks, most were lined with small, tidy row houses with postage-stamp front yards, well kept by renters or owners who had been there for generations.
When it came to the city elite’s portrayal of the neighborhood, Binzen’s choice of chapter title in his book Whitetown USA captured the sentiment: “Kensington Against the World.” In reality, neighborhood politics were more complex and O4O’s founders knew that the real Kensington belied simplified media reports of a downtrodden neighborhood filled with proud and hardened racists. The right-wing hoodlums, cops and a few reactionary groups were always there and racial conflicts did occur, but O4O’s work proved many more residents opposed these extremists than supported them. When a group of neighborhood troublemakers broke into a Puerto Rican family’s home and started trashing it, dozens of neighbors filed into the house and stopped the assault. The cops drove by while it was happening, yet did nothing to intervene. It was practically policy for police to let such racial skirmishes play themselves out.
Beyond a local neo-Nazi and some diehard George Wallace supporters, it was Frank Rizzo who served as the city’s most visible architect of this racial antagonism. The Philadelphia police followed Rizzo’s lead and Rizzo made no secret of his support for white ethnics “protecting” their neighborhoods. Rizzo wasn’t brilliant or even that charismatic, but his control over the city showed a skilled hand in machine politics. Rizzo was born in an Italian enclave of South Philadelphia and joined the police force in the Forties. For decades the city’s Italian American workers held some of the lowest paying jobs the city had to offer. Italian immigration to Philadelphia picked up in the late 1800s when Congress passed laws allowing the importation of cheap labor, mostly into the country’s low-wage manufacturing sector. To survive, most new Italian immigrants relied on padrones in order to find work and housing—an arrangement resembling part indentured servitude and part ward politics. The padrone system fit Rizzo’s style of governance perfectly and helped secure his tenure in the police department. Granting favors and exacting tributes, Rizzo projected the image of a strong father figure who had pulled himself up by his own Italian bootstraps. His campaign messages evoked stories of European immigrants who arrived with little and, through the virtues of hard work and discipline, built a well-earned stability.
The New Right found an unlikely partner in the Democrat Rizzo, but he proved himself a worthy tribune for the cause. As a Democrat he resembled more the total-domination style of machine politics embodied by Louisiana Governor Huey Long than the simple fear-based racism of George Wallace. In 1959 Rizzo led a series of raids on Philadelphia’s growing bohemian coffeehouse scene. While the department pointed the finger at beatniks, many believed the raids were a pretext for anti-gay harassment. Police justified one raid by saying that a young girl told them she went to the café to meet lesbians. As one journalist put it, “Creeps, kooks, liberals, phonies, fags, ultraliberals, lefties and bums—Rizzo’s morality dictates that he must save his city from the shaggy perverts whose politics or culture spread like dandruff.”10
It was clear he planned to disembowel the Left and stir whites’ fears about civil rights and the city’s growing Black population. In 1967 he was promoted to police commissioner, a last stop on his way to City Hall. As an Italian-American, his promotion was a kind of coup at a time when Philadelphia’s Irishmen dominated the department and anti-Italian bigotry ran high. Rizzo was undeterred though, and political events provided plenty of fodder for a tough Italian policeman looking to bolster his reputation. In November 1967 Philadelphia police beat up and arrested dozens of Black high school students during a demonstration calling for Black history classes and school improvements. The cops were following Commissioner Rizzo’s direct orders after he shouted, “Get their black asses!”
The following year, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, riots erupted in a hundred U.S. cities, burning some blocks to the ground. Philadelphia escaped substantial damage, attributed by many to Rizzo’s use of mobile buses to quickly deploy hundreds of officers to trouble spots. Only four years earlier, North Philly had erupted into an infamous riot after police arrested a Black couple for illegal parking. Damages were estimated at $2 million. This time, however, Rizzo was in charge. Large showings of police force shored up Rizzo’s image as a man who could keep the rabble in line. Rizzo was also skilled at conflating the Black communities’ spontaneous outrage with organized civil rights actions. He laid the groundwork for his mayoral campaign by convincing white voters that the civil rights movement’s real goals were specious and violent. Rizzo even had a group of hardcore Black supporters who he bonded with over their mutual hatred of radical dissidents (and a well-known policy of generous patronage). By the time he captured the mayoral seat, however, he minced few words about his plans for rebels, anti-police demonstrators and Blacks. In one of his more notorious statements, he bragged to a reporter, “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”11
As a new generation of rebels came of age in the City of Brotherly Love, Rizzo became notorious for his crackdowns on the Black Power movement and the New Left. In September 1969 police raided the Black Panthers’ North Philly headquarters under the pretense of a fugitive search. A few months later, several Panthers were arrested on firearms charges, all of which were later dropped. In August of that year, Rizzo directed another raid on the Panther offices after unidentified Black men allegedly shot two police officers. He forced the Panthers to strip naked and invited the press to photograph them.12 With the Panther leaders in jail, police gutted their offices seizing furniture, clothing, records and equipment. Word of Rizzo’s brute force spread quickly in the Black community and across Philadelphia’s Left. His efforts at intimidation backfired as hundreds of North Philly residents showed up to join the Panthers and rebuild their office before arrested leaders even got out of jail. In each incident Rizzo sharpened his use of the media to drive home the message that liberal dissidents would be punished. He revealed in graphic detail what he thought the government should do with the Panthers. “I don’t know why we let idiots like them survive. Maybe the laws have to be changed.… These creeps lurk in the dark. They should be strung up.… I mean within the law.”13
By all accounts Rizzo relished his shock value. Apparently, so did some voters. In 1971, Rizzo bec
ame the first Italian-American mayor of Philadelphia. He was voted in by white working-class residents in South Philly, Kensington, Fishtown, Frankford and Port Richmond. An estimated 20,000 Republican voters switched their affiliation to the Democrats in order to vote for Rizzo in the primary, helping him win the mayoral seat by a 50,000-vote margin. His victory reflected the ambitions of many white ethnic workers who faced some of the toughest times seen since the Depression. It also symbolized the apex of a decades-long process of Italian-American assimilation into the city’s power structure.