by Amy Sonnie
Assimilation or not, Rizzo capitalized on the fact that many white ethnic groups who had arrived in a melting pot of indistinguishable whiteness were eager to reclaim their immigrant roots and traditions. Groups like O4O and White Lightning recognized the importance of these identities, as well, and encouraged members to explore the cultural traditions and progressive histories of their ancestors. However, Rizzo fortified a conservative brand of white ethnic chauvinism and deployed it toward a fine-tuned politics of resentment and discrimination. As the economy buckled under severe recession, white workers and immigrants who had ascended from poverty to a semblance of security felt in a precarious position. The real Philadelphia, Rizzo claimed, was threatened by civil rights, intermarriage and suburbanization. The noble working-class who had built the city (by which he meant only European immigrants) needed to shore up “defenses.” Philadelphia’s population had fallen below two million people as middle-class whites moved to the suburbs. Those who remained were anxious about scarcity and job competition with the factories closing down. Their presumed competition came from Black workers who had moved North looking for work and, to a smaller extent, new communities of Puerto Ricans, Chinese and Cambodian immigrants. As middle-class whites left for Bucks, Chester and Montgomery Counties during the Fifties and Sixties, the Black population in Philadelphia more than doubled. With it grew resentment from the city’s remaining white elite and some white working-class residents who couldn’t afford the train to the suburbs.
Despite the relative insularity of the neighborhood, many of O4O’s members already had close relationships with Black and Latino Philadelphians. In some cases they went to school together and often they worked together. O4O member Sue Milligan14 got a job in an insurance firm after high school where she worked with many Black women. She related to these women as friends and coworkers, hanging out after work and partying together along with several of her friends from Kensington. Before Milligan ever heard about O4O, those relationships catalyzed her political awareness. One of her good friends had recently gotten involved with the Black Muslim movement and admired Malcolm X. Milligan had only ever heard about Malcolm X’s “white devils” comments, so she worried what this might mean for their friendship. Malcolm had changed his thinking, her friend explained. He opened to the possibility of working with whites and in 1965 he had outlined a model for multiracial alliances similar to the one SNCC and the Panthers adopted. This inspired Milligan. Malcolm X had seen the same deep connections between race and class oppression that she was starting to see. Milligan began reading more and having discussions with her Black friends about institutionalized racism. She didn’t join O4O immediately but once she did Milligan joined the Women’s Committee and started attending the group’s education sessions. Like most other radical groups at the time, O4O members read and discussed Marx, Engels, Mao, Che, emerging feminist theory and literature from the era’s current political movements. In practice, both Milligan’s personal relationships and O4O played equally important roles in her political education. Each helped her develop the deeper values that turned her into a lifelong organizer.
O4O’s unique labor–community organizing model spoke to Milligan as well. O4O organized in both workplaces and the surrounding neighborhood from its inception. While some leftists debated whether workplaces made better sites for mass mobilization than neighborhoods, which usually lack a single unifying issue, O4O “didn’t have the luxury of choosing one or the other,” as Milligan put it. In neighborhoods like Kensington where machine shops and factories sat interspersed with narrow row homes, the workplace and the community were inseparable. In contrast to other neighborhood-focused groups like JOIN and Rising Up Angry, or even the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, which grew out of SDS and focused solely on factory organizing, O4O carved out a unique position by organizing where they lived and where they worked.
O4O’s Chris Robinson grew up in the then working-class and semi-rural Fox Chase section of Philadelphia. After a stint in SDS he joined Revolutionary Youth Movement II in order to organize workers, but through O4O he found Kensington to be the best of both worlds. O4O activists made sure their neighbors remembered the city’s history of multiracial women’s organizing among Jewish, Italian and Black garment workers in the 1920s. They set a practical and moral pole for Kensington to continue in that tradition and hundreds joined the cause, as neighbors and workers. Class was always the group’s starting point, and addressing racism was simply part and parcel of fighting capitalism. For O4O’s Dan Sidorick this approach meant organizing his coworkers at Goldman Paper Company against layoffs and dangerous working conditions by day and his neighbors against police brutality, the war and big business by night.
During its early days O4O’s leaders looked around for an issue that could jump-start the organization, expose Rizzo and unite people. Rizzo’s regime had well-known outposts in the neighborhood, including social service providers like the Lighthouse Settlement. These outposts provided both obstacle and opportunity for O4O. Founded in 1893 to provide social services to the neighborhood’s mill workers, the Lighthouse of the Seventies provided recreational and social services to the majority-white neighborhoods of Kensington and Fishtown despite sitting within arm’s reach of North Philadelphia’s Black and Puerto Rican communities. When the Black Panthers and Young Lords campaigned to start a free breakfast program at the Lighthouse, a powerful group of white residents called the Committee of 11 rallied to stop the program and the distribution of leftist newspapers like the Free Press, which Rizzo had declared “even more dangerous than the Panthers.” Several members of the board expressed interest in change but none wanted to anger Rizzo or alienate those white residents who were protesting loudly about racial mixing in the neighborhood. The board decided to create a separate division to “service” Black and Puerto Rican residents, which meant de facto segregation from the other programs. The group decided to go on the offensive with a campaign to democratize the Lighthouse Settlement.
After surveying residents, O4O found that a good number of people opposed the racial bias of their more vocal neighbors. However, most feared losing their jobs or facing other retaliation if they spoke up. They also weren’t too pleased that the Lighthouse barred young women from joining sports leagues. Working with local activists of color, O4O issued a set of demands to the Lighthouse that included ending discrimination, diversifying its board and creating a sports program for girls. They kept up pressure as well to set up community-sponsored events like free concerts in Lighthouse Field. When their demands were denied, they placed a band and a generator on a flatbed truck and led a march through Kensington. Three hundred residents joined them in the pouring rain. The action yielded no immediate changes, but it gave O4O a chance to test its mettle and identify neighbors sympathetic to their cause. With its base of support secure O4O started both a jobs project and a community school, but it was in confronting police brutality that the group really earned its street credentials.
Throughout surrounding neighborhoods O4O started distributing pocket-sized cards for the People’s Bail Project including information about individuals’ rights during arrest, booking and trial. Leaders recognized the effort as critical to build unity among working-class neighborhoods across the city. The cards provided an opportunity to talk directly with white residents, reminding them that police harassment was something all working-class residents had in common. On an individual basis, this undermined the mayor’s basic tactic. Rizzo was relying on fear and the magnetism of overly simple explanations: crime in Philadelphia was up and so too was the city’s Black population.15 White residents were left to draw easy conclusions about cause and effect. Rizzo made his solution clear: Control the rising Black population, show them who’s boss, lock them up and throw away the key. Such logic asked white communities to assume if people of color went to jail they must have deserved it. O4O worked to point out the fallacy of such assumptions.
Police behavior in white neighborhoods made
this argument easy for them. According to O4O community surveys, police seemed to do anything they wanted to poor white residents in Kensington and nearby Fishtown. One incident in the neighborhood drove the point home. In September 1970 Philadelphia police shot and killed Paul Frankenhauser, a young Fishtown resident. When the cops responsible were let off with no penalty, Frankenhauser’s family contacted O4O for help. The following April the group planned a protest demanding that the city reopen the investigation into his death.16 Community members, including Frankenhauser’s wife Joann, decided to disrupt one of Rizzo’s rallies in the heart of the Fishtown neighborhood. The police anticipated the protest and members of its Civil Disobedience Squad were already on the scene.17 The Frankenhausers and O4O demanded an audience with Rizzo, at which point the police attacked the unarmed residents shattering the skull of O4O co-founder Robert Barrow. When Whalen pulled up in his taxi, it immediately doubled as an ambulance and a getaway car. A lawsuit against Rizzo for Robert Barrow’s beating resulted in a $5,000 settlement.
Over the next few years, O4O expanded its programs to address just about every issue likely to build community power and improve conditions. At one point the entire leadership of O4O participated in setting up community self-help centers and planned a “Community Health Fair” at the McPherson Square Library that drew people from surrounding neighborhoods to get free testing for diabetes, glaucoma, anemia and lead poisoning. Hundreds of city residents showed up to talk to volunteer health providers, get tests they hadn’t been able to afford and lend their voices to O4O’s demand for universal health care.
With a growing membership, O4O also started raising questions about the bigger context, nationally and internationally. Radical organizations in the late Sixties and early Seventies, especially those focused on neighborhood work, were always on the search for ways to “bring the war home.” O4O knew that protests and preaching about the ills of U.S. foreign policy would just push residents farther away. With hundreds of locals fighting in Vietnam, the war was already right at home for them. O4O’s Sue Milligan had seen dozens of friends drafted. Some never came back. Others came home badly injured and psychologically wounded. The local high school her brothers attended had the highest Vietnam War casualty rate for a student body in the entire country; fifty-four Thomas Edison High School students lost their lives in the war. Illustrating the broader problems with the war meant finding a different approach from the student movement’s mass rallies. During a pair of carpet-bombings just before Christmas 1972, B-52 bombers unleashed thirty bombs over heavily populated sections of Haiphong and Hanoi in North Vietnam. Timed just days after the breakdown of the Paris peace talks between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the “Christmas bombings” destroyed thirty multiunit residential buildings in the Kham Thien area and leveled the 900-bed Bach Mai Hospital, killing twenty-five doctors. Pentagon spokesperson Jerry Friedman described the destruction as “some limited, accidental damage.”18 Columbia University professor and retired general Telford Taylor, who was in Hanoi at the time, vividly described a very different scene in the New York Times: “Hospital grounds were torn by huge fresh craters and the buildings that escaped hits were shattered by blasts … with rescue workers carrying patients piggyback, cranes and bulldozers and people using only their hands desperately clearing debris to reach victims said to be still buried in the rubble, and the frantic hospital director running from one building to another.”19
Although the war was never short on atrocities, the bombing became a powerful symbol for the anti-war movement and spread dissent far beyond radical circles. In New York, the cast members of seventeen Broadway plays gave up their pay on Richard Nixon’s Inauguration Day and contributed the money to the hospital’s reconstruction. Public repulsion was so widespread that the Internal Revenue Service took the unprecedented step of officially disallowing tax-deductions for any contributions to the Bach Mai Emergency Relief Fund.20 O4O came up with their own way to help. They launched a blood drive, walking door-to-door in Kensington and Fishtown to recruit donors. The organization wanted to show the world that the workers of Philadelphia were opposed to the war. At house after house they found supporters. Hundreds of willing participants joined the effort. Many donated money. The rest showed up at the blood bank the following Saturday. Even among Kensington’s more conservative residents, nobody agreed with bombing a hospital.
The blood drive also provided an opportunity to talk about the costs of war. Many residents had already made the connection. Their own local hospitals were in dangerously poor shape and low-income women regularly received shoddy treatment when seeking health care, especially for reproductive health issues. Health care and women’s issues also emerged as a natural place to build strong coalitions with activists of color. Through their friends at the Third World Women’s Alliance, O4O members learned, for the first time, about the U.S. government’s practice of forcibly sterilizing Native American and Puerto Rican women, as well as Black women and women prisoners. The Third World Women’s Alliance published a newspaper called Triple Jeopardy dealing with the impacts of racism, poverty and sexism on the lives of low-income women of color. After inviting Triple Jeopardy to a meeting to discuss how they could support each other, O4O women formed a multiracial coalition with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party to tackle issues with particular impact on women’s lives.21 Their major campaign drew in a broader cross-section of women’s groups focused on improving patient treatment at St. Joseph’s hospital in North Philly.
Over the next several years O4O’s women’s group emerged as an anchor point for the group’s community work. Like Rising Up Angry, women in O4O never considered splitting off into a separate women’s group. Instead the group resolved to struggle together around sexism in the same way they struggled within the organization around class and within their community around racism. At one point a couple of male members of the steering committee were suspended for sexism, but O4O’s overall approach was to educate, discuss and learn together. The O4O women’s group started organizing regular educational forums for both men and women on issues like equal pay and reproductive freedom. The forums also provided a space to uproot sexist attitudes among members and reinforced the idea—which needed pointing out at the time—that women are and have always been strong leaders.
With the forums as a model O4O used ongoing popular education methods to deepen conversations with residents on a range of issues from city corruption to foreign policy. During one session, O4O bused Kensington residents to the Main Line suburbs to see how the rich lived. They made special stops at the homes of nineteen individuals O4O believed directly oppressed and exploited the neighborhood, especially landlords and elite industrialists.22 This simple geographic tour of the city’s political economy focused people’s anger. O4O understood that in a community the strong arm of “the boss” isn’t always as visible as in the workplace. The tour showed there were real people reaping real benefits from O4O members’ cycle of poverty. By showing where these landlords and corporate elites profited in nearby poor Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, the tours also helped residents see common cause across racial lines. A special issue of the local Kensington News Bulletin provided background information on the nineteen targets, which the Philadelphia Daily News dubbed, “A handy tabloid-size directory of Who’s Who and Where He Got His.”
Knowing where he got his, or how he kept it, mattered like never before among families devastated by unemployment, record inflation and the city’s disregard. It also helped O4O choose its targets. In one campaign the organization took a page from the unemployed workers’ movements of the Thirties using direct action “office visits” to challenge Philadelphia Energy and Gas Company for cutting off electricity to families behind in their bills. Twelve O4O members accompanied one mother to the utility offices to demand her electricity be restored. The single mother of two had paid her back debt but couldn’t make the extra $25 reinstallation charge. As a result of the action, PECO restored her service.2
3 In another incident, city inspectors failed to hold anyone accountable for a massive sewage backup in the home of a young Kensington family. The city’s property licensing department claimed they didn’t know who owned the house. After two months and hours spent scooping the sewage out with buckets, the family called O4O for legal help. A volunteer lawyer uncovered a chain of previous owners and missing city records that could have been replaced within days, not weeks. O4O planned a sit-in to demand the city repair the broken pipe and locate the owner. The day before the action a plumber appeared at the home to clean up the waste and fix the sewer line.
With interventions like these, O4O did its best to improve people’s daily reality. Each action earned them new supporters. About sixty people served in the organization’s core leadership at some point, and about five hundred participated as regular members over the years. Unfortunately, not every action succeeded and rising unemployment only made things harder for the region. Philadelphia lost 40,000 jobs between 1971 and 1974, most in the manufacturing trades and private construction. When the city announced almost three hundred jobs would open up in September 1974, ten thousand workers stood outside in the rain to apply. It was a waste of time. Mayor Frank Rizzo had already filled the positions with his supporters and their friends. Many people in Kensington always disliked the mayor and the city’s machine politics, but Rizzo had a big enough base to aim for reelection that year. After all, backdoor promotions to civil service positions were just one of the perks offered to his loyal supporters.
In the lead-up to his 1974 reelection, Rizzo returned to his old tricks trying to divide residents in North Philly and Kensington along racial lines by dedicating himself to blocking the relocation of Thomas Edison High School. The Vietnam War had devastated the student body, but the school itself looked like its own kind of war zone. The school building at 8th and Lehigh—then named Northeast High School—was declared a fire hazard in 1956. At the time, city officials responded by redistricting. They opened a new school in the far Northeast to serve the city’s remaining middle-class families, but they kept the old building open. The city just gave it a new name and filed in poorer Black, Puerto Rican and white students from North Philly and Kensington. Because Edison was the only boys’ public school in the area, neighborhood boys had no choice but to attend Edison High, unless they were fortunate enough to attend Catholic school. The campaign to rebuild the high school in a new location near Lighthouse Field forced the issue of neighborhood unification. Rizzo seized the opportunity to remind white residents that the new locale would bring Black and Puerto Rican students closer to the heart of Kensington. O4O naturally joined parents and students in pressing for the new school site. When Rizzo’s forces asked people in Kensington to call the governor to voice their concerns about the relocation, three times as many people called to vote for the new site.