by Amy Sonnie
During his second-term campaign Rizzo had to work twice as hard for Kensington’s votes. Many in the neighborhood were fed up with the regime. In the months preceding the election, police harassment of local kids had reached new levels. Cops swept through the area around Westmoreland and Mascher Streets arresting almost every young person in sight, seemingly without provocation. According to a witness quoted in O4O’s newspaper, “They got a paperboy who was collecting on his route, a boy walking his mother to bingo, kids on errands for their parents, several people sitting on their front steps, and people hanging in the schoolyard—forty-seven in all.” At one point the cops crammed twenty-one kids into a single paddy wagon. Kensington residents reacted instinctively; two hundred parents spontaneously blocked an intersection at Front and Allegheny to prevent further raids. Police had illustrated, once again, that the department’s brutality problem lived on both sides of the color line. Protests against the police department increased and so did Rizzo’s tough-guy rhetoric. His divisive tactics had failed at Edison, but he wasn’t finished. In 1975 Frank Rizzo was reelected as mayor, once again drawing his support from white ethnic communities in the Northeast, South Philly, Richmond and to a lesser extent Kensington. He won, but he spent $1.2 million to do so—three times more than his opponents.24
Frank Rizzo hadn’t changed, but some minds in Kensington and Fishtown had. O4O built a sense of possibility among workers and residents, breaking through the fears they learned during decades of scarcity and red baiting. Their challenges and successes, however small, showed an innovative approach to organizing white communities during a decade of political and economic fallout. Their workplace-plus-community approach was unique at the time, and helped demonstrate their message of working-class unity in practical ways. They supported local workers when they went on strike and used their newspaper to share dispatches from national groups, such as the United Farm Workers of America. They celebrated the historic campaign of Mother Jones to support textile workers and stop child labor and they highlighted Philadelphia’s history of progressive populism. In the end, people in O4O felt like they were a part of something bigger, which is precisely what kept many of them in the movement far beyond the group’s lifetime.
Part of this broader connection came from their collaboration with Rising Up Angry in Chicago and White Lightning in the Bronx. Rising Up Angry’s Steve Tappis played the biggest role in uniting the three groups. Tappis spent time in both Philly and the Bronx working to set up a formal alliance. At the time there were fewer national forums for neighborhood organizers to share lessons or collaborate so his attempt was more difficult than it would have been a few years earlier. The formal alliance never amounted to much more than moral support, information sharing and reprinting articles from each other’s papers, but the groups’ shared analysis did bolster their sense of purpose.
At the time, White Lightning was gearing up to take on its own Goliaths in New York. The campaign against Nelson Rockefeller’s draconian drug laws was only one side of the coin. On the other, White Lightning was fighting to loosen the grip of heroin on poor communities. Like their friends in North Chicago and Kensington, White Lightning members in the Bronx saw their work as part of a broader revolutionary project of long-term neighborhood organizing. They intended to build a permanent base of radicalism among ethnic whites and recovering addicts in close collaboration with the Black and Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and Harlem.
Only a few years earlier, White Lightning founder Gil Fagiani was just a face in the crowd at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Like many in attendance his politics were catalyzed by the moral cause of civil rights and opposition to the War in Vietnam. Through the chaos of demonstrations, counter-demonstrations, police riots and mass arrests unfolding in front of him, Fagiani arrived at a much more personal realization. He could no longer deny he was addicted to heroin. He had traveled to the convention with his fiancée by bus to be part of what he expected would be a defining moment of his generation. He packed a small amount of heroin for the journey, but his supply quickly diminished. While his comrades faced off with police in a highly publicized street battle, Fagiani fought a far more private battle as the turmoil of withdrawal wracked his body.
Fagiani’s internal struggle with his upbringing fueled both his politicization and his addiction. Like many Italian immigrants his family had followed a path from the city to the suburbs. Originally raised in the Villa Avenue section of the North Bronx, he moved to a suburban development in Connecticut when his family received a Veterans Administration loan. There he first observed the extent to which European descendents—many of whom were moving away from the working-class—were obsessed with race. This preoccupation intensified the status anxiety of Italian Americans, who had long been regarded as the least educated, darkest people in town. He learned quickly that past discrimination against Italians didn’t necessarily translate into empathy for groups facing the same or worse. While Fagiani gravitated toward his mother’s sympathy for the civil rights movement, he began to feel deeply alienated from his community. He wanted out.
Hoping to find a career path and some focus, Fagiani enrolled in Pennsylvania Military College. During summer break following his junior year, he joined a Cornell University student project working with the East Harlem Tenants Council. While serving the Puerto Rican community in a day camp, he attended his first anti-war demonstration, started reading progressive political literature and became outraged with the slum conditions he saw firsthand. In the Thirties, East Harlem had been a bastion of support for the “Red Congressman” Vito Marcantonio whose seven terms in the House of Representatives made him the most successful radical politician in U.S. history. Between 1934 and 1950 Marcantonio led a multiracial coalition of Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Italians, while championing anti-imperialism abroad and housing rights for Harlem residents. By the Sixties, however, most of New York’s Italian-American leaders were staunchly conservative.
East Harlem, too, had changed. The neighborhood shifted to a Puerto Rican majority after construction began for some of the first public housing in the city. On the face of it, New York was finally doing what generations of reformers had demanded: clearing slums to build modern housing. New public housing brought new faces to the neighborhood, but as people of color moved in most of the remaining Italian Americans fled, and the legacy of Marcantonio’s coalition politics dissolved—at least for a while.25 For Fagiani, the exodus and the increasingly conservative tilt of New York’s Italian-American population reinforced his estrangement. On one hand, he was developing a keen political eye and a sense of outrage. On the other, becoming more alienated from his culture intensified his heroin addiction. In 1967, at the end of his senior year, Fagiani moved back to East Harlem. He worked for a while with the East Harlem Tenants Council, participated sporadically in left-wing political activities, and cut ties with his friends and family as he became more and more deeply involved with street drugs. A cousin intervened and attempted to enroll him in a treatment program, but Fagiani was placed on a waiting list.26
In November 1969 Fagiani entered Logos, a residential drug treatment program in the Bronx. Logos, and the recovering addicts Fagiani met there, became the backbone for a new radical community organization: White Lightning. In the U.S. the drug trade and, by extension, recovery programs had become some of the few places where people of various races and classes regularly mixed. This was especially true at Logos. Its multiracial residents included Blacks, Latinos and whites, many of whom were fed up with the program’s rigid hierarchy. Employing the “Therapeutic Community” model, Logos emphasized intense, confrontational group sessions geared to help residents move each other toward sobriety.
In 1970 residents saw warning signs that Logos was becoming something like a cult. The group’s director decided to eliminate community reintegration as a final phase of the program. Embracing the “Synanon” model, he wanted to convert Logos from a treatment program to a lifelong
utopian community.27 Fagiani and other participants formed a protest caucus called the Spirit of Logos. In their first campaign they attempted to convince New York City’s Board of Estimate (the credentialing body at the time) that Spirit of Logos was, in fact, the real program that should receive city funding, not Logos. Their initial campaign demanded Logos administrators end the blacklisting of ex-residents for jobs, welfare and parole, and called for Logos residents to have a part in organizational decision-making.
Dr. Michael Smith, who worked at Logos through Lincoln Hospital, had strong left-wing sympathies and was impressed with Fagiani’s initiative. He recruited Fagiani into Think Lincoln, an organization working to reform the notoriously dilapidated hospital. Lincoln served the predominantly Puerto Rican and Black communities of the South Bronx. The area was one of the poorest in the entire metropolitan area, with the average household income under $3,000. The hospital’s five buildings had been condemned in 1961, but there’d been no progress on a new facility. With its dismal survival rates and archaic equipment, Lincoln was dubbed “the butcher shop.” Patients and staff at Lincoln in the late Sixties described human excrement backed up in toilets, lead paint and plaster peeling from the walls, and one floor where the pediatric patients shared a room with the dysentery ward. The neighborhood’s infant mortality rate was thirty per one thousand live births—double the national average.28
The hospital quickly became a flashpoint for community and radical organizations. In 1968 hospital mental health workers, including hundreds of Black and Latino residents hired to provide non-medical services like translation, revolted over administrators’ broken promises, working conditions and the quality of patient care. During a three-day sit-in they ran the hospital themselves and won the termination of three dictatorial administrators. Forming the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM), they demanded immediate changes, as did the New York Black Panther Party, Think Lincoln, the Republic of New Afrika and the local Young Lords Party. Beyond the practical concerns of letting a horrible hospital serve a poor neighborhood, the fight to change Lincoln also had symbolic significance. Lincoln Hospital was built in 1839 as “The Home for the Colored Aged,” a nursing home for elderly runaway slaves. To many in the neighborhood, the city’s failure to address conditions at Lincoln was just proof that the same centuries-old racism was alive and well in the North.
The Panthers organized at Lincoln until April 1969 when police arrested the entire New York leadership for allegedly plotting to blow up public sites in Manhattan. Though all were later acquitted, severe government repression mounted against leaders of color. Soon after, most Black and Latino activists left Think Lincoln and Spirit of Logos to join HRUM. The exodus mirrored the racial division of labor in the Left overall. In this case, however, breaking into separate organizations didn’t foster alliance or camaraderie. The Third World section of Spirit of Logos ended up dissolving quickly, which left Spirit’s white members without a compass. Fagiani and fellow Logos resident Willie Everich regrouped, forming White Lightning to organize ethnic whites in the Bronx.
In the wake of Think Lincoln’s dissolution, the Young Lords Party took the lead on the Lincoln campaign, with White Lightning and an array of left-wing groups joining in support. The New York Young Lords formed in June 1969 with the blessing of Cha-Cha Jiménez and the original Chicago chapter. Led by youth barely out of their teens, the New York Lords quickly made a name for itself by using creative, militant direct action to draw attention to the city’s utter neglect of basic neighborhood services. In Harlem garbage would pile up for weeks, a putrid insult added to the injury of the ghetto. Residents of El Barrio regularly watched as garbage trucks drove through their neighborhood en route to service more affluent ones. The Lords’ first public action was to sweep the waste into the street using large brooms appropriated from the Department of Sanitation. When a few trucks arrived, most of the garbage had blown back to the sidewalks. The next day the Lords returned the garbage to the streets—this time creating a five-foot wall in the middle of 3rd Avenue. The “garbage offensive” provided a burst of conviction in New York’s Puerto Rican community, which also made up 70 percent of the area surrounding Lincoln.29 The Lords understood the hospital’s “brutal neglect” of the community as its own kind of garbage.
The Lincoln campaign reached a crescendo in the summer of 1970. On July 14, one hundred fifty people invaded the hospital. Commandeering an entire floor for a detoxification program, they demanded, as one flyer put it, “total self-determination of all health services through a Community-Worker Board to operate Lincoln Hospital.” While the takeover itself lasted just twelve hours, the Lords, HRUM and a nascent White Lightning continued to work closely with staff for months afterward. Community organizers set up guerilla programs that employed dozens of neighborhood residents and helped hundreds of addicts. In the detox unit, political education became a central part of the therapeutic process with classes and discussions challenging the gospel of drug addiction as a personal pathology.
The community organizers were aided by a significant number of Lincoln’s doctors. Unknown to the takeover orchestrators, Lincoln physician Charlotte Phillips had been recruiting progressive medical professionals to the hospital for months.30 When the activists stormed the facility, they were actually welcomed by much of the staff. Any medical personnel sitting on the fence got a substantial push to choose sides when the hospital’s pattern of neglect made even bigger headlines. One day after the takeover, Carmen Rodriguez, a resident of Logos and friend of Fagiani’s, died at Lincoln due to gross malpractice during an abortion. Disgusted, Dr. Mike Smith, who later became a member of White Lightning, displayed her medical charts to the local press in an act of medical disobedience. The charts revealed that doctors failed to record Rodriguez’s pre-existing heart condition. She had died of cardiac arrest.
For a few years, it seemed as if almost all the borough’s radical activity was linked back to Lincoln in some way. “It was the closest thing I could see in the United States to what socialism might actually look like,” Fagiani recalled. Thanks to the takeover and steady community pressure, a new Lincoln Hospital opened in 1976.
For the newly minted White Lightning it only made sense to continue addressing the health needs of the community. At first, drugs were Lightning’s singular issue. Even their name was a dual nod to their mission of organizing whites and to one of heroin’s many street names. According to member John Duffy, White Lightning was primarily a group of ex-drug addicts committed as much to getting people off drugs as they were to revolutionary programs and politics. This attitude was uncommon in the Sixties and Seventies when groups such as Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies and the Weather Underground (at least for a period of time) viewed narcotics as a tool for personal liberation, part of pummeling bourgeois socialization out of the mindscape.31 In other radical circles, like some chapters of the Panthers, drug use was grounds for expulsion. White Lightning staked out another position. Its base included people in various stages of recovery. To expel members for drug use was out of the question, so White Lightning focused its policy on confronting the politics of the drug trade and the criminalization of addicts.
Strongly influenced by the pamphlet “Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide” written by New York Black Panther Michael Tabor, Lightning saw drugs as a deliberate attempt to destabilize ghetto communities for corporate profit. Tabor’s pamphlet criticized the popular concern that Sixties counterculture had made drug use fashionable in white middle-class communities. He argued it was the drug epidemic in poor communities, especially communities of color, which presented the real danger. Tabor also attacked the Therapeutic Community model for denying the socioeconomic origins of drug addiction. “These programs were never intended to cure Black addicts,” Tabor asserted. “They can’t even cure the White addicts they were designed for.”32
In a creative re-interpretation of Marxist theory, Lightning’s take on the political economy of dope framed the addicted pusher
as an exploited worker, not a perpetrator. For them, the real criminals were drug companies that overproduced for the illegal market, along with the cops and organized crime factions that profited from trafficking. Adopting a Panther-like political program, Lightning demanded an end to the flood of drugs in working-class communities and adamantly opposed legal addictive drugs such as methadone. To Lightning, both prescription and illicit drugs were forms of chemical fascism, effective in neutralizing and controlling poor communities through a nearly guaranteed path to prison or the morgue. Though it took more than thirty years for published reports of crack-cocaine trafficking by intelligence agencies to surface, Lightning and the Panthers always suspected government culpability in the growing drug epidemic. Through its newspaper, Lightning accused the New York Police Department and federal government of complicity in the drug trade. They alleged that dealers and users alike were arrested for the sole purpose of reselling contraband. When New York Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy reported that four hundred pounds of heroin and cocaine had mysteriously disappeared from police evidence lockers, Lightning seized the opportunity to publish their “Cops Push Dope” tract accusing police and intelligence agencies of funneling the drugs to poor neighborhoods.33