by Amy Sonnie
In one of its most defining campaigns White Lightning attempted to defeat the first wave of Rockefeller Laws. In 1973 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican and potential presidential candidate, was looking for a way onto the national stage. By targeting drug users he fortified his tough-on-crime image. In an address to the state legislature, he warned, “The crime, the muggings, the robberies, the murders associated with addiction continue to spread a reign of terror. Whole neighborhoods have been as effectively destroyed by addicts as by an invading army. This has to stop.”34 Rockefeller proposed a new set of laws ordering mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Holding more than one ounce of marijuana would result in a fifteen-year prison term. Heroin and cocaine possession, in any amount, could mean lifetime residency behind bars. The concept of mandatory minimum sentencing would soon be copied in multiple states and incorporated into federal sentencing guidelines—sending hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders to prisons.35 To craft his hard-line legislation, Rockefeller borrowed heavily from the federal 1951 Boggs Act, which made little distinction between drug dealers and users for purposes of sentencing. Affluent families often found competent legal counsel for members charged with possession, while working-class families relied on the over-burdened public defender’s office. These families watched their loved ones disappear to Attica, Sing-Sing and a dozen other facilities in the state.
Lightning saw the drug crackdown the same way it saw the military draft: as an opportunity and a threat. While the laws threatened to lock up their base, such obviously punitive legislation also had the potential to broaden dissent. In 1973 Lightning joined United Parents Who Care (UPWC), a grassroots movement that reached far beyond traditional leftist circles. UPWC was mostly made up of white working-class parents whose children had drug problems. Building the coalition was a challenge for the group because the families tended to be fairly conservative. Most were only drawn to activism because their own children were facing prison time. Often they struggled against any talk of broader social reforms. White Lightning tried to turn this tide. Inspired by the way Black and Latino radicals had used their histories of resistance to build pride and solidarity across racial divisions, Lightning studied the history of European immigrant groups and tried to infuse lessons about their struggles into their community work. Examining the 1891 lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans, the group connected the history of lynching to the current impact of drug laws on poor communities. They asked members to explore their ancestors’ participation in radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World or the many progressive parties European immigrants had formed, especially European Jews. Some UPWC members were happy to claim these histories and situate their troubles in a broader context, but many were not.
Lightning struggled to move even those white immigrants who came from socialist countries. Life in the United States was hard. The McCarthy era taught them to keep their heads down and American capitalism made alluring promises. Some of the families in United Parents Who Care had even established a moderate degree of security as small shop owners or foremen. Lightning’s platform started to seem a bit too radical for people who just wanted to help their kids. It didn’t help that Lyndon La Rouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees made a habit of crashing community meetings and spouting accusations about White Lightning’s “counter-revolutionary” leaders. Adding a nail to UPWC’s coffin, New York authorities were quick to exploit the political gulf. One father, with whom Fagiani worked closely, received a call from the police demanding, “Did you know this guy Gil you work with is a Communist?” Fed up with the perceived dogma of the Left, parents began to drift away.
Adding to their troubles, the New Left’s general ambivalence toward poor and working-class whites had cemented White Lightning’s estrangement from the broader student movement. Lightning’s organizers started to feel like they were on an island all their own, save for their connection to Angry and O4O. Fagiani recalls common remarks from some student radicals deriding Lightning’s base as “racist rednecks” and hopeless reactionaries. He felt constrained by what he perceived to be an overarching rigidity in the larger movement around methods to undermine white supremacy. His approach was to connect positive stories of white ethnic history to current struggles among people of color. He authored a pamphlet comparing the trial of Panthers Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins to the persecution of Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolemo Vanzetti, drawing useful parallels. However, he suppressed his own work, feeling that any positive portrayal of European identity would be denounced as racist. Recalling a time when he attended an Italian feast with a leftist who commented that she was eager for the day when such “reactionary” cultural and religious celebrations were abolished, Fagiani feared that White Lightning and its sister groups might forever be out of step with the rest of the movement. The gulf between professed radicals and ordinary people sympathetic to the cause seemed impossible to bridge.
Alienated from the white Left, White Lightning relied implicitly on their preexisting relationships with radicals of color, but as these groups atomized—either around ideas of cultural nationalism or simply under the weight of growing state repression—White Lightning’s leaders had to confront difficult questions about what they could really accomplish. Perhaps more than any other white working-class organization of the era, Lightning’s members struggled the hardest with the racial division of political labor. The model implicitly relied on having others to work alongside, but Lightning’s closest allies—the Panthers, Lords and HRUM—had begun to fragment, leaving the group without a strong multiracial alliance. By 1971 Lightning had to decide how they could emulate the programs of Third World liberation groups without formal coalition.
Key leaders in Lightning also struggled to focus just on white residents’ problems in a region like the Bronx where even they grew up in racially mixed neighborhoods. Terry Doyle, Willie Everich and John Duffy all grew up in the Bronx as white minorities within neighborhoods of color. For them, cultural nationalism and strict solidarity politics made little sense. Throughout the life of the organization all three remained intensely uncomfortable with organizing in ethnically seperate groups. Duffy’s parents were Irish immigrants. His father worked in a meat factory and his mother was a domestic worker. After the death of his father, Duffy’s mother raised him and his brother on a meager combination of social security and veteran’s benefits. As a kid, Duffy witnessed the Mott Haven neighborhood shift from Italian, Jewish and Irish to a majority Puerto Rican and Black. One of the few white families that stayed in the neighborhood, Duffy and his brother quickly assimilated into Black and Puerto Rican culture. Duffy dropped out of school at fifteen but was schooled, as he remembers it, by “the brightest youth in the ghetto”—the Black Panthers, the Young Lords and the Nation of Islam. For Duffy, Spirit of Logos and Think Lincoln evolved organically the same way his childhood friendships did—people were united by their common experience. Building unity across race was practical, not ideological. It wasn’t that members like Duffy rejected solidarity models of organizing whites in support of people of color’s demands, it was just that some of White Lightning’s members simply knew no white community to call “their own.” Given the mandate of the time, they tried. “It was what it was,” Duffy says now. But many of Lightning’s members later wondered whether the separation of forces diffused any longer-term impacts for their work.
Lightning members did their best to develop their own approach given the conditions of the time. Once the Rockefeller Laws passed, Lightning took a page from Rising Up Angry and O4O by providing legal aid and addressing other community issues. They provided advice and advocacy for those arrested for possession, conducted radically minded drug recovery groups and launched their own series of Serve the People programs including a legal aid service. Taking a page from Rising Up Angry’s legal defense program, Lightning started providing free clinics for women on issues like how to obt
ain a divorce. New member Kirsten Andersen was one of several women in Lightning to join the group’s broader efforts and see a natural fit for women’s programs. Andersen moved to New York from rural New Jersey and joined White Lightning after a period of searching for movement groups where she could do practical work with everyday people. She was at once impressed by and struggled with the group’s emphasis on discipline, theory and focus. As part of her initiation, Fagiani administered an oral test of her political orientation. His verdict was, “Great on class and race, but a little weak on women’s issues.” More so than Rising Up Angry or O4O, Lightning’s leadership was mostly male, so she was obviously upset by the ruling. She joked later though that Fagiani was probably right. She, like all young movement leaders, had just as much personal growing to do as the people they were trying to organize. Andersen found that White Lightning, contradictions and all, provided the chance she was looking for to develop political projects that tackled class, race and gender in tandem. During her first few months she helped build a women’s caucus called Women Hold Up Half the Sky, a name taken from Mao’s writings on women’s equality.
One of White Lightning’s busiest legal programs was its housing clinic. The group evolved to tackle poor housing conditions both out of necessity and strategy. Besides drug addiction, slum housing created one of the biggest health hazards in the neighborhood. Some apartment windows were painted shut, lead paint flaked from walls, staircases lacked railings and landlords rarely followed through on fixes. These poor conditions had been intensified by white flight. Beginning in the 1950s nearly 100,000 people, mostly white families, left the Bronx for neighborhoods in Queens, Staten Island and Connecticut. With white flight, New York City disinvested in the Bronx and absentee landlords stopped making improvements on a deteriorating housing stock. It wasn’t that the properties were vacant, though. More than 100,000 new residents, nearly all Black and Latino, moved into the Bronx during the same period.36
Soon, both newcomers and old-timers faced a common enemy: redlining. Bank lenders simply refused to give loans or mortgages to individuals in neighborhoods they deemed deteriorating. Looking around the Bronx, anyone could see the bombed-out tenements, shops and vacant lots as landlords and investors abandoned properties. Some still hoped to cash out though. In Mott Haven, arsons reached epic proportions. In the mid-Seventies a rash of suspicious fires tore through blocks designated for redevelopment, including the Fordham area dividing the South and North Bronx. An estimated seven thousand fires plagued the region over a two-year period. Time magazine counted the Bronx fires as part of a national trend in poor neighborhoods where 40 percent were ignited to collect insurance money.37 One fire on Christmas Eve destroyed the Lightning storefront at 109 East 184th Street and two others gutted a nearby residence and restaurant. The fires left most residents unable to rebuild. As a result, landlord abandonment soon peaked and a second round of arsons gripped the neighborhood. Landlords and city developers assumed residents would just move on without a fuss. For the area’s poorest residents, moving on was no more an option in 1975 than it had been when white flight started two decades earlier.
Adopting the legal aid model of Rising Up Angry, Lightning members Terry Doyle, Willie Everich and Bill Whalen became experts on New York housing law. They alternated between organizing rent strikes and representing tenants in court. In most cases, victories came from their do-it-yourself approach to housing court. Lightning received housing law training from the Metropolitan Council and El Comité, a militant Puerto Rican group active in combating gentrification. These trainings provided members with the legal and practical skills needed to help residents navigate housing court.38 Soon enough, Everich was helping residents collectivize their own buildings. New York City rent control laws at the time made this tactic viable, but landlords and their lawyers regularly threatened to sue the activists for practicing law without a license. Lightning’s legal team replied, “Go ahead! You can’t get money out of a turnip.” In one case, Lightning halted the displacement of tenants being evicted by a local branch of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Lightning disrupted church services by leafleting the congregation about the pastor’s real estate dealings.
Even as the group expanded to address other community concerns, White Lightning never strayed far from its anti-drug roots. When Fagiani and others spent time visiting Rising Up Angry and touring college campuses to talk about their work, they decided to make an important stop in Ohio, the home of the Eli Lilly Corporation. Lilly was responsible for manufacturing the majority of methadone consumed in the U.S. at the time. The drug was developed during World War II as a substitute for addictive drugs and administered to lessen the pain of soldiers maimed in battle. Lightning objected to the use of any drug meant to prolong and enable addiction—methadone use just substituted state-sanctioned dependency for an illegal high. Even as early as 1960 patients reported nasty consequences from the drug including difficulty breathing, heart troubles, insomnia and confusion. Lightning’s Ohio protest was small but it also garnered them a new recruit. For Gene Bild, whose brother Steve was active in Rising Up Angry, the focus on the drug epidemic resonated as did the group’s criticism of therapeutic community models for addiction treatment. Bild was active in the Panther Defense Committee before Fred Hampton was killed and found in White Lightning a place to combine solidarity work with direct organizing on the issues he cared about.
Through the legal clinic and drug recovery programs, Lightning did some of its best work. Organizers helped people kick drugs, stopped evictions and won building improvements. Yet, the wins were arguably small in the scheme of their revolutionary goals. Questions about the real effectiveness of their strategies created a steady backdrop and, at times, a huge obstacle. In the Sixties white radicals were driven by the moral vision of civil rights, the radical program of the Panthers and the intellectual leadership of SDS. The Vietnam War, too, had created a focal point for dissent that unified people from all corners. Now, leaders found themselves lacking direction. By the mid-Seventies, the recession, factory off-shoring and urban depopulation flipped familiar terrains of Left organizing on their sides. Even the most profound reform victories seemed temporary in the face of severe recession and growing conservatism. Politicians like Rizzo sharpened the perceived victimization of whites through a language of resentment and a baseless rhetoric of “reverse racism.” This language continues to build political careers to this day. The movement was right where the government wanted it to be: in a state of exhaustion following years of assassinations, trials, disruptions and uphill work.
Before the stone hit the pond this trajectory was clear to organizers. They faced yet another fork in the road. In 1975 Lightning’s Bill Whalen left to work at the Alinsky-inspired Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which organized Black, Puerto Rican and white residents together around neighborhood issues. Many of his comrades in Lightning disagreed with this choice, citing the coalition’s lack of revolutionary outlook. Whalen, however, saw building a broad neighborhood coalition as a hands-on attempt to challenge racism. The interracial coalition served the whole neighborhood, giving it the latitude to address the complex issues raised by gentrification and neighborhood integration. Pushed out by urban renewal in Harlem and the Lower East Side, many of the Blacks and Latinos moving into the Bronx were leaving worse-off areas. “It could have been a recipe for jealousy as people of color often rented the buildings with elevators while whites had the walk-ups they had lived in forever,” Whalen points out. “The presence of a coalition, putting forth ways for people to work in common, was a powerful example.” His brother, O4O’s Jack Whalen, also took a job in a settlement house where Philly residents came together around common issues rather than racial identity. While the Whalen brothers’ aims were always revolutionary, many of their peers disagreed that any real revolutionary work could happen in these venues.
Frustrated with the slow progress of neighborhood organizing, by the mid-1970s other Left l
eaders turned to party-building and Maoist-influenced Marxist-Leninism as a framework for revolution. An ideology that promised a break from the one step forward, two steps back pattern seemed like a logical and necessary next step given the state of the movement. A New Communist Movement emerged in the 1970s to build national political parties that could, at least theoretically, lead the working class to power. Veteran leaders attracted to these politics attempted to stitch together Left organizations vying for the title of vanguard by forming new parties independent of existing socialist and communist organizations.39 This strategy was simultaneously a mark of maturity and a fatal trap. On the one hand, it forced hundreds of activists to further grapple with the limits of reform and pushed a movement born of the U.S. civil rights struggle to connect the political dots rippling across the globe with the expansion of neoliberalism.
Party building took a substantial number of movement organizers away from day-to-day work in the community and neighborhood projects suffered. Leftists looking to build revolutionary political parties recruited the “best and the brightest” from the ranks of community organizations. Groups such as the Revolutionary Union, which later morphed into the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the October League (Marxist-Leninist) recruited members from existing labor and community organizations. White Lightning’s John Duffy joined the October League, and several members of O4O joined the newly formed Revolutionary Union. For years these organizers grappled with the limits of neighborhood politics. They saw it become increasingly difficult to translate local reforms to more than citywide importance even in cities as large and influential as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Most movement leaders agreed that the fragments of the Left would eventually have to unite in a single party or broad-based organization, but the push toward party-building steamrolled the hard-won gains of community organizations. At the time it seemed for the greater good. Those organizers who joined Left parties in the 1970s hoped to get past incremental change and reach thousands rather than dozens of people.