by Amy Sonnie
Just as it was for the Young Patriots Organization when leaders split over the party question, White Lightning and O4O didn’t survive the splits. Duffy saw White Lightning’s move from a neighborhood group to a vanguard organization as something that destroyed its credibility with the very people it intended to organize. O4O’s Sue Milligan agreed. It wasn’t the right time for a party, she felt. “Most of those organizations had no real base in the working class—you can’t create a real movement on theory alone.” That theory and Left politics continued to guide her activism; she just wasn’t convinced to adopt a party line. For Dan Sidorick, the New Communist Movement had both benefits and drawbacks. “There was a real need to think beyond the neighborhood and analyze how we might change the course of the nation.”
Inspired by the history-changing global events of the Sixties, they were right to, at least, attempt that new course. Their search for a “right way” mirrors the crisis of formation that faces almost every social movement. Once organizations emerge to coordinate spontaneous uprisings, new democratic experiments become necessary. White Lightning and O4O’s radical community organizing showed important gains, but finally hit simultaneous roadblocks. By 1976 both O4O and White Lightning quietly dissolved. With the memory of the government’s counterintelligence program looming large, O4O members decided to destroy nearly all the organization’s archives.40 Bill Whalen remained at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition as Executive Director. Marilyn Buggey and Jack Whalen took time away to deal with health and family crises, returning later to community work outside the Left party structure. Doyle stayed connected to progressive politics and is today a gardener in Central Park. Everich is a respected percussionist in New York City’s Latin Jazz scene. Following Lightning’s dissolution, Duffy worked in faith-based community organizing before becoming a Hollywood line producer. Fagiani is a social work administrator and poet still active in the Left.
Before shuttering its doors October 4th Organization did reconvene for one last campaign. In 1978, a broad coalition of Philadelphians finally defeated Frank Rizzo, albeit unceremoniously. According to the city charter, Rizzo could not run for a third term. Stepping down was the last thing on his agenda, so against the advice of top aides, he authored a ballot measure that would remove mayoral term restrictions. The Stop Rizzo Campaign amassed its own rainbow coalition, bringing the kind of unity to Philadelphia’s Left created only by a strong enemy and years of alliance building. According to Michael Simmons, a Black member of the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee, the backbone of the campaign came from Puerto Rican and Black activists. The Black United Front Against Charter Change coalesced nationalists, Baptist churches and assorted radicals. The Philadelphia branches of the Young Lords and El Comité anchored work in the Latino community, while white radicals carried their own weight with members of O4O going door-to-door in Kensington and Fishtown to mobilize voters. Even the city’s middle-class liberals created the Committee to Protect the Charter and businessmen miffed at a gigantic rise in taxes under Rizzo contributed more than $200,000 to oppose the initiative. At a rally near the end of Rizzo’s term, Black radicals marched under the banner “Hey Rizzo, have you heard? Philly ain’t Johannesburg!” Rizzo always maintained he was free of racism and shrugged off the comparison. In his campaign message, though, he simply urged his supporters, “Vote White.”
Aware of the mass anti-Rizzo upswell, the mayor’s cronies did their own part to swing the results. Election observers documented several instances of polling places in anti-Rizzo precincts being moved far out of the neighborhoods to deter voters. Witnesses also reported violent harassment of Stop Rizzo activists. Their efforts to protect their patriarch failed. More than 170,000 new voters registered so they could weigh in on the battle—most were Black voters united in their opposition to Rizzo’s politics. The mayor’s attempt at a third term was defeated by nearly two-to-one.41 More than 36 percent of Kensington voted against Rizzo. Despite his obvious defeat, the former mayor—who always insisted he wasn’t a racist—told the press he would move on to create a national “white rights” organization if not allowed a third run. “I am now going to defend the people, the people of this city that I believe have been kicked around too long.… I’m going to defend the rights of American citizens who happen to be ethnics. The whites have to join hands to get equal treatment.”42 Rizzo maintained that the white working class needed a defender who would help keep minority rights in check. The Philadelphia Daily News opined that he was grooming himself to be “a kind of Northern replacement for George Wallace.” Rizzo’s white rights organization never materialized, but it didn’t have to. The backlash to civil rights was quickly moving from the margins to the mainstream of electoral politics. Over the next decade both Republicans and Democrats would come to reflect a similarly paternalistic politic, making major strides with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
Throughout history there have been times—like in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York—that demonstrate how these rainbow coalitions changed both lives and conditions. Unlike David facing his Goliath, they faced theirs with more than just luck. Like their Chicago counterparts, White Lightning and O4O measured their greatest successes in the sense of power and purpose they built for hundreds of working-class people over the years. They drew on the long history of progressive populism in their neighborhoods and immigrant traditions, and in doing so aided others to begin the kind of personal–political transformations that ultimately sustain people as lifelong radicals even in times of austerity and defeat. Like JOIN, the Patriots and Rising Up Angry, they found that fighting together for a better world—in whatever form or era—is what changes lives and sustains our hope when we need it most.
Epilogue
Over the span of a decade, the organizers profiled in this book demonstrated that the U.S. Left could be relevant to the everyday lives of everyday people. Inspired by traditions of progressive populism, the civil rights movement and national liberation struggles around the globe, these radicals cultivated the progressive potential of poor and working-class whites even as the architects of liberal and conservative movements saw these same communities, respectively, as an impediment to civil rights and a sign of economic uncertainty. What’s more, JOIN Community Union, the Young Patriots, Rising Up Angry, October 4th Organization and White Lightning helped to shape a spirited class politics that directly confronted America’s legacy of racism—a momentous achievement.
These groups demonstrated the possibility of a revitalized working-class movement in the United States and beyond. With little more than a dedicated cadre of organizers, these new organizations compelled the Sixties Left to take working-class whites seriously as a force for change. In fits and starts, their work revealed that there were ready radicals in blue-collar neighborhoods, white ethnic enclaves, northern “slums” and industrial centers. There were also remarkable personal transformations. As these groups evolved, members insisted that outside organizers learn to respect their intellect and culture, even as student organizers played a necessary role in directing actions and helping people understand personal experience within a broader political context.
But there are lessons as well as triumphs to be considered: The role of “the organizer” remained a tension in these groups, as each tried to find a balance between leadership and member participation, theory and action, political discipline and meeting people “where they were at.” For JOIN, the tension between local organizers and the student movement proved instructive even as it fractured the organization. Both SDS organizers and community leaders like Peggy Terry and Mary Hockenberry recall invaluable personal and political lessons from their collaboration. As Peggy Terry put it, they needed each other—even if poor people needed some time to stand on their own. “Those kids stopped a war and … if anybody has failed, it’s the system and not them.” For the Young Patriots, the tension came out in their blunt challenge to the middle-class Left; it was time to stare white poverty in the
face. Taking a different approach, Rising Up Angry, O4O and White Lightning reconciled this by ensuring the majority of organizers were actually from the community they worked in. For O4O this meant an independent worker–community organization drawing inspiration from a long legacy of populist workers’ movements. For White Lightning it meant an organization united by a common experience of addiction and incarceration. For Rising Up Angry it meant creating a “radical cool,” a culture where former gang members and single mothers came to see their experiences in the context of imperialism and their freedom tied to its undoing.
These groups each found that poor and working-class people rarely have the luxury of separating their experiences into single issues. Their survival meant juggling multiple concerns at once: unsafe housing conditions, late welfare checks, the draft, domestic violence and women’s oppression, labor grievances, child care, drug addiction, factory closures, the war, racism. Theirs was an immense project, and their victories show in the lives they changed and the vision they demonstrated just as clearly as in policies altered or slumlords exposed. The programs they created—in the tradition of participatory organizing and the Black Panthers’ revolutionary service model—engaged neighborhood residents in a kind of radical self-governance that transformed self and society. They expanded multiracial alliances with communities facing similar conditions. And because members took part in a broader movement, their visions went beyond immediate reforms. While JOIN’s march to the Summerdale police station in 1966 demanded the dismissal of a particular cop, their chants demanded something much more radical: community control of the police. When Rising Up Angry rallied against the war, they did not sing, “Stop this War”; they sounded an S.O.S.—Save Our Sailors—and veteran marines marched with them en masse. In their own ways, they recognized that people’s sense of power is born when they act to change their own conditions and also ask for something larger. The job of community organizers, they showed, is to direct power toward justice and solidarity.
They never assumed their job would be easy. Because they studied history, the leaders of these groups also understood the role racism had played in fracturing prior U.S. movements, and, therefore, leaders listened when activists of color called on white radicals to address racism at its source. In proposing a racial division of labor, Black Power leaders aimed to curb white racism within the civil rights movement and to point out the obvious: racism would not be overcome by ignoring white communities any more than capitalism would be overcome by ignoring the poor. It was in this context that these five organizations evolved their strongest alliances with radicals of color. These relationships fostered their greatest potential—manifested in alliances like the Rainbow Coalition and a depth of political understanding among members. Even as the form and function of these relationships presented challenges, the common cause politics and class-based unity they fostered remain remarkable.
The “organize your own” strategy put forward by the Black Power movement followed from the impact of white racism within the civil rights movement, but the duration, end goals and praxis of this strategy were unclear. Each of the groups profiled in this book went through several formulations of what it meant to work under or alongside leaders of color. In the vague terrain in between, the Patriots experimented with their own brand of nationalism, White Lightning struggled to find a foothold when once-close allies drifted away, and Rising Up Angry evolved into a multiracial organization as its neighborhoods became more integrated; by the mid-Seventies a white-only organization no longer seemed relevant. If it weren’t for the millstone of government repression, the original Rainbow Coalition might have guided these organizations through changing times. But under the circumstances, the only clear lesson is that successful multiracial coalitions require each constituent group to have a strong base in its own community and a clear program for moving members to stand up for the rights of others. However ill-defined, solidarity politics exist, they learned, to bridge the gaps that weaken social movements.
Much has changed in the United States, yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the “organize your own” model as a relic of the past. In the present era, white organizers still overlook the difficult work to be done in their own backyards, and racial discrimination remains an overwhelming concern for political movements. Over the past fifty years, the engineers of the American conservative movement have slyly manipulated white working-class anxieties to dismantle civil rights and secure their road to dominion. They will continue this manipulation unless the Left again makes itself relevant to the nation’s 60 percent: working-class people spanning all races and regions.1 To borrow advice that Rising Up Angry’s Mike James offered his peers in 1968, serious organizers need to “get off the Interstate” and connect to the progressive potential of America’s heartland.2
The “heartland” is a real place, after all: the urban, rural and suburban communities where working-class people live. For most working Americans, the national dream is a bad check written so long ago that figuring out who wrote it sometimes seems futile. But many still demand an explanation, many still believe in equity and justice, and the heartland is a good place to talk about what comes next. Many of those we interviewed for this book believe the white Left’s failure to get off the Interstate between 1965–1970 was a “fatal flaw.” Doing so might just have changed the course of the New Left. Beyond the organizations we have profiled and a handful of others, their movements missed many chances to reach “forgotten Americans,” and conservatives were only too quick to court them with promises of security, order and individual rights.
Today’s heartland is a different place. But what the “organize your own” model teaches us is that we should each find connections to the freedom movements of our time. The people who have shared their stories for this book did so out of a steadfast belief that remembering our past might embolden today’s dreamers and justice seekers. These organizers awoke to the stench of bigotry and poverty, and in doing so, vowed to end the ongoing nightmare created by racialized capitalism and gender oppression. They did so because the manipulation of poor people by lawmakers and the dismissal of working-class whites by a sometimes-myopic Left dishonors the lifetimes devoted to struggle. These people proved, again and again, that revolutionaries are made, not born. And that organizing, when sustained, transforms both lives and conditions. Hundreds of people involved in these groups were changed by their personal relationships with activists of color and white radicals, by their exposure to international social movements and by the radical community they created. These organizations disproved the mythology that poor and working-class whites clung more firmly to racism than politicians, corporate liberals or the middle class, even as they were honest that they sometimes failed to reach their own neighbors.
Their heartland, not necessarily a single place on the map, was the home of possibilities—for a nation reimagined by everyday people who were no longer willing to settle for anything less than a truly great society. And today? Where is the heartland today, and where is the Left within it?
Acknowledgments
The fact that you hold this book in your hands is the result of a collective leap of faith. Since very little scholarship has been done on these organizations, we depended largely on interviews with movement participants and, in many cases, their personal archives. At least initially, these individuals received a phone call from complete strangers who were infants when this history took place. Their willingness to build relationships with us is testament to their shared vision of political community and faith in a new generation of activists who believe a better world is possible.
Steve Tappis and Gil Fagiani were the first to accept our invitation. Their generosity and political insight provided threads that hold this text together. Diane Fager and Mike James also went above and beyond providing feedback and archival material for this project. Early on Dan Sidorick and Sue Milligan sent copies of rare October 4th Organization materials, few of which remain; without these we wou
ld know little about that group’s unique history. We have also benefited greatly from their insight and ongoing feedback, along with that of Jack Whalen, Bob Lawson and Carol Tappis. Our deepest thank you goes to Margi Devoe for inviting us into her home and sharing her mother, Peggy Terry, so graciously. Without Peggy Terry’s extensive personal archives much of this book would not have been possible. We also extend our sincerest thanks to Dennis Winters for the invaluable interviews he conducted with Peggy in the late 1990s and to Jonathan Nelson at Wisconsin Historical Society for archiving Peggy’s collection.
It goes without saying that we are indebted to all those we interviewed, often more than once, who additionally shared stories and materials. A list of those individuals appears at the back of this book. Additionally, archival research for this book was conducted at Temple University’s Urban Archives, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, San Francisco Public Library, Oakland Public Library, Wisconsin Historical Society’s Social Action Archive, University of California Berkeley, and the Council of the Southern Mountains archive at Berea College in Kentucky. Thanks also to Bolerium Books in San Francisco for providing volumes of precious materials at a discount.