by Amy Sonnie
Finally, without our network of supporters this book would have far less insight. To Melville House and our editor Kelly Burdick, thank you for believing in the importance of these stories. To Malik Rahim and Sharon Martinas who inspired us individually to pursue this research, and to those close friends who provided substantive feedback on key drafts: Dan Berger, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Diane Fager, Harmony Goldberg, Mike James, Paige Kruza, Sue Milligan, Dan Sidorick, Jen Soriano, Emily Thuma, and most especially, Chris Dixon. And to our respective friends and families for sustaining us through the (very) long process of research and writing, we say thank you to: Kat Aaron, Kirsten Andersen, Daniel Tucker and AREA magazine, Micah Bazant, Gene Bild, Paul Boden, Ingrid Chapman, Malkia Cyril, Max Elbaum, Ananda Esteva, Emma Gerould, Harjit Singh Gill, Rahula Janowski, Matt Kahler, Jamie McCallum, Sam Miller, Matt Gonzales, Sam Green, Mike Gray, R. Kumasi Hampton, Lynn Hudson, Jennifer Kirby, Chelsea Kirkland, Amanda Klonsky, Lynn Lewis, Allison Lum, Kari Lydersen, the Montgomery-Gabriel family, Left Turn crew, Leroy Moore, Peter Plate, Jean Rice, Aaron Sarver, Madigan Shive, Sarah Shourd, the Sonnie family, Lisa Sousa, Shannon Stewart, Juliette Torrez, the Tracy family, Josh Warren-White and Tom Ward.
Interviews
We could not have uncovered this essential history without the first-person stories of dozens of individuals, many of whom we spoke to numerous times over the years. Their insights shaped our understanding and writing in countless ways.
Andy Keniston, February 2008
Al Metzger, August 2009
Bill Whalen, February 2008 and April 2008
Bob Lawson, December 2007, June 2011 and ongoing via email
Bob Lee, September 2006 and September 2007
Bob Simpson, August 2006
Burton Steck, January 2008
Carol Coronado, March 2009
Carl Davidson, August 2006
Cathy Wilkerson, April 2010
Christine George, December 2007
Chris Robinson, March 2007
Chuck Armsbury, March 2007
Dan Sidorick, May 2007, May 2011 and June 2011
Diane Fager, August 2006 and ongoing via email
Earl Billheimer, April 2009
Estelle Carol, August 2006
Fritz Kraly, March 2008
Fran Ansley, January 2008
Gene Bild, November 2007
Gil Fagiani, October 2006, July 2008
and ongoing via email/phone
Jaja Nkruma, May 2006
Jack Whalen, December 2007
Janet Sampson, December 2007
Jean Tepperman, December 2007
Jimmy Curry, August 2006
Jim Redden, April 2007
John Sinclair, April 2008
John Duffy, February 2007
Jose “Cha-Cha” Jimenez, February 2008 and July 2011
Judith Arcana, April 2008
Kirsten Anderson, May 2008 and June 2008
Margi Devoe, March 2008 and ongoing via email/phone
Marilyn Katz, July 2007
Mark Rudd, July 2008 and June 2011
Mary Driscoll, August 2007
Mary Hockenberry, March 2008
Melody James, September 2006
Michael Simmons, March 2010
Mike James, August 2006, March 2008
and ongoing via email/phone
Mike Klonsky, December 2007
Mike Laly, December 2007
Dr. Mike Smith, April 2008
Paul Finamore, February 2007
Paul Wozniak, April 2010, May 2010 and June 2011
Pat Sturgis, May 2007
Peter Kuttner, March 2008
Rennie Davis, July 2008
Rich “Pipe” Kroth, December 2007
Robert Barrow, October 2005
Sue Milligan, June 2007, May 2011 and June 2011
Steve Goldsmith, July 2008 and August 2008
Steve Max, December 2010
Steve Tappis, September 2005, June 2006
and ongoing via email/phone
Stone Greaser, October 2007
Tom Hayden, January 2006
Terry Doyle, November 2006
Willie Everich, July 2007
Notes
Documents unattributed to a particular archive come from the personal collection of the authors.
Many items cited from Peggy Terry’s personal collection can now be found at Wisconsin Historical Society under the “Peggy Terry Papers, 1937–2004,” call numbers Mss 1055; PH 6582; Audio 1460A; VHA 898-903. We are honored to have played a part in documenting her collection.
Foreword
1. Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 304.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Introduction
1. Author George Katsiaficas defines the New Left as a “world-historical movement” in the post-World War II era, which sought the wholesale remaking of economic and political systems. For the purposes of this book we agree with this broad definition, but in dealing with U.S.-based organizations we use the term more specifically to refer to those interrelated social uprisings in North America between 1956 and 1975, including the civil rights, student, national liberation, feminist, gay liberation, countercultural, anti-war, progressive labor and new communist movements. All of these uprisings made a defined break from the Old Left’s platform and terrain, though some drew stronger lessons from the old. All were interlinked to varying degrees, and shaped by the leading influence of civil rights organizers in the United States and Third World Liberation movements globally. Notable European Left movements also shaped activists’ understanding of the world social order during this period. Where differentiation is needed, we refer specifically to the Black Liberation, student Left, labor or other movements. See, George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 17–28.
2. Speech by Preacher-man (William Fesperman), July 19, 1969, Oakland, CA. Recording available from Pacifica Radio Archives, United Front Against Fascism Series, No. 5-9. Other details about the United Front Against Fascism Conference are drawn from interviews and “Gathering of the Clans,” Newsweek, August 4, 1969.
3. While the term “Third World” may seem outdated today it was commonly used at the time to refer to those nations, mostly in the Global South, struggling to gain independence from foreign rulers or suffering the long-term impacts of colonial occupation. To better understand the concept of “Third World” politics and liberation in the context of this era, we recommend Malcolm X’s historic speech, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963), widely available online; the essay “What is the Third World?” from the Third World Women’s Alliance newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, 1969–70; and the article “Strike Over But Struggle Goes On,” in The Movement 5:4, May 1969, 14–17, which includes first person interviews with the Third World Liberation Front activists in San Francisco. See also, Jason Ferreira, All Power to the People: A Comparative Study of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968-1974 (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2004); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, cited above.
4. James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 195–196.
5. While some of these organizations have been discussed briefly in other works, JOIN Community Union is the only organization that has been investigated thoroughly, and only insofar as JOIN was part of Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Research and Action Project. Most accounts of JOIN’s work and influence end in 1965–66 with ERAP’s dissolution, a full two years before JOIN alums created the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry. Some good starting points on JOIN’s work include, Kirkpatrick S
ale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1972); and Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001). In addition to this book, new films, writing and archival exhibits on the Rainbow Coalition and related groups are just starting to emerge, and we hope to see more in the years to come.
6. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Pelican Books, 1971), 14.
7. While all of these organizations focused on reaching working-class whites, JOIN and Rising Up Angry never had exclusively white memberships. The changing landscape of their neighborhoods along with their commitment to “rainbow politics” made it imperative to serve their entire community. In JOIN this included the important leadership of two Black Uptown residents, Dovie Thurman and Dovie Coleman, and in Rising Up Angry this included several leaders of color, including Soledad and José Rodriguez.
Chapter 1: The Common Cause is Freedom
1. The prior year CORE helped organize a massive push for federal enforcement of interstate transit desegregation. It had been more than fifteen years since the NAACP won a 6–1 Supreme Court ruling on the issue in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946). The high court’s decision was, of course, never enforced. During the summer of 1961, CORE assembled nearly five hundred individuals, Black and white, to board interstate buses in a direct challenge to local jurisdictions. Facing arsons, beatings and threats on their lives, they became known as the “Freedom Riders.” See Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Biographical details about Peggy Terry in this book are drawn from a variety of sources including Terry’s personal archives, her journals, published interviews with friend and journalist Studs Terkel, unpublished transcripts from biographer Dennis Winters and interviews with her family members. All quotes without citations are drawn from these sources and reprinted with the permission of her daughter, Margi Devoe.
3. See Tom Johnson, “The Mechanics of the Bus Boycott,” The Montgomery Advertiser, January 10, 1956. See also, Mary Fair Burks, “Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965, Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse and Barbara Woods, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 71–83.
4. Estimate taken from a pamphlet by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, Why We March, circa 1965. Retrieved from Peggy Terry’s personal collection.
5. Arthur M. Brazier, Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1969), 47–48.
6. See Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Jack Temple Kirby, “The Southern Exodus, 1910-1960: A Primer for Historians,” in The Journal of Southern History 49:4, November 1983, 585–600.
7. Other great migrations from the region include the forced removal of the Cherokee in the 1830s, and two major periods of African-American migration from central and southern Appalachia between 1865–1900 and 1916–1925. See James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, “The Trail of Tears,” in The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 160–173; Joe William Trotter Jr., “Introduction to Black Migration in Historical Perspective,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, Joe William Trotter Jr., ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–21; Jack Temple Kirby, “The Southern Exodus, 1910-1960: A Primer for Historians,” in The Journal of Southern History 49:4, November 1983, 585–600; and Isabel Wilkerson’s incredible narrative history of Black migration in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011).
8. Uptown also included a small population of Blacks and Native Americans, and a growing number of Latinos and Japanese Americans. In 1960 these communities totaled about 6 percent of the neighborhood. By the 1970 census the population showed significant changes as Black, Latino, Native American and Asian populations grew to 23 percent. Uptown’s Black population alone increased eightfold, and the Latino population, largely Puerto Rican, grew to 13 percent. See, Elizabeth Warren, Chicago’s Uptown: Public Policy, Neighborhood Decay and Citizen Action in an Urban Community (Chicago: Loyola University, 1979), 105–109.
9. See, Chad Berry, “Southerners,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, Web site (accessed January 4, 2008); and Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
10. Albert N. Votaw, “The Hillbillies Invade Chicago,” Harper’s magazine, February 1958, 64.
11. Gene Klinger, “What’s the Toughest Neighborhood in America?,” True magazine, October 1971, 27–34.
12. Jon Rice, “The World of the Illinois Panthers,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South 1940-1980, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 41–42.
13. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1971), 28.
14. Chicago Tribune, as cited in Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles, 186.
15. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1790 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Working Paper No. 76 (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).
16. Phillip J. Obermiller and Thomas E. Wagner, “Hands-Across-the-Ohio: The Urban Initiatives of the Council of the Southern Mountains, 1954-1971,” in Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner and E. Bruce Tucker, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 134.
17. While not the largest student organization in U.S. history, SDS is by far the most renowned with ongoing influence in 21st century politics. The student group grew out of one of the few socialist federations to survive the Red Scare, the League for Industrial Democracy. The group resurrected its youth wing as growing numbers of young intellectuals, fed up with Cold War ideology, started to coalesce around pacifism, civil rights and their distrust of the powerful. They quickly began to question the limits of their parent organization’s model as well. They saw “new insurgencies” brewing in America, in new locations, requiring new strategies. For the definitive history on SDS see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1972).
18. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, 98.
19. Despite its radical tenor, SDS’s early vision resided only a little farther to the left than the New Deal of its parent generation. Early SDS documents flatly rejected Soviet-style communism, while noting that virulent American anti-communism was equally corrosive of democratic values. The Port Huron Statement dubbed America’s lazy form of representative democracy a “politics without publics.” In its place, SDS suggested a completely horizontal form of democratic assembly, a “democracy of individual participation.” Directly inspired by the southern civil rights movement, they envisioned a society built on fraternity, economic self-determination and a fully participatory democracy. In their early days, they reasoned that the university, rather than the Old Left relic of the Party, represented the most democratic place to develop an intellectually grounded merger of liberalism and socialism for the new era. With ERAP’s launch SDS embraced community organizing as a necessary vehicle to complement or even replace the group’s campus work. See, Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, cited above.
20. Rothstein, “ERAP and How It Grew,” page 3 of unnumbered pamphlet from the author’s personal collection.
21. Carl Wittman and Thomas Hayden, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor,” in The New Student Left, Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 204.
22. While Stokely Carmichael is best known for asking whites to “organize their own,” civil rights leaders Ba
yard Rustin, Ella Baker and Anne Braden began encouraging white volunteers to live and organize in white communities as early as 1960. For examples see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 101–103; and Becky Thompson, A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 51.
23. Despite the growing troubles with white volunteers, Black civil rights leaders did collaborate with several important organizations of white southerners during this period. SNCC’s first white staff organizer, Bob Zellner, worked with Carl and Anne Braden of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and the Southern Mountain Project to organize white students and poor whites in tandem with the civil rights movement. As SNCC began turning white volunteers away, many more white volunteers swelled SCEF’s ranks. Many of them, especially those from middle and upper class families, often lacked sensitivity to poor white southerners. As Anne Braden put it, white volunteers had a reentry problem after leaving integrated civil rights groups where they’d come to see “every white face [as an] enemy.” The Bradens have since become icons of the era, and Zellner went on to found Grassroots Organizing Work, or GROW, in the Mississippi Delta in 1967. For more on these important efforts see Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 304; and Bob Zellner, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2008).
24. For more on Sherrod’s story see Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 52.