by Amy Sonnie
25. Richie Rothstein, “ERAP and How It Grew,” page 3 of unnumbered pamphlet.
26. In the end, only ERAP’s Chicago and Hazard, Kentucky, chapters actually reached majority white communities. The project in Hazard was also pivotal as it illustrated how the rural coal-mining crisis propelled southern migration to northern cities. In Hazard, jobless miners organized for a federal jobs program and compensation from the coal companies. Berman Gibson, president of the unemployed miners’ Appalachian Committee for Full Employment, and Hamish Sinclair, secretary of the Committee for Miners, visited college campuses in 1963 hoping to bring student activist support to Appalachia. Campus committees in support of the miners sprouted from a belief that “their work with predominantly white unemployed workers would enable the students to become an active bridge for a new kind of populist alliance, on the grounds of job discrimination against all workers black and white in an automated age.” See Hamish Sinclair, “Hazard, Kentucky: Document of the Struggle,” Radical America 2:1, January–February 1968, 1. Retrieved from Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
27. JOIN’s first action in May 1964 didn’t go over as well as they planned. Chabot and volunteer Max decided they would sell apples in Chicago’s Downtown Loop. The action was intended to evoke the Great Depression when unemployed workers sold apples on city streets as a matter of survival. The apple selling failed to rouse much support. For more on JOIN’s early work see, Richard Flacks, Chicago: Organizing the Unemployed (Ann Arbor, MI: Economic Research Action Project/Students for a Democratic Society, April 7, 1964). Report retrieved from Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
28. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1972), 103. The other ERAP chapters fumbled as well. Organizers in Cleveland, Newark and elsewhere spent their first six to twelve months working in local hang-out spots and trying to build relationships. A 1964 headline in The Michigan Daily summed up the reality: “ERAP Inches Toward Helping Nation’s Poor.”
29. For one of the internal arguments cautioning SDS to temper its wholesale shift to community organizing among the poorest of the poor, see Douglas Ireland and Steve Max, For a New Coalition (New York: Students for a Democratic Society Political Education Project, December 25, 1964). For a deeper look at this debate, see also Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor; and Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, both cited above.
30. In the Thirties and Forties, the group shaped how New Deal relief money was spent in the neighborhood, creating an infant wellness clinic, a recreation center and a hot-lunch program for unemployed workers. A council offshoot, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee pressured the Armour Company to accept the workers’ demands for a union. The BYNC also pioneered what would be known decades later as an “alternatives to incarceration” approach to juvenile crime. Chicago police turned first-time offenders under the age of sixteen to BYNC’s delinquency program. If family income was determined to be a factor, BYNC secured employment for the parents and the youth. See, Kathryn Close, “Back of the Yards: Packingtown’s Latest Drama: Civic Unity,” Survey Graphic, Magazine of Social Interpretation, December 1, 1940. Last accessed July 4, 2011 at www.newdeal.feri.org/survey/40c22.htm; and Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy (New York: Vintage, 1989).
31. The tension between the ideologically based community organizing of the Communist Party USA and the progressive-populist version associated with Saul Alinsky is best described in Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984). Though he had vocal critics, Alinsky deserves credit for inspiring The Woodlawn Organization, influencing key leaders in the Black Panthers, and even providing the rhetorical—if not political—inspiration for the “community union” concept that JOIN adopted. Also under his tutelage, the Industrial Areas Foundation pressured the Kodak Eastman Corporation to hire Blacks and protested banks and businesses to end redlining in loan practices to communities of color. His Rules for Radicals remains one of the best-selling book on radicalism in the U.S. and Alinsky is still widely respected for developing a model that places full individual participation and local solutions at the center of neighborhood organizing.
32. See Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel, cited above, 525. The two sides would clash again years later, but this time it was JOIN’s neighborhood leaders who confronted Alinsky, in part over competition for funding. When talk began that Alinsky might start a project in Uptown, JOIN responded, “We are alarmed at this possibility as we are mindful of the results of Alinsky’s organizing techniques in the Back of the Yards area of Chicago. It is our deep belief that in organizing poor whites one must deal honestly and openly with the problem of racism in our people.” See Peggy Terry, “JOIN Community Union: Funding Grant by SCLC to Realize the Goals of the 1968 Poor Peoples’ Campaign in the Uptown Community of Chicago,” date unknown.
33. John A. Andrew, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998).
34. 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), 43. This article may be the single most succinct account of the power politics of Chicago during the 1960s and how they contributed to the rise of the radical Left.
35. Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 423–424. Gitlin and Hollander both spent time as organizers with JOIN and have meticulously documented its history and the lives of key Uptown residents. As authors we are indebted to them for capturing this history as they were living it.
36. Richie Rothstein, “Evolution of ERAP Organizers,” in The New Left: A Collection of Essays, Priscilla Long, ed. (Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1969), 282.
37. Ruth Moore, “Tenant Union Signs Building Contract Believed City’s First,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 26, 1966.
38. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Pelican Books, 1971), 147.
39. The Chicago Freedom Movement’s list demanded an end to the northern brand of Jim Crow segregation and the ghettoization that resulted from discriminatory city and business practices. The list also called for the revocation of contracts with firms failing to uphold fair employment practices, citizen review boards to govern the police and increased public services in slum areas. See, The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle 1954-1990, Clayborne Carson, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); and James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Boston: Harvard University, 1993).
40. In 1951 Cicero had garnered worldwide headlines when more than three thousand whites rioted under the banner “White Power” to protest the “black slum invasion” of the neighborhood.
41. The chorus included the refrain, “Well, we’re gonna romp, and we’re gonna stomp, and we’re gonna have us a time. We’re gonna get, what the poor ain’t got yet. Gonna keep on the Firing Line.”
42. See Bob Lawson and Mike James, “Poor White Response to Black Rebellion,” The Movement, August 1967, 4; and Peggy Terry, “Poor Whites Must Decide,” The Movement, August 1967, 4.
43. Details of these events are drawn from personal interviews, with quotes from Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago; and Joseph Morang, “Arrest 5, Seize Dope in Raids on Civic Units,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1966.
44. While on the FBI’s payroll, Mosher joined the Young Patriots Organization, a successor of JOIN Community Union, and helped to coordinate the Black Panthers’ 1969 United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland, California. Mosher briefly returned to Stanford to complete his economics degree in 1968 and it was then he says the federal government asked him to start keeping tabs on movement leaders. According to Mosher�
�s reports to federal authorities he considered himself a part of the New Left until a trip to Cuba where a group of young radicals met representatives of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam who encouraged Americans to take up armed struggle, including bombing draft boards. Upon returning to the United States, Mosher claimed he visited SDS leader Mark Rudd outside of Boulder, Colorado, and that Rudd’s support for revolutionary violence cemented Mosher’s decision to work as an FBI infiltrator. Rudd recalls no such conversation with Mosher ever took place. He doubts Mosher’s story about his Cuba trip as well. For Mosher’s own account see T. Edward Mosher, “Inside the Revolutionary Left,” Reader’s Digest, September 1971; and “Testimony of Thomas Edward Mosher,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, 92nd Congress, First Session, Part 1, February 11–12 and March 19, 1971. Retrieved through a Freedom of Information Act request by the authors.
45. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 26.
46. For more on issues of gender within SNCC and SDS see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
47. Numerous other accounts of this moment exist including Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, cited above; and Stokely Carmichael and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2005).
48. First published in 1966. Reprinted two years later as Michael James, Getting Ready for the Firing Line (Chicago: JOIN Community Union, 1968).
49. Mike James, Diane Fager, Bob Lawson, Junebug Boykin, Tom Livingston, Tom Malear, Bobby McGinnis, Virgil Reed, Mike Sharon, and Youngblood, “Take a Step Into America,” Don’t Mourn—Organize! (San Francisco: The Movement Press, December 1967). Also reprinted in Loren Bartz, The American Left: Radical Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 406–417.
50. Peggy Terry, “Tellin’ It Like It Is,” speech to SDS Convention, December 27, 1967. Reprinted in The Firing Line newspaper, January 16, 1968.
51. Peggy Terry and Doug Youngblood, “JOIN: A New Outlook for the Movement,” date unknown.
52. Martin Luther King Jr., Western Union Telegram to Peggy Terry, March 6, 1968.
53. Peggy Terry’s personal journal from the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, April 4, 1968.
54. Fran Ansley, personal letter to Peggy Terry, April 10, 1968.
55. Peggy Terry, “Solidarity Day Speech at Lincoln Memorial,” June 19, 1968. Typewritten transcript. Other details drawn from Hoke Norris, “Vanguard of the Poor in D.C. Rally,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 13, 1968.
56. Interethnic tensions did erupt in Resurrection City as Latino and Native American leaders challenged the Black-white paradigm of race relations in the U.S. and in the civil rights movement. The conversations that began in May–June 1968 represent the beginnings of a more defined revolutionary nationalism for many Black, Latino, Native and Asian organizations. For a more nuanced exploration of the Poor People’s Campaign’s importance for multiethnic politics, see James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement, cited above; and Gordan Keith Mantler, Black, Brown and Poor: Martin Luther King Jr., the Poor People’s Campaign and Its Legacies (PhD Diss., Duke University, 2008).
57. Doug Youngblood, “Letter from Youngblood,” The Movement, September 1968.
58. Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
59. “A Letter from Eldridge Cleaver,” policy statement, printed by the Radical Caucus of Peace and Freedom Party, Alameda County, August 17, 1968; and “Cleaver for President” flyer, Peace and Freedom Party, date unknown.
60. In his career as a judge and a Democratic delegate, Wallace was originally a liberal on racial issues. The NAACP even endorsed him during the primary in his first bid for governor. Wallace lost to an opponent who had the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Vowing to “never be outniggered again,” Wallace turned coat and secured himself a landslide victory in the next election. Asa Carter, editor of the ardently racist Southerner magazine, wrote Wallace’s 1962 inauguration speech where he declared, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Playing to whites’ racial anxieties, the speech held out the deaths of white settlers in the Belgian Congo as evidence of things to come in the American South. See Stephen Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 1994), 122–127; and Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1996), 122.
61. Lesher, George Wallace, 104.
62. National Organizing Committee, press release, October 1, 1968; and National Organizing Committee/Peace and Freedom Party, “Statement to the Press,” October 2, 1968.
63. Courier-Journal, “Youths Cool to 4th Party Candidate,” date unknown.
64. Doug Youngblood, “You’ve Got the Right String But the Wrong Yo-Yo, Georgie Baby,” National Community Union paper, circa Fall 1968.
65. California Secretary of State, Statement of Vote General Election, November 5, 1968 (Sacramento: State of California, 1968). See also, Richard Rodda, “Big Southern Counties Deliver 220,000 Votes for Nixon Win,” The Fresno Bee, November 6, 1968; and Jerry Rankin, “Voting Last Week Shows Minor Party Difficulties,” Red Bluff Daily News, November 11, 1968.
66. See Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981); and Mark Toney, “Revisiting the National Welfare Rights Organization,” Colorlines magazine, Fall 2000.
Chapter 2: The Fire Next Time
1. Informally, the coalition counted other collaborators as well, including Rising Up Angry, another project descended from JOIN, and radical Third World groups like the Chicano Brown Berets.
2. Letter from an anonymous “Dislocated Hillbilly,” reprinted in Bruce Franklin, From the Movement Toward Revolution (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 111.
3. Historical studies of the Panthers tell slightly different accounts of their founding. Good starting points on this history include, David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); and Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).
4. Seale and Newton modeled their survival programs on the literacy schools and wealth redistribution programs established decades earlier by populist Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long, whom Huey P. Newton was named after, the San Francisco Diggers and Irish-American labor radicals in Virginia, the Molly McGuires.
5. For more on the history of the Young Lords Organization in Chicago and the Young Lords Party in New York, see Miguel Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, eds., The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); and Darrel Enck-Wanzer, The Young Lords: A Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
6. This idea was expressed concretely through the Communist International in 1928 and influenced the Communist Party’s support of southern Black sharecroppers and Black industrial workers in the North in the 1930s. For more on this fascinating history, see Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996); as well as Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). The idea was resurrected by Sixties Black radicals and popularized in the 1967 edition of Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage, 1992); and Robert Allen’s 1969 release of Black Awakening in Capitalist
America (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).
7. In the simplest terms, this concept of a nation was different from that of a country or state and mostly defied the imposition of borders. Under this definition, influenced by Stalin, nations were made up of people who share a common culture, language, history and consciousness, and may or may not determine their own right to secede from the imperialist country by claiming an independent land base. For a far more nuanced discussion of the Third World Left than we have space for here, see Laura Pulido, “Ideologies of Nation, Class and Race in the Third World Left,” Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 123–152; as well as 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). For more on the global uprisings from which they drew inspiration, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002); and George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, cited above.
8. The Patriot Party, “The Patriot Party Speaks to the Movement,” in The Black Panther Party Speaks, Philip S. Foner, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 239–243.
9. Clarus Backes, “Poor People’s Power in Uptown,” Chicago Tribune, September 29, 1968.
10. Keniston had been living in Kentucky and planned to work with the ongoing coal miners’ campaign in Hazard. There, he had met two men affiliated with the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a pioneering organization founded in the 1950s to bring white people into the struggle against segregation. SCEF was ahead of its time owing much to the incredible leadership of Carl and Anne Braden, who had faced an infamous sedition trial in the 1950s for covertly helping a Black family buy a home in a white neighborhood. Keniston planned to stay, but the organization hit a wall that year when local prosecutors once again charged the Bradens, and other organizers, with sedition for their racial justice and anti-poverty work. The organization was consumed by the legal battle and Keniston realized other political work there would have to wait. He and his wife, Mary Ellen Graham, moved to Fairborne, Ohio, to find work and it was there that he first met Mike James.