by Amy Sonnie
11. This speech was transcribed in FBI surveillance files on William Fesperman, from an appearance at University of North Carolina, Raleigh, September 1969. Retrieved from the personal collection of Bob Simpson.
12. Other New Left organizations also tried to capture the flag away from its racist connotations. The Southern Student Organizing Committee (dubbed by some as the “SDS of the South”) experimented with a similar emblem featuring black and white hands shaking over a Confederate Flag. Claude Weaver, a Black Harvard student active with SNCC, created the symbol. See Gregg Michel, Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964-1969 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 50. To gain a deeper understanding of the history of Southern progressive organizing, see archival issues of Southern Exposure and 1960s issues of the Southern Conference Education Fund’s newspaper, The Southern Patriot.
13. Mike Gray, “Chicago: August 28, 1968,” liner notes for American Revolution II, DVD, dir. Mike Gray (Chicago: Facets Video, 1969; re-released 2007).
14. Chuck Geary was one of the few local organizers who hadn’t actually come up through JOIN Community Union. Geary emigrated to Uptown from Jugville, Kentucky, for the same reason everyone else did: a job. After JOIN’s demise Geary decided to start a new program called the Uptown Coalition to focus on defeating urban renewal and fixing up dilapidated buildings. With seasoned organizers like Peggy Terry on the group’s steering committee, the group conducted door-to-door surveys counting as many as four thousand residents who would be displaced by plans for a new city college. There is very little scholarship about the considerable contributions of Charles Geary to Uptown’s progressive, anti-racist politics. What little exists tends to confuse Geary’s Uptown Coalition with the Rainbow Coalition. While Geary supported its formation, the Rainbow Coalition was formally only an alliance between Panthers, Patriots and Lords. See Charles Geary, What I’m About Is People (Chicago: Children’s Press, 1970).
15. Untitled article, Chicago Tribune, Jul 12, 1970, L17–20.
16. “Young Patriots,” leaflet, date unknown. From Peggy Terry’s personal collection.
17. Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 179.
18. This Poor People’s Coalition was unrelated to the national Poor People’s Campaign started by Martin Luther King Jr. before his death.
19. Barbara Joyce, “Young Patriots,” in The Movement Toward a New America, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Knopf, 1970), 546–548.
20. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 123.
21. See Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 11. See also the documentary COINTELPRO 101, dir. Freedom Archives (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011).
22. One of the best historical sources on this tragedy exists in the firsthand footage compiled in The Murder of Fred Hampton, dir. Mike Gray and Howard Alk (Chicago: Facets Video, 1971; re-released 2007). See also: Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010).
23. African People’s Socialist Party, “Interview with Akua Njere (Deborah Johnson),” Burning Spear, June 1990.
24. Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton, 76.
25. Arthur Turco was also implicated in the Baltimore case, but he was eventually acquitted. Little else is known about Turco except for this case. He briefly practiced law in New York City and attempted to represent the Panther 21 defendants who had been arrested for plotting to blow up city buildings, but were later cleared. Shortly after the dissolution of the Patriots, he seemed to disappear from public view. Records kept by the New York State Bar Association show that he was disbarred in the mid-Seventies.
26. For a good account of the Panther 21 trial, see Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). See also, Bill Fesperman, “Patriot Party Attacked,” The Patriot, March 21, 1970, 10; and Liberation News Service, “Young Patriots,” in The Movement Toward a New America, Mitchell Goodman, ed. (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1970).
27. The charges against Seale for the Alex Rackley murder were eventually dropped. See, Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale and the Redemption of a Killer (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
28. This and other stories of the Eugene chapter of the Patriots Party are documented in surveillance files now at the Portland City Archives. Thanks to author and journalist Jim Redden for pointing us toward them. Chuck Armsbury provided additional archival material, including a copy of the Genocide Complaint. Jaja Nkruma described the improbable growth of the Eugene Patriots in an interview over catfish sandwiches in Oakland. Part of this story can also be found in his essay Short History of the Black Panther Party in the Eugene Oregon Chapter on the Black Panthers archival website, www.http.itsabouttimebpp.com/Chapter_History/Eugene_Oregon_Chapter.html (last accessed May 4, 2011). Thanks to Daniel Burton-Rose for sharing notes about his research into this portion of Armsbury’s history, now captured in the book Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anti-Capitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
29. The Prisoner Rights Movement in the U.S. is a powerful outgrowth of the Sixties upheaval. Good points of departure in this study include Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Eric Mann, Comrade George: An Investigation Into the Life, Political Thought and Assassination of George Jackson (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Jamie Bissonette, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1974); Part I of Angela Y. Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); and more recently, Dan Berger, We Are the Revolutionaries: Visibility, Protest and Racial Formation in 1970s Prison Radicalism (PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010).
30. At the time, such legal work was made possible by inmates’ access to law books and their ability to file complaints with the help of outside attorneys. McNeil’s prisoners enjoyed a Writ Room, in which determined prisoners could learn the ropes of legal research.
31. Raymond Tackett interviewed by Peter M. Michels, “Aufstand in den Ghettos,” Zur Organisation d. Lumpenproletariats in d. USA. (Frankfurt a.M., 1971): Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl (1972, Hamburg). Translated for this book by Amber Tellez.
32. “Raymond Tackett Murdered in Kentucky,” Rising Up Angry, February 11–March 4, 1973.
33. Among the only books to feature the Young Patriots are Philip S. Foner, The Black Panthers Speak; Bruce Franklin, From the Movement Toward Revolution; and Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, each cited above.
Chapter 3: Pedagogy of the Streets
1. In May 1970 the New York Times published a poll reporting that more than three million U.S. college students thought revolution was necessary. While staggering, this number reflects only one sector of a much broader Left whose revolutionary outlook and impact was never captured in single statistic. As found in Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002), 18.
2. For more on these events see, Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew (London: Verso, 1997).
3. As author Dan Berger summarized, “It was a split over class and race, aboveground versus underground, Communist party versus armed revolutionary movement—and more than a few strong egos were involved.” See, Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 87. Other good accounts of these debates and the end of SDS are included in Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air; and Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, cited above.
4. After t
he splits, RYM II returned to the Old Left’s arena of class conflict to build revolutionary organization and multiracial unity among workers. Among them was JOIN’s Steve Goldsmith who spent the next ten years organizing in a Midwest steel mill, and Mike Klonsky, a Chicago activist close to members of both JOIN and Rising Up Angry, who worked in various factories over the next decade. Meanwhile, the now-famous Weathermen set out to act as a pressure valve, forcing the FBI to pursue them rather than revolutionaries of color. Within a few months of the split at the SDS convention, Weather planted dynamite at the police memorial statue at Haymarket Square in Chicago, starting a five-day clash between police and protesters dubbed the Days of Rage. After the protests failed to produce the mass turnout Weather had hoped, the group refocused their efforts to build a small but decisive cadre of militant fighters. Some Weather members went underground. Over the next few years, the Weather Underground Organization played a role in at least two-dozen deliberate bombings of targets associated with the U.S. government or corporations. The only proven fatalities Weather ever caused were their own. For more on RYM II’s history and participants, see Elbaum, Revolution in the Air. For more on the evolution of the Weather Underground, see Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007); as well as Berger, Outlaws of America; and Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew.
5. Rising Up Angry’s inclusion of Ireland as part of the Third World pantheon was part of a larger Left tradition of collaboration between U.S. and Irish radicals. Leaders in the Irish movement were deeply influenced by the southern Civil Rights Movement, while U.S. radicals drew inspiration from Ireland’s history of resistance to British rule, especially during the twentieth century. Irish leaders like James Connolly, a Marxist, radicalized the Irish struggle by asserting that nationalism would only be revolutionary if the end goal was socialism. This was an important distinction for Sixties radicals, as well. As Connolly wrote, “The Republic I would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal should be of such character that the mere mention of its name would at all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land.… Nationalism without Socialism—without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin—is only national recreancy.” See James Connolly, Collected Works, Vol. One (Dublin: New Books, 1987), 304–305.
6. For an authoritative firsthand account of veterans who joined the anti-war movement, see Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). Also view, Sir! No Sir!, DVD, directed by David Zeiger (Los Angeles: Displaced Films, 2006).
7. In the mid-twentieth century, a host of radical thinkers, most notably Antonio Gramsci, turned their attention to the power of culture in society. Gramsci coined the phrase “cultural hegemony” to describe the intricate web of tradition, media and mores that produce a “common sense” in working-class people. Simply put, hegemony is a shared sense of reality that builds compliance with the State and capitalism. Imprisoned by Mussolini in the 1930s and writing from an Italian prison, Gramsci could not have anticipated rock-and-roll as both a product of capitalism and a tool of revolutionaries. Rising Up Angry set out to break this compliance and create a popular culture of Left politics among the urban white working class.
8. The legendary rock band MC5 was an important vehicle for another white-led radical group at the time: the White Panther Party in Detroit. Founded by John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon in 1968 as a response to Huey Newton’s suggestion that whites should organize a Panther Party of their own, the White Panthers eschewed the Serve the People breakfast programs and free clinics in favor of using rock-and-roll to launch a “total assault on culture.” For their efforts they were rewarded with relentless FBI surveillance, an attempted frame-up for an explosion at a CIA office and, later, exile. Sinclair was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of two joints. His case became a cause célèbre, with Sinclair Freedom Rallies attracting performers such as Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Muddy Waters, Bob Seeger and the Stooges. At the pinnacle of the campaign, John Lennon recorded a protest song calling for Sinclair’s release: “If he’d been a soldier man / Shooting gooks in Vietnam / If he was the CIA / Selling dope and making hay / He’d be free, they’d let him be / Breathing air, like you and me” (Lyrics from Lennon’s “John Sinclair,” 1972).
9. The Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves broke ground as the first publication to address women’s bodies, sexuality and health care in a radical framework (it was originally named “Women and Their Bodies” and spanned 193 pages). Framed by both the assertion of women’s liberation and the openness of the sexual revolution, the book brought questions about women’s bodies and reproductive health out of the shadows. There have been numerous revised editions since the Seventies, including special editions on issues like menopause and pregnancy. To this day, Our Bodies Ourselves, now nearly 800 pages in length, is considered the leading source on health information “by and for women.”
10. D&C means “dilation and curettage.” For more on this work, see the excellent self-published document, Jane: Documents from Chicago’s Clandestine Abortion Service 1968–1973 (Chicago: Firestarter Press, 2004). See also the award-winning film Jane: An Abortion Service, DVD, directed by Nell Lundy and Kate Kirtz (Independent Television Service, 1995).
Chapter 4: Lightning on the Eastern Seaboard
1. Nixon’s 1971 Executive Order 11625 set specific goals for a Minority Business Enterprise contracting program. For a brief summary of this history, see: “The History of Affirmative Action Policies,” In Motion Magazine, October 12, 2003.
2. The growth of the New Right follows a complex path. The term “New Right” is often used as a synonym for the Christian or evangelical Right that rose to the national stage during the Seventies. Here, we use the term to encompass a rightward political shift (present in both political parties) marked by the growth of right-wing populism in reaction to civil rights and the War on Poverty expansion of social welfare. A concise and insightful explanation of the dynamics contributing to the rise of the Right appears in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin’s America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University, 2000); and in Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). For an expansive look at the history of right-wing populist movements in the U.S., see Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000).
3. For an introduction to the role of white resentment and the resurgence of ethnic essentialism during this period, see Thomas J. Sugrue and John D. Skrentny’s article, “The White Ethnic Strategy” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
4. Nelson Rockefeller didn’t invent the War on Drugs—Richard Nixon did when he made the anti-drug agenda a central part of his presidency—but the Rockefeller Laws provided the blueprint for states to implement it. As the War on Drugs continued, the U.S. prison population spiked dramatically. By the year 2000, it reached a record two million people, most imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. Counting those on probation and parole, the total number of people in the system at the turn of this century was a shocking 6.4 million. Ten years later, it climbed again to 7.2 million. For additional information on the history of the Rockefeller Laws, see New York Civil Liberties Union, The Rockefeller Drug Laws: Unjust, Irrational, Ineffective (March 11, 2009).
5. Accounts of this incident vary greatly, especially on its exact year. 1779 is used here because it is the year cited in O4O literature. For one account, see Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the “Lower Sort” During the American Revolution, 1775-1783 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U
niversity Press, 1973).
6. While their work was considerable, O4O was not the only Left organization in Philadelphia to build a base with white working-class communities. The Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee, a Marxist-Leninist organization, also sent a cadre into workplaces to organize laborers.
7. Paul Lyons’s book The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003) covers this and other important moments in Philadelphia’s Left tradition.
8. Robert Barrow is a pseudonym used at the participant’s request.
9. Peter Binzen, Whitetown USA (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 81.
10. Journalist Nora Sayre’s firsthand account of Philadelphia’s left offers both anecdotes and analysis, see Nora Sayre, Sixties Going on Seventies: Revised Edition (New York: Arbor House, 1996), 90. Originally published in 1973.
11. Several different versions of this quote appear in news articles. Some attribute it to his plans for anti-police protestors, but most agree he made the comment to a reporter during his bid for reelection in 1974. Of course this was just one of many inflammatory statements. Rizzo’s excesses even shocked members of the political establishment. Former Philadelphia mayor and U.S. Senator Joseph Clark remarked at the time, “He’s a stupid arrogant son of a bitch—and that’s on the record.” For a complete history of Rizzo’s rise to power, there is no better book than Joseph Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King: Mayor Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).