by Amy Sonnie
12. Rizzo conducted the raid with no evidence that the Panthers were behind the killings, and none has surfaced since. The infamous photo by Elwood P. Smith was circulated worldwide. See Deborah Boiling, “He’s Seen It All,” City Paper, August 22-28, 2002.
13. Frank Rizzo quoted in People Against Rizzo, Evening Bulletin, Philadelphia Free Press supplement, September 15, 1971.
14. Sue Milligan is a pseudonym used at the participant’s request.
15. According to the U.S. Census, Philadelphia’s Black population doubled after World War II, and rose another ten percent during the Sixties, though all sides assume the population was undercounted. By 1970, the official estimate put Philadelphia at thirty-four percent African American.
16. Frankenhauser v. Rizzo later set the standard by which private citizens could demand police records. Stephen M. Ryals, Discovery and Proof in Police Misconduct Cases (Frederick, MD: Aspen Publishers, 2002), 173–180.
17. See Jack McKinney, “The Voices of Dissent in Kensington,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 26, 1972.
18. Andrew J. Rotter, ed., Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Revised Edition, 1999), 138–139.
19. Telford Taylor, “… and of Deceit,” New York Times, January 3, 1973.
20. For original accounts of these events, see “Casts of 17 Shows Give $10,000 for Bach Mai,” New York Times, January 13, 1973; and Eileen Shanahan, “I.R.S. Disallows Tax Exemptions For Gifts to Hospital,” New York Times, July 9, 1973.
21. Emerging from the Black Women’s Caucus of SNCC, the Third World Women’s Alliance broke new ground in pursuing an agenda that centralized gender, race and class issues as part of their work. Further, groups like Triple Jeopardy, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and the Combahee River Collective laid the foundation for the emergence of influential women of color feminist theory rooted in early concepts of intersectionality. The importance of this political tradition is evident in the feminist canon, especially in the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many others. For the specific history of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in Philadelphia, see Carmen Teresa Whalen, “Bridging Homeland and Barrio Politics: The Young Lords in Philadelphia,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices From the Diaspora, Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 107–123.
22. O4O’s Chris Robinson details this and other efforts by the group in the pamphlet Plotting Directions: An Activist’s Guide (Philadelphia: Recon Publications, 1982).
23. From O4O’s newspaper: “People Force PECO Backdown,” A Single Spark!, Winter 1974.
24. For a detailed breakdown of Rizzo’s campaign finances in both mayoral runs, see Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King, cited above.
25. For more on this history see Russell Leigh Sharman, The Tenants of East Harlem (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 34–37.
26. For more on Fagiani’s life during this period, see Gil Fagiani, “East Harlem and Vito Marcantonio: My Search for a Progressive Italian American Identity,” Voices in Italian Americana, Volume 5, Number 2, (Fall 1994); and George De Stefano’s An Offer We Can’t Refuse: the Mafia in the Mind of America (New York: Faber & Faber, 2006), 282–284.
27. The term Synanon refers to an internationally utilized recovery and self-actualization method, which later devolved into a cult. Former members often faced retaliation, even escalating to attempted murder. See Rod Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia (New York: Nation, 2001), 40–43. See also Gil Fagiani, “An Italian American On the Left: Revolution and Ethnicity in the 1970s,” in Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society: Proceedings of the Symposium of the American Italian Historical Association 7, Jerome Krase and Judith N. DeSena, eds. (1994), 218–222.
28. The battle for a better Lincoln Hospital is most vividly memorialized in Fitzhugh Mullan’s White Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of An American Physician (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
29. The Chicago chapter was known as the Young Lords Organization, while the New York chapter was known as the Young Lords Party. For an accessible introduction to the New York Lords see Miguel Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).
30. See Juan Gonzalez, “Lincoln Hospital Emancipation Takeover,” New York Daily News, October 1, 2008; as well as Fitzhugh Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist, cited above.
31. See Dan Berger, Outlaws of America, cited above.
32. Michael Tabor, Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide (New York: Black Panther Party, no date).
33. White Lightning and the Panthers were right to suspect foul play. In 1996, San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb published a series of articles that finally proved the CIA connection with the explosion of the crack epidemic. Webb documented how the CIA allowed a flood of cocaine into poor neighborhoods in order to finance anti-socialist covert action in Latin America. His work lent credence to anecdotal suspicions that the U.S. government had used similar tactics in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era. Not without critics, Webb later published a book on the same theme with extensive citations, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
34. Sasha Abramsky, Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 67.
35. It took a while for Rockefeller’s approach to catch on. In the 1970s even conservative Republicans advocated medical not punitive measures against drug addiction and championed rehabilitation. In 1970, President Nixon passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which repealed federal mandatory sentencing guidelines, yet within a decade, they had become part of the tough-on-crime toolbox and emulated in dozens of states.
36. For more on this history, see Jim Rooney, Organizing in the South Bronx (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 44.
37. This practice allowed the same financial institutions to later buy up the buildings cheaply and redevelop the area at a profit. For original accounts of these events, see “Arson for Hate and Profit,” Time magazine, October 31, 1977; and “Fire Attacks On Our Neighborhood,” White Lightning newsletter, March 1975.
38. For more on El Comité see José E. Velázquez, “Another West Side Story: An Interview with Members of El Comité-MINH,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 88–106.
39. The term vanguard is an easily misused and misunderstood one. Lenin believed that in order for revolution to be possible, a single vanguard political party must be built to develop leadership among workers and provide political clarity during mass working-class rebellion. It was through a vanguard that revolution was possible by providing the continuity between periods of upsurge and decline. Among the U.S. Left a vanguard proved elusive. During the Depression, the Communist Party USA became the closest embodiment. They organized strikes, led militant anti-eviction efforts and mobilized the unemployed for relief. Their analysis of race could be simplistic (“Black and White, Unite and Fight”), but the Party’s willingness to defend and organize Black workers set them apart from other parts of the white Left which rode the fence on the Jim Crow issue.
40. Thanks to Dan Sidorick, Sue Milligan and Jack Whalen some of this rare archival material was not destroyed.
41. See Gregory Jaynes, “Philadelphia’s Message to Rizzo: ‘Enough,’ ” New York Times, November 9, 1978.
42. James F. Clarity, “Out of Mayoral Race, Rizzo Plans Career as Guardian of White Rights,” New York Times, November 8, 1978.
Epilogue
1. Even today, there are many examples of progressive organizing in this spirit. In rural Oregon, Bring the Ruckus does direct outreach at gun shows where reactionary forces recruit to urge atte
ndees to resist anti-immigrant scapegoating. Gathering forces from across the U.S., the Excluded Workers Congress has mobilized immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, and domestic workers against exclusion from traditional labor protections. In New England, the Vermont Workers Center won an incredible campaign for universal health care wherein a majority of residents stood in solidarity with undocumented immigrants for their equal right to medical services. Jobs With Justice combines bread-and-butter organizing with a sophisticated multiracial approach to alliance building, and there are many more.
2. Mike James, “Getting Off the Interstate: Or, Back Home in Heartbreak, USA,” The Movement, vol. 4, no. 8, September 1968, 5.