From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  The 1964 Civil Rights Act intensified the fury. By that October, in Mississippi alone fifteen people had been murdered and thirty-seven black churches torched or bombed. Police killed protester Jimmy Lee Jackson outside Selma in February 1965. As the Selma marchers dispersed from Montgomery, Klansmen—one an FBI informant—shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five, daughter of a coal miner and wife of a Teamsters business agent, who had come from Detroit to show solidarity with the movement.

  Amid the rising violence, black activists began to wonder if integration into the American mainstream was possible, or ever desirable. Federal concessions seemed meaningless: voting rights were not yet enforced; the War on Poverty had hardly begun;the Justice Department had not stopped white supremacist terrorism. Events in northern cities showed that intransigent racism and persistent poverty were not peculiar to the South. Hamer recalled, “I used to think that if I could go North and tell people about the plight of the black folk in the state of Mississippi, everything would be all right. But traveling around, I found one thing for sure: it’s up-South and down-South, and it’s no different.”

  In 1962 in Cambridge, Maryland, student protests against segregation at the movie theater and the skating rink roused local activists to demand not only desegregation in schools and hospitals but also jobs and housing. In June 1963, the National Guard arrived to keep the peace and stayed almost continuously for more than a year. The same month 3,000 black Boston students stayed out of public schools for a day to protest segregation; over the next school year hundreds of thousands of students staged protests in other northern cities. Also in June 1963, black New Yorkers picketed a Harlem construction site to protest their exclusion from the building trades unions. On March 6, 1964, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) blocked traffic on New York City’s Triborough Bridge to protest conditions in Harlem—substandard schools and public services, dilapidated housing, poverty, and police brutality.

  The righteous anger fueling these protests found an eloquent spokes-person in onetime railroad porter and petty criminal Malcolm Little. While in prison for burglary, he joined the Nation of Islam, renounced his “slave name,” and became one of the Nation’s most charismatic ministers. From Harlem’s Temple Seven, Malcolm X condemned American white supremacy in all its forms and called on African Americans to practice self-respect, self-defense, and self-determination. In 1964, he broke with the Nation; inspired by the African anticolonial struggle and the multiracial composition of orthodox Islam, he founded the Organization of African American Unity to promote political action as part of an international, multiracial movement against oppression. On February 21, 1965, he was gunned down at an OAAU meeting in Harlem.

  The anger Malcolm X tried to steer to political action burst out in a wave of urban rebellions. Protests against police brutality over the summer of 1964 in Harlem, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, Philadelphia, and other cities had turned violent, and most of the rebellions began as confrontations with police. In August 1965, in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles, when police pulled over a twenty-one-year-old, then arrested his mother when she protested, thousands of people gathered, forced the police to retreat, and began four days of rebellion. They took weapons from pawn shops and military surplus outlets, built barricades, stoned police and firemen to shouts of “This is for Selma” and “Long live Malcolm X.” They targeted stores known for price gouging, easy-credit schemes, and rudeness to patrons, sparing libraries, schools and black-owned businesses. The National Guard cordoned off the zone and cleared it street by street. Property damage totaled more than $35 million—thirty-four people were killed, nearly a thousand injured, over 4,000 arrested.

  The summer of 1966 saw rebellions in forty-three cities, with eleven people killed and more than 400 injured. The following summer was worse. The July revolt in Newark lasted six days, and spread to nearby New Jersey cities like Paterson, Passaic, and Elizabeth. Less than a week later Detroit broke out in the worst U.S. rebellion of the century—eight days of violence suppressed by federal troops. Seventy-five major rebellions that summer claimed eighty-three lives.

  As fires blazed in urban black ghettos, the southern civil rights movement shifted direction. In the summer of 1966, SNCC declared itself for “Black Power.” The new agenda originated in SNCC’s work with Alabama sharecroppers in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. LCFO practiced self-defense. Sharecroppers surprised their student allies by bringing guns to meetings; as one man explained, “You turn the other cheek, and you’ll get handed half of what you’re sitting on.” The organization ran its own candidates for public office, outside the Democratic Party. LCFO’s black panther insignia and the Black Power slogan electrified legions of civil rights activists.

  The slogan drew fire from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King publicly chided Black Power advocates for abandoning nonviolence. But even his wing of the movement charted an increasingly radical course. In 1966, SCLC opened its first campaign outside the South, joining Chicago civil rights groups to challenge discrimination in housing. In April 1967, King denounced the U.S. war in Vietnam and identified imperialism as the enemy of racial equality at home. That December SCLC inaugurated a Poor People’s Campaign dedicated to the radical redistribution of wealth. The right to organize took center stage in spring 1968, when black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, struck for union recognition and SCLC leaders rallied in support. On April 4, King was assassinated in Memphis, and black communities erupted, their youth battling police in more than 100 cities with forty-six lives lost.

  By the time of King’s death, the movement he had helped launch in Montgomery was starting to stall. Vigilante attacks had ebbed, but police repression had reached new heights. In 1967, the FBI deployed undercover agents to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit” every major civil rights group. In February 1968, police in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired on a peaceful black student protest at the local bowling alley, wounding twenty-eight and killing three. When Republican Richard Nixon entered the White House the following year, the FBI grew even more aggressive and the police more trigger-happy. Cooptation undermined the movement too. As black voters registered in greater numbers, the Democratic Party absorbed grassroots activism; its southern wing integrated under the control of the old establishment. But challenges to white supremacy were mounting outside the South, in communities where new organizations campaigned to empower the dispossessed.

  “POWER TO THE PEOPLE”

  In the late 1960s and 70s, activism surged in poor and working-class communities. Many activists got their start in groups supported by unions—Students for a Democratic Society came out of the League for Industrial Democracy, an old socialist group supported by officials from the UAW and other unions; CORE started with support from several unions including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the UAW and the Teamsters; SNCC had links to the Highlander Folk School, a worker education center started in 1932 in Tennessee, and got support from the United Packinghouse Workers as well as from the independent United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. More activists came fresh from the anti-imperialist wing of the peace movement, which renounced anticommunism and explored variations on the Marxist doctrine that only the organized working class could achieve revolutionary social change. The slogan “Power to the People” captured the general mood.

  The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, combined radical politics and militant tactics with community service programs. The Panthers saw black America as a colony—their goal was self-determination, their first concern survival. They demanded housing, education, jobs, exemption from military service for black men, release of black prisoners, black juries for black defendants, and an end to police brutality, reparations for slavery and discrimination, and a United Nations plebiscite to determine “the will of black people as to their national destiny.” Their community servic
es ranged from schools and day care to clinics, with programs for sickle-cell anemia and high blood pressure. They supported prisoners’ families with transportation and emergency cash grants, and collected clothing and shoes for school children. By 1969, their Free Breakfast program—run by welfare mothers and grandparents—served 23,000 children in nineteen cities.

  The Panthers also identified with African and Asian anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, recruited mostly young working-class men (especially veterans and ex-convicts), and conducted community patrols wearing black berets and armed with guns and law books to monitor police activities. By late 1968, the Party had twenty-five chapters from coast to coast, and had become the chief target of local, state, and federal police, coordinated by the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). By 1970, police had killed twenty-seven Party members. Chicago police shot Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their beds on December 4, 1969.

  The Panthers were not alone: groups in many communities adopted the combination of community service, militant protests, and special attention to youth, whether students, workers, or on the street and unemployed. (Black youth unemployment, first measured in January 1972 at 37.1 percent, fell below 30 percent only twice in the decade.) In Newark activists associated with writer and Black Power advocate Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) ran political and cultural projects ranging from the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN) to youth groups, cultural centers, community schools, repertory companies, and cooperative stores. In Detroit, SNCC veterans and a local group called UHURU started the monthly Inner City Voice in 1967 and founded the Republic of New Africa the next year. They also campaigned against police brutality—Detroit police held the national record for the rate at which they killed civilians.

  A series of Black Power conferences spun off national organizations. The Congress of African Peoples (established 1970) had branches in fifteen cities;in coalition with other groups CAP helped mobilize 30,000 people to march in Washington, D.C., on African Liberation Day (May 27, 1972), and 30,000 more in simultaneous demonstrations in San Francisco, Toronto, and several West Indian cities. The March 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, attended by about 10,000 activists, founded the National Black Assembly.

  Only in the census did the category “Hispanic” form a single group. Though most spoke Spanish, Latino communities differed in origin and history. Puerto Rican migration had soared after World War II, pushed by the island’s unemployment and pulled by industrial recruitment—U.S. Steel subsidiary National Tube Company and Carnegie Illinois Steel in Gary, Indiana, each brought in 500 mill hands from the island in 1947 and 1948. By the mid-1960s, more than a million Puerto Ricans lived in Northeast and Midwest cities. Most lived in New York City, where the Young Lords Party started in 1969 (borrowing the name from a Chicago youth group). The Party advocated self-defense, socialism, and self-determination for the Puerto Rican nation, and recruited workers, students, unemployed youths, and veterans returning from Vietnam. Its first community project was sweeping Spanish Harlem and South Bronx streets with brooms confiscated from the City Sanitation Department, but YLP soon set up free breakfast and clothing programs for children, tuberculosis and lead-poisoning testing, rent strikes, drug detox programs, and cultural activities—study groups, concerts, poetry readings, art shows. Most Young Lords were Puerto Rican (though the Party welcomed all Latinos); branches appeared in East Coast cities from New Haven to Philadelphia, and later in Puerto Rico. Other Puerto Rican groups developed, including La Unión Latina, Resistencia Puertorriqueña, and Puerto Ricans for Self-Determination. The pro-independence Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño, founded on the island in 1971, set up the first of many U.S. branches in 1973.

  Puerto Ricans also joined El Comité, a Manhattan West Side group started in 1970 by a neighborhood softball team of factory workers and ex-gang members led by Federico Lora, a Dominican Vietnam veteran. El Comité organized against urban renewal, moving squatters into condemned buildings then daring the city to remove them by force, a tactic adopted by many housing activists afterwards. El Comité also agitated for better public education, health care, and day-care centers, and supported strikes by Latino workers. Among the many political refugees who fled the Dominican dictatorship installed by U.S. Marines in 1965 were branches of opposition parties such as the Movimiento Popular Dominicano.

  French-speaking Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Like many Dominicans, Haitian immigrants were often refugees from a U.S. client regime, the dictatorship of François Duvalier and his son Jean Claude: “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc.” Tens of thousands came to New York City after Duvalier père came to power in 1957. Proud of Haiti’s standing as the second republic in the New World (and the first black republic anywhere), and affronted by the color line in U.S. society, Haitians tended to see their residence as one of transit, and to focus on ending the repression and exploitation that had forced them to emigrate. The Organization of Patriotic Haitian Women, for example, which started in New York in the early 1970s, insisted that feminist demands be subordinated to the task of Haitian liberation.

  More than two-thirds of the Latinos in the U.S. were of Mexican origin, and the largest Latino movement took shape in their communities. Migration from Mexico continued, both illegal and legal. The Bracero program, based on the 1942 agreement between Mexico and the U.S., brought in over four million farmworkers before it ended in 1964. Illegal immigration was probably higher. During the 1950s, La Migra—the Immigration and Naturalization Service—deported almost four million people to Mexico, more than a few of them U.S. citizens or legal residents. Immigrants did participate in the Mexican American movement, but it was based mainly among people born in the U.S. Like their African American and Puerto Rican counterparts, Mexican American activists moved from a civil rights agenda towards radical nationalism.

  In 1959, the Mexican American Political Association started to register voters and protest police brutality and discrimination in housing and education in southern California. A Texas group—the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASSO)—formed in 1961; in 1963, Crystal City PASSO and Teamsters activists backed a slate of working-class Mexican Americans who took over the City Council.

  The same year, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) formed to press claims for lands confiscated after the 1848 annexation. In 1966, La Alianza, with 20,000 members in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Texas, and California, turned from legal to direct action. Alianza activists occupied the Kit Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico, and in 1967 raided a local courthouse to free Alianza members from detention.

  Such militant actions galvanized young campus and community activists. They began to call themselves “Chicanos,” turning a disparaging term for Mexican Americans into a badge of pride, and started a host of new organizations. The Brown Berets, founded in 1967 in East Los Angeles, recruited barrio youth and modelled themselves on the Panthers. They joined the 1969 National Chicago Moratorium Committee, which staged mass protests against the war. The same year in south Texas, La Raza Unida formed to promote “the natural right of all peoples to preserve their self-identity and to formulate their own destiny,” and ran candidates on platforms calling for community control of schools, police, and public services.

  Black and Latino resistance to oppression reverberated in the prison population. Authorities reported sixteen inmate uprisings in 1970, organized by groups like the California Prisoners Union, which spoke for “the convicted class.” Inmates at California’s Folsom Prison staged a three week strike demanding better conditions and treatment, including the minimum wage and the right to organize; they asked Panthers and Brown Berets to negotiate for them. In August 1971, over half the 2,200 inmates at Attica Prison near Buffalo, New York, seized half the facility and thirty-nine guards, demanding “adequate food and shelter,” religious freedom, legal assistance, reading material, and fair wages for prison labor. After fou
r days of negotiation, state troopers stormed the prison, killing twenty-nine inmates and ten guards.

  Another prison made headlines when “Indians of All Nations” briefly (and for the second time) occupied the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. Their claim was based on an old broken treaty, but even long-established treaty rights were under new attack. Between 1946 and 1960, tribes lost over 3.3 million acres of land, and reservation activists were organizing from Alaska to Florida over issues like water rights, fishing rights, and land use.

  A third of the country’s half-million Native Americans lived off reservations, mostly in cities. In 1968, Native American ex-convicts in Minneapolis-St. Paul started community patrols against police abuse and founded the American Indian Movement, which popularized the slogan “Red Power” and called for a return to native traditions. AIM joined the pantribal “Trail of Broken Treaties” in 1972, which took a caravan of cars and trucks to Washington, D.C., and seized BIA offices. In 1973, Oglalas tyrannized by paramilitary goons working for Pine Ridge Reservation Chairman Dick Wilson, asked AIM for help. AIM mustered at Wounded Knee and withstood a ten-week siege by the U.S. Army, though two members were killed by crossfire. Targeted by COINTELPRO and racked with dissension, AIM faded as an organization, but Native American traditions of protecting Mother Earth helped rally environmental activitists to support the Navajos who defied a 1974 act of Congress mandating the removal of more than 10,000 people from their ancestral homeland on coal-rich Big Mountain in Arizona.

  Native Hawaiians also asserted ancestral land claims, as well as demanding reparations for the 1890s coup and annexation. The movement targeted land seized by the U.S. military, especially 600,000 acres taken during World War II. In 1976, protesters occupied Kaho’olawe Island, used as a target range since 1941, and forced its demilitarization and decontamination.