by Amy Sonnie
No country has pursued this goal more successfully and ruthlessly than the United States, which, at its founding, announced its intention of conquering and eliminating all the Indigenous peoples west from the original thirteen states to the Pacific Ocean. The United States spent the next hundred years at war against Indigenous nations, thereby building the foundation for the most aggressive and violent military machine in human history. Soon after the founding of the United States, as the Spanish American colonies became independent republics, the “Monroe Doctrine” proclaimed the intention of dominating the whole hemisphere. By 1848, half of Mexico was annexed to the United States, which extended economic dominance over the rest of Latin America. These events secured for the settler nation a place among world empires. After World War I, the United States was recognized by the European imperialist powers as an equal, and after World War II, a superior.
When we imagine the consequences of this process, it had to be deeply corrupting of the European settler and his descendant, the American settler—so deep it is not even consciously acknowledged or interrogated. White supremacy and empire were normal. And, in this process, generations since its colonial beginnings have been corrupted or confused, often self-hating, not understanding why. Violence resulted at every level, from individual white supremacy to regeneration of the white republic through violence against non-white peoples. The identity politics born in the Sixties were just a temporary solution to the burden of the past. Now, we are stuck, having played out the multicultural program. All the while, the origin myth of the United States has remained intact, as virginal as the myth created by the colonizers, that they were claiming virgin land, unpopulated, in its original state. Gone is the truth of vast territories populated and transformed by Indigenous farmers for millennia who built towns and governments, perfected crops, managed ecosystems, fished, hunted, traded, practiced sacred rites.
These Indigenous farmers were easy to kill, by burning or stealing their crops and storehouses of food, or stealing the food. It’s always been easy to kill farmers, but until the rise of capitalist-based colonialism, no one wanted to kill farmers, because the farmers fed everyone. Conquerors required tribute in food from the farmers. Yet, people still had to eat under capitalism, so the colonizers enslaved Indigenous African farmers and brought them in chains to the Americas. They also brought destitute British and European farmers who had been evicted from their farms through the enclosure of the commons. Once the Indigenous American communities were reduced or removed, these two groups—poor whites and enslaved Africans, who also intermarried with Indigenous individuals—made up the majority of the population of the British colonies in North America.
In these thirteen colonies, around 20 percent of the population of 2,780,400 were Africans at the moment of independence. There were 200,000 enslaved Africans in Virginia alone, more than in any of Britain’s twenty-two colonies in the western hemisphere. By 1820, an estimated 20 percent of the nine million U.S. Anglo settler population lived west of the Appalachian/Allegheny mountain range. By 1860, the U.S. settler population was thirty million, and half of them lived west of the mountains.2 This was one of the most rapid transfers of human populations in history. But it was not a natural migration. It was government-planned colonization with Indigenous territories cleared of their inhabitants by the military, and settlers given the land, resulting in markets guaranteed to the farmers by the government that was backed by its Navy and Marines. During the 1840s and 1850s, millions of white settlers were recruited to immigrate from Europe and given passage, tools and land, to people the territories taken. Sometimes this process is described as a rush of land-hungry farmers, in a democratic setting, forcing their government to destroy Indigenous villages and remove the survivors so that white settlers could have land. But that is not how it happened.
At the onset of the industrial revolution, millions of Indigenous Irish fled the famine in their British colonized homeland. The rapid development of industrial capitalism in the United States brought the opening of immigration to southern and eastern Europeans, many of them Jews fleeing pogroms and socialists fleeing persecution. Chinese and Filipino males were also recruited as cheap labor. Mostly European immigrants found jobs in urban areas, but many also worked in the mines in remote regions. This period of rapid development during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the formation of a huge immigrant industrial workforce, coincided with the wars against the Indigenous nations in the Plains and the annexed Mexican territory in the west and southwest parts of the continent. The establishment of the oppressive reservation system on reduced portions of their original territories left the Indigenous population living in the conditions of war refugees, totally dependent upon the occupying country.
This is the context within which we need to place and evaluate the role of “poor whites,” “white trash,” “rednecks,” “crackers,” “hillbillies,” descendants of the original landless or land poor settlers, the ones that kept moving westward with the United States, squatters sent to fight the native inhabitants. Under Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, the process was institutionalized with the Homestead Act. The small farmers, those frontier trekkers, the foot soldiers of the United States project of imperialism, have been blamed for a lot, but they were not in control of their destinies, although they committed many crimes. They seemed to know it. Those westward “pioneers” practically drowned with alcohol consumption, the men at least. The men and the women fed their guilt into feverish evangelism, waves of it from the 1790s on into the 21st century with the “Tea Party” movement.
These descendants of the early settlers, those with little or no land or other property, have long been a problem for the U.S. ruling class, while being invisible or a blur to the urban population. Why a problem? They are evidence of the failure of the “American Dream.” The mythology that they have some rights, some prominence in the national story buys the population’s loyalty to the state, even though they have no say in its affairs. They are the people who give the lie to the Jeffersonian ideal of a rural republic of yeoman farmers, of the bootstraps paradigm. They were the foot soldiers of British and United States colonization in North America. They have been the point men on the front lines, killing Indian farmers to take their land, only to be displaced by land companies turning the land into real estate, later coal companies, oil companies, timber companies, agribusiness, cities. The displaced poor whites often moved on to repeat the pattern in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, parts of Texas, and even the fruit fields and cotton fields of the California Central Valley. The Appalachian poor whites relocated to Cincinnati, Chicago and other industrial cities for jobs in factories. All along, they have made up the majority of the military, still cannon fodder, but feeling righteous and “patriotic.”
History is made up of stories, but those stories are meaningless or even distorting without an analytical context within which the narrative plays out. Many of the dedicated and brave organizers of the 1960s did not think of their work within this larger historical context. And that remains a fundamental problem today.
This essential book documents a moment in time when a group of radical organizers in Chicago, in cooperation with the Black Panther Party and other radicals of color, recognized a revolutionary potential in young, displaced Appalachians and other poor whites descended from the old settlers. These people were the Achilles heel of the U.S. origin myth and the “American Dream.” These organizers attempted, for over a decade, to cut at the tendon of that myth. Given the invisibility of this history, this book couldn’t be more timely and more necessary.
Poor whites are here today … to make ourselves visible to a society whose continued existence depends on the denial of our existence. We are here today united with other races of poor people, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, Indians, and Black people in a common cause. That common cause is freedom!
—Peggy Terry at the Poor People’s Convention
Washington, D.C., June 19, 196
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Panthers and Patriots together at the United Front Against Fascism Conference, Oakland, CA, July 1969.
(Photo by Stephen Shames)
Introduction
In July 1969 a dozen self-identified hillbillies showed up to a Black Panther Party conference with Confederate flag patches sewn to their ragged jean jackets. Just above the flag, three hand-painted letters identified their radical outfit: Y.P.O., the Young Patriots Organization. To outsiders, the Panthers’ reputation for self-defense combined with the very real violence committed under the Southern Cross might seem to guarantee a nasty brawl. Instead, prominent Panthers welcomed members of the Young Patriots Organization like all revolutionary brothers and sisters—with a fist in the air and “All Power to the People!”
The Young Patriots had come to Oakland, California, for the United Front Against Fascism Conference. They arrived from Uptown, a Chicago neighborhood home to thousands of economically displaced Appalachians, mostly white, who had turned the area into a bastion of southern culture. Their families had moved North in search of work after mining and agriculture work started to disappear. But only a few found steady jobs. The rest scraped by on day labor, hustling and domestic work. By one estimate more than 40 percent of the neighborhood was on some form of welfare. It was their families the Sunday Tribune had deemed a “plague of locusts” descending on the city. Yet, Uptown’s residents also represent some of the lesser-known protagonists in the Sixties New Left.1 As one Patriots member put it, “We are the living reminder that when they threw out their white trash, they didn’t burn it.” That trash was picking itself up.
The Young Patriots were part of a new trifecta with the Chicago Black Panther Party and a Puerto Rican street-gang-turned-political-organization called the Young Lords. Under the banner of the “Rainbow Coalition” they formed a “vanguard of the dispossessed.” While ultimately short-lived, the Rainbow Coalition created by these groups had deeper roots and a longer legacy than even their FBI tailgaters might have imagined. And yes, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had tabs on them from the beginning. This was half the reason they traveled together to Oakland in July 1969. Called by the Black Panther Party, then at the peak of their fame, the United Front Against Fascism Conference addressed two urgent concerns: community control of police who were terrorizing poor neighborhoods and mutual protection against the federal government’s escalating attacks on the Left.
The three-day conference drew more than two thousand self-styled revolutionaries from across the nation. Black Panthers in their black berets and sleek leather jackets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Young Patriots wearing the flag of the Confederacy. Joining them in the cavernous Oakland Auditorium were American Indian activists on the verge of their famous Alcatraz Island takeover, members of the Young Lords flying the bandera of Puerto Rico, Chicano farm workers wearing the Aztec eagle, sympathetic lawyers juggling a full docket of conspiracy trials, more than a few police informants, and members of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) in the middle of a fierce organizational split that led to at least one fistfight before Panther leaders told the factions to “freeze on that shit” for the rest of the weekend.
Outside the auditorium, Panther members and sympathizers watched their kids play while serious looking radicals floated in and out listening to speeches by Panther defense lawyer Charles Garry, Penny Nakatsu speaking out about internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, city councilmember Ron Dellums, and an especially moving message from jailed Panther Ericka Huggins read by Elaine Brown. The Young Patriots’ own chairman, William Fesperman, even let some heartfelt gratitude show in between jibes about the “pig power structure” when he explained how the Patriots came to be at the conference: “Our struggle is beyond comprehension to me sometimes and I felt for a long time [that poor whites] was forgotten … that nobody saw us. Until we met the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and they met us and we said let’s put that theory into practice.” Summing up why they had all come to Oakland, he added, “We want to stand by our brothers, our brothers, dig?”2
For the leftists gathered that July, a life or death battle was unfolding. While the depths of the FBI’s covert counterintelligence program wouldn’t come to light for years, dozens of movement activists had been killed, and others sat in jail facing serious legal charges. Among them: Panthers cofounder Huey Newton, several leaders of the Sixties student movement, and renowned icons of the Yippie youth counterculture Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Though the government reserved its most vicious attacks for Black and Brown radicals, by 1969 nearly ever sector of the U.S. Left was caught in its crosshairs. The conference in Oakland reminded movement leaders that unity was going to be their most effective defense strategy. As Chicago Panther Fred Hampton put it, “You can jail the revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution.… You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation.”
Hampton, it turned out, had written his own elegy. The Rainbow Coalition, spearheaded by Hampton and fellow Panther Bob Lee, lit a spark in the movement but ignited a fuse with deadly outcomes. Less than six months later Chicago police murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. The nighttime raid was orchestrated with the help of the FBI and a local informant. Hampton had been drugged so he wouldn’t wake up to fight. To understand the Patriots is to understand this history as well. To understand their militancy is to understand the severity of the conditions they faced, both the poverty they grew up in and the drastic police response to their community organizing work with the Rainbow Coalition. To understand how they might adopt a symbol of southern racism or call themselves “hillbilly nationalists” is to understand how and why Sixties radicals rose up to determine their own destinies and call for a revolution. To understand the Young Patriots’ origins and importance is to understand a longer legacy of “rainbow politics” in Chicago and beyond that began in the early Sixties and lasted well into the Seventies.
Beginning with Jobs or Income Now in Chicago, and continuing with the Young Patriots Organization, Rising Up Angry and its two sister groups on the east coast, White Lightning in the Bronx and October 4th Organization in Philadelphia, this book traces an historical arc among five community-based organizations that directly challenged white supremacy while struggling for the class interests of poor and working-class white people. Without inflating their impact, we follow the stories of the era’s lesser-known leaders over more than a decade of community organizing. In an era of intense urgency, this protracted approach to community organizing set them apart from other segments of the New Left in the United States. Over time their defined independence from the student milieu and dedication to community, rather than campus or electoral organizing, also set them apart. They carved out a community organizing approach that addressed poor people’s immediate concerns—health, welfare, housing, jobs, drug addiction and police violence—while paying strategic attention to civil rights and multiracial coalitions. This approach opened direct links to struggles in communities of color, allowing poor and working-class whites to participate as actors, not just allies, in the struggle for racial and economic justice.
The seeming contradiction of confederate flag waving revolutionaries in deep dialogue about Black Power and Third World Liberation is less extraordinary than the fact that anyone doubted poor and working-class whites’ participation in the first place.3 Yet, they did. Whether presumed under the thumb of traditional labor unions or conservative politicians, white workers’ revolutionary potential was debated and doubted. Even some well-intentioned attempts to organize poor white communities mistook their neighborhoods as simply a training ground for student organizers, who left when they wanted. Others dismissed poor whites as too narrowly focused on their immediate problems, or worse, decided that some people were simply too poor to organize. Not every one agreed, but they certainly debated the question. In the mid-Sixties, SDS president Paul Potter warned the student movement away from over-emphasizing the “problems of the dispossessed.” Potter belie
ved that the movement needed to take growing middle-class frustrations more seriously. “It is through the experience of the middle class and the anesthetic of bureaucracy and mass society that the vision and program of participatory democracy will come—if it is to come,” Potter argued.4
Until recently, the narrative of the Sixties New Left largely excluded serious mention of poor and working-class whites who formed or took over radical organizations.5 Instead, historians have tended to focus on the oppositional role of white workers—Teamsters, construction workers and carpenters—who violently confronted anti-war protesters, disregarded the plight of fellow Black and Brown workers, and cajoled labor’s support for U.S. military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia. Most often poor and working-class whites appeared as the frontline of violent, racist backlash against civil rights and the loyal supporters of Mississippi’s Ross Barnett and Alabama’s George Wallace. It’s a fact that Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign drew whites by the tens of thousands to rallies nationwide. Yet woven among the watershed events of the Sixties and Seventies are dozens of examples of poor and working-class whites who propelled racial justice rather than opposing it. These men and women understood that ending racism was not a threat or an act of charity, but a part of gaining their own freedom.
Then, as now, their stories are largely invisible. In the United States we have seen so few mirrors of this reality that it’s hard to imagine a broad Left movement that includes white poor and working-class people as radical change agents. Instead, poor and working-class whites occupy a unique place in the North American psyche. Whether presented as rednecks, trailer trash or Steinbeck’s noble proles, depictions of struggling whites depend largely on the prevailing social need for either a hero or scapegoat.
