by Amy Sonnie
Beginning in the early Sixties, the image of poor whites emerged as an especially pliant marionette for the nation’s post-war blues. A decades-long tidal wave of 20th century internal migrations crested in the early Sixties with millions moving from rural towns to urban centers. And so did the anxieties of businessmen who bankrolled popular culture and news. West Side Story and The Young Savages dramatized the mounting ethnic conflict in changing U.S. cities. Turf war dramas neatly illustrated senseless urban tragedies offering only two remedies for the mean streets—federal urban renewal programs to displace the poor and strong-handed law enforcement to keep the rabble in line. Those who could afford it escaped to the suburbs or at least the outer edges of the city. Enter TV’s blue-collar everyman, Archie Bunker, who became the nation’s number one racist-next-door. His armchair epithets mimicked white anxiety in the post civil rights era, but reassured viewers of a harmless shift from direct racial violence to private bigotry and ballot box demagoguery.
Hillbillies and rednecks, of course, made for the most sensational characters in the national identity crisis. A slapstick comedy about hillbillies who strike it rich and move to Beverly Hills nicely obscured the massive industrial collapse and government neglect that actually forced millions of southerners to big cities. Lest anyone get comfortable with lovable illiterates, though, the media issued sinister warnings about their rough country cousins, still poor and unwilling to assimilate. Chicago’s Sunday Tribune advised readers that opium dens made safer hangouts than neighborhoods “taken over by clans of fightin’, feudin’ Southern hillbillies and their shootin’ cousins.” Worse, the film Deliverance offered one of the rare cinematic moments when the racial script of the savage gets flipped. The film fanned fears of backwoods, inbred predators lurking in the shadows. It supplied a disturbingly brutal warning to city slickers not to buck the march toward “progress.”
In the early Sixties, Michael Harrington’s exposé on poverty, The Other America, woke the country from its fable of universal prosperity. It was a threadbare myth to begin with. “The very rise in productivity that created more money and better working conditions for the rest of society” had been “a menace to the poor,” Harrington wrote.6 The war boom that inspired national amnesia about the working classes’ unyielding racial and economic nightmare was now over. The coal miner automated out of a job, the farmer forced off his land, the poor woman working in a munitions factory told to return to homemaking even though she had been doing paid labor since age fourteen—each joined previous generations of Black and white migrants, Native Americans and newer immigrants looking for a fighting chance in urban economies. As a result, the racial makeup of urban neighborhoods changed rapidly during the Sixties and Seventies, escalating ethnic conflicts in some areas, and creating opportunities to heal racial divides in others.
There’s a reason West Side Story tells a tale of true love tragically divided. Would anyone believe the plot if the Sharks and the Jets had joined forces to fight the police and open a community health clinic? Popular history gives us so few of these stories that tales of racial unity seem romantic at best, propaganda at worst. Just as likely it’s because there is no easy theatrical resolution for the problems of poverty and racism. The violence depicted is real. But so are the lesser-known attempts people made to name and transform those conditions. The latter rarely made headlines. Instead, the media spotlight found a new character in poor and working whites. This time they were antagonists in highly publicized resistance to school busing, neighborhood integration and affirmative action. Unfortunately, this white backlash was fact, not fiction. But so was the decade-long effort of Philadelphia’s October 4th Organization to support neighborhood integration, address police brutality and work alongside Black and Puerto Rican women for guaranteed health care. So was the story of the Washington, D.C., Young Patriots chapter when it became the “Committee to Defend the Panthers.”
This is what this book brings to the fore. The complicated one-step-forward-two-steps-back story of making social change. Out of necessity and strategy these groups experimented with their own way to organize populations the broader Left had failed to reach. Their constituents included disaffected youth, the chronically unemployed, welfare recipients, recovering drug users, day laborers, blue-collar workers and white ethnic communities.7 Theirs were the neighborhoods turned upside down by federal urban renewal programs and local neglect. Their families were the newly arrived Italian, Irish and Polish émigrés; the poor whites living alongside Black and Latino neighbors; and the “dislocated hillbillies” who were just as poor in the North as they’d been in the South. By focusing their organizing efforts on these neighborhoods—largely written off as slums—they chipped away at some of the mortar of racial division and united poor residents.
People came into the struggle from a place of shared experience. Sometimes the change was temporary, but as we chronicle in this book, the experience transformed more than a few lives. In chapter one we share several of these transformations, most especially the story of a southern migrant named Peggy Terry, whose sympathies for the civil rights movement evolved into a lifelong radicalism rooted most deeply in her years at JOIN Community Union in Chicago. Founded as a project of Students for a Democratic Society, JOIN is one of the few organizations in this book discussed in any depth by other scholars. Few have told its history from the perspective of leaders like Peggy Terry who was influenced by the best aspirations of the student Left and the emerging Black Power Movement as she and others attempted to make JOIN a truly participatory organization. Their work directly inspired the formation of the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry in 1968 and 1969. In chapters 2 and 3 we trace these two groups’ unprecedented work and the role each played representing the “white arc” in the now-famed Rainbow Coalition. Their work took shape during years when white radicals searched for meaningful ways to support the goals of Third World Liberation while continuing to fight for concrete improvements in their own communities. This search sent them looking to other cities for models as well. Chicago’s Rising Up Angry, in particular, forged strong relationships with two east coast groups organizing working-class whites. In chapter 4 we trace the distinct stories of October 4th Organization in Philadelphia and White Lightning in New York as they responded to a deepening recession and growing right-wing backlash throughout the 1970s.
Each and every one of these groups contributed to the transformation of its members and its surrounding community. Yet these five groups also differed from each other in marked ways. Some differences were due to geography, and some to relative proximity to other Left organizations. Most differences resulted from the experimental nature of their work, as each evolved its own answers to the major political questions of the time. Rising Up Angry, for example, came to understand their work primarily in terms of solidarity with “Third World” radicals at home and abroad, while they also evolved a welcoming role for neighborhood families as its leaders began having children of their own. The Young Patriots Organization worked more directly under the Black Panthers and adopted the Panthers’ revolutionary nationalism and discipline as a political party. October 4th Organization began with the question of class and took the dismantling of racism as a necessary part of any working-class movement. Among these groups O4O uniquely combined both factory and neighborhood organizing in the industrial area of Kensington, Philadelphia.
In different ways, JOIN, the Patriots, Rising Up Angry, October 4th Organization and White Lightning made two radical propositions through their work. First and foremost, they suggested that poor and working class whites weren’t any more likely to defend racism than whites with money. This assertion then, as now, raises necessary and complex questions about class and allegiance to race and nation. Second, they put forward the idea that poor whites experience the benefits of institutional racism differently and, therefore, class-based organizing must account for those differences without ever ignoring the race question. Through trial, error and a deep dedic
ation to common cause politics, these groups engaged residents around concerns they could relate to. Like most revolutionary projects of the period, they didn’t always succeed. Yet the legacy of their experimental alliances sheds light on a largely unexamined dimension of urban radicalism in the U.S. Amid the turbulence of the 1960s and recession of the 1970s, their projects offer evidence of how white supremacy and economic injustice can be undermined even as these entrenched inequities demonstrate their durability.
We studied these organizations because we believe they engaged honestly with the complexities of racialized capitalism in the United States. The historical intersection of race and class defies easy explanation. The one thing we can say with certainty is that racism has long been used to divide workers and impede solidarity and community. History provides a depressingly long list of movements started and then broken by race baiting. But the end result is never the whole story. There have been times, as in the long arc of these Rainbow Coalitions, when poor and working people have come together recognizing a common goal. Whether this political tendency constitutes a significant success depends largely on how one judges the outcomes they achieved given the conditions of the time. We have done our best to present the forces and debates shaping these projects along with the decisions participants made under those circumstances. Some are inspiring, others difficult to comprehend.
As part of reconstructing this buried history we relied largely on interviews with movement participants. Most of them are still active in community, labor and educational organizations. To all who have given their time, opened up their homes and turned over their personal archives, we extend our deepest thanks. In an era of increased repression, another enduring war and lean economic times, this was no small favor. Their insights are woven throughout this text and so we chose not to footnote each instance. Quotations without footnotes come from these interviews and other original research. We have used footnotes only when needed to cite historical documents or provide additional context.
As authors we came to this project as activists, two individuals who, through the course of our own community organizing experience, sought answers to today’s challenges in movements of the past. We have been inspired by what we found and eager to engage in the many discussions that will arise from this history. We did not try to capture all of the ways poor and working-class whites participated meaningfully in the New Left. Hundreds of activists continued working alongside middle-class leftists in other organizations, and hundreds more organized in the South and rural areas, most notably through Anne and Carl Braden’s Southern Conference Education Fund and later Grassroots Organizing Work, or GROW, started by Bob and Dottie Zellner in New Orleans. During this same period, groups like Slim Coleman’s Intercommunal Survival Committee in Chicago and the White Panthers in Detroit also worked directly with the Black Panther Party. Still others went into the factories to form oppositional caucuses within workplaces and unions. All of these groups deserve further attention. We hope that our work here inspires others, especially those with a different take on things, to write their own stories.
—Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, January 2011
CHAPTER 1
The Common Cause Is Freedom:
JOIN Community Union and the
Transformation of Peggy Terry
I come from the South / I followed the route
To Chicago, a big old town.
But I found me hard luck / Couldn’t make me a buck
All I got was the run around.
If we’re gonna get / What the poor ain’t got yet
Gotta keep on the Firing Line.
—Popular folk song sung at JOIN,
adapted from “Good Old Mountain Dew”
In 1962 a southern-born white woman named Peggy Terry walked into the Chicago headquarters of the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) and asked how she could help. For a daughter of the South, whose grandfather took her to a Ku Klux Klan rally at age three, this moment was immense. She didn’t entirely know what to expect, but she knew CORE was one of the oldest and most respected civil rights organizations in the country.1 By the end of Terry’s first day she and dozens of other activists landed in jail for blocking an intersection outside the Chicago Board of Education in protest of the city’s segregated school system. Terry looked around her jail cell marveling at the courage of her new friends. She was humbled to be a part of it and felt—for the first time in her life—a mutual respect from people she admired. It was exhilarating and a little overwhelming.
Terry moved to Chicago just a few years earlier and was keenly aware that most northerners viewed southern whites, especially poor whites, with cautious suspicion or outright animosity. She felt this more from bosses and landlords, of course, but who would blame Black civil rights leaders for thinking the same given the white racist violence erupting anywhere people of color organized? She hoped her commitment to civil rights would be apparent enough to overshadow her obvious southern drawl. She threw herself into local civil rights work, adopting a comfortable behind-the-scenes role. Over her two years in CORE, she mostly kept quiet about her past and her struggles living in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
All that was about to change. Before the turbulent Sixties came to a close Peggy Terry emerged as the voice of the invisible white poor in a nation experiencing major revolts against race, class and gender oppression. She spoke on national stages with famed civil rights leaders, held kitchen conversations with reluctant white neighbors, and shared the 1968 presidential ticket as running mate to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. She focused her entire vice presidential campaign on countering segregationist George Wallace and his fearmongering message to the white working class. Her story, however, is not one of exceptional celebrity. Peggy Terry’s personal transformation is one of hundreds shaped, first, by the universal inspiration of the civil rights movement and, second, by deliberate local organizing that engaged working-class whites in the New Left through the prism of their own experience.
For Peggy Terry and dozens of others that personal transformation took place in an experimental new organization called Jobs or Income Now (JOIN). Initiated by young intellectuals from the country’s rapidly growing student movement, JOIN was the pilot project for an ambitious organizing effort in poor urban neighborhoods. Initiated in 1963 by Students for a Democratic Society, the project set out to win “short run social reforms” that would create conditions for leadership and participation beyond campuses and the South. Anticipating a spike in joblessness and a recession, JOIN’s founders were looking beyond their campuses to locations where a truly bottom-up organization might dovetail with the civil rights movement and growing radicalism among discontented middle-class youth. To the project’s founders community organizing seemed both logical and necessary, yet to some on the Left the poor white slum where Terry lived seemed an unlikely place to find willing volunteers.
While the civil rights movement started to expose many prominent lawmakers as witting enemies of racial justice, the public largely viewed angry white citizens as the primary agents of racial violence. When Alabama Governor George Wallace publicly professed allegiance to Jim Crow, his “segregation forever” maxim positioned him as the protector of hardworking whites who had little to spare and everything to lose if Black southerners gained a social or economic foothold. He adopted this position midway through his political career in order to win the top state office, and he succeeded. Wallace and other southern politicians cast the “Common Man’s” concerns—and therefore righteous violence—as a century-old, grassroots effort to protect the Heart of Dixie against federal intrusions on state and local autonomy. If politicians were simply racism’s insurers, the public saw poor and working-class whites as its mechanics.
While Peggy Terry began to see the fallacy of this logic, she certainly knew the voters who propelled Wallace to the governor’s office. Born in Haileyville, Oklahoma, and growing up in Paducah, Kentucky, she rarely came into contact with people o
f color as a child, even when the poor white and Black sections of town stood literally back-to-back. Segregation was a given in her southern towns, reinforced by silence and heated family gossip about her aunt’s marriage to a Choctaw man. Terry’s cousin Delbert, born from that marriage, was her only relationship with a person of color until she joined the civil rights movement three decades later.
Controversial as her aunt’s marriage was, segregation between Blacks and whites created a far thicker smoke. While her father always “spoke out and stuck up for the workingman,” he clung to the meager warranty of white supremacy with every breath. Terry’s grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, her father a sympathizer. They brought her along as a child on rides through the Black section of town to “shoot off chimneys.” When she was just eight years old she watched her father flatly refuse roadside assistance from a Black man, opting instead to leave his family stranded in a roadside ditch. It was a bitterly cold winter on the route between Kentucky and Oklahoma. Her pregnant mother tried to balance herself in the front of their lop-sided Model T, while Terry and her siblings huddled in the backseat to stay warm. When the passerby asked Lon Ousley if he needed a hand pulling the car out, her father commanded the man to get his “black ass on down the road.” The irrationality of his racism was lost on Terry, but not on her mother, who muttered something about cutting off his nose.2
Terry left school after fifth grade. When she was fifteen, she left home and married her first husband. They hitchhiked from town to town looking for work. She labored alongside Mexican workers in the Rio Grande Valley picking grapefruits and worked the cotton fields in Alabama alongside Black workers, but she never spoke to them. Even the laborer’s makeshift tent camps were segregated. Occasionally, a loaf of bread would appear when there wasn’t enough food in one of the other camps, but few ever discussed it. Terry stuck with the Irish and Scots, failing to see any commonality with the other men and women who, like her, traveled from town to town, season after season, working, living, giving birth and raising children under plastic tarps that provided little shelter from the dust, heat and rain.
