Historical Account of Class, Race Wars Relevant for
Organizers Today 

Sunday 18 March 2012 

by: Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout | Book Review

http://www.truth-out.org/historical-account-class-race-wars-relevant-organizers-today/1329940470

(Image: Melville House Publishers)

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black
Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times [3] by Amy
Sonnie and James Tracy, with a foreword by Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz Melville House Publishers Brooklyn, New
York, 2011 $16.95 201 pages

As a kid, I didn't know the term working-class, but I
certainly knew the antagonisms that came from falling
below the middle and upper tiers of Connecticut's
Fairfield County. I was about eight when my parents
enrolled me in Hebrew school at Congregation B'nai
Israel, the least-expensive Jewish education program in
the area.While the shul's ideology was unabashedly
liberal, most of the students came from ritzy Fairfield
and Westport.

Not me. I came from blue-collar Bridgeport, a world
away from my peer's lavish homes and European
vacations. Looking back, it's not surprising that I was
an outcast from the start, the butt of hostile comments
and sneering taunts. Thankfully, my misery ended with
my confirmation at age 14.

But I was still not out of the proverbial woods. At
Central High, I was in Track One and Two classes,
separated - with the exception of gym class - from the
largely black and brown student body. More than once, a
total stranger called me "a dirty Jew" as I tossed a
basketball or ran around the track.

I kept my hurt hidden, private, but the sting lingered.
Later, as a scholarship student at a private urban
university, a sense of class inferiority reasserted
itself. Since then, it has surfaced in virtually every
professional job I've had - in the assumptions that
govern both employer-employee and collegial relations.

It's thorny terrain, and, like most working-class
turned middle-class people, my trajectory has been
rattled by numerous race, class and gender collisions.
Since class is rarely addressed, a vast number of
questions and feelings remain unexamined, not only for
me, but for most Americans.

Amy Sonnie and James Tracy's "Hillbilly Nationalists,
Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power" zeroes in on this
conundrum and explicates the role white, working-class
activists played in several anti-racist community
movements of the 1960s and 70s. The book highlights the
little-known and short-lived organizing of five groups
- Jobs or Income Now Community Union (JOIN), Rising Up
Angry, October 4th Organization, the Young Patriots and
White Lightning - and challenges popular stereotypes of
working-class whites as bigots and male chauvinists.
Sadly, the book does not address the lasting
repercussions of hatred on the individuals who
experience it.

Still, Sonnie and Tracy's assessment is provocative.
"Poor and working-class whites occupy a unique place in
the North American psyche," they write. "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 a scapegoat."

"Hillbilly Nationalists" attempts to offer nuance,
focusing on concrete efforts of working-class whites
that go beyond these cliches. At the same time, the
book would have benefitted from more first-person
narratives to describe the pushes and pulls inherent in
each project, and to elucidate the ways racism was
confronted in interactions between progressive and
reactionary community members. Nonetheless, the
showcasing of groups that made connections beyond the
narrow race and class interests of their members is
important. That said, the omission of trade unions as a
force for improving working-class life, is glaring -
and unexplained.

One of the most vibrant groups in the text is JOIN,
started by members of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS). JOIN centered its work in Chicago's Uptown
neighborhood, a district of displaced
former-Appalachians who had moved to the city looking
for economic advancement.

"A good number of Uptown's poor whites succumbed to the
double-edged sword of white supremacy," Sonnie and
Tracy report, "understanding themselves as more
deserving than Blacks and Latinos, but also as victims
- of police, bosses, politicians, the draft, and most
divisively, of the economic progress civil rights
seemed to offer communities of color. More than one
JOIN member came into the organization railing against
uppity Blacks who were looking for a free lunch, then
showed signs of changing their attitudes before
ultimately retreating back to the safety of white
superiority."

Of course, not everyone took solace in bigotry, and
JOIN members worked overtime to make common cause with
people of color - including the Black Panthers - as
they organized tenants and welfare recipients. In
addition, a JOIN theater group and newsletter sought to
link the macro and micro, connecting neighborhood
improvements with opposition to the Vietnam War, as
well as support for Black Power, Third World and
women's liberation movements.

It wasn't an easy sell, and, as anyone who has done
organizing knows, change happens slowly. Sonnie and
Tracy write that the SDS activists within JOIN soon
balked at the pace of achievement. "Their mistake was
in forgetting one of the main tenets of participatory
democracy: The outside organizer should be a catalyst,
not a leader. Ultimately, the power struggles within
JOIN proved irreconcilable. In December, 1967, local
leaders - inspired by the Panther injunction to
'organize your own' - asked SDS students and other
outside volunteers to leave," they write.

The Young Patriots Organization (YPO) was an outgrowth
of JOIN's anti-police-brutality committee. Despite the
name - and use of the confederate flag as a symbol -
the Chicago group modeled itself after the Black
Panthers and followed a service-plus-organizing model,
opening a health center staffed by volunteer doctors
and health workers. Their goal was to show that "poor
whites were ready to fight for a new, revolutionary,
classless society." Their ten-point program included
demands for full employment, decent housing, prisoner's
rights and the eradication of racism.

The group's demise came shortly after their support for
the Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords became
overt. Like their comrades, they were targeted by
government counterintelligence and became victims of
COINTELPRO. Despite YPO's eventual fragmentation and
dissolution, the authors herald the group as proof that
the "white children of the southern Diaspora might
claim an identity separate from the legacy of racism."

While Rising Up Angry also operated out of Chicago, the
October 4th Organization (O4O) did its work in
Philadelphia, and White Lightning worked in the Bronx.
The former took on racist Philadelphia Mayor Frank
Rizzo's war on the poor, and provided needed health
care to low-income people while simultaneously
organizing opposition to the Vietnam War.

White Lightning formed in the 1970s to oppose to the
Rockefeller drug laws that established mandatory
minimum sentences for those convicted of
narcotics-related offenses. Created by a group of
recovering addicts, they connected stopping the flood
of heroin into low-income communities to prison reform,
the struggle for affordable housing, and support for
the Panthers, Lords and other agents of social change.
"Organizers helped people kick drugs, stopped
evictions, and won building improvements," Sonnie and
Tracy write. "Yet the wins were arguably small in the
scheme of their revolutionary goals."

Indeed, as the momentum of 1960s waned, Sonnie and
Tracy write, many activists left grassroots campaigns
and joined the New Communist Movement, an effort to
build revolutionary parties. As attention turned to
cadre development, community work faded, and White
Lightning and O4O, like JOIN, the Young Patriots, and
Rising Up Angry, disappeared.

At the same time, each group left a legacy, and Sonnie
and Tracy highlight the lessons gleaned from their
efforts. First, the authors conclude, the five
highlighted groups show that poor and working-class
whites are not necessarily hostile to fighting white
supremacy. "Racism could not be overcome by ignoring
white communities any more than capitalism could be
overcome by ignoring the poor," they write. Secondly,
the poor and working class experience the benefits of
racism differently than those who are more economically
advantaged, something class-based organizers need to
remember. Lastly, race and class enmity serves the
ruling classes by diverting attention from our real
enemies.

While these findings are undeniably true, as I read
"Hillbilly Nationalists," I kept waiting for the
political to become more personal. The groups Sonnie
and Tracy write about did great organizing, and can, in
some ways, serve as 21st century models; at the same
time, protecting the bullied and harassed - and
teaching them the healing power of fighting back - also
needs a place on the agenda. In the end, learning from
past errors and remaining mindful of the emotional
needs of individual activists - the too-often-ignored
other side of organizing - is an imperative element of
successful community mobilization. In fact, it's the
only way to build sustainable resistance. Creative
Commons License [4]

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States
License [4].

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