The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism. Ed. by Dan Berger. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. xiv, 303 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8135-4873-9. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4874-6.)

Stephanie Gilmore     Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, his Chicago-based relationships with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers haunted him. As the media picked up on Wright’s black nationalist rhetoric and Ayers’s former association with the radical Weather Underground, the 1970s were revisited through those men and their associations with the man who would become the forty-fourth U.S. president. The contributors to The Hidden 1970s demonstrate that Wright and Ayers were hardly radical aberrations in an otherwise conservative era, but instead were part of a large undercurrent of deeply radical activism. The essays in Dan Berger’s finely edited collection showcase organizations and issues rarely discussed in mainstream historical analyses of the 1970s. Together they offer a fine, usable history of radical activisms that moves beyond the tired assumption that “identity politics” dissolved the Left and the radical activism of the 1960s.

The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on insurgency as a metanarrative of the 1970s, and the authors address prison abolition, sexual assault, and land reclamation. Liz Samuel’s rich chapter on prison abolition stands out as a wonderful piece of scholarship that showcases black nationalist and white pacifist activists as part of the same movement against imprisonment and confinement. In fact, all of the chapters in this section underscore how shared fury among black, Native American, and white people was a hallmark of radical activism—and just as current radical antiracist activisms go largely unreported by the mainstream media, so too are those more distant efforts hidden from history.

Part two focuses readers on solidarity as the strategy for political advancement. Activists utilized global entities, such as the United Nations, to advance Native American sovereignty claims to land, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates in her chapter. Decolonization was also significant in the movement for an independent Puerto Rico (Meg Starr’s topic in her chapter) as well as the sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974 (the subject of Fanon Che Wilkins’s chapter). The authors do not shy away from the complicated realities of decolonization but instead underscore both the importance of articulating what seemed to be an impossible dream of global freedom and the grassroots work of activists who insisted that the rhetoric of “America” align with the nation’s actions.

Community is the theme for the third and final section of the book, where the authors explore how community bonds gave way to new political actions, ideas, and goals. Case studies of Chicanos fighting against police brutality in Texas (by Brian D. Behnken in his chapter) and white working-class people fighting against deindustrialization (in James Tracy’s chapter) illuminate how community was a geographical place and a political practice of resistance against the status quo. Of particular interest is Elizabeth Castle’s biographical chapter of Madonna Thunder Hawk, whose decades of radical activism across many issues serves as a keen and respectful reminder of the large number of people who engage in the hard work of community building.

The histories in this book should be chronicled in depth elsewhere, and scholars and activists have begun addressing the complicated and radical work underway on this era. For this new perspective on the history of the 1970s, Berger is to be commended. This decade is being taken more seriously by historians, and The Hidden 1970s offers an important intervention in the current narrative of the 1970s as an era of conservative backlash to the 1960s. Indeed, as the authors in this book make clear, the 1970s was a deeply radical time. I hope other scholars will take up this decade with the same ferocity and commitment shown by the authors here. I hope also that activists will read and draw inspiration from these histories of insurgency, solidarity, and community.

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs (New Villiage Press, 2010)  Jane Jacobs was one of the few voices in the wilderness of city planning against 1960s urban renewal and relentless freeway expansion. Her classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is still the bible for progressive Urban Planners.  Like many of her contemporaries she elevated public participation –but often without a strong enough reckoning of role the market economy. This allows her readers to find many details to support their own pre-conceived notions of what the good city would look like. This aside, Jacob was a wise and inspiring canary in the coalmine to the arrogance and abuse of the Redevelopment Agencies. Is she relevant today? In What We See, twenty-five writers say yes, then advance her observations in the realms of the environment, sustainability and the just metropolis. Some of the pieces are a little esoteric but most hit the mark, especially those from Deanne Taylor, Ray Suarez, and Hillary Brown and Chester Hartmann.  The city of today is is constant flux as newer forms of redevelopment reinvent the built environment almost annually. This makes What We See an important collection for anyone who hasn’t given up on cities yet.

On the Road To Healing, An Anthology For Men Ending Sexism, Basil Shadid ed. (Dual Power Press, 2009)

There’s the old saying that the personal is political and the political is personal. It’s one of those sentences which will probably still be debated a century from now. But really, it’s one of the central contributions of 1970s feminism–don’t screw up your big revolution because you are afraid to fight your personal one. Most of the pieces in this collection are good primers for the necessary uprisings men need to make in the everyday life, not just for the sake of a better world, but a better self. On The Road’s main contribution is pointing out that men have a self-interest in ending sexism. Tony Switzer, Chris Dixon, Jeff Ott, Chris Crass and Basil Shadid turn in the standout pieces in a solid, accessible collection.

Fix This Mess, Selections 1993-2010 by Billie Rain (Dual Power Press, 2011)

Billie Rain’s poetry exists in life’s messy grey areas–mixed-race, expansive gender identity, working-class and college educated. She conducts the contradictions in such a beautiful way, dealing with pain and loss in a way that never lays claim to the victim mantle. The collected poems span seventeen years, so the reader is treated to a range of poems which scream bloody murder (and make one hear an imaginary guitar riff in your head) to those tempered by time and wisdom. Highly recommended.

The Tribes of Burning Man: How An Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counter-Culture by Steven T. Jones (CCC Publishing, 2011)

I’ve always needed a little convincing that Burning Man wasn’t just some snake-oil show masquerading as social change.  Jones makes the case for its importance–an expression of the DIY ideals without which, any movement would be a lot more boring. The section on Burner’s involvement with New Orleans relief (which, in full disclosure I was quoted in) made me forget Burning Man’s expensive tickets and take it seriously. Perhaps it is a lab on the Playa for ways to survive the coming troubles. It’s well written and smart. Yet also feels like you are on a barstool, say in Buck’s Tavern listening to Steve, who has just returned from the Burn to tell you how it all went.

She Said, by Judith Arcana

I picture this powerful mini-book in a glass case which reads In case of Gingrich Victory, Break Glass.For Judith Arcana, poetry and politics have always been bound together. Those who know her are more likely to be familiar with her activism in the pre-Roe group Jane and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union than her writing. Hopefully,  that won’t always be the case because her writing is top-notch. She Said recalls the time when abortion was illegal, a time which any number of today’s politicians would love to return to. Not mere polemics, this operates on the emotional and political sides of the brain at once.

“The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Recently, I’ve had some good dialogue with people about the importance of freeing the Hikers. They point out that with so many people in prison for jacked-up reasons, it seems strange to put so much energy into these three. My answer is that Sarah, Shane and Josh are exactly the people who fight for other’s freedom, and we need them here with us doing that. They are also simply our friends and community members. I, for one,  do not want to attend a 10, 20, or 30 year vigil for their freedom. I want them out now. It’s not about white privlege. It’s about having your friend’s back in a time of need.

The capacity at Bottom of the Hill is 350 and it looks like nearly 150 tickets have already been sold! We really want everyone who wants to be there to get in, I encourage you to buy tickets now as it will sell out soon: http://www.stubmatic.com/bottomofthehill/event/6442

They Sing These Songs in Prison: A Benefit to Support Freed Hiker Sarah Shourd’s work in the campaign to Free Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal from Prison in Iran

Jolie Holland/Tom Morello/Jason Webley/Ryan Harvey/Lia Rose MCed by poet James Tracy and freed prisoner Sarah Shourd Poetry from Ananda Esteva

Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th Street San Francisco, CA 94107 February 10th, Thursday, $12-18

In 1965, Peggy Terry and Dovie Thurman met for the first time in a storefront office in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The two women, one white and one Black, would not have been natural friends a decade before. But, hundreds of miles away in the American South political and economic events had been unfolding for years that would have a profound effect on these soon-to-be radical organizers, on Uptown and on Chicago.

In July of 1955, seamstress Rosa Parks attended a training and strategy session on desegregation at the Highlander Institute in Monteagle, Tennessee. Six months later, while working as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, Parks took a historic stand by refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. With the support of the Women’s Political Council and NAACP, Parks’ activism sparked a 381-day boycott of segregated public transportation that catalyzed the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.[1]

The boycott was not only an assault on Jim Crow laws but also a push to finally stare down the specter of white supremacy in the United States. Park’s action was not the first refusal by a Black person to relinquish a seat at the driver’s request. In fact, Irene Morgan’s lesser-known refusal in 1944 allowed the NAACP to take the issue of transport segregation to the Supreme Court (Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia).[2] A decade later, however, Parks’ planned civil disobedience was the first time a city’s Black community was fully prepared to shut down the transportation system in protest. Between December 1955 and January 1956, 17,000 Black Montgomery residents walked to work; and later, devised an alternative, autonomous transportation system based in mutual aid. For one white southerner, whose family was steeped in southern racism, the movement in Montgomery catalyzed a change that turned her into one of the Black Freedom Movement’s staunchest allies. Just over a decade later, she would run as the Peace and Freedom Party’s Vice Presidential candidate alongside Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

Peggy Terry was born October 28, 1921 and raised in poverty in Oklahoma and Kentucky. Like many white southerners, she very rarely came into contact with Blacks growing up, but remembers being taken to a Ku Klux Klan meeting at age three. Terry’s grandfather had been a member of the Klan; her father was a sympathizer. Peggy’s mother, Mary Bethel Ousley, did not share her father’s attitudes, and like Peggy later joined the Civil Rights Movement. Her mother’s benevolence primed Peggy to confront her own prejudices later in life. Still, among the many racist messages Terry received as a child, she recalls that her father once refused roadside assistance from a Black man, preferring to remain stranded in a ditch in the middle of winter; four children huddled in the car. Her father’s position was common among white southerners; he was a coalminer in Kentucky and an oilman in Oklahoma who always “spoke out and stuck up for the workingman,”[3] yet he clung to the meager warranty of white supremacy. “When I was a little girl we used to ride through the ‘niggertown’ and shoot off people’s chimneys. I didn’t have enough sense to know kicking black people didn’t pay the rent.”[4]

During the Great Depression, when she was fifteen, Terry married her first husband. They hitchhiked from town to town looking for work, in Texas picking grapefruits for Edinburg Citrus Association, and in Alabama picking cotton. She had her first child, Doug, during those years. During World War II she worked alongside her mother and sister in a weapons factory in Viola, Kentucky. By 1955, Terry was living in Montgomery, Alabama, a stop in her migration that altered her path forever.

The bus boycott in Montgomery transformed Peggy Terry. “Poor whites in the South did not have much, but riding in the front of the bus was one of them. That boycott, and their getting on the front of the bus, that shook me.”[5] Several weeks into the boycott, Terry witnessed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. beaten by a gang of white vigilantes as he was released from jail. She saw the injustice of white violence with new eyes. King’s non-violence in contrast to the mob’s brutality shocked her and shook loose the entrenched racism of her upbringing. She later said, “I don’t know what it was about the boycott that touched my brain and soul. I’d like to think that it was because I realized that I had been blind to the reality if the world I lived in. I do know that it was the beginning of my becoming a better person.”[6]

In 1956, with the boycott still in full swing, she moved to Chicago then on to Jackson, Michigan before returning to Chicago. In the North, she felt, for the first time, her own oppression as a poor southern woman. Poor southern whites were denied housing based on their accents, police brutality was rampant, and poor white ghettos showed the highest unemployment rates in the city. Struggling with her own shame over racism and poverty, she began to feel that the wool pulled over poor whites’ eyes in the segregated South was not only thinner in the North, but that a false sense of superiority no longer offered any comfort. During those years she developed an incisive critique of capitalism and understood racism as its tool.

Soon, she saw more than commonalities. She got involved with the anti-nuclear group Women for Peace, and was briefly a member of Communist Party USA in Michigan, where she lived with her second husband, Gil Terry. It was Gil who invited a Black friend to their home for dinner one evening—it was the first time Peggy Terry saw a white man treat a Black person with respect. Of her own racism, Terry later said, “How can you be raised in garbage like that and not stink from it. You walk through garbage, you stink.”[7]

The Terrys attracted the attention of the FBI as they attended meetings with Gus Hall, CP veteran and organizer of numerous steelworker strikes in the 1930s. Terry’s daughter, Margi Devoe, remembers being taken with a group of neighborhood children to integrate the local roller rink in Jackson, Michigan. Back in Chicago in 1963 Terry joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). With CORE she participated in her first civil disobedience, landing in jail before the end of her first day. She was arrested a half dozen times over the next several years and met, for the first time, Rev. King. In one of her many interviews with famed journalist Studs Terkel, Terry captured the personal transformation she experience as part of the “beloved community” in CORE, as well as in SNCC’s Chicago’s office, saying, “Where else could I go and be treated with this respect that I’ve been treated with by Reverend King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner? No white Nobel Prize winner would pay poor white trash like me the slightest attention. Reverend King does.”[8]

Terry remained active in CORE and SNCC until 1966, traveling south once again to march with Rev. King in the Mississippi March Against Fear. While still active in the Civil Rights Movement, Peggy Terry learned about a new organization of poor whites in Uptown from SNCC leader Monroe Sharp. She was initially reluctant to belong to an organization of poor southern whites. Like many whites who’d rejected their racist upbringing, she recalled feeling like she had just made a break with the racism of the South and didn’t want to “get back into it” with southerners in the North. Sharp persisted, challenging Terry to confront her own shame about being white and poor. “I was finally dragged by Monroe Sharp. He said, ‘This is where you belong. You haven’t yet figured out who you are…. you have to really know who you are before you ever know who we are.’”[9]

An Interracial Movement of the Poor

As Black and white southerners continued the Great Migration north, Chicago’s neighborhoods received a new group of migrants in 1963: New Left student activists. Inspired by Black-led organizations that were bringing the Civil Rights Movement north, Students for a Democratic Society started a new project to mobilize the unemployed and working poor. According to Richie Rothstein, in the early Sixties “SDS still believed in the possibility of change within the framework of America’s formally representative political institutions.” SDS’s Economic Research Action Project (ERAP) was intended to rouse those institutions, to “demand that resources be transferred from the cold war arms race to the creation of a decentralized, democratic, interracial welfare state at home.”[10]

This was a time of openness and experimentalism in the New Left. SDS reasoned that there were “new insurgencies” brewing in America. The 1963 national SDS convention formally adopted this position in the document America and the New Era. Changes in the economy, the document argued, would lead to a Triple Revolution: cybernation, weaponry and human rights. Only an end to the arms race could let the nation expand on the opportunities presented by automation and meet the demands of the Civil Rights Movement. Racial justice could not be achieved independently of economic reform.[11] A paper written by SDS’s Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman, An Interracial Movement of the Poor?, analyzed white communities’ backlash to civil rights reform. The duo argued that demands for economic changes of tangible benefit to both Black and white poor people were one of the few tools to join the working class and circumvent racist reaction to civil rights. Hayden and Wittman asked, “As desegregation proceeds, what are the possibilities for alienation between Negroes and their real or possible white allies? The areas of possible alienation are twofold: between Negroes and all whites, and between Negroes and poor whites.”[12]

SDS recruited students to work in cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Newark to “organize people around their felt needs” with the strategy of building an interracial movement of the poor—a northern upsurge—that could eventually be united with the Civil Rights Movement. It was the Chicago ERAP project, named Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), which most directly attempted to bring jobless workers displaced by automation into that movement. And, it was JOIN that lasted the longest of the ERAP projects. As Peggy Terry remembers it, by the time Stokely Carmichael made the more vocal call for whites to leave SNCC and “organize their own” in 1966, JOIN had already made inroads transforming poor white participation in the New Left. The road, however, was bumpy.

From its inception, ERAP was an experiment. Initially, the project received enthusiastic support from organized labor. Grants from the United Auto Workers assisted in the birth of eleven separate chapters. However, SDS’s move from campus to community organizing was much debated. Some, like co-founder Al Haber thought it foolish to give up what the organization did well, which was to organize students. One unknown author wrote, “To split SDS into a community-oriented organization is to admit its failure on campus, to head for what seems to be an easier, more fruitful area to organize: the street people, students off campus.”[13] Others, like Steve Max, supported the tactic but feared that the strategy of building a movement of poor people would fail if not integrated into a larger coalition with organized labor and progressive churches in close coordination with the Civil Rights Movement.

The Tempest in the Teapot: Changing People’s Minds and Hearts

Joe Chabot was ERAP’s first organizer in Chicago. JOIN’s first action was to sell apples in the Downtown Loop, evoking the Great Depression when unemployed workers sold apples as a matter of survival. Chabot opened the first JOIN office just a few doors away from the Unemployment Compensation Office (UCO) on North Kedzie Avenue. With co-organizer Dan Max, one JOIN organizer would leaflet the UCO and the other would stay behind to talk with workers who visited in response to the leaflet. In the first week, roughly one hundred people came into the JOIN office. According to an internal ERAP paper, about 80 unemployed people took on a regular role in JOIN with about ten to fifteen assuming leadership roles.

After less than a year, however, Chabot seemed defeated by one of ERAP’s first lessons—that change would be painfully slow, at least at first. Chabot left and JOIN moved out of the Downtown Loop. The chapter was permanently relocated to the Uptown neighborhood, focusing attention on a wider range of pressing, and therefore actionable, community issues: welfare, housing conditions, unemployment and police brutality. As more student organizers began to arrive in Chicago, JOIN also welcomed an influx of community members who became a steady force in the organization. From Uptown, Peggy Terry, Dovie Coleman and her niece Dovie Thurman, Dorothy Perez, Dominga Alcantar, Mary and Candy Hockenberry, Virginia Bowers, Terry’s son Doug Youngblood, Junebug Boykin and Bobby McGinness were joined by SDS organizers Richie and Vivian Rothstein, Mike James, Diane Fager, Pat Sturgis, Steve Goldsmith, Todd Gitlin and Nancy Hollander, among others from both the community and the student movement.

Peggy Terry came to JOIN terrified about what she had to confront, but soon she saw an opportunity to show poor whites not only the terrain of political action but also how they might wrestle with fears of loosing what little they had. She knew well that for folks in Uptown, this was very, very little. The ruling class had long stoked poor whites’ fear that gains for people of color would come at the greatest loss to them. In the Sixties, the Cold War added trepidation that social change would mean austerity and sacrifice.

Terry brought to JOIN the growing sophistication to navigate these anxieties among poor whites. She had the soft skills of an organizer, spending hours at her kitchen table talking to people. She was a prolific writer, an insightful though reluctant speaker and she listened to people’s problems without judgment. Her style and experience earned her the admiration and trust of both Uptown’s new arrivals and its long-time residents. JOIN member Mary Hockenberry remembers Terry as one of the most effective organizers in the neighborhood. Terry and Hockenberry came to JOIN around the same time, along with the Dovies and Virginia Bowers. The five women became fast friends and, together, formed the core of JOIN’s welfare committee, along with the backbone for its housing rights work.

Mike Laly, a working-class son of European immigrants, recalled how Terry convinced his wife that change would not necessitate getting rid of all cherished possessions, as one movement worker had demanded. “There were discussions at the time, really esoteric ones, about what people had to give up in order to be part of a revolution. I think she had heard that people should be willing to give up their teapot if the people’s army needed the scrap. My wife treasured her teapot. Peggy once came to visit us; we lived in a little Quonset hut with salvaged furniture. My wife brought this up because Peggy was the first person in the movement she thought she could trust. Both were working-class women. Peggy said, ‘No Dear, you don’t have to give up your teapot. This isn’t about you giving things up, it is about making more so everyone can live in dignity.’”[14]

What made JOIN different from Chicago’s Alinsky-driven organizations at the time was its mission to organize around poor people’s immediate needs with an explicit effort to address racism. Terry’s influence and ability to demonstrate this vision—whether over coffee in her kitchen or when confronting the welfare caseworkers—was critical for JOIN. At JOIN, every organizer was engaged in this conversation. Mary Hockenberry recalls, “Not only did I learned a lot [at JOIN]. I really faced the reality of what [the students] were fighting for. I felt they were right. I felt there had to be changes.”[15]

A Welfare Recipients’ Bill of Rights

JOIN emerged in the same era in which President Lyndon Johnson declared an all-out “War on Poverty.” A hallmark of LBJ’s domestic policy, this war was fought with an onslaught of government services, creating the Job Corps, Head Start, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. During this time, the federal government also established local Community Action Centers (CAC) under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which promised exactly what SDS demanded: a participatory role for poor people in the administration of the welfare state.[16] However, war on poverty agencies usually confined this input to informal, non-binding dialogue. In Chicago, the city channeled CAC funds to existing service agencies leaving the bulk of the decision-making process in the hands of administrators and social workers, not community representatives as the Act stipulated. Coupled with the fact that the federal government was simultaneously intensifying poverty by destroying thousands of homes through urban renewal, Uptown residents knew “The Great Society” to be a charade.

As early as JOIN’s first year, the organization demanded accountability from new service agencies coming into Uptown and a voice in their projects and decisions. In a statement presented to the Urban Progress Center on its opening day in February 1965, JOIN wrote, “No poor person in Chicago has been consulted about the City’s War on Poverty plans. These facts not only reveal a contempt for the poor and for their participation in democratic decision making; they also spell disaster for the success of Chicago’s plans to fight poverty.” [17] JOIN organizers had spent months surveying Uptown residents about their priorities which included day care, safe places other than the street for children to play, jobs and better housing. In one section of Uptown, organizers also found that forty-eight percent of residents were unemployed and one third were on public assistance.[18] JOIN asserted, “The Uptown community rejects the notion that an Urban Progress Center is needed to coordinate existing public services. Those services are already inadequate and coordination will not enable them to deal with an economy which cannot provide jobs with decent pay for all its citizens.” They argued, Uptown men and women didn’t need counseling, they needed decent work. They needed housing without rats and roaches and building inspectors that followed up on complaints.

Led by Terry, the Dovies, Bowers and Hockenberry, JOIN formed a Welfare Union that took up the task of confronting the paternalism of state welfare. Through the welfare project, Uptown’s residents, most of them women, challenged the invasion of welfare workers into their lives and homes, urged the bureaucracy to improve communications about available services and complaints, and, when necessary, brought the community right to the door of the welfare office.

Recipients routinely had their homes inspected by caseworkers, received notices demanding educational retraining or were repeatedly sent to the Montrose Urban Progress Center (MUPC), a particularly invasive war on poverty program. JOIN member Phrenie Simpson wrote for the newsletter, “I got a letter from the Welfare Dept. It said I was to go to school down on Montrose for reading, writing and arithmetic. I went to high school for 3 years. 2 years ago I went to night school… A girl from the JOIN office, Casey, found out for me I didn’t have to go, but I didn’t know. My welfare workers didn’t tell me anything about it.”[19]

The welfare committee quickly realized that recipients didn’t even know that they were entitled to reliable payments, basic household items, and some amount of medical care. Through JOIN’s monthly newsletter, Terry dedicated an entire column on welfare rights in each issue and the committee authored a 10-point Welfare Bill of Rights demanding, among other things, a right to write the rules welfare dispensation, a right to privacy, to decency, to enough money for food, to keep their children and to organize without the threat of aid revocation.

In June 1965, four JOIN organizers were arrested after demanding that a recipient have the right to examine the rules. Rennie Davis and most of JOIN’s staff went with the women. When Davis announced they wouldn’t be leaving, caseworkers agreed to take requests from each of the recipients just to get them out of the office. Recognizing that they needed more than the word of the caseworkers, the women led another march soon after demanding copies of the welfare policies. Hockenberry remembers, “We never saw literature from the welfare office. The policies were hidden from the public. So we walked out with about twenty [caseworker] books. And, we danced and sang.”[20]

Later that year, JOIN members picketed at the welfare office demanding an increase in budgets for day laborer work as well. Terry considered this one of the “most far reaching and important” actions because they won a day laborer center in the Urban Progress Center (UPC). In contrast to predatory labor placement agencies like Manpower, they convinced the UPC not to charge a fee. At the time, the going rate was fifty percent of the laborers’ earnings. Agencies like Manpower were also in the habit of yanking workers just before they’d logged enough time to qualify for a job site’s union. This was also one of the few times neighborhood men were involved with a welfare committee campaign.

As JOIN coupled direct action with direct services, the organization expanded its services to meet community needs including maintenance of a daily job list, as-needed transportation to Chicago employment agencies and worker placement for contractors willing to pay fair wages. By that point, JOIN’s Welfare Union was well organized, boasted dozens of active members and provided a model for the organization’s other committees. In May 1966, the Welfare Union organized a march in coordination with other welfare rights groups nationwide. The march represented the beginning of a national welfare coalition—National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)—and the start of what would soon become the local Welfare Recipients Demand Action, founded by Dovie Coleman. Within a few years the NWRO had more than twenty thousand members. As documented by historian Jennifer Frost, JOIN along with ERAP projects elsewhere did actually succeed in building an interracial movement of the poor, “especially, a mass movement of poor women.”[21]

Indeed, JOIN’s first women’s group emerged from this welfare committee. Years before the emergence of the women’s lib movement, JOIN women set the stage. Women like the Dovies, Peggy Terry, Jean Tepperman, Marilyn Katz, Diane Fager, Fran Ansley, Casey Hayden, Sharon Jeffrey, Vivian Rothstein, Virginia Bowers, and Mary and Candy Hockenberry played some of the most critical roles in JOIN. According to JOIN organizer Bob Lawson, the welfare rights work was the organization’s heart and soul, as women organizers helped build multiracial coalitions both in the city and nationally.

JOIN’s Marilyn Katz notes, “Because so much of poverty was a women’s issue, and welfare was an issue of women, of women’s lack of access to control of pregnancy and their inferior status in the workplace, and, particularly in the southern white community, their oppressed status in the home. Issues of women’s liberation, in a way, came out very clearly in the kind of work we were doing.” Women, Katz contends, were the canaries in the coalmine whether the issue was male dominance in JOIN decision making, welfare, lead poisoning, housing or the police violence targeting Uptown’s sons.

While Peggy Terry never called herself a feminist, she along other JOIN women showed that JOIN’s original vision was possible, and, in doing so, outlined a vision for women’s liberation and leadership that was deeply rooted in ending race and class oppression. Women’s leadership within JOIN helped deepen members’ and organizers’ understanding of poverty, racism and sexism as combined struggles, directly informing the formation of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the oldest feminist organization in the country. ◊

References

1 See, Mary Fair Burks, “Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965, Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse and Barbara Woods, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 71–83.

2 In 1946, the Court ruled 6–1 in favor of Morgan and desegregated interstate bus transportation. See Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

3 Peggy Terry interviewed by Studs Terkel, in Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (New York: The New Press, 1992), 51–55.

4 Ruthie B. Stein, “White Woman’s Drive to Aid Poor People, She Recruits For Poor Campaign;  Urges Whites to Stop Hating,” Jet magazine, June 11, 1968.

5 D. J. R. Bruckner, “Ticket Mate of Cleaver Still Fighting, Peggy Terry Sees Struggle Involving Classes, Not Races,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1969.

6 Peggy Terry, unpublished speech delivered to her grandson’s African American history class, Columbia College, Chicago, IL, May 20, 1998. Retrieved from Peggy Terry’s personal collection, courtesy of Margi Devoe.

7 Peggy Terry interview by Studs Terkel, Race, 51.

8 Ibid., Race, 54.

9 Peggy Terry interviewed by Jim Axelrod, rough transcript, Spring 1972, Berea College, Kentucky. Publication date unknown. Retrieved from Peggy Terry’s personal collection, courtesy of Margi Devoe.

10 Richie Rothstein, “Evolution of ERAP Organizers,” in The New Left: A Collection of Essays, Priscilla Long, ed. (Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1969), 271–288.

11 Richie Rothstein, ERAP and How It Grew (Boston: New England Free Press, date unknown); see also The Ad-Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution (Students For a Democratic Society, 1963). Both pamphlets retrieved from Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.

12 Carl Wittman and Thomas Hayden, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor,” in The New Student Left, Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 177.

13 Students for a Democratic Society, Don’t Cop Out! Stay In, Build a Campus SDS! (Students for a Democratic Society, date unknown). Pamphlet, from personal collection of authors.

14 Mike Laly interviewed by James Tracy, via phone, September 27, 2007.

15 Mary Hockenberry interviewed by Amy Sonnie, Chicago, IL, March 23, 2008.

16 John A. Andrew, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998).

17 “Statement on Urban Progress Centers,” presented to the Uptown Urban Progress Center on its opening day (Chicago: JOIN, February 12, 1965).

18 Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 55.

19 Phrenie Simpson, “The Welfare Dept Should Ask People What They Want, Not Tell Them What They Need,” ERAP Newsletter (New Haven, CT: Students for a Democratic Society, June 30, 1965), 2.

20 Mary Hockenberry interview.

21 Frost, An Interracial Movement, 163.

[In 1968, Terry ran as the vice presidential nominee of the U.S. Peace and Freedom Party as running mate to Eldridge Cleaver. That same year, The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry grew out of JOIN’s work. Together with the Black Panthers and Young Lords they formed the original “Rainbow Coalition.”]

(Originally published in Fog City Journal)

John Mayer’s recent comments to Playboy magazine fall into a long tradition of racism in Rock and Roll. Every few years some white rock star or another sprinkles an interview with a liberal dose of bigoted comments. For example, Eric Clapton and David Bowie both called for the ethnic cleansing of England of immigrants. Elvis Costello called Ray Charles a “blind nigger” and has spent the past two decades apologizing for it. Morrissey has flirted with fascist imagery in his performances. Perhaps Bowie was hinting at something when he proclaimed on the Ziggy Stardust album-”This isn’t Rock and Roll-it’s genocide!”

What followed the Mayer incident was nothing short of predictable—finger pointing, gasping, a clumsy apology, and countercharges of political correctness and double standards (“they say it-why can’t we”—yawn).  Missing from the debate is the fact that white Rock and Roll couldn’t even exist without much worse forms of racism. Acts such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin stole many of their songs note for note, verse for verse from Black blues artists, many of whom died broke and penniless.

Music’s Middle Passage?

Zeppelin was basically a gigantic thievery corporation. Like most empires, the musical one was built through uncredited rip-offs of Bukka White, Howlin Wolf, and John Estes, to name a few. The Rolling Stones pillages much of the obscure Country Blues and Chicago sounds catalogues—but in recent years have at least acknowledged their music debts to the forms.

In this context its easy to see a pattern of white artists, who grew up listening to black music, turning their idol worship into contempt. Without a sense of the political meaning of their musical history, they are condemned a search for soul, realness and authenticity leading to nowhere. It’s a lot easier to act what you think it is like to be Black—leading to stupid comments like Mayer’s—than to challenge the history of white appropriation in rock becoming a musical race traitor.

I’m not arguing that white musicians can’t play the blues, jazz or even hip-hop. Black music is so engrained in the DNA of rock there’s no way to avoid influence. New music will always build upon the old. In a much better world, cultures could freely give and take from each other building new forms of expression and communication. The trick is to move music away from the history of colonization and co-optation.

So while people debate on the use of that most unfortunate word—the corporations who have profited from plagiarism are laughing all the way to the bank. Mayer’s controversy, like all others before it, will sell millions of downloads. They own the rights to both copies and the originals.

The term reparations carries with it such baggage—yet that is exactly what needs to happen to finally divorce rock from racism. Where the original artists or their descendants can be found, they deserve to be paid with interest due. Where this is not possible, these royalties still need to be paid—perhaps in massive ongoing support for the music and art programs removed from working-class communities of color over the past three decades of bi-partisan attacks on public education and the gains of the civil rights movement.

Notes:

—Bowie apologized for his embrace of fascism and racism and blamed it on the drugs. Clapton has never done so, but continues to pocket a mighty sum from his use of Black music.

—Now out of print, I highly recommend the book “Beating Time” by David Widgery–a good chronicle of the British Rock Against Racism movement.

The event celebrates the history most of us didn’t hear about in school: the accomplishments our labor organizers, free-speech advocates, feminists, sports heroes, actors and poets. What we won’t celebrate every October are lost sailors, stolen land, and the not-so little matter of genocide catalyzed by Columbus’ arrival in a world that was only “new” to those from the other side of the pond.

The Avanti readings stand in a tradition which include groundbreaking events in the 1990s organized by New York’s Italian-Americans for a Multi Cultural US, and the powerhouse San Francisco activist Tommi Avicolli-Mecca at the old Josie’s Juice and Cabaret in SF’s Castro District.

Why, 517 years after the arrival of Columbus is this important? On one hand, it is a simple matter of pride. When the history of our people on this continent is rich with those who acted from a vision of a world radically better than theirs. why laud Columbus, who wrote about how easy it would be to enslave the native population? More importantly, by sailing beyond Columbus worship, we also break with a mindset that justifies war and domination.  Potentially, this can alter how we react to today’s wars, occupation, immigration debates, and environmental disasters.

The ways in which we understand history directly impact the ways we see the present and future. Over the past five years, we have received a bit of criticism accusing our humble reading as promoting revisionism and guilt. We have time for neither. We love our heritage enough to remember some of our near forgotten heroes and sheroes. If we ever stand in solidarity with immigrants who are facing the same hardships our parents and grandparents faced, our community will be at its best.

This October, let’s reclaim the memories of some real paesans with a different world in their hearts:

Anti-facist Virgilia d’Andrea who fled from Mussolini, landing in New York, known for her fantastic oration in support of workers and women’s causes, “every time she spoke, she left behind seeded ground.”

Angela Bambace, organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the 1930s, led the sit-down strike against Robert’s Dress Company of Baltimore fighting for improved wages and conditions.

Mario Savio, son of a Sicilian steel worker is best known for his “bodies on the gears” speech in support of the Free Speech Movement. However, Savio was also a fervent opponent of racism and had been arrested while demonstrating in support of black hotel workers fighting their exclusion from non-menial jobs in San Francisco.

We have no illusions that an annual poetry reading will change the world nor topple the pillars of racism and war. The events serve as an opportunity for us to unearth hidden histories, and rededicate ourselves to a future when “discovery” might lead us to a truly new world of peace, equality, and worker’s emancipation and solidarity.

Avanti Popolo 2009, October 12th 2009 7pm.  City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus San Francisco with Michael Parenti (Author of Democracy For The Few) Giovanna Capone (Avanti Popolo Contributor)Tommi Avicolli Mecca (Editor of Smash The Church, Smash The State) Paola Bacchetta (Smash The Church, Smash The State Contributor) Ed Coletti (No Money In Poetry Blog) Christopher Giovacchini-Ramirez (Author, Poetry In The Whiskey Of The Damned).