Читать книгу No Fascist USA! - Hilary Moore - Страница 10

ONE

ONE LONG REIGN OF TERROR

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

—George Jackson

Harsh endings punctuated 1977. Elvis Presley performed his last concert, then died unceremoniously from drug-induced cardiac failure on his bathroom floor. Apartheid activist and political leader in South Africa Steve Biko was killed in police custody, a death attributed to massive brain injury. And world-renowned Brazilian soccer star Pelé played his final game. Abrupt beginnings and fantastic distractions filled the holes. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as the thirty-ninth president of the United States. Rocky won the Academy Award for best picture. The Atari 2600 gaming system made its debut. And legendary English punk band The Clash released its self-titled first album. While the coy hijinks and serial misunderstandings of Suzanne Summer and John Ritter in the sitcom Three’s Company enveloped American pop culture, a lesser known dramatic saga was unfolding.

On June 1, 1977, Khali Siwatu-Hodari, a Black man incarcerated at the Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York, wrote an open letter to plea for support. The Ku Klux Klan was infiltrating prisons in the region, with large numbers of Klansmen holding jobs as guards and prison teachers.

An Open Letter:

On behalf of myself and the men at Eastern Correctional Facility, and all prisoners throughout the state of New York, I issue this open letter as an appeal for support. I am calling on all individuals and groups, and on the press, to support and join our fight against the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of organized racism in New York State. The Klan is a growing force in this country, as well as in the prisons, and it will take a concerted, conscious effort to expose and root it out.

For years we have waged a struggle against the Klan, even while as many as 60 members and sympathizers patrolled outside our cells. We thought we were alone. But now it is clear that the Klan is recruiting from Buffalo to New York City, in the high schools of Ulster and Sullivan Counties, through civic associations, and school boards, in government and openly boasting about their racism in the press.

A massive offensive must be mounted.

Historically, the Klan has operated in secrecy. Two years ago, men at Eastern broke the clandestine organizing of guards and teachers in the prison by exposing none other than the Grand Dragon of the state, Earl Schoonmaker, who was passing out white supremacist literature among white prisoners. State authorities have done little to rid us of this degenerate element, thereby condoning Klan violence against the prisoners. The Klan has used the publicity generated by our exposure to promote its new “nonviolent” image and initiate new recruitment campaigns, continuing to preach its vicious hatred of Black and other Third World peoples.

State authorities use the Klan’s new image to justify their inaction. In the meantime, Klan organizing in this very prison and others is on the rise and reported in detail in newspapers and magazines. The Inspector General has investigated our charges, and a report is now being suppressed by the state government. We can no longer rely at all on the state of New York to carry out even the most minimal defense of our rights.

Therefore, we have taken two courses of action. First of all, we have initiated two federal lawsuits against the Klan, charging harassment and abuse of Black and other Third World prisoners. These suits charge guards as well as officials and give us the power to force the state to reveal what we prisoners already know about the Klan. These suits will be heard in Federal Court in New York City and must be supported. Secondly, we have worked on compiling this press packet, with the aid of outside supporters, to bring the word to the public in as much detail as possible.

We ask that you show your solidarity with our struggle against the Klan by coming out to support the suits this summer, and by using this material to continue to investigate Klan activity all over the state. You, the concerned people and press, are our only hope of broadening the campaign we began here in the prisons three years ago. We will continue to fight the Klan in every way possible here, but the power of a united force, fighting inside and outside against the Klan is our hope of a total victory.

Unite to Smash the Klan!

Khali

Khali Siwatu-Hodari

(nee Frank Abney)

Siwatu-Hodari’s letter coincided with a resurgence of the Klan that followed a long period of decline after peaking out in the 1920s.⁴⁰ Far from being solely a Southern problem, the Klan wreaked havoc across the United States, including in the Northeast. Building slowly, the Klan infiltrated police departments, prisons, and the military. For incarcerated people, this led to a constant state of siege, harassment, intimidation, and violence.⁴¹ In 1974, a brutal beating of an incarcerated Puerto Rican man at Napanoch, New York, led others incarcerated to establish the first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) behind bars.

Prison guards’ harassment of the incarcerated surged along with increased efforts to sever connections to their outside support. A white woman named Nancy Loori gave up her position as director of volunteer services at Napanoch after receiving death threats. People on the inside contacted outside supporters, alerting them that Klan members were employed by the New York State Department of Corrections. The Klansmen were attempting to prevent incarcerated Black people from utilizing recently established educational programs. Later in 1977, the New York Daily News conducted an investigation into allegations that the Klan staged a rally on land owned by a correctional officer. But this was not exactly breaking news. Since 1974, and consistently throughout the rest of the decade, the New York Daily News exposed not only extensive Klan infiltration and recruitment efforts within Napanoch prison, but incidents in which such infiltrators attacked incarcerated Black people, including firebombing their cells. Reporter Brian Kates observed the growth of the Klan in the North: “Nowhere has their influence been greater than in prisons. In New York alone, Klan units have gained a stronghold among both guards and incarcerated people at correctional facilities in Napanoch, Walkill, and Attica.”⁴²

Shortly before Siwatu-Hodari sent his letter, another major incident publicly revealed the Klan’s activity within state institutions. This time, Klan activity was exposed inside California’s Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. It was well known that the Klan had a chapter operating on the base. Numerous active-duty white Marines wore KKK symbols, posted threatening flyers in common areas, and carried large knives in order to intimidate Black Marines.⁴³ It was only when long-simmering racial tensions erupted into violence that the situation became news. Although an investigation uncovered that a group of sixteen Klan members on the base were armed with a .357 magnum revolver, clubs, knives, and KKK paraphernalia, it was thirteen Black Marines who were charged with assault after barging into a room and attacking those inside thought to be holding a Klan meeting. The actual KKK meeting was being held in the room next door.

Witnesses testified that Marine Klan members regularly distributed recruiting materials and emblazoned the words “nigger sticker” on their knives. The American Civil Liberties Union represented the Klan in court, prompting the resignation of thirty-five people. Finally, the Marines arrested and transferred one Klan member, Corporal Daniel Bailey, in a last-ditch effort to quell the racial tensions. The events at Camp Pendleton intensified anxieties that the Klan, and other white supremacist groups, were infiltrating the armed forces in preparation for an impending race war.⁴⁴ This incident contributed to the sense that the Klan, while increasingly marketing itself as a nonviolent cultural institution, was still a paramilitary vigilante group that was allowed to operate within the shadow of state institutions.

Around this time, Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert, two veteran activists living in upstate New York, received Khali Siwatu-Hodari’s letter. Working to bring young white radicals into support organizing for incarcerated people, Judy used her position as a professor at State University New York at New Paltz to build contacts. Together with formerly incarcerated people who were now students, they formed the Inside-Outside Prison Coalition, a campus-based group that leveraged university resources to support people incarcerated for their political actions. The group produced flyers about the plight of political prisoners, organized fundraisers, and screened films about state surveillance, the targeting of activist groups, and the rebellion at Attica State Prison. They also visited incarcerated people during frequent trips to Naponach and other New York state prisons. New Paltz students on parole were the first to introduce outside activists to Siwatu-Hodari, a member of the Black Panther Party and president of the NAACP chapter in the Napanoch prison. These connections were instrumental in creating the conditions for the founding of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. For instance, Bob Boyle, originally from New York City, was an early member of the Inside-Outside Prison Coalition. He was studying at New Paltz and worked on political prisoner cases through the National Lawyers Guild.

Prison support work in upstate New York began mingling more intentionally with the work in New York City. It wasn’t long before Boyle connected with Lisa Roth, a New Yorker who had worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at her high school and later the Students for a Democratic Society. Roth helped form the group Friends of Assata and Sundiata,⁴⁵ which was at the forefront of radical organizing. She recalled how, at this time in the late 1970s, the movement was forced to grapple with the realities of imprisoned comrades. “By the early to mid-seventies many former members of the Black Panther Party were in prison throughout New York. So many of us who got our start doing anti-racist support work for the Black Panthers ended up doing support work for incarcerated people.”

Even the most committed activists had trouble understanding the implications of Siwatu-Hodari’s letter. Could staff throughout the New York prison system be members of the Ku Klux Klan? They were skeptical. Roth admitted, “Our initial response was that the prisoners meant that the guards were really, really racist. They couldn’t possibly mean that they were members of the Klan. But they struggled with us and urged us to research the situation.” Siwatu-Hodari’s letter made clear that prison support activities such as running errands for people inside were not an adequate response to the threats posed by the Klan. “We were pushed to respond,” remarked Pam Fadem, a founding member of the Committee, “The Klan was burning crosses in the prisons, beating people. We were pushed to respond by Black leadership.”

The support network in New York City was taking off around the same time. To explore how best to respond to the fact that so many leaders were imprisoned, Pam Fadem, Lisa Roth, and Alan Berkman formed the John Brown Book Club, a study group that met in Roth’s living room. The commingling of the Inside Outside Coalition and the Book Club gave rise to the official formation of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.

“Our main strategy was to bring white people into contact with the Black revolution and allow them to be changed by it the way we had been,” explained LauraWhitehorn, who joined the group after it formed. All of the founding members had participated in the early Civil Rights and Black Power movements through organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group decided to bring these threads together—political prisoner support, anti-Klan work, and rigorous study of liberation movements. The choice of John Brown as a namesake struck a defiant pose. For them, it signaled that the era’s liberal white agenda fell far short of the work that needed to be done to abolish white supremacy.

Throughout the history of the Black Freedom movement, the reliability of white allies was constantly tested. An early emblematic rift was the controversy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Civil Rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer brought sixty Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) activists to contest the seating of their state’s Jim Crow delegates to the convention. The all-white Credential Committee yielded a mere two atlarge, non-voting seats while keeping sixty-eight other old-guard delegates in their positions.⁴⁶

Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

This drove home a sense that the government, established political parties, and many white allies would be unreliable—and if pushed, hostile—to the goals of Black Freedom movement. The MFDP refused the deal and walked away.⁴⁷ Writing from solitary confinement in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his frustration with moderate white clergy who denounced his nonviolent direct-action tactics. King wrote: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”⁴⁸

In this context, adopting the name John Brown intended to indicate the lengths the group was willing to go to in order to abolish white supremacy. In 1859, Brown led a group of twenty-one people in a raid on Harpers Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia. Brown’s goal was to seize weapons and catalyze an abolitionist war against white enslavers. The U.S. Marines, led by soon-to-be Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, defeated Brown’s militia. In his last speech before being executed, Brown appeared to be at peace with his decisions: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so, let it be done!”⁴⁹

John Brown, circa 1859.

Reproduction of daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Harpers Ferry was the culmination of Brown’s lifelong commitment to end racialized slavery in the United States. A decade prior, he had helped Black people in Massachusetts form a self-defense organization to counter the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When the fate of Kansas as a free or slave state was undecided, Brown’s small group of guerrillas attacked and killed many pro-slavery settlers. There were some who reached the conclusion, as Brown did, that only principled militancy could undo white supremacy. Yet there were others who believed that a more peaceful legal fight was a better way to end slavery and place the nation on a road to greater equality.⁵⁰

In the long arc of racial justice organizing, people have held many views about John Brown. Black activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee initially cautioned white people who traveled to the South to avoid emulating Brown and adhere instead to collective decision-making as part of a group. In contrast, Malcolm X held up Brown as exactly the type of white person the movement needed: “If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves.”⁵¹

In their first act as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, members discovered that Klan leader Janice Schoonmaker was serving on a local board of education and that there was a Klan Youth Corps campaign to recruit in East Coast high schools. The Committee’s research involved connecting names of active Klan members to towns, and identifying what, if any, roles they played within public institutions. Once they had a scoop, they looked for ways to publicly expose Klan members. As Whitehorn described it, “We had a list of names of the Klan guards in the different prisons. We made posters with their names with the intention of going to the small towns they lived in in upstate New York to expose them.” Members regularly drove the two hours between Napanoch and New York City in order to gather information.

The group’s early research culminated in the publication of their first pamphlet. In it, they publicized thirty-five prison guards that incarcerated people exposed as active members or sympathizers of the Klan. Digging deeper, members of the group traveled to Albany to locate the incorporation papers of the New York Klan. They printed these papers, exposing the Grand Dragon of the New York Klan, Earl Schoonmaker (married to Janice), had been a prison teacher and the head of the Napanoch chapter of the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association.⁵² Following complaints from a white female prison employee who alleged that she was threatened and harassed for showing sympathy to incarcerated Black people, Schoonmaker had been investigated, and in December 1974, he was suspended from his job. In 1975, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the prison, but this did very little to tangibly improve prison conditions. Despite the disciplinary action and widespread attention in the press, including coverage in the New York Times, violence continued at the prison. Activists behind bars were often placed in solitary confinement, assaulted, and harassed.

The Committee worked to publicize the demands of incarcerated people to immediately remove Klansmen from their jobs at Napanoch. During the summer of 1977, incarcerated people took over a cellblock to protest Klan-instigated brutality, a rodent-infested mess hall, and the use of rotten eggs in their food. Court records showed that about fifty incarcerated people overwhelmed several corrections officers and took thirteen hostages. Felix Castro, the imprisoned leader of the Latinos Unidos organization, was credited with negotiating the return of prison staff and later faced charges of instigating the uprising.⁵³ When news broke that Klansmen were planning cross burnings in the local Klan unit, or “Klavern,” at Pine Bush, New York, the group decided to investigate Schoonmaker more closely. To get more information about his role, Whitehorn agreed to go to Schoonmaker’s house posing as a journalist. She wore a wig. “I sat in his house asking him questions, ready for him to reveal something we could use, but it was nothing that surprising,” she recalled. “He hated Black people, Jews, and the Catholics.” On multiple occasions, Laura Whitehorn, Terry Bisson, Lisa Roth, Nancy Ryan, and Afeni Shakur all piled into Laura’s van, driving two hours north to attend the deposition.

Incarcerated people at Napanoch continued to demand that Klansmen working at the prison be fired. John Brown members met with them regularly, as they were increasingly concerned about the threats they faced for challenging the white supremacists. Here they learned that prison guards associated with the Klan had received clearance by the administration, and several had received promotions. Some guards maintained their jobs and retaliated against activists on the inside with intimidation tactics and harassment. One guard wore his Klan robe inside the prison and burned a paper cross in front of the cells of the incarcerated Black men.

At this point, the John Brown crew decided that bringing more people into the fight was needed, to increase prison support work and fight white supremacists in prisons. They also focused on educating people about the connections between police brutality at home and the role of empire in suppressing populations in Third World countries. Their first pamphlet, Smash the Klan!, opened with the letter from Siwatu-Hodari and outlined important details of the pending case against the prison. It also offered fact sheets and contact information for getting involved. The pamphlet stated:

We have known about Earl Schoonmaker’s Klan affiliation for 3 years. We have had lists of violent acts against prisoners at Napanoch and other prisoners. These are not unrelated to the atrocities which have characterized the Klan’s 100 years of racist terror. Exposure of the Klan’s whole history and strategy is a responsibility that must be shared by all honest forces in this country.

With this tangible anti-Klan material, the group made its initial attempts at conducting public outreach in white communities. First, members went to supermarkets. “It wasn’t particularly strategic, but that is where we thought we would find white people we could talk to,” remembered Boyle. In addition to free Smash the Klan! pamphlets, they offered “Death to the Klan!” T-shirts for $3.50, and buttons for 60 cents.

Never taking an official position on the role of white working people, they often completely missed the opportunity to organize around labor and economics. When shoppers stopped by their table in Brooklyn, members tried out conversations with white people who weren’t already part of the movement. Bob recalled talking to a working-class white woman when she approached the table.

“She had three crying children, she was carrying her stuff, maybe she was a single mother, maybe not. And here I am going to law school and telling her that she is privileged and if she didn’t support Black Liberation, something was wrong. This was the line. We couldn’t talk to this woman from where she was coming from, that she worked all week and was dealing with the kids and had to do her shopping, was probably living in a three-story walk-up. It wasn’t getting anywhere.”

While the concept of “white privilege” had yet to be popularized, the Committee continued an open-ended analysis that had already gone through several iterations throughout the decades. W.E.B. Du Bois never used the term but theorized in 1935 that white workers received positive psychological wages based on their skin color. These invisible wages created a diabolical bargain in which white workers gained the illusion of superiority and lost just about everything else in terms of wages, power, and the possibility of their own emancipation. In a sense, his description of the politics of whiteness was the opposite of subsequent understandings of privilege. Depending on their politics, theorists have emphasized the individualistic aspects of the idea or the structural causes. The basis of the theory is simple. People of color in the United States are excluded from economic, social, and political access that whites provide for one another. The interlocking system that upholds this inequity is led by elites with the near full participation of less privileged white people, who also get limited access to power. The process of chronic exclusion involves a violence against equality, fairness, justice, and freedom. This violence lies at the core of white supremacy and its legacy from the era of settler-colonialism through to the current period.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Theodore Allen developed these ideas to assert that there was no scientific basis for the category of the white race, and that it was invented as a method of class control. He formed this thesis after meticulously searching through pre-colonial records in Virginia and finding no mention of “white” until after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The rebellion united Black and white laborers against a colonial regime that was seen as coddling indigenous raids on settler colonies. Fearful of what might come after, Allen documented the use of whiteness to confer material and social advantages—privileges—on whites in order to sabotage potential Black-white alliances. Allen described privilege as a “poison bait” that would never allow for working-class power.⁵⁴ Cedric Robinson forever changed this debate in the early 1980s with his seminal work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. He argued that the roots of racism reach far back into Europe’s history, where the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”⁵⁵ This meant that not only was racism a tool of capitalist elites, but capitalism and racism were inextricably interwoven.

Post–World War II policy changes sharpened the ways that material advantages were distributed toward white workers. The white sections of the low-wage working class shrank, while poverty among Black and Brown workers expanded. Policy after policy, from the subsidization of suburbs to the disinvestment of cities, reinforced this dynamic. New Deal labor policy purposely excluded labor protections for farm and domestic workers. Mainstream labor organizations raised few objections to the parts of the New Deal that jettisoned workers of color. In this context, two of the most influential, yet divergent formulations of white skin privilege emerged.

In the mid to late 1980s, feminist writer Peggy McIntosh emphasized the day-to-day advantages of privilege through her famous writings on “the invisible package of unearned assets” that white people can count on “cashing in each day.” “White privilege,” wrote McIntosh, “is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”⁵⁶ Author J. Sakai put forward that, as a whole, working-class white people could never truly be revolutionary due to unbreakable attachments to empire and settler-colonialism. He further argued that the white members of the working-class were not part of the proletariat at all, thanks to their status as settlers, and that the citizenship and labor struggles of groups who later would become white was “nothing more nor less than a push to join the oppressor nation, to enlist in the ranks of the Empire.”⁵⁷ Sakai’s distinction reverberated through the Committee, for they saw white privilege as the means that the state uses to organize its support base.

The events in New York prisons made it clear that Jim Crow wore a different face outside of Southern states. New York was simply “Up South,” as Malcolm X had described. The normalization of increased Klan activity was rampant. In a blow to the people incarcerated at Napanoch, the New York High Court ruled in April 1977 that prison guards were allowed to join the Ku Klux Klan. Months later, members of the NAACP and Latinos Unidos took over a wing of Napanoch, taking eleven hostages. A grand jury returned indictments against ten of the men involved. The men were then quickly transferred to other facilities, hampering further organizing.⁵⁸

With legal channels shutting down, it seemed to many anti-racist organizers that the “massive offensive” Siwatu-Hodari urged against the Klan was the only option left on the table. The newly minted John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was more than happy to oblige.

BEGINNING FROM AN AFTERMATH

In the late 1970s, radical optimism was on the ropes. Only a decade before, it seemed that “The Movement” might somehow redeem the violent history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism in the United States. The right’s reaction against the gains of the Black Freedom movement was defined with a wave of conservative politicians winning office. A rancid bouquet of white supremacist ballot-box organizations bloomed, ready to follow the right’s electoral gains with violence in the streets. Many activists remained in the fray. International solidarity work turned toward opposing intervention in Central America and apartheid in South Africa. Domestic organizers stared down bulldozers leveling low-income communities. The Committee’s founders confronted the stark reality of old friends behind bars and the ongoing wars between law enforcement and Black organizers, radicals, and revolutionaries.

The movement against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism shaped the politics of many members of the organization. The war, and the compulsory draft of civilian men, had drawn hundreds of thousands of young people into the anti-war movement. For some, avoiding military service was simply a matter of self-preservation. Others began to see the war as part of a larger system of oppression that reinforced white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. militarism. This analysis saw Black, Indigenous, and Latino people⁵⁹ living within the United States as internally colonized communities, and imperialism as the main target for radical organizing. The people who came to the Committee were addressing the same questions that were first asked of them in their student years: What is the role of white people in dismantling white supremacy? Is racism a permanent feature of the U.S. American experience? How does fascism harness racism in the United States? How can both be abolished?

These questions remerged as part of the unfinished business of the 1960s, particularly the factional fights that rippled through the U.S. left, and that ultimately ended the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many of the original members of the Committee had been members of SDS. Emerging in 1959 from the remains of the progressive Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, the organization started with great optimism about the redeemability of U.S. institutions. Its inaugural “Port Huron Statement,” written in 1962, identified racism, militarism, and nationalism as the key evils holding back progress. Foreshadowing a later cultural turn towards anti-imperialism, it critiqued exploitation of Third World countries by Western capitalists. Working in projects such as “Friends of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” members regularly delivered white volunteers to support voter registration, nonviolent direct action, and Freedom Schools in the South. Some actions drew the connections to many concerns of the era. The 1968 student occupation of Columbia University, for example, linked military research and the college’s gentrification of Harlem.⁶⁰

White students’ complicated relationship with the Black Freedom movement mirrored the larger one between the era’s white and Black radicals. Throughout the 1960s, questions of when violence and insurrection might be called for were always under discussion. These questions became more urgent as thousands of young people drafted to fight in Vietnam were killed in battle, injured, tortured, or held as prisoners of war. It seemed that “the system” would, as John F. Kennedy warned, “make peaceful revolution impossible and make violent revolution inevitable.”⁶¹

The Black Freedom movement began to demand more of its white supporters. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked white activists to leave the group and to focus on organizing against racism in their communities.⁶² In fits and starts, the “organize your own” experiment had already begun a few years earlier. Attempts at doing this created the Economic Research and Action Projects of the Students for a Democratic Society, which experimented with community organizing in impoverished communities. It was an attempt to build an “interracial movement of the poor.” Ironically, only one such project, Jobs or Income Now Community Union, gained traction, situated itself in a low-income white community, and made an honest go of heading off reactionary politics there. The rest fell short. Other New Left groups, such as the Sojourner Truth Organization, embraced workplace organizing and sent organizers into factories to address the politics of white privilege within the working class.⁶³

Protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago placed the violence of a Northern city in the national spotlight and peeled back illusions that the Democratic Party could be easily reformed. Multiple factional fights within its ranks ultimately ended the group. The faction that formed the Weather Underground was based on the idea that white youth could challenge the oppressor nation and align with the revolution of Black people. This set of politics abandoned the left’s traditional emphasis on class struggle and promoted the idea that national liberation movements would be the vehicle for revolution in their time. Central to this understanding was the idea that colonies existed internally and externally. For example, Black people living within the United States were colonized as surely as those living under European rule in Africa. SDS was anti-imperialist and committed to organizing through militancy. The murder of Fred Hampton was an important turning point for the Weather Underground organization, eventually leading it to embrace a path of underground armed struggle. Inspired by the writings of Che Guevara and a cornucopia of successful anti-colonial uprisings overseas, the Weather Underground embraced Foco theory—strategies for armed insurgency and guerrilla warfare.

Their particular interpretation held that clandestine group structures taking “exemplary action” could replace mass organizations, and that acts of militancy and property damage against symbols of oppression could incite mass rebellion. Over the next five years, the group claimed responsibility for dozens of bombings. The Weather Underground’s template for action was to target a symbol of U.S. power and to publicly associate the act as a counterattack against government repression. Among their targets were the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Justice Department, a Long Island Courthouse, the New York Police Department, banks, and police cars. The only human casualties of their operations were three of their own members: Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Teddy Gold were killed when a bomb they were constructing in a New York townhouse accidentally detonated.

From 1969 to 1975, the Weather Underground published communiqués, a volume of revolutionary women’s poetry titled Sing a Battle Song, and a detailed exposition of their political ideology titled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The group’s statements warmly embraced revolutionary movements across the globe and upheld them as the basis of change. They were pessimistic about building a strategy around economic class, especially one that relied on participation from its white section. Weather Underground members saw revolutionary potential in “Third World peoples in the U.S., and also women, youth and members of the armed forces.” It was an outlook that would be adopted by many organizations long after the Weather Underground’s eventual demise.⁶⁴

The United States was in a position of overwhelming power after World War II, and in post-war restructuring, the U.S. supported imperial European forces in regaining access to their previous colonies, such as France’s rule over Vietnam. The United States also fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming an independent state capable of influencing other Asian countries, including Japan and Indonesia, and thus restructuring the balance of regional power.⁶⁵ When John F. Kennedy escalated the war, it became clear that Vietnam would not be an obedient colony.

The standard liberal account of the Vietnam War has been that the United States tried to save South Vietnam from the threat of communism, and despite a valiant effort, was not able to see it through, and thus retreated. A right-wing account, on the other hand, has been that the U.S. military was stabbed in the back by American society and politicians, and if there had been more time and resources, the United States would have won. Polls conducted in 1975 by the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs indicated that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, and not a mistake the U.S. government happened to make. Television played a significant role in popular disproval, bringing the violence of the U.S. government into the homes of average Americans. Within this vast tilt toward condemnation, many in the radical left saw the Vietnamese resistance, led by a diplomat turned revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, as a living model for fighting imperial powers such as France and the United States. In fact, the struggle of Vietnam seemed to indicate that it was, at least in some ways, possible for a small country to pull out of the transnational economic system.

Decolonization efforts in developing countries provided both inspiration and a road map for action. European countries were being shown the door from occupied territories on an annual basis. In the year 1960 alone, more than a dozen African nations—including Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Congo/Kinshasa, Congo/Brazzaville, Somalia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Gabon, Chad, Nigeria, Mauritania—gained independence from European empires. In 1962, the same year the Port Huron Statement was signed, many young people in the United States were gaining political consciousness through the Civil Rights movement. The Algerian struggle for self-determination successfully liberated the country from France. In 1974, Angola and Mozambique won independence from Portuguese rule. The following year, the Portuguese were ejected from Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. In Latin America, revolutions by socialist and national liberation forces, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were beginning to emerge. At the same time, U.S. interventions, often violent and covert, increasingly destabilized the region.

In 1976, the Weathermen initiated the Hard Times Conference in an attempt to consolidate different radical strands of the movement. If unity was the goal, then Hard Times failed. The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee criticized what they believed to be an effort to submerge anti-imperialism and racism into class-only politics and challenged the conference leadership to explicitly embrace women’s struggles. This perspective was shared by the members of the John Brown Book Club who were in attendance. A year later, at a conference, Prairie Fire finally split in two, with the May 19th Communist Organization (named after the joint birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X) organizing on the East Coast. Both organizations would eventually promote John Brown Anti-Klan Committee chapters across the country.

“There really was a sense that the movements from the 1960s and 1970s had failed,” recalled Laura Whitehorn. One of the ways activists adapted to this massive political shift in the late ’70s was to double down on their commitment to movements for self-determination. The concept of self-determination was rooted in Malcolm X’s assessment, following his return from Mecca, that liberation for Black people in the United States involved forming a separate nation.⁶⁶ For Committee members, it was national liberation struggles that animated their political imagination. As China Brotsky, a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Committee, explained: “National liberation movements were setting the world on fire, at the very moment we were formulating our politics—between American Indian Movement, and Puerto Ricans, the FALN in New York, the Panthers, and Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chicano, and Mozambique. For us, it was completely normal and logical.”