Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power
Community Organizing in Radical Times
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
THE STORY OF SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND LITTLE-KNOWN ACTIVISTS OF THE 1960s, IN A DEEPLY SOURCED NARRATIVE HISTORY
The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a group of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by.
James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups:
+ JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .
+ The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .
+ In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .
+ In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor.
Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A group of scraggly white men wearing Confederate flags showing up at a Black Panther convention might seem like an act of provocation, but in the summer of 1969 it was a gesture toward solidarity. The whites were members of the Young Patriots Organization, a small but significant vanguard of "hillbilly" radicals willing to cross racial boundaries in the interest of class unity. Southern whites are often depicted as resisting civil rights or supporting racist political candidates; in this provocative and surprising history, activists Sonnie (Revolutionary Voices) and Tracy (editor of The Civil Disobedience Handbook) reveal the forgotten militancy of the "poor and working-class whites who propelled racial justice rather than opposing it." In derelict neighborhoods in Chicago, Philadelphia, or New York City, transplanted Southerners did not require outside agitation in order to become radicalized. The relentless pressures of the Vietnam War, the draft, street demonstrations, and racial violence gave momentum to such homegrown organizations as Rising Up Angry and White Lightning. Drawing their membership from "gang kids and greasers," they combined community organizing with direct action and had little use for "middle-class intellectual bullshit." By the late 1970s, their efforts victims of the New Right and the FBI's counter-intelligence programs had been largely suppressed, but this compelling narrative refutes any "biased notions about poor whites as either hopelessly racist or reliant on the Left intelligentsia for a radical reeducation."
