Table Of ContentADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HILLBILLY NATIONALISTS, URBAN
RACE REBELS, AND BLACK POWER
“Hillbilly Nationalists recovers the voices of white, working-class radicals who
prove abolitionist John Brown’s legacy is alive and well. Over ten years, Sonnie
and Tracy have collected rare documents and conducted interviews to fill a long-
missing piece of social movement history. Focusing on the 1960s–70s and
touching on issues just as relevant today, these authors challenge the Left not to
ignore white America, while challenging white America to recognize its
allegiance to humanity and justice, rather than the bankrupt promises of
conservative politicians.”
—ANGELA Y. DAVIS, AUTHOR OF ABOLITION DEMOCRACY:
BEYOND PRISON, TORTURE AND EMPIRE
“This book is, without question, the definitive resource for scholars, students,
and activists interested in some of the most innovative and understudied
coalitional politics of the New Left.”
—DARREL ENCK-WANZER, EDITOR OF
THE YOUNG LORDS: A READER
“In our world, ‘white, working-class anti-racism’ is considered an oxymoron, or
at best a pipe dream. Amy Sonnie and James Tracy prove these assumptions
wrong, excavating a forgotten history of poor white folks who, in alliance with
black nationalists, built a truly radical movement for social justice, economic
power, and racial and gender equality. They have written a beautiful, powerful,
surprising account of class-based interracial organizing; I expect Hillbilly
Nationalists to inspire a new generation of activists who understand that a true
rainbow coalition is not only desirable but our only hope.”
— ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, AUTHOR OF FREEDOM DREAMS:
THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION AND THELONIOUS MONK:
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
“Sonnie and Tracy are master storytellers whose stories of working-class,
interracial solidarity chart a new direction in the history of the modern freedom
movement. Based on dozens of oral histories and previously untapped personal
records of movement activists, this book offers an inspiring and largely invisible
history of poor and working-class whites who built a ‘vanguard of the
dispossessed’ with Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others in the radical
movement for racial and economic justice. Written with nuance and power, this
is a major contribution to the study of civil rights, social justice, working-class
communities, and the politics of whiteness in the United States.”
—JENNIFER GUGLIELMO, AUTHOR OF LIVING
THE REVOLUTION AND ARE ITALIANS WHITE?
“Hillbilly Nationalists is the story of reformers and revolutionaries, dreamers
and doers, who remind us of a transformative organizing tradition among white,
working-class communities. Inspired by Black Power and global events, these
organizers did what only poor folks can do: they pooled their resources to build a
vibrant social movement that escapes easy classification. Sonnie and Tracy
combine first-rate historical research and extensive oral histories to capture the
legacies of those unsung heroes and heroines who battled for the hearts and
minds of working-class Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.”
— DAN BERGER, EDITOR OF THE HIDDEN
1970s: HISTORIES OF RADICALISM
AMY SONNIE is an activist, educator and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social
justice movements for the past 17 years. She is cofounder of the national Center for Media Justice.
Her first book, Revolutionary Voices, an anthology by queer and transgender youth (Alyson Books,
2000), is banned in parts of New Jersey and Texas. Her work has appeared in the San Franscisco Bay
Guardian, Alternet, Philadelphia Inquirer, Clamor, the Oxygen Television Network, Bitch
magazine, and The Sojourner.
JAMES TRACY is a longtime social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the
founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense
Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D
Press: The Civil Disobedience Handbook and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have
appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, and Contemporary Justice Review.
ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ (Foreword) grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless
farmer and a half-Indian mother. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at
California State University East Bay, and author of numerous books on Indigenous peoples’
histories, as well as three acclaimed historical memoirs: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie; Outlaw
Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra
War; and Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980.
Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power:
Community Organizing in Radical Times
© Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
Foreword © Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: September 2011
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-61219-008-2
Cover photo: the original Rainbow Coalition on April 4, 1969, at a press conference urging interracial unity
on the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Standing, from left to right: Andy
Keniston, Hi Thurman, William Fesperman, Bobby McGinnis, Mike James, Bud Paulin, Bobby Rush, Elisa
McElroy and Alfredo Matias. Seated: Junebug Boykin, Nathaniel Junior, Luis Cuzo. Courtesy of Michael
James Archives.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
List of Abbreviations
Foreword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Common Cause Is Freedom: JOIN Community Union and the
Transformation of Peggy Terry
Chapter 2 The Fire Next Time: The Short Life of the Young Patriots and the
Original Rainbow Coalition
Chapter 3 Pedagogy of the Streets: Rising Up Angry
Chapter 4 Lightning on the Eastern Seaboard: October 4th Organization and
White Lightning
Epilogue
Acknowledgments & Interviews
Notes
List of Abbreviations
BYNC Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council
CFM Chicago Freedom Movement
COINTELPRO Counterintelligence Program [of the FBI]
CORE Congress of Racial Equity
ERAP Economic Research and Action Project
HRUM Health Revolutionary Unity Movement
JOIN Jobs or Income Now
LID League for Industrial Democracy
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NWBCCC Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition
NWRO National Welfare Rights Organization
O4O October 4th Organization
PFP Peace and Freedom Party
PL Progressive Labor [Party]
RYM / RYM IIRevolutionary Youth Movement
SCEF Southern Conference Educational Fund
SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SDS Students for a Democratic Society
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
UPWC United Parents Who Care
Foreword
BY ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ
I
first met representatives of the New Left at San Francisco State College (now
University) in the Spring of 1961, my first semester there. I was twenty-two
years old, having moved to San Francisco from Oklahoma with my husband.
During 1960, my first year living in San Francisco and working fulltime in an
office machine repair factory, I followed the television images of the burgeoning
Civil Rights Movement in the South and all over the country and I was ripe for
recruitment to the Movement. In particular, I closely watched the local anti-
death penalty sit-ins at San Quentin prison to prevent the execution of author-
inmate Caryl Chessman, and followed the student demonstrations against the
House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall as police
attacked hundreds of students with batons, blasting them with fire hoses and
arresting dozens. I wanted to meet those brave young people.
I had long hungered to go to college and now it seemed like a way to get
involved with the Movement too—I was thinking less about the risk and more
about my excellent typing skills. So, that day on the San Francisco State campus
when I saw an information table about the Mississippi Freedom Rides, I thought,
“Finally!” After a full year in San Francisco, this was the first seemingly public
invitation to join.
Back in Oklahoma I came from a childhood of rural poverty. For my last year
of high school I moved from “the sticks” to work full time in Oklahoma City,
which meant I attended the trade high school, secretarial track of course. It was
the first year of school desegregation in Oklahoma, a year after the Supreme
Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation
of public schools. I attended the first public school in Oklahoma to integrate. It
was no accident that the single wholly working-class white school received that
honor. Predictably, there were acts of white racist violence against the few Black
students. I began to pay attention to the sit-ins at local drugstore counters. I read
the local extremely rightwing newspaper, because that was the only one
available, but the photographs spoke for themselves about the violence being
meted out against Black people all over the South. Then, I married into a family
that abhorred racial discrimination. My father-in-law, a New Deal Democrat,
had been a leader in efforts to desegregate the local crafts unions. From my in-
laws’ point of view, “lower-class” whites were the racist culprits, the kind of
people I came from. I nearly held my breath for three years until I could leave
Oklahoma and my past forever. I hoped San Francisco would be free of “racist
low-class” white people.
In San Francisco everything seemed possible. Attending college was a dream
come true and here, during my first semester, I found the noble activists I hoped
had all the answers. Without knowing it, they intimidated me to the core. Behind
the table sat two handsome young white men wearing jeans and plaid shirts.
Standing behind them were two young women with long, straight blonde hair,
dressed in black turtlenecks, skirts and leotards with shiny black boots. They
were all laughing and talking with each other. I felt thrilled, as if a whole new
world lay before me. I was also panic-stricken, not knowing what to say. (I look
back and see, through their eyes, this working-class young woman dressed in the
style of the new first lady, Jackie Kennedy, in a pastel linen shift and matching
cardigan sweater with matching purse and medium high heels, panty hose, of
course, and a bouffant hairdo. And then, out came the pronounced Okie accent
when she got up the nerve to speak). I fingered a flyer on the table that asked for
donations to send freedom riders—Black and white students on northern buses—
to Mississippi to protest segregated interstate transportation. It seemed a brilliant
but dangerous program. They also had a sign-up sheet for volunteers. How I
wanted to sign!
Suddenly, I heard my voice asking if they were going to talk to poor whites in
the South. They seemed stunned by the question, perhaps thinking I was joking.
But, my surely terrified face and trembling hands must have made clear that I
was serious, and that I was myself one of the poor whites. Immediately, I wished
I could take back the question and start over. Then, one of the young men said,
“No,” and added that they weren’t recruiting them either. It seemed I had spoiled
my attempt to somehow join the cause.
It took several years before I tried to get involved again—only after I had
successfully gotten rid of my accent, changed my way of dressing, grown my
hair long and driven the working-class rural Okie girl underground in order to be
accepted by the Movement. My experience is perhaps exceptional, but only
because most individuals from my kind of background instinctively avoided
putting themselves in positions of such humiliation and rejection.
I am glad I persisted in my radical commitment, but the truth is that the
Movement was, and still is, mired in class hatred. One of my mentors, the late
