Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times by Amy Sonnie & James Tracy

Author:Amy Sonnie & James Tracy [Sonnie, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-008-2
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

In 1972 Raymond Tackett, a Chicago Patriots member, had described the devastation that shattered the organizations in the Rainbow Coalition. “Every time one of us were arrested, we could see our pictures hanging on the wall of the police station and the pigs aiming darts at them.” Tackett also worked with the Patriots sister group, Rising Up Angry, and did his own stint in prison. “All there was left was the power structure of the pigs who had destroyed everything else,” he wrote.31 Tackett was killed in 1973. Under circumstances eerily similar to John Howard’s murder, Tackett returned to his home state of Kentucky to organize in the mining town of Evarts. He was in the process of starting a Serve the People–inspired free clinic when he was killed. Although the police arrested a suspect in his murder, Tackett’s family alleges he was killed by a hired assassin, paid for by the police.32

While the Young Patriots and Patriot Party only receive passing mention in most histories of the New Left, their alliance with the Panthers has been held up as proof of the era’s revolutionary vision.33 A group of poor white guys—some former gang members—working alongside the Black Panthers and Young Lords contradicts biased notions about poor whites as either hopelessly racist or reliant on the Left intelligentsia for a radical reeducation. To Jaja Nkruma, the Patriots were obvious allies because they were truly grassroots. “In order to be grassroots you have to reach your community in the beauty shops, barbershops, grocery stores, factories, sawmills and cabinet factories,” he said. To outsiders the Patriots–Lords–Panthers partnership may have seemed unlikely, but to its founders it was an inimitable political alliance—unique and difficult, but necessary. Theirs was a project molded in the image of other multiracial uprisings in U.S. history, and like the work of Carl and Anne Braden in the South and JOIN Community Union in Chicago, the Patriots boldly suggested that the white children of the Southern Diaspora might claim an identity separate from the legacy of racism and help realize the promise of rainbow politics for the entire nation.

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