by Fred Hampton until his murder in December, 1969. Under Hampton, the Illinois BPP was one of the most vibrant sections of the Party nationwide. It developed ongoing (though not always smooth) relations with the SDS national office, and with activist groups in other communities that were modeled in part on the Panthers, such as the Young Lords Organization in the Puerto Rican community, and the Young Patriots, who were active in the community of Appalachian whites who had immigrated to Chicago over the course of the sixties.60 French recalls that she had been arrested shortly before Hampton was killed, “so I was in Cook County Jail and did not get out until some time after the funeral. I’d been beaten and sustained leg injuries that still cause me problems. I went east to [stay with] my parents for a few weeks, and gave a lot of thought to whether or not I would return to the BPP.… Although I ultimately returned to the Party, I was involved in the founding of [STO] during the interim.”61 She also proposed the name “Sojourner Truth Organization,” after the former slave, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist of the nineteenth century.62 The name stuck with the group long after French departed, and despite the almost all-white demographics of the membership throughout its history.
Carole Travis was an antiwar activist whose main frame of reference was antiracism and a commitment to the working class. For a time she was on staff at the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.63 Travis’s father was Bob Travis, an active militant in the Communist Party who had led the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937, which was pivotal in organizing the auto industry and gave incredible momentum to the newly founded CIO.64 “I grew up with my mother,” Travis recalls. “She was more of a New Deal Democrat, although she was a genius and critical of everything, and she had a good sense of humor and was crazy.”65 She embraced her mother’s opposition to racism, but she also retained her father’s commitment to the industrial working class. The militant struggles at the grassroots that characterized the Flint strike and other early CIO efforts were a major influence on the initial workplace organizing of STO in the early seventies.
Sometime in the late sixties, Travis met and married Don Hamerquist, who was to become the only person involved with STO throughout the group’s existence. At the time of their meeting, Hamerquist was an emerging young star of the CPUSA. He had recently relocated from the west coast to Chicago in order to participate in the planning of the protests around the 1968 Convention.66 He had been favorably profiled in Time magazine, and was rumored to be Gus Hall’s pick to replace him as head of the Party.67 But things changed: Hamerquist was profoundly influenced by the new left, and was dismayed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. His biggest political influence was Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were newly translated into English in the mid-sixties.68 Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony and consciousness, and his commitment to the workers’ councils as the basis of communist power, were to be hallmarks of STO’s analysis throughout its existence.
Hamerquist and others briefly attempted the equivalent of a coup in the Party, advancing an alternative political program and convincing many younger radicals to join the party in an attempt to elect a new leadership slate. Having lost this effort, he quit before the Party could expel him, and set his sights on next steps.69 He and Travis remained in Chicago, immersed themselves in factory work, and began developing the analysis of dual consciousness that would mark STO from the start. Their disillusionment with the CPUSA also led them to a critique of Stalinism that meshed well with the Jamesian approach that Ignatin was developing around the same time.
One additional person deserves mention here. Ken Lawrence, as mentioned above, was not a founding member of STO, partly because in 1969 he was still a member of the not-yet-defunct Facing Reality Organization, led by James and coordinated by Martin Glaberman in Detroit.70 Lawrence had also played a role in the small resurgence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a few years earlier, and found himself profoundly influenced by the legacy of the original Wobblies.71 This connection no doubt had some responsibility for the development of STO’s initial “Call to Organize,” which begins by quoting the famous first sentence of the Preamble to the IWW Constitution: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”72 Lawrence also had extensive experience in the civil rights movement, and through Facing Reality was familiar with the development of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. By the late sixties, Lawrence was a familiar face to several of those who did participate in the creation of STO, and his influence was significant on the early trajectory of the group.
In short, the founding members of STO were in some ways as diverse as the movements from which they emerged: men and women, mostly white but with black and latino participation as well, largely young and inspired by the new left of the sixties, but also with ties to the old left of the CPUSA and its various splits and imitators. The result was an eclectic mix of experiences and perspectives, which bore some similarity to the emergence of other groups in what became known as the New Communist Movement, while retaining a uniqueness that persisted over the course of the next two decades.73
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The initial rumblings of what became the Sojourner Truth Organization lie in the RYM II conference in Atlanta, over Thanksgiving weekend of 1969. In advance of the conference, a small grouping of revolutionaries, including the people described above, had begun meeting in Chicago to discuss the future of the movement, broadly speaking.74 As indicated, they took inspiration from the Leninist tradition, both in the US and around the world. The grouping drafted a paper to distribute at the Atlanta convention, advocating the creation of a Marxist-Leninist party as a key task for the coming period. The Atlanta paper identified several key attributes that were necessary if the new party was to succeed. It needed a theory and a line that could guide a comprehensive revolutionary strategy for the United States; that theory was Marxism-Leninism, and the line was the emerging analysis of white skin privilege. The line had to be tested in practice, and in particular it was necessary to be sure that success was a result of the line, not of the efforts made by individual leaders of the party. The party had to succeed in recruiting workers, not simply students or middle-class intellectuals, and including these workers in the leadership. The membership needed to reflect the demographics of the US population, and it had to be a presence in “the most important industrial centers of the country.” Finally, it needed a sizeable and supportive periphery, people who wouldn’t join the party but “were happy to see it formed.”75
In this, the Chicago grouping was on the same page as most of the other RYM II formations. The hosts in Atlanta, for example, were in the process of forming the Georgia Communist League, which also looked toward the creation of a new party. But the similarities largely stopped there, as the Chicago grouping took far greater interest than any other RYM II groupings in mass (as opposed to cadre) revolutionary formations, in the development of revolutionary consciousness through collective action, and in the repudiation of Stalinism.76 Further, STO’s understanding of the white skin privilege line differed significantly from the analysis adopted by most of the other RYM II groups, some of which eventually repudiated the line completely as the
