The Chicago grouping continued to meet after the Atlanta conference, despite the fact that RYM II was clearly doomed. By the end of the year, the collective decided to act on the paper it had produced and constitute itself as a formal organization that would act like a party on a small scale.78 Just after Christmas, the Sojourner Truth Communist Organization was born. (The word “Communist” was “allow[ed] … to fall into disuse” about a year later.)79 A meeting schedule was agreed upon, dues were collected, and two areas of work were prioritized: workplace organizing focused on producing an underground in-factory newsletter as part of the campaign to keep the International Harvester plant open, and community organizing efforts were dedicated to winning the release of a young black man who had been framed on a murder charge. The SDS/RYM/RYM II experience had left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of STO’s founders, and initially the group avoided contact with the rest of the self-identified left, preferring direct immersion in working-class communities. Although this policy was soon reversed, the insistence on mass work as opposed to a simplistic reliance on left coalition-building efforts was a continuing theme within the organization.
Over the course of the next fifteen or more years, STO would go through innumerable changes in membership; only Hamerquist, Ignatin, Travis, and Katz (as well as Lawrence) would play any significant role after 1973. The political transformations the group would undergo as the years progressed were even more important. The first major period of the group’s existence, roughly from 1970 until 1975, saw the development of STO’s initial ideas around the centrality of working-class experience (Chapter Two) and the opposition to white supremacy (Chapter Three), as well as the group’s initial efforts to develop an organization that could sustain the fight for revolution in changing circumstances. It is to the practical and theoretical implications of these concepts, workers and whiteness in the context of revolutionary strategy, that we turn next.
7 For more on the shift from civil rights to black power modes of the black freedom movement, see Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006).
8 For more on COINTELPRO operations against the black movement, the white left, and the far right, see David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
9 The influence of the Panthers, and black radicalism generally, on the white left of the late sixties is detailed in David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
10 On the Panther 21, see Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997 [1973]).
11 The best work on Hampton’s killing is Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2010).
12 The split in the Party is detailed by Peniel Joseph, Midnight Hour, 261–269.
13 The classic assessment of the League is Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (Updated Edition) (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998 [1975]).
14 See Chapter Two for more on the LRBW’s influence on STO.
15 Georgakas and Surkin describe the rise of DRUM and its connection to the emergence of the LRBW. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 20–41.
16 Carl Davidson, “Toward Institutional Resistance,” New Left Notes, November 13, 1967, quoted in David Barber, “‘A Fucking White Revolutionary Mass Movement’ and Other Fables of Whiteness,” Race Traitor no. 12, Spring 2001, 35. Davidson subsequently participated in the New Communist Movement throughout the seventies, including several years spent in the Harpers Ferry Organization, a small New York City group aligned with STO.
17 Carole Travis, interview with author, June 6, 2006.
18 This process is outlined in Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988), 45–51.
19 Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, et. al., “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” (June 18, 1969), in Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1970), 66. “Fight the people” is discussed in favorable terms in Bill Ayers, “A Strategy to Win” (September 11, 1969) in Jacobs, 192.
20 For more on labor unrest in the late sixties and early seventies, see Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Wislow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010).
21 These events are described in greater detail in Chapter Two.
22 According to economists Peter Jackson and Edward Montgomery, the unemployment rate for black men between the ages of eighteen and nineteen was 19 percent, more than double the 7.9 percent for white men of the same ages. Peter Jackson and Edward Montgomery, “Layoffs, Discharges and Youth Unemployment,” in Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 116.
23 This particular phrasing comes from the “General Rules” of the International Workingmen’s Association, adopted in October 1964. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/rules.htm (accessed January 7, 2012).
24 The classic work on GI resistance in Vietnam remains David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005 [1975]). For a thorough, if pro-military, look at fragging, see George Lepre, Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).
25 James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) describes this historical development through the end of 1969.
26 Quoted in Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 1999), 214–215.
27 George Schmidt, interview with the author, March 26, 2006.
