The Panthers and the PatriotsThe story of how a group of poor whites in Chicago united with the Black Panthers to fight racism and capitalism.
In the fall of 1968, a Methodist church invited the Young Patriots to give a presentation about their work alongside Bob Lee of the Illinois Black Panther Party. The audience — mostly white, liberal, and middle-class — treated the Panthers with curiosity, but expressed open hostility toward the Patriots. Lee had never seen anything like it: white people attacking poor whites. He rose to the Patriots’ defense. Afterward, he suggested the two groups collaborate.
It was an ambitious undertaking. Then as now, Chicago was sharply segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Lee spent three weeks in Uptown getting to know the Patriots and their neighbors before mentioning the idea of an alliance to Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Panthers.
But Hampton was enthusiastic upon hearing Lee’s proposal, and dubbed the fledgling alliance the “Rainbow Coalition.” He even accepted the Patriots’ use of the Confederate flag. According to Thurman, Hampton said, “If we can use that to organize, if we can use it to turn people, then we need to do it.”
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“The Rainbow Coalition was all about identity politics,” said scholar Jakobi Williams, author of From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. “Folks were not asked to abandon their identities, but to use their identities as a way of building bridges to form alliances on poverty or whatever other issue that they believed to be important.”
Though short lived, the Young Patriots and the Rainbow Coalition showed that working-class movements can overcome significant divides (even Confederate flags) to unite around issues like poverty, corruption, and police brutality. The fierce resistance they faced from elites, both liberal and conservative, underscores the potency of their radical project.
A few years ago, Hy Thurman restarted two chapters of the Young Patriots in Alabama. Already he’s attracted a younger cohort of supporters. A multiracial group of teens and twenty-somethings, after learning of Thurman’s history, reached out to him and became his collaborators. Thurman has also linked up with Chuck Armsbury, a former Patriot Party member who lives in rural Washington State. Their goal: to revive the organization as an antidote to the pervasive despair in poor and working-class white communities.
It’s a tall order. But we can be sure of one thing: Fred Hampton and “Preacherman” Fesperman would be proud.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/blac ... ed-hampton