Born in 1897, Lillian Smith was a pioneering White Southern critic of the Jim Crow South. Her antiracist journey began as a child, when her family adopted a little White girl named Janie, who had been found living in a “shack” with a Black family. Janie was suspected of having been kidnapped, and was forcibly relocated. Lillian and Janie became fast friends: they played together, shared clothes, and slept in the same room… until it was discovered that Janie was actually a White-passing, Black child. When Janie was suddenly torn away from Lillian, Lillian realized that there was something “out there” in the world beyond her parent’s control… and that it was powerful enough to make her parents do bad things. As she later wrote in her book Killers of the Dream:“I began to know that people who talked of love and children did not mean it . . . Something was wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people.”
Lillian Smith became a prolific writer, whose keen psychological insights into the functioning of White supremacy supported generations of freedom fighters. Her writings explore how Jim Crow rituals sank in on a deeply somatic level that made it hard to question the racial order: it was not only children’s minds, but their bodies that learned “the twisting turning dance of segregation . . . hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our lives without thinking.” She describes how a broader authoritarian culture that enforced unquestioned and strict rules around religion, gender, and sexuality was necessary to create the conditions for also not questioning White supremacy. Lillian Smith is also an early example of how queer women were often at the forefront of asking the deepest questions and developing the deepest analysis of power at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
In addition to her contributions as a writer, Lillian and her partner Paula Snelling ran the Laurel Falls Girls Camp, located on Georgia’s Old Screamer Mountain, throughout the 20s, 30s, and 40s. The girls and young White women who attended were encouraged to explore any and all questions that felt alive to them in their lives, through theatre, dance, art, and discussion. The process inevitably led to rich conversations and realizations about race relations, sexism, authority… and in Lillian’s words, “our bodies, sex, death, life, God, our parents, hate, love, fear, anxiety, guilt, and beauty.” Generations of White southern women would later express the enormous impact that Laurel Falls Camp had on their lives.
Constance Curry – affectionately known as “Connie” – was born into a newly emigrated, working-class Irish family during the Great Depression. For the first ten years of her life, her family was constantly on the move, chasing work in the textile industry before finally finding a stable job in the mills of Greensboro, North Carolina. Connie’s parents regaled their children with Irish poetry, song, and the stories of Irish revolutionaries. “It is clear to me,” she later wrote, “that the Irish struggle got planted deep in my heart and soul at an early age, and that its lessons and music and poetry were easily transferred to the southern freedom struggle.”
In college, Connie got involved in student organizing with the progressive National Student Association (NSA). In 1953 – shortly before the Civil Rights Movement began – she was elected by the NSA to represent the students of the South. As a ferocious White backlash against the movement developed, students of the NSA felt that young White southerners were ready to chart a more progressive path than their elders… if they had some support. And so, in 1959, the NSA launched the Southern Project, which aimed to build a multiracial network of student supporters of the Civil Rights Movement across the South. Connie was the Southern Project’s first director.
In February of 1960, Connie was driving through Greensboro when she heard the news on the local radio: four Black college students had been arrested, for refusing to leave the Woolworth’s lunch counter. From that moment, the sit-in movement spread like wildfire, and Connie began showing up to witness, document, and build relationships with the student activists. She used her directorship of the Southern Project to spearhead a newsletter about the student-led movement, which was distributed throughout the NSA’s national network. The newsletter gave students across the country updates on the violence their fellow students in the South were facing, what the needs of those students were, and what local actions could be taken to offer support. Connie’s newsletter contributed to a surge of northern support, and laid the foundation for the northern networks that would later support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.)
When the sit-in leaders gathered later that year to form SNCC, Connie was one of the few White people in attendance, and became the first White woman on SNCC’s executive committee. She gave SNCC leaders the keys to her Southern Project office to make use of the resources there, introduced them to her NSA network and funding sources, and even used funding for the Southern Project to directly pay SNCC’s bills. She never asked for permission to do any of this… and no one from the NSA chose to question her.
Connie stepped away from SNCC in 1964, as the organization moved away from campus organizing. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, she accepted a new position as the southern field representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), where she worked for eleven years to ensure that the promises of the Civil Rights Movement’s landmark legislative victories were kept. She was the AFSC liaison for planning the Poor People’s Campaign, and was in a meeting with Martin Luther King the day before he was killed. From 1975 to 1990, she served as the City of Atlanta’s Director of Human Services, under the city’s first two Black mayors: Maynard Jackson, and Martin Luther King’s dear friend, Andrew Young. As the era of mass incarceration picked up steam, she fought diligently against the New Jim Crow. She also turned toward writing, helping to chronicle many of the untold stories of the civil rights era. Connie Curry died in 2020, at the age of 86.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was born in Brooklyn, in 1945, in “a swirling Jewish ghetto/community of first-and-second generation immigrants,” where union support and opposition to McCarthyism was the norm. She was raised to understand that racial prejudice was wrong by a father who had been a member of the Young Communist League, and a mother who had been spat on for her activism against the Korean War. As Melanie wrote in her biographical essay, To be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century: social justice “was my Jewish upbringing, as much as the candles we lit for Hanukkah.”
At age 17, Melanie had her first experience of organizing. It was 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. She began working for the Harlem Education Project, which was connected to the SNCC-affiliated Northern Student Movement. As Melanie describes the project, they “had organized a tutoring project, several rent strikes, an anti-rat campaign; had pressured schools for decent facilities and a Black history curriculum, and helped to create freedom schools for children to attend in protest . . . It was my first experience with a mobilizing proud community and with the possibilities of collective action.”
It was also her first experience in a non-Jewish environment. During her time with the Harlem Education Project, she met civil rights activists returning from the South. She heard personal stories of incredible oppression – of loved ones lynched, of great grandparents enslaved – as well as of inspiring freedom struggles. The experience led her to become intensely focused on combatting White supremacy. And yet, she was “utterly unaware of racism against Jews.” The Holocaust, at her young age, felt like it was “eons ago, irrelevant.”
In 1966, Melanie left New York for graduate school in Berkeley: “I wanted to get away from NY, from my family, my people, to be part of the radical politics developing on the West Coast.” She threw herself into the antiwar movement; into struggles for racial justice and economic rights; into the women’s rights movement; and after coming out as a lesbian in the early 1970s, into queer liberation. Jewish issues were hardly on her radar.
And yet, she felt out of place and socially awkward in the progressive spaces she inhabited. In 1978, she had coffee with a woman who wanted to work at the rape relief hotline Melanie was involved in. Although the two women had little in common, Melanie experienced a sense of ease in their conversation that she rarely found in movement spaces. She realized it was because they had a shared culture: they were both East Coast Jews. She began to sense that it was important for her to be around Jews, Jewish culture, and to pay attention to Jewish issues.
This sense was solidified over the next few years, during a period of moving around the country. While living in Maine, her house “had a swastika smeared on the bedroom door in what looked like blood.” As more swastikas appeared in the neighborhood, she wrote: “I was becoming very very conscious.” Driving through the South on the way to her new home in New Mexico, the messages on the local conservative talk shows struck fear in her heart. And: as she began writing and speaking more about Jewish issues in the places where she yearned to feel at home – feminist left spaces – she encountered “resistance, overt rejection, ridicule, a willful ignorance . . . the ant-Semitism I was encountering in the women’s movement and on the left hurt me more, not because it was more threatening but because the feminist left was where I needed to be: this added to my sense of isolation as a Jew.”
These experiences led Melanie to realize that she would be better equipped to engage in the issues she cared about, if she grounded herself in the culture and the people she came from. This realization, in turn, informed her ever-deepening understanding of the politics of solidarity. In a critique of the left, she wrote: “Few of us have learned to trust our own rhetoric, that people will fight harder as they also fight for themselves.” She felt that when it came to Jews especially, the left ignored “how much political energy can be generated as groups develop a cohesive identity and analysis.” “True coalition,” she wrote, “forms between groups; the premise is that each group has a strong base in a larger community. Thus Jews who want to work in coalition need not only to know who we are but to be bonded with other Jews.”
For the rest of her life, Melanie strengthened her bonds with Jewish communities and Jewish organizing. She did so partly because connecting with Jewish communities was a personal need of hers, and partly to mobilize those communities around the issues she cared about. That included building support for Palestinian human rights: Melanie lamented that although many Jews embraced progressive policies, “on this one issue, Israel/Palestine, it’s still acceptable at the Jewish center to forget that Palestinians are people, too.” She worried that Israeli dehumanization facilitated antisemitism around the world, writing that: “While anti-semitism is never the fault of Jews, the brutality of the Israeli occupation . . . has got to pump up Jew-hating.” In Wrestling With Zion, she imagines showing up to the Israeli consulate to reject her “right to return” to Israel, saying: “I do not believe the solution to anti-Semitism is the creation of another hated minority so that I can enjoy the privileges of majority. Far from feeling protected by Israel, I feel exposed to danger by the actions of the Israeli state.”
In her final book – The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism – Melanie brought an important focus to the racial and ethnic diversity of the Jewish experience. She also continued to deepen her politics of solidarity by theorizing an ethic of “radical Diasporism,” which pushed back on the notion of Israel as the Jewish homeland. “Where Zionism says go home,” she writes, “Diasporism says we make home where we are.” Melanie emphasized that by embracing Diasporism, Jews can also find commonality and build solidarity with other diasporic peoples… including Arabs. As her partner Leslie Cagan summarizes, Diasporism calls for people to bring the “fullness of their traditions and values”, and “put them into practice wherever they are.”
In theorizing Diasporism, Melanie built on the Jewish “principle of doikayt – hereness – the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are.” She goes on to connect some powerful dots between Diasporism, Doikayt, and solidarity: “Doikayt means Jews enter coalitions wherever we are, across lines that might divide us, to work together for universal equality and justice.” Diasporism also teaches “the salient lesson of the Holocaust, which is: build with allies an urgent and powerful opposition to all hatred . . . trying to forge strong coalitions is our best defense. Not Jewish defense leagues. Not an ever more powerful Israeli Defense Force. Not billions of U.S. dollars for the Israeli government to purchase weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers.”
Melanie’s path towards developing and living out these principles began when she joined the New Jewish Agenda in the early 1980s, where she served on the steering committee and co-chaired its Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Racism. The organization was one of the few American Jewish organizations to immediately oppose the 1982 Lebanon War. During this period, Melanie also co-edited the groundbreaking, multicultural lesbian literary & art journal Sinister Wisdom, where she devoted an entire issue to the Palestinian refugee experience. Her work with Sinister Wisdom exemplifies another essential dimension of Melanie’s life: that of the feminist poet and activist artist. As Lambda Literary’s tribute to her beautifully evokes, Melanie “recognized the importance of stories and particularly women’s stories to the work of revolutionary change . . . Poets played an important role in the feminist movement and their poems were tools for women to use to build consciousness, build community, take action, and fight back.” When Melanie passed the torch of editorship to Elana Dykewomon in 1987, she wrote: “I know Sinister Wisdom is a tool for the making of culture and culture is bread, culture is roses, culture is inspiration, inspiration is the breath of resistance, resistance is how we survive who were never meant to survive.”
In 1990, Melanie became the founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), which fostered a progressive Jewish voice and organizing space in New York City. JFREJ emphasizes that her legacy “centered our work in a deeply feminist, queer, anti-racist, multicultural, class-conscious analysis. The word ‘intersectionality’ did not yet have wide currency, but Melanie communicated the concept and put it into action.” JFREJ was one of the few Jewish groups at the time that was organizing against anti-Arab prejudice, and that was building relationships of solidarity with Arab American communities. This allowed JFREJ to better support those communities in the wake of 9/11, when anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices skyrocketed. With JFREJ, Melanie also founded Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Hour; organized workshops for confronting White privilege, racism, and antisemitism; and launched a series of radical Jewish history conferences.
Throughout her life of activism, Melanie was also a professor, teaching broadly about racial and gender justice and Jewish studies. This included teaching the first Women’s Studies course ever at Berkeley. She was a beloved mentor to many. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz died in the summer of 2018, after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. “Everything about Melanie’s life,” her partner Leslie Cagan wrote, “– her very being – was grounded in the deepest empathy and the strongest commitment to solidarity I have ever seen.”
“Solidarity is the political version of love.” Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
That was Stanley Levison. Stanley was a wealthy Jewish businessman from New York… and was also the former manager of the Communist Party’s finances, who had left the Party to use his business acumen to channel money into the Black Freedom Struggle. Together with his comrades Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, Levison had been involved in an effort to fund local movements in the South that were trying to get off the ground in the period leading up to the civil rights movement. When the Montgomery Bus Boycott erupted, these three master-strategists channeled resources to the local movement… hoping that it would become the spark could light the fire of a regional movement.
And indeed, partly because of their support – which ranged from fundraising, consulting, networking, ghost writing, and even the direct mentorship of Martin Luther King – it did. From that moment on, Stanley Levison became Martin Luther King’s invisible confidant… the man who Martin always knew he could call if he woke up at 3AM filled with fears, with emotions he needed to process, or with new ideas he wanted to explore. Over the years Martin’s relationship with Stanley never wavered… not even when the FBI began using Martin’s connection to the former communist as the excuse for their campaign of surveillance, demonization, and intimidation of the great civil rights leader that was designed to destroy the most important social movement of the 20th century.
Martin valued Stanley partly because – unlike so many others, including important mentors like Bayard Rustin – Stanley had no interest in pushing Martin’s ideas or strategies in a certain direction. He was there simply to help Martin Luther King process his emotions and his thoughts, and to support whatever Martin’s decisions were. This allowed Martin to trust Stanley, perhaps more than anybody else, to be forthright with him and to express hard truths.
For years, Stanley Levison did Martin Luther King’s taxes, ghost wrote for him, secured his book contracts, worked tirelessly as a fundraiser for the movement, and most importantly, was a key advisor. Whenever Martin tried to offer Stanley payment, Stanley refused. In one letter explaining his refusal of payment Levison wrote: “My skills . . . were acquired not only in a cloistered academic environment, but also in the commercial jungle . . . I looked forward to the time when I could use these skills not for myself but for socially constructive ends. The liberation struggle is the most positive and rewarding area of work anyone could experience.”
One of Martin’s most beloved friends and most important aides, Andrew Young, later said of Stanley: “Of all the unknown supporters of the civil rights movement, he was perhaps the most important.” Coretta Scott King wrote: “Because he was such a modest man, few people know of the magnitude of his contributions to the labor, civil rights and peace movements.” After Martin’s assassination, Stanley joined his friend Harry Belafonte in ensuring that Martin’s wife and children would have no economic difficulties. Stanley Levison continued to fund a variety of movement causes until the day he died.
Freedom Rider Joan C. Browning was born into the summer heat of Georgia, in a small shed on the family farm, in 1942. Hers was a small community – too small to be called a town – that had one store, and one school. She grew up picking cotton – by age 16 she could pick 200 pounds a day – and her family would sew chicken feed sacks into clothing. Joan grew up thinking she was well-off: for her family farm was larger than those around her, and hers was the first house for miles around to get electricity. She was shocked when she learned that much of the wider world saw her family as “poor White trash.”
The farming community that Joan grew up in was deeply proud of their self-sufficiency. They also embraced a strong community spirit of lifting one another up in hard times. When drought hit the farms, community members shared scarce resources and made sure everyone made it through. When her family’s house burned down, the community donated their own clothes and furniture, and raised funds to help the family rent a new home. Joan later reflected that “My family and community ordeals and the responses people had to them prepared me for the Freedom Movement’s concept of the Beloved Community.”
Joan was a precocious student. She skipped grades, graduated from high school at age 16, and headed off to Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville. The switch from rural to urban life was a difficult one. “After an initial infatuation with paved streets and paved sidewalks,” Joan recalls, “I missed my family. I missed my rural home of small places and small groups.”
Central to those small groups had been Joan’s beloved Methodist church. It was a tightly knit community, where everybody knew each other, sang passionately together, and where the values of rural life such as the spirituality of land stewardship were preached from the pulpit. The Methodist church in Milledgeville, on the other hand, had a thousand congregants. A professional choir performed for the congregation. Joan experienced it as feeling overly formal, stiff, and impersonal. For the first time in her life, she began avoiding church on Sundays.
During this time, however, Joan would often walk by a Black church, carrying her books under her arm. The Reverend was often sweeping the leaves in front of the church, and would engage her in conversation about the books she was carrying, or the beauty of the autumn leaves. Joan soon began attending Reverend Mincey’s church… where the people sang passionately together in the way that she longed for.
When her college discovered that she was attending a Black church, the president called Joan into his office. He looked nervous and afraid as he told Joan that the college had received threats of violence if she didn’t cease her “dangerous and irregular activities.” Although Joan had grown up in an all-White rural community, she had harvested cotton alongside Black people – and rested in the shade with them – for her whole life. Because her community – including the local rural papers – kept silent on the matter of race, Joan was naively unaware of segregation’s violent enforcement. She was dumbfounded that what felt to her like an innocent activity could lead to threats of violence.
Motivated in part by a desire to understand why simply attending a Black church would lead to such a backlash, Joan snuck off to an interracial Christian conference for college students, hosted in Augusta. This was in the spring of 1961, and the Black college students in the conference had been staging sit-ins for a full year. The conference buzzed with movement energy. James Lawson – one of the leading trainers of nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Movement – was a conference speaker. His teachings reminded Joan of a message that had been so important to the rural community in which she was raised: that God is Love, and that God is known through Love and through taking actions grounded in Love. Lawson inspired her to see the Civil Rights Movement through that lens. In her words, he showed her “how to behave as a nonviolent Christian witness against racism.” Joan joined the sit-ins the same day that she heard him speak.
That sit-in took place at the H.L. Green Variety Store, which was “just around the corner from a store that served as a hangout for the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council.” During the sit-in, a group of Whites paced back and forth behind them muttering threats. When one of them raised a knife to attack a White participant, the local sit-in leader Bill Didley leapt in front of the blow and was stabbed just under his heart. The Black participants of the sit-in, seeing that the White participants were being targeted for violence, told them to run. Bill Didley survived – but in true Jim Crow fashion, was charged with possessing a concealed weapon: the knife that was lodged in his chest.
News of Joan’s sit-in quickly reached her college president, and she was given two choices: to be expelled, or to leave quietly, with her excellent college record intact. She left quietly. In her chapter in Deep In Our Hearts, Joan reflects:
“I visited the black Methodist church not because it was black but because the minister and I had struck up a cordiality that was reminiscent in style to my rural roots. I went there to worship, not to break some racial barrier. Certainly I had no notion that attending church would lead to my expulsion from college. I did not know that society had built those limits into my own freedom . . . I stumbled innocently, unaware, across southern racism’s dividing line. In the rural isolation of my home, I did not know that there was a taboo against black and white Methodists worshipping God together. In the end, my search for the warmth and friendliness of a small community meant ostracism from the very thing I sought . . . The personal history I was writing made me an outcast in white southern society, while my white skin sometimes separated me from black people.”
And so, at age 18, Joan moved to Atlanta with $25 in her pocket. When she had been kicked out of college, she had been accused of being part of several “subversive” groups she had never heard of. In Atlanta, she quickly looked them up and visited their offices: the NAACP, the Urban League… and SNCC. Her first SNCC contacts were Jim Forman, Norma Collins, and Julian Bond. As Joan recalls,
“I was drawn to SNCC’s few dingy, poorly lit, upstairs rooms . . . I remember dilapidated desks and chairs, with lots of commotion, always people mimeographing. I felt lucky to do whatever Jim, Julian, or Norma asked me to do. Julian Bond wrote press releases, and I folded them and put them in envelopes, feeling I had been entrusted with a very special task.”
When Jim Forman began to look for White volunteers to join the Albany Freedom rides, Joan volunteered to go. Although she was scared by the fire bombings and vicious beatings that had met former Freedom Riders, she was inspired to join because of the deep trust she had developed in Jim Forman and the official observer for the ride, Casey Hayden. (One of only four White southern women to participate in the Freedom Rides, Joan’s comrades would later joke that she was the token “Hillbilly Freedom Rider.”)
Although the Albany Freedom Riders arrived safely at their destination, they were thrown in jail. Joan, as the only White woman, was placed in solitary confinement. When her SNCC comrades suggested bailing her out due to their concern that she would be a special target of the guards, Joan refused to be released until they all were. Meanwhile, the Albany movement, newly energized by the Freedom Rides, exploded around them. As hundreds of demonstrators filled the jails, Joan secretly documented the experience by writing detailed notes on toilet paper and napkins.
Upon release, she went straight to a mass movement meeting in a Black church. In that moment, she felt profoundly at home. Joan would later write that the movement allowed her to explore “new dimensions of my own Christianity . . . The movement allowed harmony in myself between ideas and ideals and action. I could be more fully whole in the movement than anywhere else . . . For me, the Freedom Movement was the all-inclusive true church.”
However, the Freedom Rides also ushered in a lifelong source on pain for Joan. She had kept her reasons for leaving college a secret from her family. When her brother Wayne saw her picture in the newspaper, he threw it across the room in disgust. Joan’s mother asked Wayne what they should do: he said to leave her in jail. Joan’s mother told her not to come home for Christmas: she was no longer welcome. She would just create discord and tension in the family and the community. Wayne later told her: “We just wrote you out of the family.” Joan was never able to repair the rift: “Being ‘written out of my family’ has scarred and shaped my life ever since.”
And yet, the family and community that exiled her had also blessed her with her first experience of Beloved Community – a community in which all people were treated with dignity and respect, and in which all people were cared for and no one was left behind. In pursuing the Beloved Community in the Freedom Movement, Joan didn’t feel that she was severing her roots as a White southerner. Rather,
“It was an expansion of my early life . . . You might . . . expect that, as a freedom fighter, I had to reject all my upbringing. I did not. As I understood my journey, I was searching for restoration of my membership in a loving family and community, membership that comforted me in early life and yet remains an elusive goal.”
Joan continued to participate in the sit-ins throughout 1962, but as she re-entered college she had less time and energy for the movement. Still, her home remained a hive of movement activity. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, she organized housing for volunteers, and sorted through thousands of documents for the Freedom Schools.
However, as the culture of SNCC began to shift away from what Joan had experienced as a more spiritual commitment to nonviolence, she increasingly felt that she didn’t fit in anymore. She continued to party with SNCC people, but she organized with them less and less. She began to reorient her energies towards other antiracist organizations and causes, including working on prison reform and with the ACLU, the National Urban League, and the American Friends Service Committee. “I was securely ensconced in this sector of the Beloved Community,” Joan writes, “when SNCC moved into the Black Power phase. From my perspective, Black Power was about cultural richness . . . as I experienced the cultural aspects of Black Power, it added new richness to my world.” Inspired by the celebration of Black beauty and Black natural hair, Joan was inspired to “stop torturing my own hair with chemicals.”
As the Civil Rights era came to an end, Joan found herself craving a return to her rural roots. She briefly tried living on a farm once again, but soon relocated to a mobile home in a mountainous region in West Virginia, overlooking the Greenbrier River. From there, she has spent decades following the advice of one of her most important mentors: Ella Baker, “who advised stepping outside one’s door and doing the good work awaiting there.” Joan continues to live in that mobile home overlooking the river today, with her dog Gabriel and her cat, Agape.
As the sit-in movement swept the South early in 1960, Black freedom struggle elder and master organizer Ella Baker convened a meeting to bring student leaders together. Out of this meeting grew the most important grassroots organization of the civil rights movement: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Ella Baker asked Jane Stembridge, one of the only White students to attend the founding meeting, to consider leaving her theological studies and help administer the new civil rights organization. As sit-ins continued to break out in many cities, part of Jane’s job was to make contact with local sit-in leaders, find out what their needs were, connect them to organizers in their region, and plug them into SNCC. When people wrote to SNCC asking what they could do for the movement, Jane was often the one to respond.
As she helped to organize SNCC’s second major conference in October 1960, Jane noticed that there were no participants from the most dangerous and isolated parts of the South. She discussed this with her close colleague, Bob Moses… and those conversations helped Bob decide that he was going to go into those areas and organize. Bob Moses’s work in the most dangerous parts of the South made him legendary, and led to some of the civil rights movement’s most important voting rights work.
Jane Stembridge also worked closely with Bayard Rustin, putting his organizing genius into the service of SNCC. When SNCC severed its ties with Rustin to avoid a scandal over his sexuality, Stembridge, who was also gay, was infuriated. Patriarchy and homophobia had played a key role in pushing her into the civil rights movement: as she later commented, “we had to find a husband, we had to be subservient to that man, and I’m like this is bullshit . . . I couldn’t work with that. And that anger and sense of injustice was in me . . . its part of what propelled me into the civil rights movement, my own sense of repression.”
Jane was deeply hurt to find such oppression even within spaces committed to liberation. In 1964 that hurt, and particularly the way Rustin had been treated, led her to leave SNCC.
Based on Articles by the Zinn Education Project & Southern Crossroads.
The Battle of Blair Mountain was, in the words of the Zinn Education Project, “the largest example of class war in U.S. history. It was fought over the course of five days in 1921 by 10,000 coal miners” in West Virginia. The mining conditions were brutal enough to unify miners across racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Black and White American miners, as well as marginalized European immigrants.
Many of these diverse men were veterans of World War I. When their unionization efforts were met with mass evictions of mining families and outright murders at the hands of the mine owner’s personal police forces, the miners armed themselves not only with rifles but machine guns… and then marched on the police. The mining owners pulled together a 3,000-person private army, and dug in along the ridge of Blair Mountain to face off with the miners.
In response, the miners formed “an effective military strategy. They gained the ridge at one location and established a standard military operation that included a command center, a rear guard, and a perimeter.” According to the New York Times, the rebel army of miners “commandeered passenger trains, cut telephone wires, looted coal company stores of arms and ammunition; and executed two alleged company spies.”
During the long mining struggles leading up to this showdown, White “union organizers and officials worked diligently to address the civil struggles of Black miners. For instance, Black miners served in a wide range of union political positions, and if the union would not have recognized this and other fundamental concerns of Black civil struggles, they would have had a much harder time uniting with Black miners. This does not mean that Black miners did not still face significant discrimination, but there was a large amount of progress as many racial lines were crossed . . . Throughout the campaign Black miners served as commanders and logistics officers. There is even one instance of a Black miner leading a troop of fighters to the front. The majority of Black soldiers in WWI were not allowed to be in combat, and so the fact that they were armed and leading white troops at Blair Mountain is an important historical milestone . . . All of this enabled the miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain to enact a degree of solidarity that was so strong it took three regiments of federal troops to stop it. This did not occur through simple class solidarity; instead the everyday interests of white, Black, and immigrant miners were woven into the larger struggle.”
“The true lesson of Blair Mountain is that when people come together in a way that genuinely attempts to integrate different struggles, one of the most powerful social forces for change can be formed. When poor white, Black, and immigrant people work together, that is what truly scares people in power. As stated above, this mix of racial, ethnic, and class solidarities was not perfect. But it was something unique for the time, and its effect can best be summed up by a white miner who fought in the battle: ‘I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven together, bound, interlocked, tongued and grooved together in one body.’”
The Battle of Blair Mountain is also where the term “redneck” comes from. As Southern Crossroads – which works to organize White southerners for racial justice – writes, “Real rednecks know that the term comes from the legacy of white coal miners in West Virginia who wore red bandannas [to signify they were with the union] and joined with their Black comrades to rise up against the coal company during the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.” Southern Crossroads seeks to reclaim this legacy for the White South today, using the hashtags #ReclaimRedneck and #SpiritofBlairMountain.
Additional Resources
This post consists mostly of extensive quotes from two articles from the Zinn Education Project, with the closing quote from Southern Crossroads (see articles below). Please consider donating to those organizations – here and here – to support the good work they do. The two Zinn resources link to additional resources to explore.
Born into a progressive New York Jewish community at the end of World War II, Heather Booth was raised to understand the importance of fighting injustice. In 1964 she headed south to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, where she helped organize the freedom schools and voter registration drives.
At the age of 18 she thus stepped into a world of racial violence, where Black people took risks on a daily basis to organize for their freedom. The Black family hosting her was making themselves a target by doing so… an experience that led Heather to feel her privilege deep in her bones. Heather also saw that women were in many ways the backbone of the movement, but that their efforts often remained invisible. The civil rights movement thus accelerated her already growing feminist consciousness.
During the Freedom Summer, Booth met a young woman who had become suicidal due to an unwanted pregnancy. After returning to her campus in the North, Booth founded the Jane Collective, a clandestine student-run organization that connected women to doctors who were committed to the right to a safe abortion. She also joined the Students for a Democratic Society, where she led women in walk-outs when the men proved unable to hear their voices, and organized women’s groups on campus to tackle the misogyny that ran rampant in the University system.
Heather Booth also continued her racial justice efforts by leading the local Friends of SNCC chapter, traveling and raising funds in the North for SNCC’s efforts. When SNCC became an all-Black organization in the late 60s, Booth threw her energy more fully into women’s liberation and antiwar organizing.
Over the decades, Heather Booth grew into one of the nation’s leading organizers of progressive politics, creating numerous organizations and training programs. In 2000, SNCC leader Julian Bond hired her to lead the voter registration drive for the NAACP, which led to a strong Black turnout in the 2000 elections. Most recently, she played a key role in the Biden/Harris get out the vote effort.
As a radical law student in the late 1960s, Bernardine Dohrn helped the National Lawyers Guild organize young lawyers to defend antiwar and racial justice activists. She was swept deeper into the movement at a time when the Black freedom struggle was radicalizing, as it confronted increasing police brutality and the assassinations of its leaders, faced the limitations of the civil rights movement to tackle systemic racism, and as it made stronger connections between imperial wars abroad, globalized economic inequality, and White supremacy.
During this time both SNCC and the BPP called for White racial justice organizers to go into the belly of the beast – into White communities across the U.S. – and organize White communities to support racial justice. When Bernardine became a leader within the most radical wing of the Students For A Democratic Society – a wing that morphed into the Weathermen – she played a key role in translating those ideas to the White student movement.
A turning point for Bernardine and the Weathermen came in the winter of 1969, when photos of the Mỹ Lai massacre were released to the public during the same month that their comrade Fred Hampton was assassinated by police while he slept in his bed. The Weathermen feared that state violence would continue to escalate, and that the surveillance and infiltration of antiwar and racial justice groups would intensify even further. Bernardine and the Weathermen went underground, to keep part of the movement alive and functioning even as state violence and surveillance increased. For the remainder of the Vietnam War, the group – now called the Weather Underground – conducted bombings of the institutions they held responsible for that violence. These bombings led Bernadine, as the group’s leader, to become one of the first women to be placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list… a distinction shared by her friends Angela Davis and Assata Shakur.
Bernardine stayed underground with her husband Bill Ayers until 1980, after which she served seven months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury against other Weathermen. By the early 90s she had transformed herself into a leading figure for juvenile justice reform. She remains active in racial justice movements today.
In 1968, Huey Newton was asked during a radio interview what White people could do to support the Black Panther Party: he said that they should form their own organizations in solidarity with the BPP. A White counterculture group who ran the Detroit Artists Workshop, which had a network of communal houses, a print shop, and a performance space heard the interview, and founded the White Panther Party in response to Huey’s suggestion. (It should be said, however, that they chose the name without consulting with the Black Panther Party – the Panthers joked about them being “psychedelic clowns,” until the White Panther Party did a good job distributing the Black Panther Party paper in Detroit).
The White Panther Party had three primary founders: jazz and rock n’ roll photographer Leni Sinclair – who also ran Magic Veil Light Company that produced psychedelic light shows; jazz poet John Sinclair – who managed the gritty proto-punk band MC5; and communal member Pun Plamondon who later drove equipment trucks for rock bands. In the years leading up to the formation of the White Panther Party, the Detroit Artists Workshop was targeted by police and raided numerous times, with 54 people once arrested in a single raid, typically for marijuana possession. Following one police raid, the Detroit Artists Workshop was re-organized into a group called Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, which provided assistance to people who were left homeless after the Detroit uprisings against police brutality in 1967, in which 2000 buildings burned to the ground. During the uprising they flew a banner outside their commune reading “Burn, Baby, Burn!”… leading to further police raids.
White members of the Detroit Artists Workshop were not only receptive to the Panther’s message because of their negative experience with police and their shared vision of capitalism as oppressive: as jazz aficionado John Sinclair puts it, “we dug black people cos that’s where the great music came from and the great weed and the refreshing concepts of sexuality. All that stuff didn’t come from no white people. Are you kidding me?” For the White counterculture figures who joined the White Panther Party, their fantasy of Black culture offered an expression of freedom from everything they felt was wrong with White America.
The White Panthers issued their own ten-point platform. Although it overlaps with the platform of the Black Panther Party, it also expresses the radical countercultural and communal visions of the 1960s. For example, the points include “free time and space for all humans—dissolve all unnatural boundaries!”, and “a free world economy based on the free exchange of energy and materials and the end of money.” The White Panther Party was a group that pledged to support the Black Panther Party and advocated for the freedom of political prisoners and the abolition of systemic racial injustice… alongside free love, rock n’ roll, and the expansion of consciousness through psychedelics. Their belief that basic survival needs should be free led them to pool communal money to purchase bulk foods for redistribution, with the San Francisco chapter feeding 5,000 families at one point.
White Panther Party member Pun Plamondon became the first hippie placed on the FBI’s ten most wanted list: indicted for bombing a local CIA office in 1968, Pun fled to Algeria – where he joined Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver – but returned in 1970 and was soon arrested. Meanwhile, in 1969 John Sinclair was arrested and faced up to ten years in prison for offering two joints to an undercover officer. The harsh sentence mobilized the counterculture: everyone from John Lennon to Stevie Wonder; from Allen Ginsburg to Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale came together for a “John Sinclair Freedom Rally.” Both Sinclair and Plamondon were freed shortly afterwards when it was discovered that the government had been surveiling them without a warrant, in what became a major Supreme Court precedent.
The name “White Panther Party” didn’t sit well with many people, and some even assumed it was a White supremacist group when they first heard about it. Because of this, the group later changed their name to “Trans-Love Energies.”