Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
In July 1969 a dozen self-identified hillbillies showed up to a Black Panther Party conference with Confederate flag patches sewn to their ragged jean jackets. Just above the flag, three hand painted letters identified their radical outfit: Y.P.O., the Young Patriots Organization. To outsiders the Panthers reputation for self-defense combined with the very real violence committed under the Southern Cross might seem to guarantee a nasty brawl. Instead, prominent Panthers welcomed members of the Young Patriots Organization like all revolutionary brothers and sisters- with a fist in the air and “All Power to the People”
The YPO was a Chicago-based group of poor, white, and revolutionary southern transplants. They played a crucial role in founding the original 1969 Rainbow Coalition, a groundbreaking alliance initiated by the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, which also formally included the Puerto Rican street gang-turned-political organization, the Young Lords, as well as informal members such as the Chicano-American Brown Berets and Rising Up Angry, another group that appealed to working class white youth. The Young Patriots are also, because of their explicit identification as “hillbilly nationalists” and symbolic adoption of the Confederate flag, one of the most fascinating, controversial, and understudied organizations to emerge from the intersection of the New Left student movement, civil rights, Black Power struggles, and new forms of community organizing that unfolded over the course of the 1960s in urban neighborhoods across the United States. Defying the stereotypes that they were ignorant “hillbillies” and hopeless racists, Uptown Chicago’s southern migrants and their allies organized the Young Patriots Organization(YPO) in 1968. Uptown had some of the worst poverty in the city and living conditions were grim with hunger and poor health for many.
The Young Patriots had come to Oakland, Calirfornia, for the United Front Against Fascism Conference. They arrived from Uptown, a Chicago neighborhood home to thousands of economically displaced Appalachians, mostly white, who had turned the area into a bastion of southern culture. Their families had moved North in search of work after mining and agriculture work started to disappear. But only a few found steady jobs. The rest scraped by on day labor, hustling and domestic work. By one estimate more than 40 percent of the neighborhood was on some form of welfare. It was their families, the Sunday Tribune had deemed “plague of locusts” descending on the city. As one Patriot member put it “We are the living reminder that when they threw out their white trash, they didn’t burn it, that trash was picking itself up”
The Patriots had a coherent regional identity around which to organize, and one with a history that often took on radical political valences: its membership was composed of southern migrants mainly from Appalachia, whose families had settled in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, a major hub along the northbound route dubbed the “hillbilly highway.” Historically, Appalachia has had a fraught relationship to other regions of the South, especially in terms of racial formation and ideological perspective; often, its inhabitants were marked as distinct from other white, Anglo-Saxon groups, and this produced combative expressions of both “national identity” – as “mountain people” – and at times, expressions of discontent against economic and state authorities and solidarity with other oppressed groups. In other words, there was a strong understanding of Appalachia as its own region of the South, and, because of its economic status as one of the most impoverished areas in the country, there was a general current of class resistance against the massive coal and power companies that monopolized whole towns and even counties.
The YPO quite consciously modelled itself after the Panthers by combining revolutionary nationalism and community defense as a political strategy, and in their viewing of the “pig power structure” as a common enemy for both poor whites and African Americans. The YPO was also marked by the specific conditions of radical politics in Chicago where the “organize your own” activist model, famously advocated by SNCC in its later phase, meant not identity-based essentialism but a forging of connections across class, race, and ethnic lines. This is reflected in the YPO’s own 11-Point Program.
“Racism was a demon that had to be driven out and slain if we were going to have unity with other groups and to believe that all people have a right to self-determination and freedom… We had to change to make life tolerable, and for life to have some sort of meaning.” —Hy Thurman, a founding member of the Young Patriots
“If Americans knew the disasters that lay ahead, they would transform this society tomorrow for their own preservation” ~ Huey P Newton, a founding member of the Black Panther Party of Self-defense.
(Black Panthers and Young Patriots- Excerpt from the documentary, "American Revolution 2." This segment showcases Black Panther Bobby Lee helping comrades in the Young Patriots (a Chicago Urban Appalachian civil rights group in similar vein to the Panthers) organize a group of working class Whites to demand for radical change in their neighborhood (which has been victimized by police brutality and economic disenfranchisement) and/or take it into their own hands. This took place in 1968 Chicago, some time after the riots that had happened after the Democratic National Convention)
