New Book: Hillbilly Nationalists, Radical Greasers and Black Power

Posted by on April 24, 2011

[posted from Comm-Org list]

From: James Tracy <[email protected]>

Below, please find a description of a book I co-authored with Amy Sonnie, due out September 27, 2011. We’ll be hitting the road for a book tour in October. If you would like to have us over to your organization, bookstore,campus, community center or living room, let us know. We think that the histories of the original (pre-Jackson) Rainbow Coalitions, Rising Up Angry, Young Patriots Organization, October 4th Organization, Jobs Or Income Now Community Union, and White Lightning are rather important in today’s political context.

Please respond directly to my email, if interested.

James Tracy
[email protected]

Hillbilly Nationalists, Radical Greasers and Black Power
(Melville House Publishing September 27, 2011)
Amy Sonnie and James Tracy

The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a small group of white college activists and the Black Panthers, activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements
of the sixties go by.

James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the 1960s for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. In five tightly conceived chapters, they show that poor and working-class whites, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party, started to organize significant political movements against racism and inequality during the 1960s.

Their book explores an untold history the New Left. Challenging the Right for the allegiance of white workers, a diverse network of new political groups helped to redefine community organizing at a pivotal moment in the history of the United States, collaborating with their better known colleagues in SDS and the Black Panthers.

These organizations kept the vision of an interracial movement of the poor alive by working arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Puerto Rican Young Lords and, in so doing, gave rise to a generation of community organizers. In the best tradition of people’s history, Tracy and Sonnie bring these diverse and groundbreaking movements alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Sonnie is a writer and educator who has worked in queer and multi-racial communities around issues including environmental justice, police brutality, land rights, and economic justice. She has worked with numerous activist organizations nationwide including We Interrupt This Message, School of Unity and Liberation, the National Youth Advocacy Coalition, Comite ’98 por un Puerto Rico Libre, the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, October 22 Coalition, and as a founding member ofRESYST. She has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Clamor, Frontera, the Future 500, and her work has been covered on the Oxygen Media Television Network. She is the editor of the book Revolutionary Voices, an anthology by queer and transgender youth (Alyson Publications, 2000).

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press The Civil Disobedience Handbook, and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, Contemporary Justice Review and the Political Edge, a City Lights Foundation anthology.