In Chicago, there were a number of such RYM collectives, including one centered in the national office of which Noel was a member. I was part of a group at the University of Chicago, where dozens of us in the top leadership of the SDS chapter had been expelled from school in late 1968, as part of a large protest where we seized and held the administration building for a good while. While some of this group went on to form the Weathermen faction, a larger group of us took factory jobs. For me, this was not an especially big deal, I had worked to pay most of my college expenses in a machine shop. Even as a community organizer in Newark, when I needed money, I had worked as an extra loading beer trucks at the Ballantine Brewery there. In January 1969, I had lost my scholarship and needed money to survive, so off I went.
After the split in SDS at the summer (1969) convention, which involved battles between RYM2, PL, and the Weathermen, the various collectives in Chicago fell apart. So parts of each of the groups in Chicago began unified discussions eventually leading to the formation of the Sojourner Truth organization.
The Formation of Sojourner Truth
Noel was clearly the early dominant figure in this group, as the author of the central white skin privilege document, and as a long-time factory worker, who by then had switched his employment to being a tool maker at the Chicago Tractor Works International Harvester Company plant; he had also been the main driver of a large SDS mobilization outside the plant to support workers who allegedly were fighting to keep the plant from closing.
So, the remnants of the three RYM2 collectives in Chicago got together. Noel, whose networking capacities were great, brought into the discussions, Lynn French, then labor minister for the Black Panther Party (BPP) Chicago chapter, and two other leftists with loose affiliations with the BPP, as well as Don Hammerquist and Carole Travis, both of whom had recently left the CP over its support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hammerquist had been a rising star in the CP, on its central committee, and some believed was being groomed to be the chairperson of the CP to succeed the then chair Gus Hall (Staudenmaier 2012:32). Carole Travis, then Hammerquist’s wife also had deep roots in the party and was the daughter of Bob Travis, the legendary leader of the Flint GM auto sit-down strike of 1936-1937.
STO, as distinguished from other New Communist Movement groups, had many important features. The first was a rejection of Stalin and Stalinism, largely the instigation of Hammerquist. While Noel was the most colorful leader of STO, putting forth the most important, unifying line about the centrality of the fight against white supremacy, Hammerquist was more widely read than the rest of us in the history of the Soviet Union and much of the contemporary debates in Marxist theory. While virtually all the new communist movement neo-Maoist groups, following Mao, either gave positive evaluations or were at best ambivalent about Stalin and his role in the Soviet Party, Hammerquist convinced most of us from the beginning that this was not the case. Stalin was a quite terrible and murderous deviation from Lenin and the founding Bolsheviks. He had executed almost all the old Bolsheviks. Even the 1934 central committee members, elected with Stalin’s blessing, had virtually all been executed by 1938. I immersed myself in histories of this period, being especially convinced by Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge. I, too, rejected the role of Stalin, while not yet falling completely out of the Maoist orbit.
Second, in part a consequence of the above, was an intellectual opening in STO, both by our rejection of Stalin, but also marked by our reading, at Hammerquist’s instigation, of pieces by Antonio Gramsci, especially his work on the nature of trade unionism under capitalism, published in English first in New Left Review, then republished by STO as a pamphlet, Soviets in Italy.
Hammerquist also brought with him a critique of the Communist Party’s so-called anti-monopoly coalition, where the party put forth a line, similar to the original People’s (or Democratic) Front, a coalition which included so-called “progressive,” anti-monopoly capitalists, justifying support of the Democratic Party. This critique resonated with the critique that most of us already had of the CP. Noel and Ted Allen argued that PL’s line was actually similar to the CP’s, branding both as right-wing formations. We also tied this to a critique of the Chinese international position, the “United Front Against Imperialism,” which included at times support from the Chinese for the Shah of Iran, against whom some of our comrades were risking their lives to oppose.
Our group, thus, had an openness to other tendencies. In contrast to Maoist groups which tended to view deviants, especially Trotskyists, as counter revolutionists, we engaged a wide variety of others. This even included the Sparticist League, with whom we co-sponsored a large meeting at which Noel debated their leader Jim Robertson on the nature of the Soviet Union. It also led to Noel’s early contacts with C.L.R. James’ former Trotskyist tendency Facing Reality, as well as ongoing relations with the League, BPP, and others, leaving a theoretical openness for political and intellectual exploration, virtually unheard of in other groups. In addition, we had contacts with a vast potpourri of people, both former colleagues of some of the leaders, and numerous others with whom Noel made contact. I thus met Harry Haywood (with whom I had lengthy conversations and became friends), leaders of the RNA, the 1973 Detroit Chrysler sitdown leaders Shorter and Carter, woodcutter unionists in Mississippi, activist truckers in the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, various strikers, and on and on. In the CP, Hammerquist had been close to Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell with whom some of us met. Len Decaux, who had been a close friend of Carole’s father, also met with our group.
Though Noel and Ted had moved far away from the POC Stalinist positions, what they kept from this period was an unwillingness to let go of the Black Belt Nation thesis of the CP associated with Harry Haywood, with whom they remained friends, and with whom I too was befriended.6The Black Belt Nation thesis was put forth in the 1928 and 1930 resolutions of the Communist International. It stated that African-Americans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation, rooted in the majority Black cotton growing counties of the South. This area had a right to separate from the U.S. and form an independent nation state. Harry Haywood, at one time on the U.S. CP Politburo, was its most prominent proponent.
With this belabored, although highly abbreviated background, I now turn to the two central positions of STO: The white skin privilege line and the building of independent workers’ organizations at the point of production.
The Fight Against White Supremacy and the White Skin Privilege Line
The main components of this line, for most of us were the following: First, the secret to capitalist rule was the division of the working class along racial lines, both ideologically, but also by giving special privileges to whites, the counterpart to the special oppression of Blacks and other non-whites. Thus, the fight against white supremacy had to be the centerpiece of revolutionary strategy in the U.S. This was distinguished from the then-approach of the CP, the PL, and the RU/RCP, which put forth a “Black and white, unite and fight” line which minimized the special oppression and unique demands of African-Americans and other non-whites.
Black workers in practice and as a matter of theory were the most advanced segment of the U.S. working class.7My own research of the 1930s and 1940s confirmed this to be the case in numerous instances, despite the erroneous beliefs that the opposite was true, by virtually all liberal mainstream labor leaders at the time. In good part, this status was a result of their lesser likelihood to be contaminated by racism and anti-immigrant ideology. The position of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was also seemingly based on this belief. As my close friend Mike Hamlin, who was chair of both the League and the later BWC, used to say, they were not nationalists, but Black workers were the only ones presently acting like the proletariat.
How exactly to go about carrying on this program was not initially clear. Noel himself had very little concrete to say about this question to the eventual dismay of many of us, a reason that a good number of us became increasingly critical of his formulations. Yet, this question was also highly entwined with the question of how to organize at the workplace.
Workplace Strategy
Noel, as mentioned previously, when he was prominent in SDS was not a student, but a factory worker. When STO began, he worked briefly as a tool and die maker for IH Tractor works until it shut down, eventually getting a job at U.S. Steel in Gary where he remained for many years. He was never with me at IH Melrose Park Works as some have suggested. Noel always developed lots of contacts, but never, as far as I know, ever organized by himself or with others, any type of activist group where he worked. This, I would suggest, fits in with his vision as an observer, not a transformer of working class life, brilliantly laid out in his posthumous bio, which I will suggest in what follows, is consistent both with his view of “white skin privilege” and of how he thought workers might organize in a radical way.
We started with an analysis of trade unions under capitalism, beginning with Gramsci’s insights about unions being organizations of class compromise, playing as Marx argued (especially in the Communist Manifesto and in Wage Labor and Capital) many positive roles for workers, but being unsuitable for playing a revolutionary role in leading workers as a class in more radical directions. Gramsci analyzed the role of unions and the need to transcend them with new organizations, during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1918, and the failed revolutionary upsurge of 1919 in Italy. We saw similar aspects in France in 1968, and Italy in 1969, as radical, perhaps semi-revolutionary, struggles were undermined by Communist-led union leaderships who used the struggles as bargaining chips for trade union demands but undermined the broader demands and struggles for power of millions of workers.
We thus argued for, and proposed the setting up of, independent workplace organizations in unionized and non-unionized places. These organizations were to be independent, supported and run by workers themselves, and to put out in-plant informational and agitational papers, in good part written by in-plant workers.
We drew first on the tradition of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) but were critical that they did not put the fight against white supremacy explicitly in the forefront, although they did challenge discrimination militantly when it interfered with their solidaristic organizing. I, too, read everything I could by and about the IWW. Some of the Wobs from the old days were still around in Chicago at this time, in their seventies and eighties, in their headquarters on Halsted, just north of Fullerton, with an old luncheonette below their offices, where some of them hung out, within a short walking distance from where I lived for a few years. While the IWW at times formed stable workplace organizations, like the longshore union in Philadelphia led by Black radical Ben Fletcher, their main thrust was syndicalist, the building of so-called revolutionary unions which conflated the goals of trade union struggles and revolutionary projects, usually leading to the rapid disintegration of their trade union organizations.
Not finding the STO analysis very complete, I began what was to become a lifelong endeavor, studying previous left-wing and more mainstream organizing, beginning with William Z. Foster, who along with Eugene Debs, had been the premier radical labor organizer in the U.S.