Activist Hy Thurman on the Rainbow Coalition, Labor Organizing

Hy Thurman helped found Chicago’s Young Patriots Organization in 1968. The group was made up of white Southerners looking for work, but who mostly found discrimination and poverty. They fought for affordable housing, health care and raised awareness of police brutality. They also joined with the Black Panther Party and Young Lords to form the Rainbow Coalition, an influential multi-racial network. Now, Thurman is based in Alabama where he runs an organizing school. And he’s started a second Rainbow Coalition. 

KZMU’s Justin Higginbottom interviewed Thurman about his life and lessons learned from organizing. As labor issues heat up around the country, Thurman thinks these lessons could be useful, especially in rural areas like Southeastern Utah.

*The following interview transcription was edited for clarity*

“There wasn’t much around in those days to help people, economically or health-wise.”

HY THURMAN

Photo: Activist Hy Thurman, from The Young Patriots Uptown Chicago History Tour. Credit BobboSphere

I was born in East Tennessee in a small town called Dayton, just north of Chattanooga. About the only thing the town was ever known for was the Scopes evolution trial. So I’m living proof that monkeys exist. There wasn’t much around in those days to help people, economically or health-wise. It was still pretty much a depressed community. We were basically sharecroppers. I was taken out into the field to work when I was three years old. My older sisters would watch us during the day. As long as I could remember, we were pooling our money together to eat. We were considered to be trash, the lower caste. And we were treated that way in school. We were treated that way in public. 

My oldest brother went to Chicago. And when I was old enough to leave, I left. I dropped out of high school in ninth grade. I mean I never really went there anyway because I always had to work. I went to Chicago. It was no different. It was terrible. I went to a place called Uptown on the North Side. There were over 40,000 people from the South at that time. This particular community was nothing more than a slum, a ghetto, with heavy police brutality, murders. I remember children being bitten by rats. There was a lot of disease. And there were no services for people at all. 

The Uptown community had an unemployment rate of 47 percent. My brother was one of the co-leaders of a gang called the Peacemakers. He had gotten away from the gang and started hanging out with some Student for Democratic Society organizers. They came into the community to set up jobs. But they found out very quickly that jobs were only part of the problem. Some of them that were more radical eventually got the community to do a march on the local police station for brutality and murder. People in the community had been just shot down by the cops. I wish I could say that this is not true. But it’s all true.

“We didn’t have an idea of what childhood was.”

HY THURMAN

Photo: 10-point program of the Patriot Party: 1969, Credit Washington Area Spark 

We were from the South. We were raised in this racist environment. It was in us. But there were a small group of us who said we’re anti-racist. Because everything in the Black community or the brown community and poor community is happening here. We started as a group of just young people. I was 17 when I started organizing and going to meetings. We didn’t have a childhood. We didn’t have an idea of what childhood was. We had to grow up very fast. We had to grow very fast in the South. And we had to grow up very fast on the street. I’m not glorifying any of this. It was just where we were put in history. 

We decided we would stand up and fight and do what we could. As a youth group, we took over a lot of the city’s meetings that had to do with our community and urban renewal, which was just poor people’s removal. Mayor Daley’s tactic to change a community was to put an institution in those communities. In Uptown he wanted to put in a community college and that community college would displace the majority of the Southern people. We got together with other organizations — it wasn’t only the Patriots — and pushed what was called the People’s Village. We developed an alternative where this college was going to go. Eventually it was called Hank Williams Village because Hank Williams was a very famous country idol. It would be modeled after a Southern town and it would be governed by the people that lived there. 

It was called the greatest housing plan that never was because the city shut us out. At one point we got involved with the Rainbow Coalition — Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. We always liked what the Panthers were doing. And actually, we were modeling a lot of our stuff after the Panthers. But we didn’t really know any of them. We went to a meeting in which we were trying to raise money for funds to help out the community. We didn’t know that the Panthers were going to be there. And the Panthers didn’t know we were going to be there. There was a Panther representative named Bobby Lee. He got up and he said, “You know, they’re trying to do the same in their community as we’re doing here.” So this was the beginning of the relationship between the Panthers and the Young Patriots.

Bobby Lee came to Uptown and lived there for a couple of weeks and saw what we were doing and went back to Fred Hampton and told them about it. He said, “There’s these crazy hillbillies up on the North Side of Chicago talking anti-racism and revolution and wearing this damn Confederate flag.” Hampton was reluctant yet he saw this is what we need for the revolution.

“Understand the culture”

HY THURMAN

Photo: The cover of a March 1970 edition of ‘The Patriot: A Peoples News Service,’ a white revolutionary newspaper. The Young Patriots Organization formed in the late 1960s, later joining the Black Panthers and the Young Lords to form the multi-racial Rainbow Coalition. Credit Washington Area Spark

We started at that point organizing together. And then the Young Lords, which was a Hispanic gang turned political, became a part. We all become the Rainbow Coalition. The original Rainbow Coalition was the Panthers, the Young Lords and the Patriots. We were working together very effectively. We were able to reach a lot of the Southern people who came from rural areas — farmers and also coal miners. 

This is very important for people who are going to organize: understand the culture. So we developed classes in community organizing. We also had history and culture of the Southern white migrant, of the Native American, of the Hispanic American, of the Black Power movement. Fred Hampton gets a lot of credit, in which he should, for the development of the Rainbow Coalition. But he never wanted to be the leader. The Rainbow Coalition was designed where it wouldn’t have a leader because it would be a collective. That’s the way the Rainbow Coalition operated. That concerned Mayor Daley and J. Edgar Hoover. They wanted someone that they could pinpoint as the leader. They did identify, of course, Fred Hampton. And we knew how bad that ended up because Fred Hampton was murdered 52 years ago this week.

“We still believe in the revolution.”

HY THURMAN

Photo: Hy Thurman at a benefit concert for the Young Patriots Organization at the Hideaway in Chicago, Credit BobboSphere

Back in the day, when we were organizing, we didn’t have the cell phone. We didn’t have social media. And there weren’t thousands of opinions out there on how to do something. What we need to do is to find commonalities. Social media is the thing that’s really hurting us these days. We need to come up with a system of what we believe — this is who we are. 

People have to serve first. I think they have to serve the people. Even though the Panthers and Young Lords and Young Patriots were leaders in the community, they were servers first. Don’t get me wrong, I like Black Lives Matter a lot. But you have to have a certain mindset when you’re talking to, for instance, a Trump supporter. You may not get very far if you talk about Black Lives Matter. But if you talk about something like the Rainbow Coalition, where everybody is involved and everybody is included, then you stand a better chance. 

If you put a group together, then make sure it’s representative of everybody. It’s not just a group of white people telling other people what to do. It’s not just a group of Black people, because a lot of white people are going to be racist and they’re going to not pay much attention. I don’t think we can do anything without thinking about commonalities. 

I am optimistic. I see a lot of good things happening, which is one of the reasons we put together the second Rainbow Coalition. There’s still a few of us around that haven’t given up. We still try. We don’t always succeed. But you know, we damn sure try. Fred Hampton says that you can kill the revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution. We still believe in the revolution. We still believe that change could come into this country and to this world. We have to try to be that change and get people to be self-determined in their community.

Justin Higginbottom reported and edited this story