Black and Brown Power in the Fight Against Poverty

Gordon Mantler, Ph.D. Thompson Writing Program, Duke University

When renowned Chicano movement leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales of Denver died in 2005, former Black Panther Lauren Watson made sure he participated in what the local media dubbed Corky’s “last march.” Suffering from diabetes, the burly but wheelchair-bound Watson slowly moved with more than a thousand others as they wound their way through the east side of Denver. “Corky and I had always worked together,”

Watson told me in an oral history just a few months later.1 From anti-Vietnam War rallies to protests against police brutality, Watson and Gonzales and their organizations often found themselves side by side in the late 1960s fighting a white supremacist power structure in the Mile High City. Citing such alliances, scholars tend to celebrate—even romanticize—the relationship between African Americans and Chicanos, black power and brown power.2 But while these alliances were real, there were distinct limits to such

“rainbow radicalism.”3 Interactions between black and brown power activists were neither as harmonious as some scholars suggest nor were these relations as fraught as other argue.4 Rather, such efforts at coalition building in the 1960s and 1970s, in Denver and elsewhere, reflected a far more complicated and nuanced relationship.

Emerging from my forthcoming book on the era’s multiracial anti-poverty activism, this paper largely traces the relationship between two men, Lauren Watson and

Corky Gonzales, in Denver and during their participation in the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. While poverty was a promising foundation for coalition for African Americans and Mexican Americans generally, overlapping but not identical definitions of justice— or ways to solve that poverty, to put it another way—proved a difficult obstacle to

1 sustained interracial and intra-racial collaboration. In the end, anti-poverty activism among black and brown power activists demonstrated the complex interplay between race and class, and identity and coalition, at the height of the era’s racial power movements.

* * *

Both Gonzales and Watson took circuitous routes to their anti-poverty activism.

A self-described “trouble-maker” in the mid-1960s, Gonzales brought considerable practical political experience to the Chicano movement. The son of a migrant sugar beet picker, Gonzales emerged in the 1940s as a charismatic featherweight boxer with a clean- cut image among Denver elites. He parlayed his success in the boxing ring first into business and then into community activism in the city’s impoverished and racially mixed

Eastside in the early 1950s, eventually becoming active in local Democratic Party politics.

And although known for his unpredictably outspoken manner, Gonzales proved to be an effective party operative among Mexican Americans. He moved up in the ranks from party ward leader to chairman of Colorado’s Viva Kennedy club to local director of the

Neighborhood Youth Corps. And in 1965, the mayor appointed Gonzales as chairman of the local War on Poverty board. The former boxer was characteristically combative: “I’m an agitator … That’s my reputation,” he said at the time. “They didn’t buy me when they put me in this job.”5

This seemed clear when, in 1966, the local Rocky Mountain News published unsubstantiated charges by a white Gonzales aide that the poverty program director exhibited undue favoritism toward Mexican Americans. A rapid series of events followed. “If a kid comes along from a family of ten children where the income is

2 $2,000, he gets a job quicker than a kid from a family of four with $4,000 income,”

Gonzales responded. “If that’s favoritism, then let it be that way.” Gonzales organized a boycott and picket around the newspaper’s building, which the mayor used as an excuse to force Gonzales out. In protest, supporters of Gonzales staged a rally at Denver’s Civic

Center, where 1,200 people heard him declare that it was only the beginning of “a crusade for justice.”6

Over the next year, Gonzales’ estrangement from the political establishment completed itself. He renounced his membership in the Democratic Party, challenging its corruption as “a world of lackeys, political bootlickers, and prostitutes.” He rejected repeated invitations to join a labor-liberal coalition. He then wrote “I Am Joaquin,” an epic Chicano poem that pays homage to Mexican history, heritage, and identity and remains a stalwart of the Chicano literary canon. Meanwhile, the reformist club he founded in 1963 to advocate for Spanish-speaking issues, Los Voluntarios, evolved into a new, more radical self-defense organization called the Crusade for Justice. Mirroring

Gonzales’ own transformation, the organization rejected mainstream politics and blended the needs of urban Mexican Americans, especially youth, with the cultural rhetoric of

Aztlán (referring to the mythical place of origin of the pre-Columbian Aztecs).7

Yet despite this direction, some of Gonzales’ most reliable allies in Denver remained those blacks and whites critical of state violence, either through police brutality or the war in Vietnam. This made sense given the Crusade’s unofficial identity as an antiwar organization – and the increasing role of peace in the Chicano movement more generally. Gonzales routinely spoke at anti-war rallies, arguing that the state’s economic health cynically depended upon war and the sacrifices made by the poor. Refusing the

3 draft and, instead, fighting at home became a central theme of the Crusade’s rhetoric.

The organization’s newspaper, El Gallo, not only encouraged Mexican Americans to attend anti-war demonstrations, but also tied participation in such protests to all racial and ethnic minorities’ fights against police brutality at home. “By not supporting a rally you show your support for ‘the man,’ the same guy who beats you, jails you and sends you up or shoots your brother in the back. All of this is true of our black brothers, too. Wake up minorities, unite.”8

Lauren Watson was already awake. Born in California, Watson described himself as the “black sheep” of a working class family in Denver’s small black community, which made up perhaps five percent of the city’s population (compared to more than 10 percent people of Mexican descent). Watson channeled his disgust with the supposedly mild racism and moderate tokenism of Denver into his own grassroots activism – first as a member of the Denver chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Finding the local

CORE to be resistant to a peace agenda, however, Watson “hung out with SDS and the

Young Socialist Alliance,” became a peace and anti-draft activist by 1967, and was a local organizer for the National March on the Pentagon that October. He also traveled to

Chicago—as did Corky Gonzales—to participate in the National Conference for New

Politics, an organization founded by mostly white antiwar activists hoping to challenge the establishment liberalism of President Lyndon Johnson. For Gonzales, the experience was eye-opening – not necessarily because it led to closer personal ties with African

Americans, but for the clear sway black power advocates, including Watson, had on the convention’s proceedings. Gonzales determined that power needed to be emulated back in Denver.9

4 Earlier in the summer of 1967, Watson organized a group of 50 or so into

Denver’s first Black Panther Party. The Mile High City’s chapter had a much smaller core membership, and there were other rival nationalist organizations in town. But the

Black Panthers took a lead in local fights against state violence. In July 1967, the separate shooting deaths of two black and Mexican American youths by police brought members of the Crusade for Justice and the Panthers together to protest ongoing violence against young minorities, no matter what color. Both groups requested march permits. But when city officials only approved the Panthers’ permit—in what may have been an attempt to drive a wedge between the two groups—Gonzales and the Crusade joined the Panthers’ march to City Hall. Protests condemning state violence at home and in Vietnam continued throughout the fall and winter, as police shot several more young men of color under suspicious circumstances.10

* * *

Watson and Gonzales soon had another opportunity to team up under the unlikely auspices of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference-led campaign for poor people. In the winter of 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had launched what would be the last crusade of his life, the Poor People’s Campaign, in a bid to lobby the federal government’s rededication to the War on Poverty. And in a first for SCLC, King explicitly invited and included not just blacks and whites, but also Mexican Americans,

Puerto Ricans, and American Indians to join the campaign. During the last several months of his life, King made an impassioned plea for a dedicated fight against poverty.

But his calls for what he called “militant nonviolence” and a state-based solution of “jobs or income”—meaning a massive government jobs program and income maintenance—

5 drew skepticism from across the political spectrum, from the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and white segregationist senators to black power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael, the leadership of SNCC and CORE, and Lauren Watson.

But King’s assassination on April 4 in Memphis changed the calculations of many activists once dismissive of the campaign. Suddenly, local organizers for SCLC reported a sharp uptick in those interested in attending. Watson initially had viewed the campaign’s nonviolent strategy as a waste of time. Only after attending King’s funeral did Watson change his mind on the campaign. “I … felt that as my personal tribute to Dr.

King that I would go ahead and do it,” Watson said. In the weeks that followed the assassination, the local Panthers joined a multiracial coalition of political and civil rights activists, including the Crusade for Justice, and marched on the Colorado capitol to demand civil rights legislation in King’s name. His change of heart did not mean he had changed his mind on the use of armed self-defense, however. “There’s always room for

(my) kind of thinking,” he said.11

And indeed there was. Watson held a leadership position in the campaign, using his extensive network among peace activists in the West to recruit participants and drive the main SCLC “telephone car” on one of eight caravans that traversed the nation to

Washington, D.C. Watson also played an unlikely peacemaker between Chicano movement rivals Gonzales and Reies Lopez Tijerina, the Mexican land grant rights leader from New Mexico, who both saw himself as the figurehead of the campaign’s southwestern contingent. Campaign organizers asked Watson to mediate, considering his geographical proximity and ideological ties to the two men. Watson and another Panther traveled to Tierra Amarilla, in northern New Mexico, where Tijerina and company “were

6 shocked to see us,” Watson recalled with a chuckle. “ … There’s no telling what they thought when these two big black guys showed up. Because they had it laid out like a

Western movie. Everybody had guns, were wearing bandoleros … but they were gracious.” The parties resolved the dispute after a day, reaffirming Tijerina’s position in the campaign but forcing him to make a key concession to top SCLC officials: leave the guns at home.12

But Watson, and other Panthers such as Mark Comfort from the Bay Area, did not always play such a mediating role—a reflection of the complex ways in which black and brown power activists related to each other during the campaign. Several campaigners described moments along the caravan routes in which interracial tensions rose around what Craig Hart, the Crusade’s unofficial chaplain, called seemingly “superficial things

(like) … who will speak first at the microphone,” or who will lead the caravan across the

Mississippi River bridge.13

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this during the campaign was after everyone arrived in Washington. The most important issue to the small contingent of

American Indian marchers was the right to fish traditional waters in the Pacific

Northwest, and they organized a protest outside of the U.S. Supreme Court building over a recent ruling. Some four hundred black, brown, white, and Indian campaigners participated and, after dispersing, were attacked by police officers. About a dozen individuals were jailed. “You really find common cause when you sit in the same … jail cell,” stated the Crusade’s Ernesto Vigil, on the hours he spent behind bars. After authorities released them later that evening, a multiracial crowd at the John Wesley AME

Zion Church greeted them as heroes. We “received a thunderous reception, black folks

7 standing up … after we were bonded out and marching in,” Vigil recalled. “… It was really a tremendous time which we could have capitalized on.” But as the crowd of black and brown sang freedom songs, several Panthers from Denver including Lauren Watson challenged SCLC’s Ralph Abernathy and his aides, arguing that they had paid too much attention to the Chicano marchers. After considerable awkwardness, Abernathy smoothed over their differences, at least publicly. The Panthers’ “power play,” as Vigil called it, created unnecessary tension among those present. Ironically, moments like this strengthened bonds among Chicanos—a small example of how short-term multiracial cooperation sometimes strengthened racial identity in the long run.14

Ideological differences between black and brown power activists, however, loomed just as large as personality conflicts and differences over strategy and symbolism in Washington. While opposition to police brutality and the Vietnam War bonded activists as they lobbied Congress and the Departments of Justice and State, they diverged on other issues. The kind of land grant rights articulated by Tijerina—dedicated to regaining land lost during the Mexican War of 1848—was not of particular interest to

Lauren Watson or Mark Comfort, for instance. Neither was bilingual education, the inclusion of Mexican culture and history in public schools, or the availability of welfare and other government forms in Spanish. Even workers rights did not always translate.

Comfort, a longtime Oakland activist, had participated in local efforts to support Mexican

American farm worker grape boycotts in Oakland. But Watson and many others showed only minimal interest. For those involved, justice to address poverty often was defined differently.15

8 There is much more to the campaign than I can discuss here today—so you need to buy my book! But in short, the roughly two-month-long campaign galvanized people across the country—at least briefly. It spawned a dynamic but troubled space in

Resurrection City, an encampment on the National Mall that housed up to 2,500 campaigners at its peak. The campaign climaxed with the Solidarity Day rally on

Juneteenth, which attracted upwards of 100,000 people to the Mall and scores of sympathy rallies and marches across the country, including here in Charleston. But police flattened Resurrection City just a few days later, and the Washington phase of the campaign petered out by mid-July before the summer’s major party conventions.

Yet even though the campaign did not dramatically change federal policy toward poverty in the last months of the Johnson administration, it did make a difference in the lives of the people who went. For many of the Chicanos who went, it strengthened their relationships with each other. Corky Gonzales began planning the first of two Chicano

Youth Liberation Conferences in Denver, partly based on the people he met during the campaign. And Lauren Watson returned to the city to pick up where he left off. This translated into more pointed calls for a civilian police review board, a small Panthers-led breakfast program, a substantial “Toys for Tots” drive, and a fleeting federal grant through the Model Cities program.16

A few of their efforts still crossed racial lines. Just days before the first Chicano

Youth Liberation Conference in March 1969, the local Panthers participated in primarily

Mexican American student walkouts on Denver’s Westside. And in early May, Gonzales and supporters joined members of the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic

Society to rally for the release of Huey Newton. There, Gonzales called for blacks and

9 Mexican Americans to join forces against the common enemy. In November, Crusade members attended a multiracial antiwar rally and then a Black Panther Party–sponsored demonstration calling for an exchange of Panther political prisoners for American prisoners in Vietnam. Lauren Watson continued to show up at Crusade marches protesting police brutality, including the suspicious shooting of a 19-year-old African

American. Both men, at times, attributed such cooperation to a mutual outlook.

But there were practical reasons, as well. By 1970, police harassment, the questionable use of federal money in a Model Cities residential housing program which

Watson briefly directed, and ensuing legal troubles had decimated the local Black

Panthers, as similar factors had in Chicago and elsewhere. In fact, the national party had expelled the Denver chapter, according to Watson, “because we were not militant enough.” This despite Watson’s persistent run-ins with police officers – one that led to a documentary still used in some law schools about proper—and improper—police procedure. To outside observers, including journalists and the FBI, Watson hoped to remain relevant by his proximity to the influential Gonzales – not coincidentally in a city that had a much larger Mexican American population.17

Clearly, sources such as the FBI need to be considered with a highly critical eye.

Yet both Lauren Watson and Corky Gonzales also suggested as much in their own way.

Years later, Watson acknowledged that they had had their differences. And Gonzales placed multiracial coalition – with Watson and anyone else – in proper perspective. In a speech in the fall of 1970 at Arizona State University, Gonzales summarized the

Crusade’s (and his own) evolving relationship with African Americans: “I tell Blacks today, with whom we are friendly and have mutual respect, until they are organized and

10 they are doing their thing, and until we are organized, there will be no international coalition.” In the case of Corky Gonzales and Lauren Watson, the great potential of multiracial coalition around poverty ended up reinforcing racial identity on the eve of the

1970s.18

1 Lauren Watson, interview by author, June 27, 2005. 2 Ogbar, Black Power; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left; Araiza, “For Freedom of Other Men.” 3 Quote in Ogbar, Black Power, Chapter 6. 4 On cooperation, see Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left; Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; Araiza, “For Freedom of Other Men”; Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun, chaps. 5 and 6; Kevin Leonard, “‘In the Interest of All Races’: African Americans and Interracial Cooperation in Los Angeles during and after World War II,” in Seeking El Dorado, ed. de Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor, 309–341; and Krochmal, “Labor, Civil Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Texas.” Of course, Carey McWilliams’ Brothers under the Skin remains the classic study in this vein. On conflict, see Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles; Foley, Quest for Equality, 4“Partly Colored or Other White,” 123–44, “Straddling the Color Line,” 341–54, and “Becoming Hispanic,” 53–70; Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough; Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty; Whitaker, Race Work, chap. 6; Vaca, Presumed Alliance; Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix; and Skerry, Mexican Americans. More nuanced accounts include Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed; Behnken, The Struggle in Black and Brown; and Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot. 5 Quotes in Rocky Mountain News, September 29, 1965. Also, Romero, “Our Selma Is Here: The Political and Legal Struggle for Educational Equality in Denver, Colorado, and Multiracial Conundrums in American Jurisprudence,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 3:1 (2004), 94-99; Denver Post, June 26, 1955; Rocky Mountain Life, February 1948; Gerry and Rudy Gonzales, Corky Gonzales’ wife and son, interview by author, June 26, 2005, Denver; Viva!, May 20, 1964; “Crusade for Justice newsletter, May 1966, Box 3, “Prison info,” RCG; Antonio Esquibel, ed., Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), xxii-xxiv; and Vigil, The Crusade for Justice, 5, 8-10, 19-26. 6 Denver Post, February 14, 1966; Rocky Mountain News, February 14, April 21 and 23, and August 5, 1966; Crusade for Justice Newsletter, May 1966, Box 3, “Prison Info,” RCG; and Vigil, Crusade for Justice, 26-27. 7 Viva!, May 20, 1964; Vigil, The Crusade for Justice, 26-27; and Christine Marín, “Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales: The Mexican-American Movement Spokesman,” Journal of the West 14:4 (October 1975): 108-109.

11

8 Quote in Oropeza, 75-76. Also, The Movement, August 1967; “Address to ‘Stop The War’ Rally,” August 6, 1966, and Crusade timeline, n.d. [1971], in Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales Papers, unprocessed, Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library (hereafter known as DPL); FBI memo, “Crusade for Justice,” Denver field office no. 100-9365, May 10, 1968; Vigil, interview by author; and Richard Gould, “The Life and Times of Richard Castro: Bridging a Cultural Divide,” Colorado History 14 (2007): 108-111. 9 Lauren Watson, interviews by author, June 27, 2005, and December 1, 2007, Denver; and examiner.com, January 29, 2011. 10 Lauren Watson, interviews by author; El Gallo, July 28, 1967; Crusade timeline, n.d. [1971], DPL; Vigil, Crusade for Justice, 29-30, 33-35 and Oropeza, ¡Raza Si, Guerra No!, 76. 11 Quote in Lauren Watson, interview by author. Also, New York Times, April 28, 1968; Ernesto Vigil, interview by author, and Rudy and Gerry Gonzales, interview by author; “Lauren Watson bio sheet,” Folder 1, LWF; Denver Post, April 30, 1968; and Vigil, Crusade for Justice, 29-30, 33-35. 12 Lauren Watson, interview by author. 13 Quote by Craig Hart, interview by author. Also, FBI memo, May 20, 1968, Denver, POCAM; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 20-21, 1968; Denver Post, May 20, 1968; Ralph Ramirez, Ernesto Vigil, and Lauren Watson, interviews by author; Mark Comfort, interview by Robert Wright, November 16, 1968; Vigil, Crusade for Justice, 57; Tijerina, They Called Me ‘King Tiger,’ 103, 106-7; and Blawis, Tijerina and the Land Grants, 120-22. 14 Ernesto Vigil, Craig Hart, and Lauren Watson, interviews by author; and Washington Post, May 30, 1968. 15 Mark Comfort, interview by Robert Wright; Lauren Watson, interviews by author; and Mantler, “Black, Brown, and Poor.” 16 Lauren Watson, interviews by author; and Mantler, “Black, Brown, and Poor.” 17 SAC, Denver field office, “Internal Security—Spanish American,” July 30 and November 28, 1969, Crusade for Justice FBI file; Lauren Watson, and Rudy and Gerry Gonzales, interviews by author; Westword, September 10, 1995; Time, March 30, 1970; and Denver v. Lauren R. Watson. 18 Gonzales, “Arizona State University Speech,” October 14, 1970, in Message to Aztlán, ed. Esquibel, 36-37. The use of “international” suggests several influences on Gonzales’ thinking, including the internationalist rhetoric of the Black Panthers and his identification with those suffering during the Vietnam War and under the brutal U.S. government-backed military dictatorship in Mexico. The Crusade’s “freedom school,” Escuela Tlatelolco was named after the October 2, 1968, massacre in which soldiers killed hundreds of protesting Mexican students in preparation to host the Summer Olympics. Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (New York: Viking Press, 1975). See also Ogbar, Black Power, Chapter Six.

12