Black and Brown Power in the Fight Against Poverty

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.

Load more