Author Jesse Montgomery tells the story of the Young Patriots Organization, poor white people who worked with the Black Panthers and Young Lords of the First Rainbow Coalition. Joined in conversation by Chika Okoye (Center For Political Education) and Finn Finneran

Formed in the late 1960s, the Young Patriots Organization was a Chicago-based radical group made up of young white migrants from Appalachia and the South who helped found Black Panther activist Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. The YPO grew from a local street gang into a powerful political and social force in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, where it fought against police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, the establishment of survival programs, and working-class cultural organizations.

In this first stand-alone history of the YPO, Jesse Montgomery presents the group as one of the New Left’s most enigmatic anti-racist organizations—one inspired by the moral and political power of the civil rights movement and the street corner socialism of the Black Panthers but also one that embraced regressive Southern identifiers, such as Confederate flags, that belied its liberatory message. Though the YPO’s existence was short-lived, its story helps us to reimagine radical unity in the face of dislocation, political oppression, and the brutal incentives of racial capitalism. As Montgomery argues, its work to cross racial and class lines and build coalitions for the greater good is a symbol of the America that could still be.

Jesse Montgomery is an Assistant Professor of English at Berea College and the author of It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story. 

Chika Okoye: Lead Educator, who has been a long-time educator for CPE's Marxism 101 programs

Finn Finneran (he/they) is a writer and organizer living in the Bay Area Originally from the south, Finn studies history at UC Berkeley