Thank those noisy, ill-mannered revolutionaries

Black Panther Party-- A Black political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California originally formed to monitor police brutality. In 1968, Fred Hampton founded and led the Chicago chapter.
Newton wrote the founding 10-point platform: 1) Freedom; the power to determine the destiny of the Black and oppressed communities, 2) Full Employment; give every person employment or guaranteed income, 3) End to robbery of Black communities; the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules as promised to ex-slaves during the reconstruction period following the emancipation of slavery, 4) Decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings; the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people can build, 5) Education for the people; that teaches the true history of Blacks and their role in present day society, 6) Free health care; health facilities which will develop preventive medical programs, 7) End to police brutality and murder of Black people and other people of color and oppressed people, 8) End to all wars of aggression; the various conflicts which exist stem directly from the United States ruling circle, 9) Freedom for all political prisoners; trials by juries that represent our peers, 10) Land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and community control of modern industry.
     By 1969, community social programs were their main thrust with free breakfasts for children, escorts for seniors, health clinics, sickle cell and anemia screening, and food redistribution.
     Through a system of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, and police harassment the FBI undermined Panther leadership, jailed and killed party members, discredited the Party, created in-fighting, and drained organizational resources. Between 1968 and 1970 there were 28 armed clashes with local police or FBI agent and hundreds of Party members were in jail. The Black panthers spent about $200,000 on bail alone and thousand more on court costs and lawyers.
     After its leaders and members were portrayed by the mainstream press as dangerous and uncontrollable, public support for the party waned, and the group became more isolated.
     The party was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. Membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in 68 cities in nine countries Including UK, Algeria, Germany, India, Israel, and New Zealand. There were more than five thousand members, two-thirds of whom were women. it began to decline over the following decade. by 1980, the Black Panther Party had just 27 members.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective-- Started in 1969 by twelve women after a workshop on women and their bodies at a Boston-area women’s liberation conference tackling the condescending attitudes of the medical establishment. The discussions were so provocative and rewarding that they formed a group to research and discuss their bodies and their health. They decided to share what they learned with other women and to challenge the medical establishment to improve the care women received, publishing a $.75, 193-page frank booklet on stapled newsprint, “Women and Their Bodies.” Its discussion of sexuality and abortion was illegal. In 1971, they changed the title to “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” to underscore that women must take full ownership of their bodies. Published by New England Free Press, the book was an underground success, selling 250,000 copies for $.40 each, mainly by word-of-mouth. [3]
Chicago Eight/Seven -- David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale were charged by the federal government with conspiracy and inciting to riot in anti-Viet Nam War protests during 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Bobby Seale gave a speech in Lincoln Park but was not part of the protests. When Black Panther founder Bobby Seale (bound and gagged in court) was separated from the defendants on November 5, 1969, it became Chicago Seven. Judge Julius Hoffman convicted five for inciting riots and gave everyone long sentences for contempt of court. All were acquitted of conspiracy. Later, the contempt charges were reversed and the convictions for inciting riots were overturned. [4]
FBI COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) —a 1956-1971 FBI effort to undermine and eradicate the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Ku Klux Klan as threats to national security and social order. The FBI was afraid of the rise of a Black "messiah." They worried about three people in particular: Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, and Fred Hampton. King was assassinated in 1968. Newton was accused of manslaughter in 1967 and was in prison until the case was dismissed in 1970. Hampton was killed by police in 1969. FBI Director Edgar J. Hoover described the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and sought to prevent the unification of Black coalitions with wiretaps, anonymous letters to the press and individuals, disruptive informants, and police harassment to create internal strife. The FBI also planted false evidence that someone was an informant to foster distrust. These activities were exposed in 1971 when an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania was burglarized by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI; the confidential files they found were released to the press. [1, 5, 6]
Fred Hampton—In 1968, Fred Hampton founded Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party. He went on to be chairman of the Illinois chapter, and deputy chairman of the national Party. In this role, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to end their fighting among themselves and work for social change. His strong leadership and charismatic personality made him a target of the FBI. He was a high school honor student and studied pre-law major in college. He was an NAACP youth organizer who worked to get better recreational facilities in neighborhoods.
     He rose quickly in the Black Panthers, and plans were in place for him to become Party's Central Committee's Chief of Staff. In December 1969 Hampton (and Mark Clark) were shot and killed during a pre-dawn raid at his Chicago apartment. During the attack (under the direction of Cook County State's Attorney's Office, in conjunction with the FBI) the Chicago Police Department fired ninety bullets into the apartment using submachine guns, shotguns, a rifle, and a pistol mostly aimed at Hampton who was in bed. Police claimed the Panthers had opened fire first, this was later proved to be false. Hampton’s bodyguard, William O’Neal, was an FBI informant. He supplied the floor plan for Hampton’s apartment and went into the witness protection program afterwards. His role was revealed in 1973. He committed suicide in 1990. [7]
Indianapolis Free Press--The largest of the many alternative small underground newspapers published in Indianapolis during the antiwar days with a circulation that reached 75,000. In existence from April 5, 1969-February 7 1971(?). See more:  https://indyencyclopedia.org/newspapers-alternative/
Jane Collective, or Jane—officially, the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, was an underground service in Chicago affiliated with the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. Between 1969 and 1973, when abortions were illegal in most of the United States, they supplied safe, clandestine, abortions to thousands of women for reasonable fees. They suspended services when Roe vs Wade court decision legalized abortion. It is estimated that they handled more than 11,000 abortions. [8, 9]
Moratorium to End the War in Viet Nam--A national demonstration against the United States involvement in the Viet Nam War on October 15, 1969. An estimated two million people took part in protests across the United States. Protests also occurred in Paris, London, Rome, Copenhagen, and Dublin. [11, 12]

Moratorium March on Washington—A demonstration against the Viet Nam war held November 13-14, 1969 in Washington, DC. Over 500,000 people attended the Saturday march, including many celebrities. March against Death, began on the evening of the 13th and continued all night and all the next day. [13]
(the) Movement-- The counterculture, anti-establishment effort that co-existed with the Civil Rights Movement in mid-1960/1970s sometime called the New Left. A descendent of the beatniks of the Beat Generation, it was populated with flower-children hippies, a term coined by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen. It championed anti-Viet Nam War opinions, civil rights, freedom of speech and assembly, environmental reforms, feminism, gay rights, use of consciousness-changing drugs, and cultural experimentation. The movement merged into popular culture as the war issues faded at the end of military draft in 1973 and the war in 1975, and economy the tightened. [14]
Anti-VietNam War Organizers
National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam (Mobe)—A group Known as "the Mobe” formed in 1966 to organize large, non-violent, anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations. Leaders included David Dellinger, Edward Keating, Sidney Peck and Robert Greenblatt. It was headquartered in New York City and had offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It organized a March on the Pentagon in October 1967, 150,000 people attended. It was involved in the demonstrations during the Chicago’s Democratic National Convention. It evolved into New Mobe. [15]
New National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam (New Mobe) —"New Mobe” was founded at a conference at Case Western Reserve University in July 1969. Along with the Viet Nam Moratorium Committee and the Student Mobilization Committee, the group organized the October and November 1969 anti-war Moratoriums. In 1970, this group disbanded. [16]
RYM-- Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) was the section of Students for a Democratic Society formed in March 1969. It split into two factions in June 1969, RYM I and RYM II. RYM I evolved into Weatherman. [20]

RYM II - A Maoist-oriented group formed in 1969 rejecting the SDS Weatherman strategy of armed struggle against the government. Instead, they advocated building a new revolutionary vanguard party through as revolutionary consciousness of the working class and Black community by organizing labor toward communism. It dissolved, spawned several smaller groups. [21]

Students for a Democratic Society, SDS-- A national student activist organization, it began in 1960 on the University of Michigan campus, Ann Arbor, Michigan. At its peak there were more than 300 chapters nationwide. Its last convention was in June 1969. It essentially dissolved into the Weatherman. [22]
Viet Nam Moratorium Committee—Founded in October, 1969 by a group of former volunteers in the 1968 Democratic Presidential campaigns of Eugene J. McCarthy and the Robert F. Kennedy who organized the nationwide mass demonstrations in October and November 1969. The group’s national coordinators, Sam Brown, David Hawk, David Mixner and Marge Sklencar aimed to channel the nation’s discontent surrounding the war into mass protest to end the war. They divorced themselves from the radical Weatherman and promoted the antiwar effort as a peaceful cause. They disbanded in April 1970, citing little prospect of change in the administration’s policy against the war. [24]
Weatherman-- Later known as the Weather Underground, a faction of the SDS named after a line of Bob Dylan's 1965 "Subterranean Homesick Blues" song. They were an offshoot of RYM. At the last SDS national convention June 1969, in Chicago, they distributed what would become their manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” It was signed by Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis. They also started planning the Days of Rage, "bring the war home, action for October 1969. They proposed defeating imperialism and racism by collaborating with the Black Panthers and third world countries. At a Weatherman a War Council in December 31, 1969 in Flint, Michigan with about 300 people in attendance, they decided to abandon ineffective, large-scale protests. They decided to become the Weather Underground to begin a covert, violent, armed struggle against imperialism. In 1970, they made a "Declaration of a State of War" against the government and began a bombing campaign of government buildings and several banks who were involved financially with the war. The group began falling apart after the United States reached a peace agreement with Viet Nam in 1973 and had disbanded by 1977. [30]

Weather Bureau – The leadership central committee of the Weatherman. [26]
Yippies (The Youth International Party)—a highly theatrical and prank-based protest organization. The term Yippie was coined by Paul Krassner, founder and editor of The Realist, an underground humor magazine. Krassner, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin founded the organization in 1967 to blend hippies with more serious political protestors. They choose Youth International Party because its members could be called Yippies. [31,32]
Puerto Rican Nationalist Party—Founded September 17, 1922, in San Juan to work for Puerto Rico's independence from the United States. Albizu Campos was elected in 1930 as its president. After Albizu Campos's death in 1965, the party dissolved into factions. The effort to be an independent nation has been afoot since 1809 or perhaps earlier, first from Spain and then from the United States. [17]
Rainbow Coalition (Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity) -- A multi-ethnic coalition political partnership founded in 1969 founded in Chicago by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, along with William Fesperman of the Young Patriots Organization and José Cha Cha Jimenez of the Young Lords. It combined the non-governmental resources of all the groups to fight inadequate housing, jobs, protection from police brutality, healthcare, food, and lack of social services. After the shooting of Fred Hampton and continued harassment by the FBI and police, the group fell apart, disbanding in 1973. [18, 19]
Young Lords-- The Young Lords formed in 1960 as a Puerto Rican turf gang in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. Mayor Richard J. Daley’s urban renewal projects of the 1960s in the Near North Side displaced an entire community of Puerto Ricans. They moved north into the adjoining Lincoln Park neighborhood and west into Humboldt Park. Both of these areas were also gentrified, and the poor were evicted from redevelopment areas near the Loop, Lakefront, Old Town, and Lakeview neighborhoods. The 1968 Democratic Convention protests in Grant Park and Lincoln Park Neighborhood stimulated the transformation of the Young Lords into a broader human rights movement. Puerto Rican independence and the displacement of Puerto Ricans and poor residents became the focus. The movement expanded from Chicago with three branches in New York City. Like the black Panthers, they were a target of the FBI's COINTELPRO. Membership declined, and the organization was mostly disbanded by 1976. [27]
Young Patriots Organization—formed in 1968 in Hillbilly Harlem, a Chicago Uptown neighborhood of poor white southerners who migrated to Chicago for jobs after World War II. They had deeply embedded ideas of white supremacy but realized how much they had in common with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords with the help of an SDS project called Jobs Or Income Now (JOIN). They put together an 11-point program, modeled after the Black Panther platform, with demands for full employment and better housing that declared “revolutionary solidarity with all the oppressed people of this and all other countries and races defeats the divisions created by the narrow interests of cultural nationalism.” The organization was able to participate in the Rainbow Coalition as long as they denounced racism. The Black Panthers tolerated the display of the Confederate flag as a sign of rebellion. [28, 29, 30]
Venceremos Brigade-- a political organization founded in 1969 by members of SDS and officials of the Republic of Cuba to send delegations of volunteers to Cuba to work on farming and construction projects to show solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and the oppression of the United States. The yearly brigade trips continue today and are coordinated with the Pastors For Peace Friendship Caravans to Cuba. [23]

  1. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Black Panther Party"
  2. Lowell Bergman, David Weir, Lowell Bergman, and David Weir, “Revolution on Ice,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 2018. 
  3. Our Bodies Our Selves, "Our Story”
  4. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Chicago Seven"
  5. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "COINTELPRO"
  6. Mazzetti, Mark. “Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows” The New York Times, January 7, 2014
  7. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Fred Hampton"
  8. Admin, Webtrax. “Text Memoirs,” CWLU HERSTORY
  9. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Jane Collective"
  10. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Liberty Union Party"
  11. John Herbers. "Moratorium Observed Nationwide By Foes of The War, Orderly," The New York Times, October 16, 1969, Page 1
  12. Tribune News Service, “War Protest Gets European Support,” Chicago Tribune, October 16, 1969, Page 7
  13. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam"
  14. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Counterculture of the 1960s"
  15. "Independent Lens. CHICAGO 10. The MOBE” PBS
  16. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam"
  17. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico" and Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Independence movement in Puerto Rico"
  18. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Rainbow Coalition (Fred Hampton)"
  19. Ganeva, Tana, “The Black Panthers' ‘Rainbow Coalition," Explained”
  20. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Revolutionary Youth Movement"
  21. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Students for a Democratic Society"
  22. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Venceremos Brigade"
  23. David E. Rosenbaum, "Vietnam Moratorium Committee Is Disbanding," The New York Times, April 20, 1970, Page 1.
  24. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Viet Cong"
  25. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Weather Underground"
  26. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Young Lords"
  27. Michael McCanne, Matt Bruenig, Matt Karp, Samuel Stein, Peter Gowan, Nicole Colson, et al, “The Panthers and the Patriots,” Jacobin magazine
  28. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, "Young Patriots Organization" 
  29. Patrick King, William “Preacherman” Fesperman, “Young Patriots at the United Front Against Fascism Conference (1969),” Viewpoint Magazine, April 28, 2019
  30. Colette Gaiter, “Chicago 1969: When Black Panthers Aligned with Confederate-Flag-Wielding, Working-Class Whites,” The Conversation, October 11, 2019
  31. “Independent Lens . CHICAGO 10 . The Yippies.” PBS
  32. Berger, Joseph. “Paul Krassner, Anarchist, Prankster and a Yippies Founder, Dies at 87.” The New York Times, July 21, 2019