Washington’s delusion of endless world dominion

China and the U.S. struggle over Eurasia, the epicenter of world power.By Alfred W. McCoy -March 22, 2021

Empires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.

By 1956, Britain had exploited its global empire shamelessly for a decade in an effort to lift its domestic economy out of the rubble of World War II. It was looking forward to doing so for many decades to come. Then an obscure Egyptian army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal and Britain’s establishment erupted in a paroxysm of racist outrage. The prime minister of the day, Sir Antony Eden, forged an alliance with France and Israel to send six aircraft carriers to the Suez area, smash Egypt’s tank force in the Sinai desert, and sweep its air force from the skies.

But Nasser grasped the deeper geopolitics of empire in a way that British leaders had long forgotten. The Suez Canal was the strategic hinge that tied Britain to its Asian empire — to British Petroleum’s oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the sea lanes to Singapore and beyond. So, in a geopolitical masterstroke, he simply filled a few rusting freighters with rocks and sank them at the entrance to the canal, snapping that hinge in a single gesture. After Eden was forced to withdraw British forces in a humiliating defeat, the once-mighty British pound trembled at the precipice of collapse and, overnight, the sense of imperial power in England seemed to vanish like a desert mirage.

Two decades of delusions

In a similar manner, Washington’s hubris is finding its nemesis in China’s President Xi Jinping and his grand strategy for uniting Eurasia into the world’s largest economic bloc. For two decades, as China climbed, step by step, toward global eminence, Washington’s inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. In the process, from Bill Clinton’s administration to Joe Biden’s, Washington’s China policy has morphed from illusion directly into a state of bipartisan delusion.

Back in 2000, the Clinton administration believed that, if admitted to the World Trade Organization, Beijing would play the global game strictly by Washington’s rules. When China started playing imperial hardball instead — stealing patents, forcing companies to turn over trade secrets, and manipulating its currency to increase its exports — the elite journal Foreign Affairs tut-tutted that such charges had “little merit,” urging Washington to avoid “an all-out trade war” by learning to “respect difference and look for common ground.”

Within just three years, a flood of exports produced by China’s low-wage workforce, drawn from 20% of the world’s population, began shutting down factories across America. The AFL-CIO labor confederation then started accusing Beijing of illegally “dumping” its goods in the U.S. at below-market prices. The administration of George W. Bush, however, dismissed the charges for lack of “conclusive evidence,” allowing Beijing’s export juggernaut to grind on unimpeded.

For the most part, the Bush-Cheney White House simply ignored China, instead invading Iraq in 2003, launching a strategy that was supposed to give the U.S. lasting dominion over the Middle East’s vast oil reserves. By the time Washington withdrew from Baghdad in 2011, having wasted up to $5.4 trillion on the misbegotten invasion and occupation of that country, fracking had left America on the edge of energy independence, while oil was joining cordwood and coal as a fuel whose days were numbered, potentially rendering the future Middle East geopolitically irrelevant.

While Washington had been pouring blood and treasure into desert sands, Beijing was making itself into the world’s workshop. It had amassed $4 trillion in foreign exchange, which it began investing in an ambitious scheme it called the Belt and Road Initiative to unify Eurasia via history’s largest set of infrastructure projects. Hoping to counter that move with a bold geopolitical gambit, President Barack Obama tried to check China with a new strategy that he called a “pivot to Asia.” It was to entail a global military shift of U.S. forces to the Pacific and a drawing of Eurasia’s commerce toward America through a new set of trade pacts. The scheme, brilliant in the abstract, soon crashed head-first into some harsh realities. As a start, extricating the U.S. military from the mess it had made in the Greater Middle East proved far harder than imagined. Meanwhile, getting big global trade treaties approved as anti-globalization populism surged across America — fueled by factory closures and stagnant wages — turned out, in the end, to be impossible.

Even President Obama underestimated the seriousness of China’s sustained challenge to this country’s global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” two senior Obama officials would later write, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”

Breaking with the Beltway consensus about China, Donald Trump would spend two years of his presidency fighting a trade war, thinking he could use America’s economic power — in the end, just a few tariffs — to bring Beijing to its knees. Despite his administration’s incredibly erratic foreign policy, its recognition of China’s challenge would prove surprisingly consistent. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster would, for instance, observe that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.” Similarly, Trump’s State Department warned that Beijing harbored “hegemonic ambitions” aimed at “displacing the United States as the world’s foremost power.”

In the end, however, Trump would capitulate. By January 2020, his trade war would have devastated this country’s agricultural exports, while inflicting heavy losses on its commercial supply chain, forcing the White House to rescind some of those punitive tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promises to purchase more American goods. Despite a celebratory White House signing ceremony, that deal represented little more than a surrender.

Even now, after these 20 years of bipartisan failure, Washington’s imperial illusions persist. The Biden administration and its inside-the-Beltway foreign-policy experts seem to think that China is a problem like Covid-19 that can be managed simply by being the un-Trump. Last December, a pair of professors writing in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs typically opined that “America may one day look back on China the way they now view the Soviet Union,” that is, “as a dangerous rival whose evident strengths concealed stagnation and vulnerability.”

Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama’s National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. China’s population, he pointed out, is aging, its debt ballooning, and its politics “increasingly sclerotic.” In the event of conflict, China is geopolitically “vulnerable when it comes to food and energy security,” since its navy is unable to prevent it “from being cut off from vital supplies.”

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, a former official in Obama’s State Department, Jake Sullivan, began auditioning for appointment as Biden’s national security adviser by staking out a similar position. In Foreign Affairs, he argued that China might be “more formidable economically… than the Soviet Union ever was,” but Washington could still achieve “a steady state of… coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” Although China was clearly trying “to establish itself as the world’s leading power,” he added, America “still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition,” just as long as it avoids Trump’s “trajectory of self-sabotage.”

As expected from such a skilled courtier, Sullivan’s views coincided carefully with those of his future boss, Joe Biden. In his main foreign policy manifesto for the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden argued that “to win the competition for the future against China,” the U.S. had to “sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world.”

All these men are veteran foreign policy professionals with a wealth of international experience. Yet they seem oblivious to the geopolitical foundations for global power that Xi Jinping, like Nasser before him, seemed to grasp so intuitively. Like the British establishment of the 1950s, these American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they’ve forgotten how they got there.

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s Cold War leaders had a clear understanding that their global power, like Britain’s before it, would depend on control over Eurasia. For the previous 400 years, every would-be global hegemony had struggled to dominate that vast land mass. In the sixteenth century, Portugal had dotted continental coastlines with 50 fortified ports (feitorias) stretching from Lisbon to the Straits of Malacca (which connect the Indian Ocean to the Pacific), just as, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain would rule the waves through naval bastions that stretched from Scapa Flow, Scotland, to Singapore.

While Portugal’s strategy, as recorded in royal decrees, was focused on controlling maritime choke points, Britain benefited from the systematic study of geopolitics by the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, who argued that the key to global power was control over Eurasia and, more broadly, a tri-continental “world island” comprised of Asia, Europe, and Africa. As strong as those empires were in their day, no imperial power fully perfected its global reach by capturing both axial ends of Eurasia — until America came on the scene.

The Cold War struggle for control over Eurasia

During its first decade as the globe’s great hegemon at the close of World War II, Washington quite self-consciously set out to build an apparatus of awesome military power that would allow it to dominate the sprawling Eurasian land mass. With each passing decade, layer upon layer of weaponry and an ever-growing network of military bastions were combined to “contain” communism behind a 5,000-mile Iron Curtain that arched across Eurasia, from the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone near Seoul, South Korea.

Through its post-World War II occupation of the defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, Washington seized military bases, large and small, at both ends of Eurasia. In Japan, for example, its military would occupy approximately 100 installations from Misawa air base in the far north to Sasebo naval base in the south.

Soon after, as Washington reeled from the twin shocks of a communist victory in China and the start of the Korean war in June 1950, the National Security Council adopted NSC-68, a memorandum making it clear that control of Eurasia would be the key to its global power struggle against communism. “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass,” read that foundational document. The U.S., it insisted, must expand its military yet again “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.”

As the Pentagon’s budget quadrupled from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion in the early 1950s in pursuit of that strategic mission, Washington quickly built a chain of 500 military installations ringing that landmass, from the massive Ramstein air base in West Germany to vast, sprawling naval bases at Subic Bay in the Philippines and Yokosuka, Japan.

Such bases were the visible manifestation of a chain of mutual defense pacts organized across the breadth of Eurasia, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe to a security treaty, ANZUS, involving Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. in the South Pacific. Along the strategic island chain facing Asia known as the Pacific littoral, Washington quickly cemented its position through bilateral defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.

Along the Iron Curtain running through the heart of Europe, 25 active-duty NATO divisions faced 150 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact divisions, both backed by armadas of artillery, tanks, strategic bombers, and nuclear-armed missiles. To patrol the Eurasian continent’s sprawling coastline, Washington mobilized massive naval armadas stiffened by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carriers — the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and the massive 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.

By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.

Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.

China’s Eurasian strategy

After all that, it seems remarkable that Washington’s current generation of foreign policy leaders, like Britain’s in the 1950s, is so blindingly oblivious to the geopolitics of empire — in this case, to Beijing’s largely economic bid for global power on that same “world island” (Eurasia plus an adjoining Africa).

It’s not as if China has been hiding some secret strategy. In a 2013 speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, President Xi typically urged the peoples of Central Asia to join with his country to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.” Through trade and infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” this vast landmass inhabited by close to three billion people could, he said, become “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

This development scheme, soon to be dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, would become a massive effort to economically integrate that “world island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe by investing well more than a trillion dollars — a sum 10 times larger than the famed U.S. Marshall plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II. Beijing also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with an impressive $100 billion in capital and 103 member nations. More recently, China has formed the world’s largest trade bloc with 14 Asia-Pacific partners and, over Washington’s strenuous objections, signed an ambitious financial services agreement with the European Union.

Such investments, almost none of a military nature, quickly fostered the formation of a transcontinental grid of railroads and gas pipelines extending from East Asia to Europe, the Pacific to the Atlantic, all linked to Beijing. In a striking parallel with that sixteenth century chain of 50 fortified Portuguese ports, Beijing has also acquired special access through loans and leases to more than 40 seaports encompassing its own latter-day “world island” — from the Straits of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline from Piraeus, Greece, to Zeebrugge, Belgium.

With its growing wealth, China also built a blue-water navy that, by 2020, already had 360 warships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and the planet’s second global system of military satellites. That growing force was meant to be the tip of China’s spear aimed at puncturing Washington’s encirclement of Asia. To cut the chain of American installations along the Pacific littoral, Beijing has built eight military bases on tiny (often dredged) islands in the South China Sea and imposed an air defense zone over a portion of the East China Sea. It has also challenged the U.S. Navy’s long-standing dominion over the Indian Ocean by opening its first foreign base at Djibouti in East Africa and building modern ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, and Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with potential military applications.

By now, the inherent strength of Beijing’s geopolitical strategy should be obvious to Washington foreign policy experts, were their insights not clouded by imperial hubris. Ignoring the unbending geopolitics of global power, centered as always on Eurasia, those Washington insiders now coming to power in the Biden administration somehow imagine that there is still a fight to be fought, a competition to be waged, a race to be run. Yet, as with the British in the 1950s, that ship may well have sailed.

By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.

As Sir Halford Mackinder might have put it, had he lived to celebrate his 160th birthday last month, the U.S. dominated Eurasia and thereby the world for 70 years. Now, China is taking control of that strategic continent and global power will surely follow.

However, it will do so on anything but the recognizable planet of the last 400 years. Sooner or later, Washington will undoubtedly have to accept the unbending geopolitical reality that under girds the latest shift in global power and adapt its foreign policy and fiscal priorities accordingly.

This current version of the Suez syndrome is, nonetheless, anything but the usual. Thanks to longterm imperial development based on fossil fuels, planet Earth itself is now changing in ways dangerous to any power, no matter how imperial or ascendant. So, sooner or later, both Washington and Beijing will have to recognize that we are now in a distinctly dangerous new world where, in the decades to come, without some kind of coordination and global cooperation to curtail climate change, old imperial truths of any sort are likely to be left in the attic of history in a house coming down around all our ears.

Fifty Years of Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition A look back on how multiracial Chicago-style coalition building has influenced organizing to this day

BY JACQUELINE SERRATO SEPTEMBER 27, 2019FEBRUARY 13, 2021

Chicago-style coalition-building helped to produce the first Black mayor of Chicago and put its first Latinx representatives in office. Some even believe its legacy led to the election of the city’s first Black woman mayor. But unbeknownst to many, this form of organizing started in the streets fifty years ago with what was called the “Rainbow Coalition”: a progressive, fundamentally socialist movement that set the foundation for radical ideals and civil disobedience in Chicago. ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

On a February afternoon in 1969, Chairman Fred Hampton and his contingent of Illinois Black Panthers went looking for a Puerto Rican kid by the name of Cha-Cha in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Hampton had just read in the paper that the Young Lords street organization had shut themselves in the 18th District police station—along with the police commander and the media—to protest the ongoing police harassment of Latinx residents.

The Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers established themselves on the West Side of Chicago in 1968 and functioned under a ten-point program of self-empowerment and service. Their Oakland, CA founding members were already involved in multiracial movement building through the left-wing and anti-war Peace and Freedom Party. 

The Young Lords formed on the streets of Chicago in 1960 as a gang, but in 1968 they declared themselves a civil rights organization. In trips to the West Coast, they were exposed to the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, who were mobilizing together for racial justice there.

Shortly after meeting, the two youths would found the original Rainbow Coalition: a “poor people’s army,” as José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez refers to it, that joined forces with working-class whites from the city’s North Side. As men were landing on the moon for the first time in a global display of American exceptionalism, the Rainbow Coalition was drawing citywide and nationwide attention to police brutality, premeditated gentrification, and institutional racism in Chicago.

“Fred took the Young Lords under his wing. He gave us the skills that we needed to come right out of the gang and start organizing the community,” said Cha-Cha, now seventy-one, leader of the gang-turned-political organization, in an interview. “We were already fighting for our rights in our neighborhoods, and we needed to form a united front. Our mission was self-determination for our barrios and all oppressed nations.”

In Chicago, the Black and Latinx activists became natural allies. Both communities had been battling Italian, German, Irish, and other white street gangs that were enforcing redlining at the street level. Black and Latinx Chicagoans lived together in the Cabrini-Green projects, attended overcrowded schools, and were denied entrance to certain beaches, restaurants, and public spaces; their parents had practically no access to city jobs or home ownership. 

The youth, who rocked black and purple berets as their respective colors, began to identify the “pigs” at the Chicago Police Department and Mayor Richard J. Daley as their common adversaries.

At the time, Chicago was a deeply segregated city, recovering from the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—who, years earlier, led the Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign against racist housing practices that cemented segregation. Widespread public discontent—and the possibility that the neighborhoods could erupt again—could be felt.

Those who remember Hampton say he had the leadership skills to arrange gang truces and bring together unlikely groups. Billy “Che” Brooks, Deputy Minister of Education for the Illinois Black Panther Party, credits him with reaching out to William “Preacherman” Fesperman and the Young Patriots, a street organization of white youths whose parents and grandparents had migrated from Appalachia seeking jobs, but now resided in slum-like conditions in and around the Uptown neighborhood. 

The newly formed Rainbow Coalition embraced the historic momentum of 1969 to organize an unprecedented partnership between blue-collar workers from the countryside and a variety of  poor urban dwellers. Hampton understood that creating these alliances was necessary to engage in a “protracted class struggle,” according to Che, who today mentors youth at Chicago Public Libraries.

“Our thing was that Black people organize in the Black community, Puerto Ricans organize in the Puerto Rican community, ‘mexicanos’ organize in the Mexican community, and poor white people organize in their community”— and then they come together, he explained in an interview. “Today, we call it coalition politics,” Che said. 

But at the time, the Rainbow Coalition’s ideology dismissed electoral politics, according to Che, and did not aspire to mere representation politics or a colorblind society, either. Rather, they sought to empower “all peoples of the world” to determine their own destiny —beginning with their own neighborhoods—“by any means necessary.”

The Panthers were aware of the social uprisings taking place in Haiti and African countries to overthrow colonial-era dictators, while the Young Lords were just gaining consciousness of their status as second-class citizens from Puerto Rico—a “modern-day colony” of the United States, they said. This internationalist ideology and model of solidarity distinguished the Black Panther Party from separatist militant Black groups, and the Young Lords from other nationalist Latin American groups. 

Hampton would often ask white liberals: “How can you go all the way to Vietnam without first going through the West Side of Chicago?” 

Despite the gestures of solidarity, it was challenging for the youth of color to completely trust their hillbilly counterparts in the Young Patriots Organization who, in Southern tradition, wore the Confederate flag as their emblem. Che “was not ready for all that,” he said, and many Black Panthers and Young Lords were not enthused to break bread with the Young Patriots. 

Enter Bobby Lee, a college-educated Texan and cousin of Black Panther Oakland chapter co-founder Bobby Seale, who had demonstrated great ability and patience when communicating with the white community. In the documentary American Revolution II, Lee speaks with a sixteen-year-old white boy in a straw hat who wants to take up arms to defend himself from detectives who slapped him around. Lee deescalates the crowded room in the film, speaking eloquently, and convinces them to go protest the police station instead. Noting Lee’s restraint, Hampton assigned him to help the Young Patriots launch their Survival Programs in Chicago.

Youth from the Young Lords and other community groups occupied the 18th District police station to protest the harassment of the Young Lords and its leader, José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez. Published in Y.L.O., a publication of the Young Lords’s Ministry of Information. (Young Lords Newspaper Collection Y.L.O. Vol. 1, No. 1, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.)

The Survival Programs of the Black Panthers were meant to fill a void left by the municipal government and institutions that were not fulfilling the basic needs of all segments of society, in particular the Black community, they said. In response to the lack of healthcare for poor people in Chicago, the Panthers opened a network of clinics in North Lawndale and other Black neighborhoods with the aid of Quentin Young, MD, and other volunteer medical students. The Lords and the Patriots followed the Panthers’ model in their own communities. 

The Rainbow Coalition youth—made up of Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots—also launched free breakfast programs that were supported by donations from community businesses and ran free daycare centers for neighborhood children. Several operations were upheld by the women of the Black Panthers and women’s focus groups like the Young Lordettes and Mothers and Others (MAO). The federal government institutionalized the School Breakfast Program in 1975.

“We’re gonna fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism not with racism, but with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but with socialism… We’re gonna fight with all of us people getting together and having an international proletariat revolution,” Hampton was recorded saying.

The overarching grievances of the Black-brown-and-white alliance revolved around the impact that both urban neglect and urban renewal, as gentrification was then called, were having on the slums and ghettos where they lived. The city wanted to “rehabilitate” some of those areas in their efforts to erect a twenty-first century world-class city, according to Mayor Daley’s proposed fifty-year development plan he called Chicago 21.

Across racial lines, poor and disenfranchised youth were routinely harassed, beaten, and incarcerated by the Chicago Police Department. In May 1969, Mayor Daley and State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan declared a “war on gangs” in Chicago, deploying 1,000 additional police to the streets. Twice, Hampton and Cha-Cha, along with Obed Lopez, a Mexican from the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO), were rounded up by 13th District police and charged with mob action for picketing a Wicker Park welfare office. 

Hampton and Cha-Cha were sent to solitary confinement at Cook County Jail multiple times as a direct consequence of their street organizing. “This was an effort to criminalize us, to bankrupt our finances, to cause fear and put us away for life,” Cha-Cha said. 

Che, seventy-one, remembered Hampton was sentenced after taking ice cream pops from the ice cream truck to pass out to neighborhood kids. Cha-Cha was jailed for stealing lumber to repair the Young Lords daycare center in order to meet city inspection, he said. Both served their time for those crimes. At one point Cha-Cha had accumulated eighteen cases and Hampton and Lopez each had nine cases.

As a high school dropout and former gang leader, Cha-Cha was a man of few words. Old press photos tended to depict him balancing a cigarette in his mouth. But his confrontational tactics were in line with Hampton’s and remain a hallmark of direct action.

In Lincoln Park, which has since become a playground for the rich, the first recorded acts of collective resistance to gentrification took place under Cha-Cha’s command. At the time, several institutions—among them the Children’s Memorial Hospital, and the McCormick Theological Seminary that was later absorbed by the DePaul University campus—were collaborating with the city to expand high-end housing near the lakefront: prime Chicago real estate. The developments were designed to exclude the Puerto Rican working class, the Young Lords found after studying the city blueprints.

The Young Lords became emboldened after one of their members, Manuel Ramos, was killed by an off-duty cop, and another, Pancho Lind, was beaten to death by a white gang. The Lords notoriously occupied the institutions that were taking over their neighborhood and presented landlords with a list of demands for institutional access. But first, they trashed the Urban Renewal office in Lincoln Park, shutting it down for months and sending a clear message of resistance to the city. 

The occupations didn’t just put the Young Lords on the map: a $25,000 payout obtained from the occupation of the university building helped to found the People’s Law Office, a social justice firm that represented the Rainbow Coalition against legal pressure from the police and the city.

In public appearances, the Rainbow Coalition was backed by community residents and Black and brown street gangs—but they also had the support of unions, Independent Precinct Organizations, college students and activists who supported the movement through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Rising Up Angry, and countless other organizations. Their allies included Concerned Citizens of Lincoln Park, the West Town Concerned Citizens Coalition, the Northside Cooperative Ministry, Neighborhood Commons Organization, and Voice of the People.

“It was really based on common action,” said Mike Klonsky, a former Chicago leader of SDS (who, like Hampton and Cha-Cha, had a reward out for his arrest). “If there was a protest or a demonstration, the word would get out and we would all come to it and support each other. If somebody was arrested, we would all raise bail. If somebody was killed or shot by the police, we would all respond together.”

Klonsky, now seventy-six, appeared with Cha-Cha, Hampton, and Yoruba, a Young Lord-in-training from New York, in newspaper photos of a press conference held by the Rainbow Coalition. The former leader of SDS, which by 1969 was splintering due to ideological differences, said they were publicly distancing themselves from the Weathermen, a militant faction of SDS who organized a three-day series of violent protests in October called the Days of Rage during which the Weathermen rampaged through the Gold Coast and blew up a statue to police who died during the 1886 Haymarket Riot. 

The Coalition knew that Black and brown activists would face the brunt of police retaliation for the Days of Rage—which Hampton denounced as “adventuristic, masochistic, and Custeristic”—and proposed a march from People’s Park (a vacant lot on Halsted and Armitage they had also occupied) to Humboldt Park as an alternative.

“We believed in self-defense, but not provocation,” Klonsky said.

Still, high-profile activists and associates like Klonsly endured government surveillance under COINTELPRO—an infamous program of the Justice Department which sent undercover agents to disrupt radical movements from the inside—and the Red Squad, a CPD intelligence unit dating back to the Haymarket Riot that kept track of their every move. 

“Their specific job and duty was to harass us,” Che said. “We had informants within the infrastructure of our organization who we referred to as provocateurs, who caused dissention and were created to destroy and basically annihilate us.”

The Coalition youth protested the torture of Seale, who was chained and gagged while in court for his participation in the Democratic National Convention protests, and the federal charges placed on the Chicago Seven activists for alleged conspiracy and rioting. Around the same time, the Rev. Bruce Johnson of the People’s Church—a United Methodist Church the Young Lords took over and turned into their headquarters—was brutally stabbed, along with his wife Eugenia, in their parsonage in a case that remains unsolved.

The confrontations between CPD and the Panthers were becoming increasingly intense. They engaged in a shootout over the summer that killed Black Panther Larry Roberson. Then in November, police alleged they were responding to a domestic dispute in the South Side when a shootout broke out that claimed the lives of Black Panther Spurgeon “Jake” Winters and police officers Frank Rappaport and John Gilhooly.

In December of 1969, the FBI conducted an overnight raid on Hampton’s apartment with intelligence provided by an infiltrator. He had just been named spokesperson of the national Black Panther Party. A barrage of police bullets struck him in his sleep as he lay beside his pregnant fiance, Akua Njeri, who survived. Another occupant, Black Panther security chief Mark Clark, was also killed. 

Distraught members of the Coalition unofficially disbanded, and a handful of the leadership went underground after Hampton’s assassination, fearing for their own safety. Thousands of people lined up to witness the open crime scene, while lawyers from the People’s Law Office disputed the later-disproved official police account, which had falsely claimed a heavy firefight on both sides. Having assassinated its most vocal leader, the Feds had effectively crushed the 1960s’ most promising push for united, cohesive social resistance in Chicago.

The Black Panthers, Young Patriots and SDS join the Young Lords in a march from “People’s Park” to Humboldt Park. Published in Y.L.O., a publication of the Young Lords’s Ministry of Information. (Young Lords Newspaper Collection, Y.L.O. Vol. 1 No. 5. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.)

Black Panther Party Deputy Minister of Defense Bobby Rush and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Chicago leader of Martin Luther King’s Operation Breadbasket, spoke at Hampton’s funeral. In time, both demonstrated political aspirations. The notion of voting for politicians from the community began to sound more palatable in the absence of revolutionary spokespeople.

Although he was not considered a “viable” candidate by the establishment, Cha-Cha became the first Latinx candidate to announce a run for office in the city of Chicago, a decision he says he made in 1973 while sitting in Cook County Jail. When he was released, Cha-Cha traded his purple beret for a suit and tie, and with North Side organizers Walter “Slim” Coleman and Jim Chapman launched his campaign for alderman in the 46th Ward. 

Cha-Cha ran on a pro-low income housing and anti-displacement platform, and lost, but garnered an unexpected thirty-nine percent of the vote and grew in name recognition. His campaign built a base of newly registered voters—Puerto Ricans could vote, as opposed to Mexican immigrants and many other Latinx Chicagoans at the time—and that carried over to Mayor Harold Washington’s campaign in 1983. 

Washington, who ran on a Neighborhoods First agenda, did not count on the support of most of the Black aldermen in the Council whose wards were beholden to the mayor’s patronage jobs. Up until that point, only one former alderman, Leon Despres, had dared to speak up against Daley. So members of the original Rainbow Coalition network re-emerged to get out the minority and progressive white vote for Washington and other candidates who openly challenged the Daley machine, including Helen Shiller’s 46th Ward aldermanic run.

Rush would later comment that Washington’s election was “directly linked” to the assasination of Fred Hampton and the values he pioneered in Chicago.

Klonsky said he “can trace a straight line between 1969 and […] the election of Mayor Harold Washington, the first Black mayor.”

As the North Side Hispanic Precinct Coordinator, Cha-Cha put together a rally for Washington in Humboldt Park that, according to the Sun-Times, attracted 100,000 Latino residents. “As some of the audience waved Puerto Rican flags, Washington welcomed them in Spanish with a greeting of ‘unity and strength’,” the paper read. 

However, Cha-Cha did not get a job with the Washington administration due to his criminal record and past drug use. He found refuge from law enforcement in Michigan, where he currently resides, goes to university, and maintains a Young Lords committee remotely.

From Washington’s supporters and the organizing network of the Rainbow Coalition emerged a wave of progressive leaders that sought political power in the late ‘80s and the ‘90s. Some recognizable names include former Cook County Clerk David Orr, former 15th Ward Alderman Marlene Carter, former City Clerk and current chair of the Board of Education Miguel del Valle, former MWRD Commissioner Joseph Gardner, former 25th Ward Alderman Juan Soliz, former 44th Ward Alderman Dick Simpson, former U.S. Representative Luis Gutiérrez, and his replacement in Congress and former mayoral candidate, Jesús “Chuy” García, and aldermanic candidates like Paul Siegel and Rudy Lozano. 

In 1984, before President Barack Obama entered the picture as a state senator, Jackson would run for president unsuccessfully, delivering a speech titled “Rainbow Coalition” at the Democratic National Convention. He subsequently adopted the name for the non-profit he founded, and then merged with his Operation PUSH to form the Rainbow/PUSH civil rights organization. Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.

But the electoral power built by the Rainbow Coalition faced pushback from traditional voting blocs. Washington faced legislative blockades from the regular Democrats during the racist Council Wars, in which white alderman (and one Latinx) banded together to systematically vote against the mayor’s proposals throughout his first term. 

The mayor’s death from a heart attack in 1987 caused divisions among Black voters who were split on a Black successor. The tragic loss of Washington allowed for the status quo to fall back into place under Mayor Richard M. Daley, who—among other self-serving maneuvers—enabled the corrupt Hispanic Democratic Organization that recruited city workers to manipulate the Latinx vote in his favor.

Since the ‘70s, more than thirty white, Black, and Latinx aldermen have been indicted or accused of serious corruption charges, ranging from bribery to extortion to embezzlement. Most recently, veteran aldermen Ed Burke, Danny Solis, and Carrie Austin have made headlines for being of interest to federal investigators.✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

And from [Washington], I can draw a straight line to what’s going on today with Black Lives Matter—and even the election of Lori, a gay Black woman,” said Klonsky, who today co-hosts Hitting Left, a political radio show on Bridgeport’s Lumpen Radio. “Her election stands on the shoulders of Harold.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot succeeded two-term Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose legacy of police cover-ups led to his decision not to run for a third term, with an anti-corruption platform that sought to eliminate the remnants of the old patronage machine at City Hall. Early in her campaign, Lightfoot promised to reform the culture at the Chicago Police Department and address affordable housing. Her campaign swept all wards—though at thirty-five percent, voter turnout in the 2019 election was significantly short of the eighty-two percent turnout when Washington won in 1983.

The issues that Lightfoot and her opponent—another Black woman, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle—championed were brought to the surface by the organizing work of people at the grassroots level. Throughout Emanuel’s term in office, activists protested the police killings of Laquan McDonald and Rekia Boyd, the mass closure of public schools and mental health clinics, and the ongoing exodus of families from traditionally Black and brown neighborhoods. 

The organizing by youth groups like Black Youth Project 100, and labor groups like the Chicago Teachers Union—along with tenants groups, independent political organizations, and cross-neighborhood coalitions like the Grassroots Collaborative—all helped to set the agenda for the mayoral race. 

Both activists and reformers have criticized the mayor during her first hundred days in office, arguing that she has not made enough progress on the talking points of her platform. And these groups are keeping the pressure on: they are fighting for a fifteen-dollar living wage, an elected school board, eliminating cash bail, nixing a $95 million police training academy, and improving sanctuary city protections for immigrants under President Donald Trump.

These are values that have been embraced by a new crop of young, multicultural Democratic Socialists and progressives in City Council. Their agendas claim to prioritize a people-powered way of doing government—“for the many, not the few” (as Hampton would say)—that removes big money from politics and ensures community benefits agreements for residents as their neighborhoods develop. 

The freshmen aldermen are not only backing, but spearheading measures like a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) and lifting the statewide ban on rent control. Aldermen from across the city have advocated for the Homes for All, Bring Chicago Home, and the Development for All ordinances that aim to regulate real estate developers and secure affordable living for working families, the homeless, and people with disabilities.

The ideological shift in City Council can be credited to socialist ideas gaining ground in recent years, but also to years of good old-fashioned door knocking and coalition building across neighborhoods. The Black Caucus, the Latino Caucus, and the Progressive Caucus are expected to intersect with one another to a degree that we have never seen before.

Politics in Chicago have come a long way since Hampton met with Cha-Cha fifty years ago.  The trajectory of fearless grassroots, youth-driven, intersectional organizing that was set in motion by the 1969 Rainbow Coalition still resonates today.

There will be an event to commemorate fallen Young Lords and the unsolved deaths of Young Lords allies the Rev. Bruce and Eugenia Johnson at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, 925 W. Diversey Pkwy., on September 29 at 10:30am, followed by a “justice march” to the site of old People’s Church, 834 W. Armitage, in Lincoln Park. bit.ly/YoungLordsMarch

“All Power to the People,” an exhibit celebrating the legacy of the Illinois Black Panther Party, is open for viewing at the Woodson Regional Library’s Harsh Research Collection, 9525 S. Halsted St., through December 31. chipublib.org

Documentary The First Rainbow Coalition, chronicling much of the history in this article, will premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival on October 24 and 25 at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St. José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez of the Young Lords, Hy Thurman of the Young Patriots, and Henry “Poison” Gaddis of the Black Panthers, with director Ray Santisteban, will attend both screenings. $18. chicagofilmfestival.com ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

Jacqueline Serrato is an independent journalist born and raised in the Little Village neighborhood. Follow her on Twitter @HechaEnChicago.

I Slept with Bill Ayres: Memories of My Life and Times with the Weather Underground!

JANUARY 8, 2021 BY JONAH RASKIN

Forty-years ago, in January 1971, on my first visit to California as a guest of the Weather Underground, Jeff Jones picked me up at the Hippo, the legendary San Francisco hamburger joint on Van Ness Avenue, drove me across the Golden Gate Bridge, and brought me to a cozy two-bedroom cottage in the hills above Sausalito. In those days, Jeff and Bernardine Dohrn were lovers. They took the bedroom upstairs, which left the downstairs bedroom, with one small bed, to Bill Ayres and me. In hindsight, I wish I could say that Bill and I made love, or at least fucked, though in those days, the undergrounders had mostly given up pan sexuality and were fast becoming monogamous, some of them more eagerly than others. Bill and I slept next to one another like two chaste boys.

I knew Bill, Jeff and Bernardine from the old days, which was back in ’69, when SDS still existed and I worked in the national office in Chicago, along with firebrand Terry Robbins, writing and producing propaganda for the revolution. Terry called our effort a “shot gun.”

It was a brochure and it offered photos and bios of Huey Newton, whom Eldridge Cleaver had called “the baddest mother fucker ever to step inside history,” along with Cleaver himself, who had been the Minister of Education of the Black Panther Party and was on his way to Algiers where he set up the Panther Embassy in exile, with help from the Algierian government.

There were other mother fuckers in the shotgun, perhaps not as bad as Huey. After all these years, I do not remember precisely who they were or what they might have done, though I think that Martin Sostre was among them. Sostre had been arrested at his Buffalo, New York bookstore, charged with a long list of crimes and sentenced to 41 years and thirty days in prison. New York State Governor Hugh Carey granted him clemency and he was released in February 1976. My friends at Pacific Street Films made a documentary about him. Sostre died in August 2015 at the age of 92, pretty old for a revolutionary. Governor Carey showed more compassion than the current governor who did not see fit to release Weatherman Dave Gilbert from prison, though with COVID-19, the place is a kind of deathtrap.

January 1971 marked my first trip to California, but it was not my first trip underground. In the winter and spring of 1970, soon after the notorious townhouse explosion in Manhattan, I rendezvoused with some of the Weather fugitives who were wanted by the FBI. At first, we met at Maxwell’s Plum on First Avenue where singles and swingers gathered for food and drink and presumably for sex at a later time. Later, when the fugitives saw that I knew how not to be followed and could rendezvous with them safely, I was invited to their pad in Brooklyn Heights, where certain devices were manufactured and dispatched to symbolic targets. My wife Eleanor was one of the inhabitants of the pad, along with four or five guys, some of whom I knew from Columbia in ’68 and some of whom knew how to put wires together with a timer.

They seemed to be fearless. Not me, though I enjoyed the excitement of the underground and planned to write a book about it. I was involved in the “above ground” anti-war movement and belonged to a splinter group called “The Mad Dogs.” We marched on the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington D.C. in 1969 and also invaded Fort Dix in New Jersey where soldiers with fixed bayonets repelled us with tear gas.

I suppose I had credentials, not the least which was the fact that I had been arrested and beaten one long night by New York City cops at the nineteenth precinct. My photo was on the front page of the Village Voice. Veteran journalist, Jack Newfield, wrote a story about me that was titled “Moratorium Man Beaten.” Bill and Jeff and Bernadine couldn’t claim to be badder than me. That’s what I thought at the time.

I had a grand visit with Bill in Marin County. He drove me around in the rain and introduced me to a cast of characters who lived in cabins which they heated with wood burning stoves. We  went to Bolinas and joined an encampment on the ridge where young kids and their mothers romped. In those days it seemed so easy to elude capture by the FBI, though I had a couple of close calls. Before I boarded the flight from N.Y. to S.F. in 1971 someone, perhaps a cop, perhaps an employee of the airline, pulled me aside and asked to see my ID.

I had a driver’s license and a ticket in the name of Thomas Charles, though I called myself “Rocco,” and so did the undergrounders. I had borrowed the name from the Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti, “Rocco and His Brothers.” I don’t know why I was pulled aside before boarding the flight, nor why I was allowed to fly. Alain Delon, my favorite actor, played Rocco Parondi. Like him I had and still have brothers.

On another occasion, near Southampton on Long Island, I was in a car with six other Weather Undergrounders all of them fugitives with wanted posters. The police stopped us, asked to see our ID, which we showed and let us go. After that, we tended to think we were invincible, though we weren’t. Some of the fugitives were popped and jailed.

I enjoyed my sojourns underground on both coasts. I liked the summer house in Margaretville in Delaware County in Upstate New York which had a lovely pond. One afternoon, I captured a dozen frogs and planned to make frog legs with garlic and butter, but Jeff Jones said I had to return them to the pond, which I did. Once we dropped acid and went on a long hike, came down on the wrong side of the mountain, ended up by mistake in a family’s backyard and had to beat a hasty retreat.

Jeff Jones baked bread. Bill Ayres made souffles. Bernardine recounted stories, including one about how the pill had changed her life. In Brooklyn one summer day, she and I took the subway to Coney Island, went on the rides and ate popcorn. By then Bernardine had given up eating meat. When she visited me and my parents in Sonoma County, my mother served venison, which she rejected politely. Bernardine had known my father from the National Lawyers Guild. When he died, she wrote a tender poem about him which I treasured for years. That visit to my parents’ place was in 1977, not long before she and Bill, and Jeff and my ex-wife Eleanor turned themselves into the authorities. By then I had become a northern California outlaw.

I write this now at the age of 79, in part as a conscious act of nostalgia and also because Bill Ayres has gotten a bad rap in some circles and has been demonized. Bill was no better nor no worse than anyone else in the Weather Underground, though more than anyone else he wanted to write books and become famous. I worked with him on one of his manuscripts while he was still underground. I remember once he showed up late at night at my parents’ house, went down into the crawl space under the living room and retrieved a box with documents he had stored there.

For most of the 1970s, Bill wanted to be thought of as a bad boy. I did too. Bad boys had certain advantages over good boys. You knew what you were getting. Good boys tended to be less trustworthy.

In 1990, when I was conducting research for my biography of Abbie Hoffman, I stayed in  Chicago with Bill and Bernardine, their two sons, Zayd and Malik and Chesa Boudin, Kathy Boudin’s and Dave Gilbert’s boy. We mostly stayed home and talked about the Sixties, though I also remember that Bernardine made matzo ball soup for the boys, and took me to a Little League game where she screamed her head off for Chesa.

Bernardine could be tender and tough as the proverbial nail. Jeff could be goofy and inspired especially when it came to the environment, and Bill was a perfect bedmate. Legends die hard. The legends of the Weather Underground have spun out of control. Much of the history has been lost. All of us who were there then have memories, some of which coincide and some of which fly in opposite directions. Isn’t that the way it has always been with veterans of long ago causes?

Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.