Rising Up Angry was a radical youth movement organized as a militant community organization based in working class communities in Chicago, parallelling but not part of the Weatherman Underground and Revolutionary Youth Movement currents in New Left politics at the end of the 1960s. [1]
They published a monthly newspaper also called Rising Up Angry from 1969 to 1975, describing itself as "a revolutionary organization committed to building a new man, a new woman, and a new world," with the masthead motto "To love we must fight." RUA took their name from the lyrics to the song "Shape of Things to Come" in the 1968 movie Wild in the Streets . The membership of the organization was of local blue-collar youth recruited out of the neighborhood subcultures called by the paper "greasers," a term used at the time to describe disaffected white youths stuck nostalgically in the subculture of the 1950s (see Grease ). [2] Members were mostly working class youths with union ties and socialist leanings who were disappointed with the efforts of perceived elitist and working class-disconnected groups like the Students for a Democratic Society. [3]
Rising Up Angry's newspaper was distributed throughout the Chicago area by volunteers focusing their distribution on high schools, union halls, university campuses; mostly a youth market. It encouraged radical dissent and featured profiles of figures such as Malcolm X and Fred Hampton, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, reviews of the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and The Wild Bunch, mixing political and cultural commentary with politically oriented cartoons by Aaron Fagen and others, montages, discussions of motorcycles and custom cars, and histories of labor activism and guerrilla warfare. [4]
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The Weather Underground was a far-left militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership. Officially known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government, which WUO believed to be imperialist.
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures in the Western world include the Levellers (1645–1650), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), and the globalized counterculture of the 1960s (1965–1973).
The British counter-culture or underground scene developed during the mid 1960s, and was linked to the hippie subculture of the United States. Its primary focus was around Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill in London. It generated its own magazines and newspapers, bands, clubs and alternative lifestyle, associated with cannabis and LSD use and a strong socio-political revolutionary agenda to create an alternative society.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a retired law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in the United States. As a leader of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for several years. She remained a fugitive, even though she was removed from the list. After coming out of hiding in 1980, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping.
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of many subcultures.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
White power skinheads, also known as racist skinheads and neo-Nazi skinheads, and pejoratively known as Boneheads, are members of a neo-Nazi, white supremacist and antisemitic offshoot of the skinhead subculture. Many of them are affiliated with white nationalist organizations and some of them are members of prison gangs. The movement emerged in the United Kingdom between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, before spreading across Europe, Russia and North America in the 1980–1990s.
The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.
The League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist–Leninist) was a Marxist–Leninist[1] movement in the United States formed in 1978 by merging communist organizations. It was dissolved by the organization's leadership in 1990.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) formed in 1969 in Detroit, Michigan. The League united a number of different Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) that were growing rapidly across the auto industry and other industrial sectors—industries in which Black workers were concentrated in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The formation of the League was an attempt to form a more cohesive political organ guided by the principles of Black liberation and Marxism-Leninism in order to gain political power and articulate the specific concerns of Black workers through political action. While the League was only active for a short period of time, it was a significant development in a time of increasing militancy and political action by Black workers and in the context of both the Black liberation and Marxist-Leninist movements in the United States.
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed in the Western world starting in the mid-1960s, and continued until the early 1970s. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights movement in the United States had made significant progress, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and with the intensification of the Vietnam War that same year, it became revolutionary to some. As the movement progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, rights of non-white people, end of racial segregation, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s.
John Gregory Jacobs was an American student and anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a leader in both Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman group, and an advocate of the use of violent force to overthrow the government of the United States. A fugitive since 1970, he died of melanoma in 1997.
Howard Norton Machtinger is a former director of Carolina Teaching Fellows, a student teacher scholarship program at the University of North Carolina. He is an education and civil rights activist, a teacher, a forum leader, and a political commentator. Machtinger is a former member of Students For a Democratic Society and Weatherman.
Jailbreaks were demonstrations staged by members of Weatherman during the summer and fall of 1969 in an effort to recruit high school and community college students to join their movement against the United States government and its policies.
In the United States, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) is the section of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Most of the national leadership of SDS joined the RYM in order to oppose PLP's party line and what they alleged to be its attempted takeover of the SDS leadership structure, particularly at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy". From its launch in 1960 it grew rapidly in the course of the tumultuous decade with over 300 campus chapters and 30,000 supporters recorded nationwide by its last national convention in 1969. The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power.
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was a US-based revolutionary black nationalist group in operation from 1962 to 1969. They were the first group to apply the philosophy of Maoism to conditions of black people in the United States and informed the revolutionary politics of the Black Power movement. RAM was the only secular political organization which Malcolm X joined prior to 1964. The group's political formation deeply influenced the politics of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many other future influential Black Panther Party founders and members.
Peter Kuttner is a Chicago filmmaker, activist, and cameraman. He is known for his early socially-conscious documentary films that touch on topics such as opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, gentrification of Chicago, racism, and social class. He produced many of these with the film collective Kartemquin Films, of which he was an original member. He is best known for his work on the film The End of the Nightstick (1993) with Cindi Moran and Eric Scholl, which documented police brutality in Chicago and torture allegations against commander Jon Burge. Kuttner has worked extensively in activism and community service, and was a founding member of activist group Rising Up Angry. Kuttner has worked with many collaborators including Kartemquin Collective founder Gordon Quinn, and filmmakers Haskell Wexler and Robert Kramer. He is also known for camera work on a number of major motion pictures including Man of Steel and Source Code.