Confederate Flags and Black Power: How the Young Patriots Used White Ethnic Nationalism to Organize Poor Whites to Ally with the Black Panther Party.

This paper explores how the Young Patriots Organization connected claims of white ethnic nationalism to an anti-racist, anti-capitalist platform to organize poor whites to fight in solidarity with other oppressed people from around the world. The Patriots were a group of young white poor self-described “Hillbillies” from Appalachia that formed in the impoverished neighborhood of “Uptown” in Chicago in 1968. Between 1970-1972 they had chapters operating in a handful of cities across the United States. Organized “of, by, and for poor whites,” they wore Confederate flags stitched onto their jackets and rallied for the cause of “oppressed white people.” Yet they also wore “Black Power” pins and identified the Black Panther Party as the vanguard of the revolution against the “pig power structure” of American capitalism, racism, and imperialism. In doing so, the Patriots claimed a position of “white revolutionary” solidarity with oppressed people of color around the world. Remarkably, the Illinois Black Panthers recognized the Patriots—a group brandishing Confederate flags—as an ally and recruited them to join the Rainbow Coalition, alongside the radical Puerto Rican activist group, the Young Lords Organization. Together they organized rallies against police brutality, gentrification, and abusive landlords. They also ran free breakfast programs and health clinics.

The Patriots clearly complicate how we think about the role of “whiteness" in interracial class struggle. Through a discourse analysis of their writing and speeches as well as interviews with former members, this project examines how the Patriots’ “white revolutionary” discourse challenges the way activists and scholars alike have thought about “whiteness” and the anti-racist potential of poor whites. It also brings the Patriots’ ideology, organizing tactics, and identification as “white revolutionaries” into dialogue with other cases of interracial class struggles, which more often than not, have disintegrated along racial lines.