In July 1969 a dozen self-identified hillbillies showed up to a Black Panther Party conference in Oakland, California with Confederate flag patches sewn to their ragged jean jackets. Just above the flag, three hand-painted letters identified their radical outfit: YPO, the Young Patriots Organization. To outsiders, the Panthers'' reputation for self defense combined with the very real violence committed under the Southern Cross might seem to guarantee a nasty brawl. Instead, prominent Panthers welcomed the members of the Young Patriots Organization as revolutionary brothers and sisters--with a fist in the air and "All Power to the People!" The Young Patriots had come to Oakland for the United Front Against Fascism Conference. They arrived from Uptown, a Chicago neighborhood home to thousands of economically displaced Appalachians, mostly white, who had turned the area into a bastion of southern culture. Their families had moved North in search of work after mining and agriculture jobs started to disappear. But only a few found anything steady. The rest scraped by on day labor, hustling and domestic work.

By one estimate more than 40 percent of the neighborhood was on some form of welfare. The Sunday Tribune deemed them a "plague of locusts" descending on the city. Yet, Uptown''s residents also represent some of the lesser-known protagonists in the Sixties New Left. As one Patriots member put it, "We are the living reminder that when they threw out their white trash, they didn''t burn it." That trash was picking itself up. The Young Patriots were part of a new alliance with the Chicago Black Panther Party and a Puerto Rican street-gang-turned-political-organization called the Young Lords. Under the banner of the "Rainbow Coalition" they formed a vanguard of the dispossessed. While ultimately short-lived, the Rainbow Coalition created by these groups had deeper roots and a longer legacy than even their FBI tailgaters might have imagined.

And yes, J. Edgar Hoover''s FBI had tabs on them from the beginning. This was half the reason they traveled together to Oakland in July 1969. Called by the Black Panther Party, then at the peak of its fame, the United Front Against Fascism Conference addressed two urgent concerns: community control of police who were terrorizing poor neighborhoods, and mutual protection against the federal government''s escalating attacks on the Left. The three-day conference drew more than two thousand self-styled revolutionaries from across the nation. Black Panthers in their black berets and sleek leather jackets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Young Patriots wearing the flag of the Confederacy--a symbol they soon discarded. Joining them in the cavernous Oakland Auditorium were American Indian activists on the verge of their famous Alcatraz Island takeover, members of the Young Lords flying the bandera of Puerto Rico, Chicano farm workers wearing the Aztec eagle, sympathetic lawyers juggling a full docket of conspiracy trials, more than a few police informants, and members of Students for Democratic Society (SDS), who were in the middle of a fierce organizational split that led to at least one fistfight before Panther leaders told the factions to "freeze on that shit" for the rest of the weekend. Outside the auditorium, Panther members and sympathizers watched their kids play while serious-looking radicals floated in and out listening to speeches by Panther defense lawyer Charles Garry, Penny Nakatsu speaking out about Japanese American internment during World War II, and an especially moving message from jailed Panther Ericka Huggins read by Elaine Brown.

At the mic, the Young Patriots'' chairman, William "Preacherman" Fesperman, even let some heartfelt gratitude show in between jibes about the "pig power structure" when he explained how the Patriots came to be at the conference: "Our struggle is beyond comprehension to me sometimes and I felt for a long time [that poor whites] was forgotten . that nobody saw us. Until we met the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and they met us and we said let''s put that theory into practice." Summing up why they had all come to Oakland, he added, "We want to stand by our brothers, our brothers, dig?" For the leftists gathered that July, a life or death battle was unfolding. While the depths of the FBI''s covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) wouldn''t come to light for years, dozens of movement activists had been killed, and others sat in jail facing serious legal charges. Among them: Panthers cofounder Huey Newton, several leaders of the Sixties student movement, and renowned icons of the Yippie youth counterculture Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Though the government reserved its most vicious attacks for Black and Brown radicals, by 1969 nearly every sector of the U.S.

Left was caught in its crosshairs. The conference in Oakland reminded movement leaders that unity was going to be their most effective defense strategy. As Chicago Panther Fred Hampton put it, "You can jail the revolutionary, but you can''t jail the revolution . You can murder a liberator, but you can''t murder liberation." Hampton, it turned out, had written his own elegy. The Rainbow Coalition, spearheaded by Hampton and fellow Panther Bob Lee, lit a spark in the movement but ignited a fuse with deadly outcomes. Less than six months later Chicago police murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. The nighttime raid was orchestrated with the help a local informant and the direct involvement of the FBI.

Hampton had been drugged so he wouldn''t wake up to fight. *** With the 10th anniversary edition of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power, we return to this history during a parallel moment of danger and possibility. Since 2011, we''ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, and of white nationalist movements in the United States. We''ve seen, once again, a fiercely reactionary conservatism take center stage in U.S. politics alongside a dangerous mainstreaming of far-right ideas. The brutalities of racial capitalism are on full display as poor communities worldwide have been hit first and worst by crisis after crisis: the tightening grip of climate change and a global pandemic that has killed millions and left millions more sick, homeless, or unemployed. At the same time, we see the legacy of the Panthers in the resurgence of mutual aid networks, community self-defense, and calls to defund the police.

Over the last decade, we''ve welcomed the growth of extraordinary, multi-issue movements led by Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities sparking some of the largest mass mobilizations in history. We''ve begun to reckon with endemic racial and gendered violence, and welcomed a new wave of intersectional feminism and queer/trans liberation politics, reflected in the global Movement for Black Lives and beyond. We see a direct lineage of the 1968 Poor People''s Campaign today when thousands march calling for a moral revival that ends interlocking injustices. We see voter protection fights and push-back against today''s supercharged surveillance state. We see the inspiration of the Young Patriots in today''s Rednecks for Black Lives and the spirit of the Rainbow Coalition in current Black-Brown solidarity. As in 1968, we are at a turning point. This generation''s new Left has the opportunity and imperative to build a united front against fascism for the 21st century. *** Then, as now, their stories are largely invisible.

In the United States we have seen so few mirrors of this reality that it''s hard to imagine a broad Left movement that includes white poor and working-class people as radical change agents. Instead, poor and working-class whites occupy a unique place in the North American psyche. Whether presented as rednecks or trailer trash, or as Steinbeck''s noble proles, depictions of struggling whites depend largely on the prevailing social need for either a hero or scapegoat. Beginning in the early Sixties, the image of poor whites emerged as an especially pliant marionette for the nation''s postwar blues. A decades-long tidal wave of 20th-century internal migrations crested in the early Sixties with millions moving from rural towns to urban centers . and so did the anxieties of businessmen who bankrolled popular culture and news. West Side Story and The Young Savages dramatized the mounting ethnic conflict in changing US cities. Turf war dramas neatly illustrated senseless urban tragedies offering only two remedies for the mean streets--federal urban renewal programs to displace the poor, and strong-handed law enforcement to keep the rabble in line.

Those who could afford it escaped to the suburbs or at least the outer edges of the city. Enter TV''s blue-collar everyman, Archie Bunker, who became the nation''s number one racist-next-door. His armchair epithets mimicked white anxiety in the post-civil rights era, but reassured viewers of a harmless shift from direct racial violence to private bigotry and ballot box demagoguery. Hillbillies and rednecks, of course, made for the most sensational characters in the national identity crisis. A slapstick comedy about hillbillies who strike it rich and move to Beverly Hills nicely obscured the massive industrial collapse and government neglect that actually forced millions of southerners to big cities. Lest anyone get comfortable with lovable illiterates, though, the media issued sinister warnings about their rough country cousins, still poor and unwilling to assimilate. Chicago''s Sunday Tribune advised readers that opium dens made safer hangouts than neighborhoods "taken over by clans of fightin,'' feudin'' Southern hillbillies a.