Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
By David Gilbert
2011, PM Press, 384 pages, $22

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
By Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
2011, Melville House, 256 pages, $16.95

Diary of a Heartland Radical
By Harry Targ
2011, ChangeMaker Publications, 316 pages, $20

The main lesson of “the 60s,” now passed down through three generations, has been that once upon a time there was an amazing period of social, political, cultural, and sexual revolution; too bad most current activists were born too late to be involved. That proverbial decade of upheaval—which began around 1954 and ended late in the 1970s—has had more than its share of written documentation: memoirs, essay collections, and analysis filling whole sections of libraries. Studies of the 60s have become a cottage industry as common as the proverbial “white on rice,” and just about as fulfilling and ethnically diverse.

It is therefore especially striking that three new books offer special and significant insights on those turbulent times. Each of these titles, unlike many of its predecessors, suggests humble paths for the current struggles. The fact that each grows out of the context of white antiwar and human rights activities is the only similarity with their countless companions. All three share important ideas on combating racism, building alliances, and designing campaigns based on solidarity and creative linking of issues.

The common, vital, and unusual contributions of all three new books is their detailing of how anti-imperialism—in different forms and for different peoples—became a way of life for various white folks struggling to support self-determination for the national liberation struggles that were prominent at the end of the 20th century.

The core weakness of our interconnected movements—discussed at every occupation, social forum, and networking space where an honest confrontation with “what is to be done” is addressed—is clearly articulated in Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’ foreword to Hillbilly Nationalists. “What neither Marx nor the abolitionists nor later leftists and oppressed nationalities in the United States have fully grasped,” she asserts, “is the reality of the United States as a colonizing state in which, as historian William Appleman Williams phrased it, empire has always been a way of life.”

Authors Amy Sonnie and James Tracy use oral history and substantial research to recover a history of poor and working-class whites who built grassroots organizations in direct solidarity with the Poor People’s Campaign, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and other local efforts. Documented in this eminently readable book is the work of Chicago’s Young Patriots Organization and Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) Community Union, the October 4th Organization in Philadelphia (named after a 1779 expropriation of hoarded food and clothing, distributed to the community during the American War of Independence), and the Bronx group White Lightning. The late 1960s and early 1970s alliances built by these efforts were, as the authors describe, the first real “rainbow coalitions” for social change across both race and class lines.

Peace studies political scientist Harry Targ has been an institution at Purdue University in Indiana for more than four decades. His books and essays have long been essential reading for many movement insiders, and Diary of a Heartland Radical happily collects many short reflections on life as a rural-based revolutionary. Less a diary than an assembly of blog posts since 2008, Targ’s book covers some of the fundamental lessons of his years in the struggle, connecting them to the urgent tasks that still need our committed work.

Also focused on the contours of race, class, empire, and resistance, Targ is at his best when he combines his “scientific” thinking with a stridently anti-militarist approach and a good eye for socio-cultural commentary. His point is well taken, as he reviews the early days of the Obama administration, that the Department of Defense (as in the 1960s) has a “blank check,” with academic researchers (now more than ever) providing the data and theories that lead and/or justify disastrous foreign and military policy. Targ explores new techniques of “humanitarian” imperialism as seen in the truly global, increasingly privatized, and largely antiseptic (weapons delivery through button pushing) nature of 21st Century empire building.

Targ is also deeply concerned about the strategies and tactics of resistance, evidenced in a wonderful piece on the political economy of the bagel (that Jewish projectile of working-class origins), and most significantly in a longer essay on the anti-racist, class struggle history of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), another part of U.S. left history nearly lost. Commenting on his own involvement in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), Targ understands that our task is to build as broad a network of progressives as possible—and his book takes us some meaningful steps in the right direction.

Perhaps the most significant of these new books is David Gilbert’s evocative review of his days as a leader of the Columbia University anti-Viet Nam War movement, his days underground with the Weathermen, and his life just before beginning the 75-years-to-life sentence he is still serving in New York State prisons. Love and Struggle pulls no punches—either at the movement that led Gilbert away from his early commitment to nonviolence or at himself for the consequences of the choices he made. But more than in any individual, self-aggrandizing autobiographies, Gilbert’s reflections are presented not to spotlight or defend his actions but to carefully review the tumultuous times that were a feature of his youth. He dispassionately discusses events he felt passionately about in order to provide food for thought to today’s activists.

Gilbert’s story begins in a context familiar to many white folks: believing that the U.S. was a democracy “with liberty and justice for all.” “It sounded beautiful,” Gilbert recalls, “still does.” But he admits that some naiveté must have caused him to have “missed the wink” that lets us in on the dirty secret that the “all” refers only to white men with money. “When the myths were later exploded by the eruption of the civil rights movement,” Gilbert writes, “I became deeply upset.”

A common feature among Gilbert’s supporters and detractors alike is that he was (and is) one of the much-vaunted “best and the brightest” of his generation. It is of little surprise that he rose to the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society, was well-liked by his peers and faculty members, and was praised for his analytic achievement (author of some of SDS’s core pamphlets and positions) as well as for his generous and loving demeanor and organizing abilities. The surprise, therefore—beyond the fact that Gilbert, then and now, maintains a humility uncharacteristic for leaders of those heady times—is that he chose a life not of academic comfort but of on-the-ground street action and revolutionary sacrifice.

Throughout the book, Gilbert gives insight into these choices, but none so poignantly as when he reflects on the common late-1960s question of whether there could be a “revolution in our lifetime.” In the analysis of many in the student movement, Gilbert remembers, “the majority of white people in this country had been deflected from the class struggle…by the benefits, the privileges compared relative to Third World people, from the spoils of empire and white supremacy at home.” In reflecting on the idea that the empire’s strengths—global reach and plunder—could now become its weakness (with an overextended military overseas and a growing resistance movement at home), the notions of hope and possibility are not unlike our own moment. While Gilbert forthrightly admits to the mistakes that led him and others to costly circumstances, he does so without giving up hope that social change can and must come through mass political action.

It may seem strange for a magazine committed to revolutionary nonviolence to publish a glowing review of Love and Struggle or any book coming out of the Weather experiment. But Gilbert’s basic treatise—that it is “our job…to win large numbers of white people to solidarity with people of the world” in order to create alternatives to “bloody wars” and “less wasteful” lifestyles—is the call to our own critical times. He has stated his apologies and regrets, noting that “the colossal social violence of imperialism does not grant those of us who fight it a free pass to become callous ourselves.” Like any true adherent to revolutionary nonviolence (and Gilbert’s life-long friendship with Dave Dellinger gives testimony to this), Gilbert sees no contradiction between the need for continued militancy and intensity in fighting against imperialism and “the need to take the greatest care to respect life and to minimize violence as we struggle to end violence.” Any humanitarian observer of the United States at this historic juncture must see that David Gilbert—and all U.S. political prisoners—must immediately be freed if we are, as a people, to arrive at a moment of reconciliation and justice.

Noam Chomsky, in his recent acceptance of the 2011 Sydney Peace Foundation prize in Australia, reminded us that A.J. Muste “deplored the search for peace without justice.” Chomsky re-asserted Muste’s urging that “one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.” These three important contributions to our understanding of the past and our engagement with the future will help us heed this sage advice.