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July 23, 2007

American Revolution 2

All That's History

By Andrew

Back in ’01, still riding high on the energy of Seattle’s anti-WTO protests and the activist cultures that fueled it, thirty people were arrested after occupying a vacant concrete pit in downtown Bellingham, Washington demanding it become a public park. It’ll never be remembered as well, or as fondly, as the “Battle in Seattle,” but it too generated a moniker, "The Pit Protest." Like the WTO protests before, the press it garnered grabbed my adolescent attention so strongly that it influenced my high school self to make Bellingham my college town of choice, thinking it a hotbed of radicalism.

To my dismay, if Bellingham had ever been a hotbed, it had burned out by the time I arrived two years later. I eventually met folks who had been involved in the "Pit Protest" and could explain everything to me, but it was still rather distant, a story to be recounted at a party maybe, but not a conscious piece of history – meaning it had yet to be documented, written about, thought about, considered or learned from.

I'm sorry to nothing of note has yet been written of these events, but incredibly, after five years of Bellingham joy and misery, I discovered they had been filmed. A friend and Pit Protest veteran admitted he had a video of the whole thing – the occupation, the arrests, everything – edited into a feature. But beyond its Bellingham premiere back in the day, the video had been seen by very few people – because, my friend explained, the video reflected many of the sexist dynamics of the action itself. Excited as I was when I got to watch the video, I could see what he meant. The video was full of loud white men hogging microphones, extolling their own righteous selves, and maybe even saying a right thing or two in the process, but turning off just about everyone else.

I recount this whole affair because in American Revolution 2 and The Murder of Fred Hampton, two films by the Film Group about Chicago revolutionaries getting their shit together in the late 1960s/early 1970s (and getting blown away by cops for it), men hog the mics too. A lot. So much so that self-described WTO-supporter Josh Feit of Seattle’s The Stranger weekly, in a review of The Murder of Fred Hampton, can’t see past it; his whole review neglects to recount the film’s content – never explaining who Hampton is or how or why he was murdered – arguing instead how the “late '60s were a simple-minded machismo parade of silly charlatans.”

I imagine Feit would think the very same of American Revolution 2, the Film Group's precursor to The Murder of Fred Hampton (for another take on that film, see my previous review). I think he might even confuse the two films; he describes a young woman Panther with a rifle that I could’ve sworn is in A.R. 2, not The Murder..., but I could be wrong. While The Murder of... is strictly a portrait of the Black Panthers, A.R. 2 is more of a political landscape painting. It kicks off in the streets all hurried and hazy during ‘68’s DNC. It then records reflections on the events from Black men shooting the shit and shooting pool at a Chi-town pool hall, before finally narrowing in on the organizing efforts of a group called the Young Patriots. Through it all, there are lots of men and lots of yelling. But as the Film Group filmed it, it’s history, and as such it deserves far more context than Josh Feit feigns to provide, his review's few introductory remarks about Black Power aside.

From our perspective today, old photos of the Young Patriots don’t make much sense: young Appalachian white guys with bushy chops, arms crossed or fists raised, and berets emblazoned with Confederate flags – standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Chicago Black Panthers. A part of the original Rainbow Coalition (Jesse Jackson later cribbed the moniker for his own campaigns) the Young Patriots allied with other Chi-town organizations like the Panthers, Brown Berets, and the Young Lords on the basis of opposition to poverty and police brutality. Usually the group is relegated to a footnote in ‘60s history books, but in A.R. 2 they’re center-stage, bringing some striking contradictions and breakthroughs into bold relief.

For one, the Young Patriots are constantly posturing, not for the camera per se , but for their constituencies. Machismo is a big part of it, to be sure, but it is also something more, an embodiment of America’s most ruthless stereotype about poor whites – strong accents, boots and blue jeans, nicknames like Jewnbug, even the very name of their organization. The Patriots turn the image on its head, utilizing its authenticity to push a socialist politics and form alliances with groups like the Panthers that other whites from their community – both middle class and working class – would otherwise be unwilling to engage in.

What’s more, A.R. 2 reveals that the best Patriot organizer wasn’t even a Young Patriot, but a young Black Panther named Bobby Lee. Lee’s fellow Panther Fred Hampton usually gets sole credit for leading Chicago’s Rainbow Coalition, perhaps out of respect and honor for Hampton’s eventual murder at the hands of the Chicago PD and the FBI. But A.R. 2 includes numerous scenes of Lee patiently getting the Patriots together with recruitment pep-talks, coaching their campaigns, activating them with anger and cautioning them when proposed tactics grow too brash .

Lee’s presence also brings attention to the unspoken matter of race relations that hovers over any all-white group like the Patriots. Lots of lip-service in the film is given to the ability to overcome racism by organizing whites and blacks together interpersonally on the basis of their shared poverty. Watching the film, we’re prone to believe it’s possible, since it's happening right there in front of us, right on the screen. But there are also brief hints of history that still sting too much for even the most earnest political coalitions. One Young Patriot, at a community hearing on police brutality, says he understands what oppression is. “We know how to beat people down,” he says, pointing to the confederate flag on his beret. The Film Group interjects a sharp cut to Bobby Rush, as if the presence of a single Black man might make everything okay. But it doesn’t; a cop at the same hearing congratulates the group, “I’m glad you call yourselves patriots,” and the potential problems of the Patriot project come rushing to the fore like blush to a face. (Lee would go on to become an organizer with Sal Alinskey, and a Texas congressman).

Of course, the Film Group probably hadn’t the time for such self-criticism. The film’s making was very immediate, and was used as a tool for organizers in the early 1970s when it was first released. As Bobby Lee explains in a later interview,

I really feel that in A.R. 2 each and every human being was a star— that showed what was so special about Chicago. Mayor Daley tried to shut down that movie. He used his influence with the Screen Projectionists Union to make sure that no theater would screen it. It took Hugh Hefner’s money to finally show it. Then Roger Ebert gave it four stars. One of the Patriot’s allies, John Howard, took the movie down to Virginia, where his family was from. The racists there killed him for that.

In A.R. 2, everything is filmed plain, direct – what’s called “cinema verite” – with little to explain what’s going on and why. Viewed thirty years later, this immediacy protects it from a great deal of the sappy/sad nostalgia that contaminates most documentaries about the Sixties, but it also hampers the film’s accessibility. The most popular cinema verite films always seem to concern a subject of immense interest and curiosity to the general public; perhaps this explains the success of the Maysles brothers, whose works like Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter are obsessed with celebrity behavior behind the PR facade. One’s interest in a film like American Revolution 2 or The Murder of Fred Hampton probably hinges on how much one knows about Sixties politics.

The immediacy of the moment gone, Josh Feit's Stranger review sees nothing but men hogging mics: none of the faces are recognizable, the politics are loud but seemingly simple-minded, they don't speak to him so why should he care? As I watch my friend’s video of the Pit Protest, "Community Grows from the Pit," another question crosses my mind: where are these people now, and what does this mean for me?

I arrived in Bellingham a little less than two years after the Pit, only to find that the momentum behind the protest had imploded. Of the few Pit participants I could find (and befriend), I learned the protest had been nothing but hard lessons learned: the strategy had been a mess, sexual assaults had riven the collective responsible for the protest, and all that lingered of the event were fond memories of being young, brash, righteous – and right. A Starbucks now graces the corner formerly known as the Pit, and Bellingham is no better for it.

As these stories were told to me, I pledged to assimilate the lessons they provided, about strategy and tactics, about anti-sexist vigilance. I urged my new friends to write down their experiences because they taught me so much. As long as their stories remained as personal anecdotes, an oral tradition for parties and social gatherings, the events risk getting lost to the ages.

In American Revolution 2, The Murder of Fred Hampton, and even my friend's video, glaring faults may go by uncommented on, but at least the events have been recorded, automatically giving them a second life, with new meanings with every viewing. What film provides is a sort of memory, and if the act of history is the art of not forgetting, these films offer priceless opportunities to learn from the past while moving beyond it, lest we risk letting others repeating the same mistakes – of the Patriots, of the Pit, or whatever else. Stuffy old Marx is often quoted as saying history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, but that's assuming history has to repeat itself at all.

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