The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

Lest anyone get the impression that all members of STO took jobs in factories, I should offer a couple of clarifications.  First, as I have previously remarked, at several points in STO’s history there were major splits that reduced the membership of the organization.  In at least three of these splits, the people who left were predominantly involved in factory work.  In addition (and partly as a result of the first two splits), the organization de-emphasized “production work” in the mid-70’s.   Thus, by the late 1970’s, only a minority of the membership was employed in factories, which helped limit the effectiveness of STO’s decision to renew its emphasis on industrial concentration at the turn of the 1980’s.

The other clarification involves an interesting quirk of the non-factory-employed members of STO, beginning in the early 1970’s:  several of them were lawyers.  In my own research, I have so far interviewed three former members of the group who are also attorneys, and I have heard mention of several others.  What drew so many lawyers to this particular left grouping, no one (including the lawyers themselves) seems to know, but the effect is worth investigating on several levels.

Perhaps most importantly, the legal training and experience allowed STO to provide significant assistance to working class militants in a variety of factories, including those in which STO had no presence.  Through a series of legal clinics (sometimes called “Workers’ Rights Centers”), the attorneys in STO were able to provide resources, expertise, and support to strikers, to people who had been fired for their in-plant activities, and to entire factories-worth of workers who had been laid off when their plants were closed.  While much of this work was necessarily confined to legalistic parameters – helping workers obtain disability or challenge a firing – it definitely offered opportunities to pursue STO’s goal of expanding the consciousness and power of the working class.

A frequently cited example of this work involved a factory owned by Gateway Industries, which manufactured the odd combination of dish soap and seat belts.  The workers were almost entirely black and latino, and perhaps half the workforce was women.  No one from STO worked at Gateway, and in fact no one in the group knew much about the company until after it had closed its Chicago plant, at which point many of the Mexican women who had been laid off came to the Workers’ Rights Center in South Chicago because they had trouble obtaining unemployment benefits.  The story of the Gateway struggle will have to wait for another day to be told, but the relevant point here is that the active participation of lawyers within STO led the group to involvement in a campaign that it would not otherwise have been part of.

Similarly, explanations of employees’ legal rights were frequently a part of STO’s published output, both in pamphlets and in the form of articles for the Insurgent Worker and the various agitational shop-sheets published by members of the group at various factories.  In some cases, striking workers who had no use for the traditional left were willing to work with STO precisely because it offered legal and other resources, rather than simply pushing a line or attempting to recruit workers.  Further, much of STO’s political intervention in the white left took place through groups like the National Lawyers Guild (NLG).  Bob Avakian’s denunciation of the white skin privilege line that I mentioned in a previous post, for instance, took place at an NLG conference.  As another example, the pamphlet "Fascism in the US?" by Don Hamerquist was framed as a response to an article published in the NLG newsletter.

Apart from the benefits for organizing, the presence of so many lawyers in STO may have had other effects that are harder to identify.  Was there a connection between the attorneys and the emphasis on theoretical dispute that led the group to be called “the greatest debating society on the left”?  At the same time, STO was never particularly bureaucratic; was their comparatively laid-back approach to organization related in any way to the familiarity many members had with the bureaucratic aspects of the bourgeois legal system?

Finally, I know that during the 1970’s a whole generation of radical lawyers emerged, swelling the ranks of groups like the NLG.  Presumably, other revolutionary groups of that decade also had attorneys for members.  It would be interesting to know whether STO had an unusually high concentration of lawyers, or whether their representation was matched in groups like the October League, the RU/RCP, or the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.