The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

Anne and Sofia and I were in Kansas City last weekend, and had breakfast with the good folks who maintain the ever-growing STO Web Archive.  We talked about a bunch of stuff, from arcane Sojourner Truth Organization trivia to present-day revolutionary politics.  One item that united those otherwise disparate threads of conversation was a pamphlet that STO produced in the mid-seventies entitled “Since When Has Working Been a Crime?  The Deportation of Mexicans Without Papers”.  This long-lost pamphlet is a popular treatment of a subject that is as even more in the news now than it was thirty years ago.

The pamphlet compares the treatment of undocumented immigrants, who then as now were largely but not exclusively from Mexico, to the experience of escaped slaves in the northern United States after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851.  But this is no academic treatment of historical parallels.  The pamphlet begins with a plausible scenario:  two non-immigrant factory workers discuss a recent raid of their workplace by the INS, and wonder about the fates of two latino co-workers who were taken away for deportation.  Later, one of the workers discusses the issue with his wife, who suggests that the raid, arrests, and deportations are unjust.

As this introduction makes clear, the target audience for the pamphlet was factory workers, both black and white, who were unsure of how to feel about their latino co-workers and the problems they faced.  Although the pamphlet was produced by STO, it was published by the South Chicago Workers Rights Center, which was one of the lawyers’ projects I mentioned previously.  South Chicago was and remains one of the few areas of the city of Chicago where sizeable populations of working class blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans all reside in close quarters, often working in the same factories (although the steel mill that employed tens of thousands of people has long-since shut its doors, leaving behind nothing but a mile long stretch of concrete, garbage and weeds along Lake Michigan).  At one point, plans were discussed within STO to go door-to-door distributing the pamphlet and talking with residents about the issues of immigration and workers’ rights.  This never happened, but the pamphlet remains as timely as ever, in light of the two months of demonstrations that began here in Chicago on March 10.

In comparing the experience of undocumented immigrants to that of fugitive slaves, the pamphlet makes a couple of points.  First, the function of white supremacy (whether in the form of slavery or of anti-immigrant repression) is larger than simply keeping black and brown people down:  it also, and more fundamentally, results in a division of the working class that keeps the class as a whole from achieving its own liberation.  In the black context, slavery – and the white supremacist world-view that it reflected – kept white workers from seeing their own common interests with black workers, even when they worked side by side in the same industries.  A disparity of wages and working conditions was part of the problem, but there were moral and ideological aspects as well.

In the context of immigration, whether in the 1970’s or the twenty-first century, the separation between documented and undocumented labor also produces a disparity in wages and working conditions, although only the very worst sorts of job situations for undocumented workers bear any identifiable resemblance to chattel slavery.  (Octavia Butler’s incredible novel, Parable of the Sower offers an intriguing take a possible near-future of this similarity.)  More centrally, the ideology that attempts to pit exploited workers native to this country (whether white or black) against exploited workers born elsewhere bears a striking resemblance to the ideology of pro-slavery advocates of white labor in the antebellum period.

At the same time, the politics of challenging white supremacy in the context of immigration is a complicated affair.  The unemployment rate among blacks in the US is far higher than that for whites, and the argument is often made that undocumented immigrants are “stealing” jobs from black people.  Further, many people, black and white, who support increased repression in order to reduce immigration by undocumented workers (that is, those who say they are “opposed to illegal immigration”) argue that wages are depressed by the presence of undocumented workers who will work for amounts below the minimum wage. 

Of course, it is important for revolutionaries to point out that the common enemies of both unemployed blacks and underpaid immigrants are capital, white supremacy and the state, but it is also important to avoid the easy illusion of unite-and-fight strategies.  There are real contradictions here, and the rhetoric of protest slogans will not overcome them.

Which brings us back to the second point made by the STO pamphlet (as rhetorical as it might be, in some ways):  organized, collective direct action by oppressed and working people can produce both immediate results and a shift in the overall consciousness of the working class.  The pamphlet advocates for worker disruption of factory raids by the INS, which could help undocumented workers escape capture, build solidarity within the workforce, and increase the workers’ awareness of their own collective power.  According to one former member of STO, this actually took place in the factory where he worked.  An inspiring connection is made between these sorts of actions and the efforts of organized mobs in northern states that freed kidnapped fugitive slaves before they could be shipped south to their prior owners.

Such actions will not by themselves change the nature of immigration (documented or undocumented) or of white supremacy.  These phenomena are shaped far more by macro-level factors related to the increasingly global functioning of the capitalist economy.  Migration from Mexico, for instance, has sky-rocketed since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, while white supremacy may have entered a period of fundamental transition where its usefulness to some sectors of global capital is increasingly in doubt. 

But these shifts in objective conditions will themselves create new opportunities for revolutionary strategy, and the grassroots actions of militant workers can contribute to this sort of new opening.  An instructive example of the possibilities here can be seen in the period of “early globalization” described by Benedict Anderson in his new book, Under Three Flags:  Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination, which details the various interaction between Cuban and Filipino nationalists and Spanish anarchist revolutionaries at the end of the 19^th century.  Similar interactions have been highlighted in the period since the Seattle protests of 1999, although the most common references have been to largely reformist efforts in various parts of the world.  (For a more radical take, check out We Are Everywhere, although even this book shies away from a focus on actual revolutionary efforts.) 

As we move forward, there is no telling where the immigrants’ movement is headed.  It has already succeeded in making May Day meaningful in the US, a task that seemed impossible just months ago.  Real dangers are present the tendency toward legalism, reform and entry into white supremacist collaboration that has marked all previous versions of immigrant assimilation.  But the movement is autonomous in character, and it is necessarily built upon an openness to illegality, and these factors preserve some hope that better outcomes can result.

In Kansas City, the STO web archive crew is arranging a translation of “Since When Has Working Been a Crime?” into Spanish, for distribution within the growing immigrant community there.  This may or may not have any effect on the direction of the movement there or elsewhere, but it represents one more example of the continuing relevance of STO in the new millennium.