The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

It’s been far too long since I put anything up here.  I’ve been busy, but that’s no excuse.  Here’s a little teaser anecdote to tide you over until I can post something more substantial.

Last spring, my wife and I were engaged in a little battle regarding our daughter Sofia’s musical tastes.  Anne was training her to answer the question "What is your favorite music?" by saying "House!" (which is actually Anne’s favorite music).  I retaliated by trying to get Sofia to say "Punk rock!" (which is only sometimes my favorite music).  Part of my plan involved repeated exposure to classic punk music — the Clash in particular.  And Sofia really liked the Clash, especially their cover of the reggae classic "Pressure Drop."  For months, every time we got in the car, she would demand to hear "the you you."  As you may recall, the opening line of "Pressure Drop" is "It is you, you, you, oooooh yeah."  I can’t say that I won Sofia’s heart to punk rock, nor did I really want to (I have a soft spot for house music myself), but it was really cute the way she would ask again and again for that song.

So, you may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with STO.  Well, in 1982 the Clash toured the US on behalf of the not-so-great album Combat Rock, and in every city they tried to make contact with local radicals.  In Chicago, for whatever reason, the local contacts set them up with some STO members, who acted as tour guides for the day, taking them to the cemetery where the Haymarket martyrs are buried.  They also visited a small alternative high school in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, which was closely tied to the Puerto Rican independence movement.  The irony (according to the STO tour guides, and confirmed by a former teacher at the high school) was that none of the students had ever heard of the Clash, and seemed totally uninterested in their presence.  Mostly, it seemed, they were remembered afterwards as the weird looking guys from Britain.

Anyway, just another small tidbit of STO’s cultural history, paired with a tangentially related anecdote about how cute my daughter can be.  I promise that the next post to the blog will be more substantial.  Promise.