The Past and Future of Multiracial Alliances for Revolutionary Change

The purpose of the Principled Unity Book Tour is to bring individuals, groups, and street organizations together to discuss the commonalities and to provide future actions in the legacy of the First Rainbow Coalition through the Second Rainbow Coalition. The West Coast Tour brought many groups together that are now working in solidarity. The East Coast Tour will do the same.

Kwame Shakur, author of My Search for Answers, Truth and Meaning will discuss how he became a revolutionary while in prison and a member of the Second Rainbow Coalition. Hy Thurman, cofounder of the first Rainbow Coalition and the Young Patriots Organization as well as the author of Revolutionary Hillbilly will be discussing his lifelong organizing as a Southern White Appalachian in the civil rights movement.

Hy Thurman’s Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes from the Struggle at the Edge of the Rainbow is a history book, an organizer’s notebook, and an autobiography. These are stories of unity against poverty and racism. Hy Thurman is a hillbilly and a revolutionary organizer. As a co-founder of the Young Patriots Organization, Thurman helped organize poor white communities in alliance with the Illinois Black Panther Party and Young Lords Organization during the Sixties. He is an educator who got his schooling in the fields of Tennessee, his PhD on the streets of Chicago, and his hunger for justice in the back of a patrol car. Revolutionary Hillbilly is unique because it is a first person chronicle of the unfolding of landmark events of the 1960’s. Hy Thurman’s book provides an insiders view of how coalitions can form and the group dynamics that can keep these movements vibrant. It is an invaluable resource for historians and activists alike.

How does the criminal mentality come about and when does a person develop one? How then does that mentality become transformed into a revolutionary one? Kwame Shakur’s autobiography, My Search for Answers, Truth and Meaning, answers these important questions and much more. From the very first page, where he robs a bank at the tender age of 19 years old, to his transformation into a revolutionary through self-education, he gives of himself while serving his time in prison. It was by no accident that upon leaving prison, he became the Minister of Culture for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. It is there, where he shares what he discovered long ago in a supermax prison cell in order to prevent our young people from enduring what he had to go through to become what he is today.

About the Speakers:

Hy Thurman is a cofounder of The Young Patriots Organization, a group of working-class white people who worked arm and arm with the Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords in the 1960s. He is the author of Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes from the Struggle at the Edge of the Rainbow. Thurman organizes with the Northern Alabama School for Organizers.

Kwame Shakur is the Minister of Culture for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. His book, My Search for Answers, Truth and Meaning, traces his life from incarceration to revolutionary activism.