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When we hear the phrase “Rainbow Coalition” within the context of the American political landscape, one immediately thinks of the doomed 1984 Presidential campaign of Reverend Jesse Jackson. The program that they presented was offered as an alternative to the neoliberal austerity of Reaganomics, which disproportionately affected a ‘rainbow’ of people, such as people of color, women, union members, queer people, the unemployed, and many other groups felt largely marginalized and alienated by corporate-controlled politics.

However, Rev. Jackson was not the first to introduce such a coalition by that name, and its origins come not from within either the Democratic or Republican Party, but the Black Panther Party. In Chicago on April 4, 1969, the city’s chapter of the BPP under the leadership of Fred Hampton created the original Rainbow Coalition. Along with the Panthers, other groups such as the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican Marxist-Leninist group, led a struggle against capitalism and police brutality across Chicago neighborhoods

Soon after its founding, several other groups such as the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and the Red Guard Party all brought in Chicano, Indigenous, and Chinese communities respectively into a joined struggle against poverty and state-sanctioned violence. However, there was one group that every petty bourgeois radical liberal would have shouted down at in Chairman Hampton’s mix. That was the Young Patriots Organization (YPO), a group of impoverished white socialists that came from the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. In the 1960s, Uptown became a refuge for economic refugees from Appalachia, looking for better job prospects.

But the question still stands: Why did the Black Panther Party build a coalition with a White Southern group? Anyone with only an adolescent frame of analysis would say it was a mistake. Yet, in looking deeper within the history of multiracial struggles across working-class Americans, one finds materially-shared causes. As economic refugees, the YPO organized to protect poor white Appalachians in Uptown against police brutality. In the late 1960s, impoverished white Southern migrants were frequently harassed and brutalized by the Chicago Police Department. Abuse from landlords was also common, and through these struggles, Comrades Bob Lee and Fred Hampton saw a revolutionary inroad to be made

Here is a quote from Black Panther Bob E. Lee on the time the Black Panther Party United in coalition with the Young Patriots Organization:

First of all, the Patriots’ leader William “Preacherman” Fesperman was one of the best human beings I have ever met. He was originally from North Carolina before he moved to Chicago. However, many of the Panthers left the group when we built alliances. Some didn’t like the Patriots, some just didn’t like white people in general. They were heavy into nationalism. To tell the truth, it was a necessary purging, except for these removed took themselves out of the organization. The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle. Preacherman would have stopped a bullet for me, and [once] nearly tried