The following is an interview conducted with Butch Cottman in the beginning of 2025. Butch has been an organizer and planner for the last 50 years and considers himself a revolutionary communist whose practice has been in the Black Liberation movement.
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Material: Can you talk about when, why, and how you were politicized? In particular, how and why did a career army man end up a revolutionary and a Maoist?
Butch Cottman: I was conscious of politics as something I ought to have some ideas about. And some practice. Because I became conscious in 1964. I had left Asia. I had been in Korea when John Kennedy got killed, and I had been in Asia, before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.1 I’d been in Vietnam and Laos.
Material: What were you doing?
Butch Cottman: I was doing stuff that soldiers did. I was a scout and a pathfinder and that meant I was sneaking and slipping and sliding around other people’s country. Looking for other people to kill. That’s what the scout does. Looking for roads and maps and bridges and potential landing zones, potential fire bases. That’s what a pathfinder does. But I was in the airport going back to United States when the Republican National Convention in 1964 was on television. And George H. W. Bush, George Bush senior, was on the TV. I didn’t know nothing about it except that the leading Republican was the guy who eventually got the nomination, who was an outright fascist.2 The name’s not coming to me now, but Bush was running as a so-called moderate candidate for the Republican nomination, and he was on TV making his presentation of himself. And he was saying, just as I began to pay attention, “Segregation now, segregation today, tomorrow, and forever” or some shit like that. And I thought to myself, “We’re overseas killing strangers for these motherfuckers. And here in 1964, when people in this country are dying for the right to vote and all the stuff that comes with that, this motherfucker is proclaiming himself an arch-racist.” I hadn’t had a deliberately or activist-inspired political thought before that.
I was just beginning to get a little disenchanted with the Army, but I had no alternative plan. I was good at soldiering. It wasn’t that I was more competent than other people, but it was less stressful for me than other people. There were guys around me who were smart and fitter, but under pressure, I seem to do better than other people. So it made it a little easier for me.
So, I gradually got to the point where I realized I was unlikely to make a career of the Army, even though there were very few comparable civilian options at that time for Black men without a college education, or any like marketable industrial skills, any machine tool skills or any shit like that. There just wasn’t much for you to do, except hunt and look for some kind laboring job, which is what I ended up doing anyway. But, I began to feel like, no, I wasn’t going to stay in the army. And then, in 1965, when I was for the most part in Fort Hood, Texas—the war was getting hot and we were training young guys to go to Vietnam. And a young white kid from somewhere in the South asked me, because I was pretty well thought of at that time as an NCO—I just made sergeant—what the war was about, and why we were going over there to fight. And I had never asked myself that question. I guess I, like most people in the Army, especially people who were regular army who were volunteers, thought, “Well, it’s just like just what we do.” He asked me and I told him as best I could, that I guess we were mercenaries. I guess that we were going over there cause that’s what they paid us to do. I certainly didn’t think that the Vietnamese were gonna sail their sampans3 to San Francisco and Los Angeles and attack us. Why were we going them 10,000 miles to be killing strangers? You know, that was the best answer I could come up with. But it stuck in my back of my mind that he had asked that and that I didn’t have an answer that was suitable, even for me. So when I was promoted to sergeant, it came as a complete surprise to me, and as far as I know, everybody around me. It was only in the last ten years that I’ve come to understand why it happened.
Material: What’s your understanding now about what happened?
Butch Cottman: My understanding now about why it happened is that John Kennedy, before he was killed, had ordered the army to promote some Black guys—Black “men,” because the army back then was overwhelmingly men in those days. Because Black soldiers had the highest rate of reenlistment of any other demographic in the service. And had the lowest rate of getting promoted and getting promoted in a timely manner. And he thought that this is some civil rights shit that he could correct administratively: find some Black men and promote them.
Cause how I got promoted was: I was coming from the motor pool one day in Fort Hood—and looked like I was coming from the motor pool, covered in grease and grime, you know. And one of the guys in my outfit saluted me on the way up to the barracks. And I returned the salute. And then an officer who was parked in a vehicle across the street got out and approached me and wanted to know, “Why did that man salute you?” And I said, “I don’t know, I guess he respects me. He thinks I’m a pretty good soldier.” And he said, “Well, were you an officer, once?” I said no. And he asked, “What’s your name” and blah, blah, blah. And then he got back in the vehicle. I didn’t give him much more thought. The business about asking if I was an officer made sense to me because this was the beginning of the regime of the guy who was secretary of defense, the one who came from General Motors, what’s his name.4 And a lot of men who had been promoted had gotten field-grade promotions in the Second World War, and in the Korean War were being forced either to leave the service or to return to their last enlisted grade, because they hadn’t gone on and got some college credits, they hadn’t got college degrees, which was supposed to keep them in the service. And between the wars there were seen to be too many officers, too many senior enlisted men. And now three years later in Vietnam, they’d been sucking those guys out the grave because that’s how badly they needed combat leaders.
But he was looking for promotable people because that’s what he was told to do. Because when I got a letter ordering me to report to the promotions board for a hearing, I thought, “Oh, boy, somebody downstairs had a nervous breakdown.”5 And I went straight to the first sergeant. I was like, “Sarge, what is this?” And my first sergeant was a good guy, levelheaded, easygoing, country gentleman. But, I wasn’t one of the guys who was tight with him.6 And I don’t know what it’s like now in the army, but in those days, if you was a young soldier and you were going to get promoted and you were gonna stay in the service and do well, it was a big help to have a senior non-commissioned officer to, in today’s expression “mentor you.” To tell you what to go through, to tell you what the politics of the job was, and who could be trusted in leadership. I didn’t have no shit like that. So at the time that I got promoted, I had just about concluded that I was not going to stay in the service.
Material: So you couldn’t answer the question about why, and you were having questions at the time that they were trying to promote you.
Butch Cottman: At the time they were trying to promote me and also at the time that the war was building up. Also at the time that the Civil Rights Movement was building up. Overseas, you didn’t get no real news about the Civil Rights Movement. But in the States, if you come in the barracks in the evening, you watch the national news like everybody else, and you had a slightly different perspective because you were in the Army.
But you could see they were drafting people left and right, snatching them off the street. And you could tell they was building up the numbers and stuff like that, but you had, unless you watched the news, no sense of what the Army’s plans were for these people. Because there was still a big army in Europe, you know, so there were plenty of places to send guys.
Material: What was the thing that pushed you over the edge to make you decide to leave the army and leave that career?
Butch Cottman: Well, when I came to believe that I should be doing something different. I had no opportunities. I had nobody to help me in civy street7 and nothing like that. But I no longer trusted the army to treat me fairly. Because even the process of me getting promoted was just so obscure or mysterious. I mean, nobody in my outfit would think, “Cottman, I put your name in for being promoted.”
The first sergeant was just as baffled by this shit. I mean, he had apparently been told something, but what he assumed was that once I got promoted, I would reenlist. That’s what they all assumed. “He’s a good soldier. He knows how to do this. If the men trust him,” you know, I was an effective squad leader. And the men did trust me. So in terms of their perspective, there was no reason for me not to go make a career out of it. If I had lived, which is unlikely as a scout, yeah, I probably would have done well, especially if I found somebody to mentor me and get me the next couple of promotions.
I remember one sergeant telling me, “reenlist,” because “smart as you is, you’ll go to S2 or some shit like that.” Well, S2 was squadron- or battalion-grade intelligence, non-CO. It’s a cushy job, but they don’t give it to poor niggas. We’re talking about 60 years ago. For instance, if you was a congressman’s son and you got drafted, they sent you to S2 to make sure you got out the shit alive. Because there were a lot of places to hide people. If your family was influential, you could get drafted and never get out of Washington DC, because they made sure that you were looked out for. At the same time, the secretary of defense, McNamara, he was rewriting the way things were done, computerized everything.
For instance, there were sergeants who spent the last ten years tending bar at an officer’s club or some shit and getting regular promotions. But because they were a sergeant who, somewhere along the line, had served with somebody who’s now a general and who was protecting them. Then under McNamara, all them names went in the computer and, whatever your military occupational service was, your next assignment was to do that work.
So you had guys all of a sudden back in the field trying to squeeze in and out of a tank, whose bellies was bigger than the opening of the tank because they hadn’t done a lick of exercise or work. No actual soldiering for years. And they were just furious and upset. But McNamara made it clear, “You gonna do this shit that’s on paper, or you gonna get out of the service.” And a lot of them was like, “I got 18.5 years, let me suffer through this last year and a half so I get my pension and get out like that.” So there was a lot of that going on. If you were a young, ambitious NCO, and you wanted to be a paratrooper, a ranger, and get promoted, you could. Because Special Forces was new and there was no such thing as Special Operations Command, and all that bullshit. But it was open in that part. And there were assignments in Europe and in Asia for you. But then when Vietnam hit, you also at the head of the line to get your ass blowed off, because if you were in the field, this is what you were supposed to do.
So, I mean, all of that became untenable, and a little bit of information about the Civil Rights Movement began to leak out and I realized I wanted to know more and do more in that area, and that I needed a life. I needed some kind of working, predictable relationship with women. And I had family. I had a bunch of shit that I didn’t have nobody else to handle for me, that made sense for me to get out.
I was still in the Army when Malcolm X got killed. That had turned the temperature up so much on civil rights activity and if you’re in the Army and you read in the newspapers or watch TV, you couldn’t help but know something was going on that hadn’t been going on when I joined the army.
Material: Were people talking about it? The enlisted men were talking about the Civil Rights Movement, they were talking Malcolm X, and when he was killed?
Butch Cottman: No. I mean, for instance, you sitting in the day room and it comes on TV. Yes. People talk about it then. I remember we were sitting there watching something and the tone was on TV, “what is it that Black people want?” kind of shit. Which the TV networks was good at acting like, “Y’all just got here from Mars. What is it y’all want?” And, that was the dialogue on TV, and Sergeant Benton was sitting over in there corner, and he said, “You know, they took this country from the Indians and killed and scattered them to take it. Don’t think for a minute they going to turn it over to y’all.”
I thought about that shit and I thought, “Yeah well, you right.” But there was that level of consciousness. Now maybe in the other outfits were different, but in our outfit, it wasn’t like on the weekends or when we were drinking or something, we were talking about politics or something like that, no.
Material: All right, so you came out of the Army and you were working laboring jobs. What was happening at that time in Philadelphia? Like what kind of organizing and what kind of organizations were you exposed to then?
Butch Cottman: I wasn’t initially. I was at Strick Trailer.8 And Strick Trailer had a Communist Party USA cell. But they were so fuckin’ far underground that, if you were young and you was asking for questions about the union, if you was the type of person who stood up and asked questions and shit like that, they tried to discourage you, tried and intimidate you.
But I wasn’t one that was scaring. But you wasn’t gonna get very satisfactory answers about shit. If the union leadership thought they could recruit you, you know, make you wanna run, you might do better. But not if you was just somebody just working, especially if you didn’t have no real seniority and nothing like that.
Material: What questions did you have at that time that they could not give you satisfactory answers about?
Butch Cottman: About the contract, about working conditions. I worked at Strick Trailer for close to four years, certainly. And every year, a couple guys dropped dead at the time clock—at least a couple, either coming or going. Coming to work in the morning, hit the clock, and drop dead. Going, leaving work in the evening and hit the clock and drop dead or approaching the clock, card in hand, and drop dead. That shit happened regularly, because, you know, it was piecework and the trailers didn’t stop moving. And so many of the guys had two jobs and it was that, and you had foremen trying to bully you.
And then there were other guys like me that were young and were veterans or just out of jail, just out of the street, working there, and the foreman would try to bully you and they be like, “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you.” And that was a regular routine. “He threatened to kill me.” “Yeah, be outside after work.” There would actually be guys outside trying to hustle somebody else in their car and get them off the lot to keep them from having a confrontation with security or something like that. Because guys had guns, and it was like, “We took enough of your shit.” And it was that kind of tension in the workplace.
Material: So the CPUSA was embedded there in the union and they weren’t dealing with this.
Butch Cottman: I don’t know if they were embedded in the union or not. They may have been isolated. But they had a cell and they had members there. I only knew one guy and he’d been in the CPUSA since the beginning of the Cold War. He’d been a mathematician and a college instructor and he got blacklisted and got a job working on the assembly line, just like me, even though he was at least ten, maybe twenty years older than me.
But he was one of the few that I actually knew was in the CP. I mean, a thoroughly nice person, but, grateful to have a job at all because the blacklist was so deep that he wasn’t going to get no work in academia, or no work in what was fledgling tech shit then. You know, IBM was like, as good as it got as far as technology in 1966 and ’67. And firms like that weren’t gonna hire nobody that came up on the red list, and if you already were hidden in an academic environment with somebody in the administration to protect you, you weren’t gonna get hired at another college, because your name would come up on shit—name and Social Security Number.
Material: At that time, though, you were conscious of the CP guys, even though they were buried deep and you knew there was a cell there. Were you interested in knowing more about communism?
Butch Cottman: I wasn’t interested in knowing more about communism for its sake. I was interested in knowing what to do, find some place where I could express my commitments and ask my questions and get some support, get some deeper understanding about the shit that was going on. So, for instance, the guys was always talking about corruption in the union, about who was getting money on the side, and how—when they got the union to agree to the contract—what the union leadership got as like undercover bonuses and shit like that. I wanted to know why. Why are you talking about that in secret off the side? You know, I’m full of that kind of shit. Guys on the plant floor liked me and liked Ernie [my brother], because they thought we were bright and they saw that we wasn’t caught up in street shit. But nobody said, “These guys are potential political activists, let me talk to you, there’s shit to do.” That didn’t happen.
And out on the street, people I grew up with, especially people who were 2 or 3 years younger than me, there was a whole strata of them who grew up under me, who were then in Vietnam. These were the guys who were getting killed from my alma mater, from Edison High School and from my neighborhood from 23rd and Diamond. And they were dying by the handful, dozen at a time. And they had brothers and sisters who were also won to the Black Panther Party, because by now, the Black Panther Party is on TV and they have a dynamic chapter here in Philadelphia. I always thought they were kind of childish. But I liked the guy who’s the leader here, Reggie Schell. Reggie was always levelheaded, you know, and patient. I mean, extraordinarily so, for somebody who was maybe a year or two older than me. But, I always thought that their program was kind of infantile. I was like this shit ain’t going no place, and this shit about confronting the cops—what are you going to do except get killed?
Material: What was their program here?
Butch Cottman: It was the same as it was nationwide. They had a food program, and they was supposed to be defending people against police abuse and shit like that. But it got to the point where they couldn’t defend themselves. You know, when Frank Rizzo turned on them and humiliated them in public, they didn’t have no response.
Material: When was that?
Butch Cottman: Frank Rizzo was a police commissioner and then became the mayor [of Philadelphia]. It was all in the newspaper, they had them strip naked in the street. One night they raided their house—they all living in the same place. Why you all living in the same place? And they had them out in the street and stripped them naked to publicly humiliate them. “You’re supposed to be a tough guy. We the cops,” that kind of shit. They bragged about being armed, but it wasn’t effectively armed. I’m like, I don’t know shit, but I can tell you motherfuckers how to set up an ambush. How to defend yourself, how to protect yourself. How to have some kind of defense in depth—not to all be in the same room, in the same house. And I mean, come on, that was annoying to me because as little as I understood, I understood that that was a dead end, that what you end up doing is spend all your time defending yourself against that shit.
And if I’m someplace and sending my children to the breakfast program, and then I turn on TV at night and the police is harassing y’all and attacking y’all and pulling you out of cars and beating your asses and shit like that, I’m not going to keep sending my kids around to get involved in that shit. Especially if I have like teenagers who find that shit glamorous, you know, and so that put real limits on what they could accomplish as community organizers.
Material: I get that perspective probably came to you clearly, because you had spent so many years in the Army and understood what the state was capable of and what an actually organized, armed group of people could do.
Butch Cottman: Yeah.
Material: And I get what you’re saying about how the breakfast program with the kids is not going to be effective if they were on TV being humiliated and harassed by the cops. But were there other aspects of their program that seems like you understood to not be viable? That was not going to be successful?
Butch Cottman: I don’t remember, at least certainly not right now, enough about the other aspects of their program. I didn’t understand how many hungry people there were in the neighborhood and hungry children until the Panthers started the Breakfast Club, and there’d be a line of kids trying to get something before they went to school. And that kind of stuff that they were doing was supposed to make it a safe neighborhood. How to confront the thieves and the addicts and speakeasies9 and shit like that, that they was doing to protect the community, to make the police presence uneasy in their community. That was important shit. But they really weren’t handling it with enough maturity.
The substance of their program, the Ten Point Panther Program, I don’t remember enough of it to remember if I had an analysis of it or if it was a useful analysis. The Panthers’ biggest advantage, and their biggest shortcoming was that they were constantly on the news and on the TV. They didn’t get a chance to grow organically. They didn’t get a chance to have a substantive relationship with their community over enough years where they could figure out how to be a presence in the life of the community. Apart from the shit about the Panthers for Self-Defense, fighting the cops—and shit about fighting the cops was very appealing to young people.
But it was developing at the same time that the drug gangs were developing. Heroin distribution and cocaine distribution was developing that junior Black Mafia and all that shit, the Black Muslims. And I realized a lot of mothers saw that as a more viable option for their son and to some lesser extent, their daughters, than the Panthers. But the Panthers were just always in hot water.
Material: So you saw this going on and then how did you become exposed to United Progressives?
Butch Cottman: Well, there was a Black power convention here in ’68. I went to that, but I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t have any understanding of the forces. I’d try to read the literature and stuff like that.
Material: But somehow you just decided to go there? Did you have someone take you there?
Butch Cottman: No, it was on Diamond Street at the Church of the Advocate. You had to be blind, dumb, and stupid not to know that it was in Philadelphia, cause it was nationally in the news, that’s how important the Black Power movement was at that time. That was in ’68. The only good thing that happened to me is that Boggs’s organization in Philadelphia, the Pacesetters, always had a table outside these events, selling or giving away Jimmy’s literature.10 They never came in, they never took part. They never raised no critical questions. As far as I know, they didn’t organize at these events or participate on any of the committees, which they should have. But that’s just the nature of the local leadership. It was just that petty bourgeois.
But the guy who was the local leader, Bill Gray, Jim Gray, I forget what his name was. He was teaching at Temple [University] at the time. He would see me and I would come over to the table and look at their literature and if they had something appealing I would buy it. And he said to me one time, “You know, you always raising critical questions—you need to have some answers.” And that struck me. And he was a real charismatic guy. He could criticize you and have you laugh at yourself. He was that kinda guy. And when he said that, that’s when I began to read. That was between ’68 and ’70. I had already read Mao On Protracted Struggle and On Guerrilla Warfare. I read that when I was in the service. When I was at Fort Hood.
Material: Really?
Butch Cottman: Yeah, because that was all that we talked about. Guerrilla warfare this, guerrilla warfare that. Well, you know, and I’m like, “Well, let me find out what the fuck is going on here.”
Material: And that was just in the library?
Butch Cottman: Yeah, not just in military libraries, in public libraries all over the country. And you could get it in the hardback. When I was at Fort Benning, they didn’t have a copy of On Guerrilla Warfare because it was always out, because especially young officers were getting ready to get assigned to places with the infantry training school. And I read On Protracted Struggle and it read like a Baptist sermon to me. I guess it is fair to say it made a lot of sense to me. Somewhere later down the line I read On Guerrilla Warfare. I don’t know how much good it did me to read it. But I’m hoping it did some. I guess it affected me in that I soldiered in a more professional way, because I had some sense of the environment. I was in with a lot of guys just who were just clueless, just walking around waiting to get shot.
Material: So you went to the Black Power conference…
Butch Cottman: I went to the Black Power conference. You know, I didn’t learn much. I didn’t think much other than that I began intentionally to study. And somewhere between then and 1970, I read my first copy of Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party by Jimmy Boggs. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I had a friend, Ralph Durham, who was one of the people organizing the Philadelphia Black Political Convention in 1970, and I went there to work with him to help them, met some people, a few of whom I struggled alongside for the next 30 years. But, he was a member of something called the Black Political Forum, which was a really important independent electoral organization at that time. And because of him, I joined the Forum.
Material: Can you talk about the Forum a little bit and what it was and what it stood for?
Butch Cottman: The Black Political Forum was an independent political organization who saw its job as educating voters, Black voters, primarily, but not exclusively. About why a person should or shouldn’t run for office, what the offices entailed, what the jobs of, say, a state representative or a state senator or city council person actually was, what you were actually expected to do, to accomplish, how a party apparatus worked, how the fact that the Democratic Party was not the same as the government of Philadelphia—the Democratic Party was a club. Stuff that people still understand very vaguely—it’s a club you join and it’s a club that exists to run people for office and to govern with a certain obligation to the club’s members, to solve certain problems for the club members, which if you were a Democrat, you were a club member. The Forum sought to make all those issues clear and simple.
And the Forum had a process for interviewing candidates for office. And if the candidate interviewed successfully, the Forum would encourage people to support them and fund them you know, and work their campaigns and stuff like that. And there were some of us who were Forum members, and if the Forum endorsed you, we would come work in your campaign. And the Forum was very, very well respected for that.
Material: And what was in the questions, the interview?
Butch Cottman: I don’t remember well enough for it to be useful, but it was, “Excuse me, what committees are there that a freshman candidate can serve on? How do they choose them? How are they gonna choose you? Which one do you want to be in? What was the likelihood?” In other words, if you campaigning about how you want to do something about school funding—how? You going to be a freshman state representative, what committees you gonna get in? What are your chances of getting on the education committee? How does the education committee affect the budget? How you want to, how you are going to get money funneled to Philadelphia, to your district? Those kind of questions, which if people understood what elected officials do, would be seen as common sense. But most people even running for office don’t have the presence of mind to realize, “I’m supposed be able to answer these questions,” because so little is expected of elected officials. It is, “I get elected, I get a salary. And I get about two years without much accountability until it’s time to run again. I’m not really expected to solve no problems. I got to be really fairly conscientious to even pretend.”
So the Forum made all that kind of bullshit much more difficult. And people, Black and white, came to the Forum for the Forum’s endorsement because it was seen as legit. If you were white and you aspired to really be a public servant. And in those days it was white Republicans who came: “I want to be interviewed,” because, “I know I can do a better job than these other people. I’ve actually read what the damn job entails. And I actually know what I’m supposed to do. My education has prepared me for it.” We had dialog like that.
You know, I remember a woman who was I think the daughter of a judge, high-level judge, at the state level. I remember she came and sought a Forum endorsement and she answered the question so well and so thoughtfully, so comprehensively, that she blew the rest of us out of the room. And I was saying to myself, “Oh, lord, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I sure wish there was some way for us to get this woman on TV so people would know, this is what you got the right to expect.”
But she didn’t have real support from the party. She had the circle of people who supported her father or her grandfather who was a judge. That could get her access to people like us, to meetings and interviews and shit like that. But she didn’t have access to the apparatus in the party that could actually run your campaign and get you elected.
Material: So how did the Forum get to have that credibility and how did it develop from nothing into an organization where candidates were coming for its endorsement?
Butch Cottman: History threw them a bone. The Forum came into existence when Black politicians and Black community activists were in rebellion—rebellion may be making it seem too dramatic—against the Democratic Party organization because no Democrats with any integrity or any principles was going to get listed by the party for public office. And you were expected to be completely subservient to the party machinery, and there were just some offices that they just weren’t going to list you for? They had one Black congressman, Robert [N. C. Nix, Sr.]. And as far as the Democratic Party went, that was going to be enough Black congressmen for the next 50 years. We had one Black city councilman, guy named Edgar Campbell—wasn’t gonna be no more, as far as the Democratic machine was concerned. And people were aware that they weren’t getting well served by the Democratic Party.
Well, the Forum, the founders of the Forum believed that they could defeat the party’s endorsed candidates if they organized and if they worked together and they created the environment. And there were some good, strong Black community leaders who didn’t want to buck the Party, and wanted to stay in the party organization. One that came later, and supported me, Reverend Shepherd, was a man out of the Baptist church—he was in a circle of men that founded the Forum, but he opted out. He stayed a party loyalist.
Material: But the Forum, would you characterize it as a revolutionary organization?
Butch Cottman: Oh, no no no no, no. And you gotta understand that in 1970, that wasn’t really that important. The revolutionaries weren’t doing no better than the rest of us, you know. For instance, in Newark, you know, Baraka’s gang11 considered themselves revolutionary and they were doing the same thing that we were doing: trying to elect a Black mayor. And they did, but then they collapsed both long before the United Progressives did. You know, on the West Coast you had the same thing happening—electing Black people to office in 1970 was considered revolutionary work. We had no meaningful presence nationwide on the electoral stage. And we were fighting to elect people. The Stokes brothers in Cleveland, the guy in Michigan, who was in Congress forever.12 This is around the same time that the guy got elected mayor of Gary, Indiana.13 That was it, like a nationwide event. Gibson, the first Black mayor, Jersey City, all that was new. The presence that Black people have in the electoral life now, that’s seen as routine, mundane, that we are part of what’s retarding the Democratic Party, that environment did not exist. It was revolutionary work to get organized, to oppose the party leadership and get somebody elected for office, to have what was described then as having actual grassroots leadership and elected office to get shit done for the Black community.
That was the phenomenon all over the country. In some states it actually involved blood and guts, like in Texas and Oklahoma. People were going to literally fight. You had a campaign office or something, you had to have 2 or 3 people posted outside with their guns, because the other people who considered themselves Democrats or Republicans was so outraged that you would have the effrontery to do this, that they would come try to set your shit on fire. And this was late in 1970, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74.
So it required far more courage and effective organizing than the way we think of it now. What the Forum did was to make the nuts and bolts of electoral activity more or less common knowledge and to train people to do something about it. And they did that with me to some extent. But, what I was naive enough to think is that they were like strictly about doing this for the community and doing this as a community development project and doing this as principled political activism. That shit dissolved when members of Forum leadership started to try to get themselves elected to office and get their children elected to office. That’s when John White, Jr.—his father was the president of the Forum, founding president, and stayed president of the Forum for most of its existence—ran for office. I organized his first campaign, but then he went and secretly organized a second campaign organization with a group of young, white Democrats up here in this neighborhood,14 and tried to keep it a secret from me and the members of the forum working on the campaign.
And I’m like, “Come on, explain this to me,” you know. And his father stayed mad at me forever because I had the nerve to confront them. And I’m like, “I’m not doing this. If you’ve got two campaign organizations—if you felt you needed two campaign organizations—you should have come to me, and said, ‘this is why I’m doing this, and here, I want to introduce you to these white people.’” They didn’t understand they was supposed to do that. I was supposed to be just a loyal minion waiting for them to throw me some crumbs. You gotta understand, we didn’t have no big funding. We were people who had regular working-class jobs, doing this shit at night and on the weekends and working ourselves to exhaustion to get it done. John ran for office for the state house and he lost by like 175 votes or something like that. His father never forgave me for that cause that was my fault. The second time he got elected—and then he got elected to city council and then in the state representatives. And he went on to become secretary of welfare.
And then Wilson Good, who went on to be mayor, was vice president of the Forum. He ran for something in 75. I can’t remember what it was, but I know he was managing director under Bill [William] Green and then to the Public Utility Commission, and then eventually running for mayor. That was some of the best and brightest that came out of the Forum. And there were other people, like judges that the Forum supported and schooled to prepare for office that did well. But, of course, when the Forum started doing self-serving shit, it began to lose credibility. It began to lose people who actually were working for the Forum’s sake, as opposed to working for the Forum because you guys are gonna look out for me when I get elected—people like me. And then it collapsed.
Material: Did you leave before a collapse?
Butch Cottman: Oh, yeah, I was forced out. Because I didn’t have enough sense to fucking leave when they wanted me to. I was showing up at the meetings, I was doing my committee assignments, making my reports, raising critical questions in the meeting. And they couldn’t understand. “Why is he still here.” They couldn’t say, “We don’t want you,” because if they had said, “Butch, we’re really sick of your shit,” that would’ve opened the floor to other kinds of conversations that other members of the Forum had questions about. For instance, we had a guy who had been a teacher of mine, a mentor of mine who was in the closet, and all kinds of people who up here in Germantown knew he was in the closet.
I didn’t have a fucking enough sense to know it. And he was a leading member of the Forum. He was on the executive committee. They talked about him behind his back and giggled behind his back and I’m like, “Excuse me, people are asking about this shit in the street. People are asking in the neighborhood, asking me, you know, you gay too?” You know, that kind of shit. “What is our organizational position on this?” And they were angry at me for asking about it because they were using it, holding it over him, and I just thought that was fucking disgraceful.
And I wouldn’t let the shit go. I’m like, “Excuse me, I want this on the agenda. As a member of the Forum, I’m not going to keep doing this and pretending I don’t know, pretending that you guys don’t know and pretending that I don’t know he’s in the closet.” And then, you know, I mean, the woman I was with at the time, Willa Mae, who was, like, as good and pure a Christian ever gave breath to. But she’s the kind of person who simply does not gossip. She’s a member of this sorority that Kamala [Harris] is in. She’s an AKA,15 which is about as good as it gets as far as Black professional women goes. She was treasurer of the local chapter for years. But Willa Mae is the kind of person, the kitchen would be filled with people, she’s sitting there, they’d be gossiping and she can sit there for 2.5 hours and not open her mouth, because that’s just her temperament. And that’s how I realized that George was known to be in the closet. And people pretended they didn’t know because he was a school administrator. Because she come home one night and we getting ready for bed. And she said, “I was on City Line Avenue, and I saw George, and the guy who was his longtime lover, crossing City Line, and baby, I think they were drunk.” And I said to myself, “Well, if Willa Mae know, then I’m a fool because this mean pretty much everybody else in the world who knows anything about the Philadelphia school district or politics in Germantown and stuff like this has heard before.”
But, it was a real important lesson to me about politics and about people’s idea of ethical living. Cause to me it was just disgraceful. I mean, it took a long time to realize that something was actually wrong with me, not wrong with them, because so many of them thought it was all right to talk about him behind his back, you know, to bully and abuse him behind his back because, you know, he had a public reputation to defend family and all that shit and to not have a conversation in the organization, no matter how bizarre you thought of it.
What do we do about this as a phenomenon in the organization? I wasn’t like, you know, no mature, experienced political thinker, no philosopher or nothing like that. But it was like, “Excuse me, people are talking about us, people talking about him. How do I keep a principled relationship with him and with this organization, if we don’t make a decision about this?” They never would.
Material: So you were forced out over that question?
Butch Cottman: Yes, that and other questions.
Material: And then by that time you had heard about UP?
Butch Cottman: By that time I was a member of UP.
Material: So how did that happen and what drew you to them?
Butch Cottman: When I joined the Black Political Forum, UP’s leaders, Melvin, William, and Oum Harrison joined Black Political Forum around the same time. They were just beginning to get involved in electoral politics. And they were trying to learn, how do you do this? And inside the Forum, we were almost always on the same side of issues. And because I was stupid and couldn’t keep my mouth shut, I was the one, they would, “Butch, ask them this, Butch, ask them about that,” and they used me just like everybody else and they’d be sitting there grinning and I’d be making everybody miserable, asking uncomfortable questions. They loved that shit. But I began to understand what they were about. Cause their electoral plans, they always couched as organizing activity. And we not trying to make nobody rich and famous and we trying do this, that, and the other thing to get these resources and get these questions and this work done in our community. And we wanna use this electoral campaign, running for office—if we win, we’ve got the following list of things to do. If we don’t, we’ve got the following list of things. They posed it like that.
Material: And that resonated with you.
Butch Cottman: And that resonated with me. They were just getting into electoral activity, but they were doing real grassroots community organizing. They had created the Brickyard Youth Council, which was to make it possible for kids to get back and forth to school safely, and kids to use the playgrounds and the Boys and Girls Clubs without the kind of shit that’s on the news every day with the shootings in this neighborhood.
Material: How did the Brickyard Youth Council work?
Butch Cottman: Well most of the United Progressives were from the Brickyard and had been more or less involved in street shit themselves before they got politicized. Not all of them, but many of them. And they had a feeling about who needed to be confronted, who needed to be supported, what neighborhood organizations did the United Progressives need to be in as representatives of the Brickyard Youth Council, so they would get adult support and get support from other community members. And they made a decision about, “Well. what was the most important thing for us to do?” And it was to make it safe for kids get back and forth to school. And they did, and it was overwhelmingly successful.
Most of the kids in lower Germantown, central Germantown, went to Germantown High School. Kids went to other schools, but that was the high school. They would have kids from the west side of Germantown and from the Brickyard, the east side, as far down as Berkley Street walk out to Germantown Avenue and walk up Germantown Avenue, escorted by the members of the Brickyard Youth Council. And their thing was, you walk with us, nothing gonna happen to you. We’re gonna protect you. And that was a promise they made not just to the kids, but to the parents. So you would have kids, the kind of kids whose father had been walking them to school with his pistol to keep the kind of shit that’s happening now from happening to them, when all of a sudden, father walks them out to the avenue, see the members of the Youth Council, shake their hand, hug and go on home, cause my kid’s safe with them.
And that evolved to the point where people would mention the Brickyard Youth Council work in church—people were praising the Brickyard Youth Council in community meetings and stand up testifying and crying, and calling on the Lord and stuff like that, because all of a sudden kids who were involved in nothing were involved in the Boys and Girls Club, involved in the Settlement youth programs because the Brickyard Youth Council made it safe.
Material: Can you go back and talk about how/when United Progressives was founded? What kind of political influences and ideology they came from and what they saw their purpose as?
Butch Cottman: I can, as best I know. They were an offshoot of Jimmy Boggs’s organization, the Pacesetters, here in Philadelphia, and they had a youth group, if I remember correctly, called the Groovers. Two other grassroots youth groups joined the Groovers and then had left the Groovers because they felt that the Pacesetters was holding them down. They wanted some actual practice, some commitment to change in their community and stuff like that.
It’s hard to read a Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, and not be won to it, to be like “let’s do that,” especially at that time. So, they were doing, in the beginning, youth-oriented organizing. And created Brickyard Youth Council trying to win youth to progressive politics, trying to confront evildoers in the community. They were kicking in the doors of speakeasies and drug houses and shit like that. They were confronting cops in the street about being on the take and doing the dirty work of other gangsters in the neighborhood: Fucking with people, beating people, arresting people because the people were getting between them and the money. That was a big part of their agenda.
Material: What was it about James Boggs’s writing and what he was talking about, that crystallized stuff for those guys and for you in such a way that you were able to then put that into some kind of practice?
Butch Cottman: His analysis. His analysis seemed to be so simple, so insightful, and just so plain good sense. It didn’t require no sophisticated understanding of Marxism-Leninism. It was: this is the circumstance in the United States at this time. These are the circumstances in the American centers at this time. And, yeah, well, that was pretty much the circumstance here. And this is the future that’s emerging. And if you want to make revolution, these are the things that you should be doing. If you’re Black and you live in the urban center, the city is the Black man’s land at this time. And politics is the highest calling. And, in other words, if we make the case for Black political leadership in the urban centers, we’re making the case for an American revolution. If we’re winning people to that, then we leading people in the direction of creating a revolutionary force in the urban centers, not on the margins, not just some shit that’s about protecting people from the police, but about some shit that’s preparing people to govern.
And the idea was certainly new to me that Black people could govern or should be at the governing center, should be making the case for the future of American life from the center, not from the margins. Not from using oppressed minorities out there, and we going to make a revolution in order to do you a favor. But you will make revolution in order to make America a different place. And we got leading ideas, and we have disciplined cadres, and we have folks that will go down fighting. That explained a role for Black militants like myself, and for white militants as well, because the CP was in collapse and there was no effective organizations anymore, like Students for a Democratic Society or the Weather Underground. It gave you a picture of what they could do and the future that James posited as possible and necessary.
In other words, what to do about education, what to do about industry. James argued that the principal contradiction in American life was political backwardness as opposed to technological super-advancement, which lord knows has played itself out. And that if you are going to make a revolution, you gonna have to overcome political backwardness and you will have to harness technological advancement in the service of revolution.
In other words, what the Marxists call the productive forces at this stage. Not at the stage of a hundred years ago—in this day. How to harness it so it is in the service of people. Now in China they seem to have a glimpse of that, even in a capitalist China. Here, we got a few people, arguing for it. But we have no organization making the case for it. Bernie Sanders comes close. Bernie ain’t pretending to be a Leninist, but he’s the best we got right now. So, I’m saying the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party just made for what was, for me, undeniable good sense. And they were the only organization that I knew of trying to live the Manifesto.
I’m not saying there weren’t others around the country, but they were dynamic and there was nobody to tell me about it. Mostly they listened to Jimmy and sold his literature. He was never very good at picking followers that were militant. They had some petty-bourgeois shit going on and certainly here in the Delaware Valley. You know, pussy, fast cars, good jobs that kept them out of trouble, that kinda shit.
Material: One of the main things that really struck me when you talked about UP was the commitment to study. And I think you credited the influence from Boggs’s organization and his analysis to really draw you guys to commit to study. But also the fact that you really demanded of yourselves, and the people who were involved, to have your own analysis and to be capable of articulating your own analysis. Can you talk some about that?
Butch Cottman: The way I remember, the commitment to study came out of the Pacesetters, out of the Groovers, and out of our study itself. I mean, Chairman Mao’s thing about studying with determination is hard to get around. Amilcar Cabral said the same thing: Study. Keep learning. Don’t stop. Ho [Chi Minh] said something along that same line. So if you were serious about internalizing that shit, the responsibility to study was undeniable. And the UP’s one thing that it was respected for, was that it had study that everybody was expected to participate in, and everybody was expected to have a basic understanding of On Practice, On Contradiction, the Five Essays. And to have a basic understanding what a democratic centralist organization was. People read about it, a lot of people understood it as an abstraction, but not a lot of people understood it as: “This is a way for me to live.” And that was one of the things that forced me to study more.
And also, because, especially when the UPs broke up, when we created Black Political Study for Social Change, I ended up leading the study for a long time, trying to make it clear and useful to people who did not think of themselves as revolutionaries and other people who came from other organizations and wanted a more substantive understanding of this stuff. Other organizations that had collapsed, or they had left or there was some shit, you know, there was a lot of that going on then. And so I spent so much time trying to explain to people, that I had to be constantly reading and writing to strengthen my ability to make this shit useful. And at the same time, growing my own capacity for a useful analysis and to explain that analysis to ordinary people. Because we had people come into our study group and into our circle of friends who have been in activist organizations, maybe since the early, mid-’60s, some from—what was Malcolm’s group?—the Organization of African Unity. But they’d never done no meaningful study of this shit. And today their understanding of Marxism is very poor and their understanding of what dialectical and historical materialism is supposed to provide you, is very poor. So I was forced to try to get a meaningful, a literate grasp of those things.
Material: How did you do it? I remember we’ve had conversations before where you were like, most people are accustomed to doing what you call kitchen table politics. So how do you move in an organized study group away from kitchen table politics to having a dialectical-materialist analysis?
Butch Cottman: You take the same issues that you bring to the kitchen table and you examine them as political phenomena. You don’t allow people to get up from the table thinking this is just a personal problem. This is something wrong with me. You make it clear, through exposition and through examples, that this is some shit that’s affecting the world. This is some shit that you didn’t create. And this is a problem that you not gonna solve by yourself. The shit that you complaining about at home is the shit that’s poisoning the world, poisoning the water, the air, and creating Luigi Mangiones, a national hero, even though the bourgeois press don’t want to acknowledge it. But I sure hope Luigi got some people on the outside that’s lining up the next CEO.
To make people understand the bread and butter issues at your house are bread and butter issues around the world, and that the same people that profit from your misery—and there are people profiting from your misery, no matter how alone you feel, no matter how helpless you are, there are people who are making fortunes off your misery and they’re making fortunes off other people’s misery. Somebody is making a fortune off this shit in Palestine. So trying to make that a deliberate growth process to moving from the kitchen table as a personal problem, to the kitchen table as a universal problem; the contradictions in your life are contradictions in the world. And having people talk about themselves and come up with their own examples was what we did in the study group.
Material: Did you struggle at that time with trying to support and enable women to speak out and have their opinions?
Butch Cottman: Oh yes. Well when we created the Black Political Study for Social Change, organizations were coming apart all around us. But at the same time, there were women who had been in organizations who had been in, like, subordinate roles. In other words, she’s not a chair, but she’s doing all the chair’s work. And they found out about our study group and we had a reputation—me, Oum, and another dear comrade who is dead, Butch Simmons, who had come from the African People’s Party, of being principled. Just being decent guys who had been in leadership of the organization. Everybody who didn’t know me certainly knew Oum, and Butch was a real patient and level-headed guy, who was a teacher, and had been forced out of the African People’s Party. So the three of us made a pretty good team.
Material: The study group was an actual study group of United Progressives?
Butch Cottman: No. This was a study group that we formed. United Progressives had its own study history which many of the themes and stuff we transferred. But when United Progressives had a coup and fell apart, and Oum and Melvin were forced out and I left, we created something called the Black Political Cadres for Social Change. And the Black Political Cadres for Social Change had a study group called Black Political Study Group for Social Change. I’m sure at home I’ve got some of what we used to send out, cards like when people do wedding invitations, for when the study was gonna start. This was way before email.
Black Political Cadre for Social Change took off and was far more successful than we had expected, because we had created it to make sure we had a study environment. And the people who were trying to support were part of that study environment. But they got so that a few who had been in other organizations and other kinds of work and stuff like that wanted to know what we were doing and wanted to study with us.
Material: And especially to some of these women who had been parts of other organizations.
Butch Cottman: Yes, there was a circle of women who were teachers and parents at the African Free School, the Nidhamu Sasa, which used to be on Queen Lane on the West Side Germantown. And when we created a study group, they took the attitude that “We don’t have to take this shit off these men, we’re gonna have to learn how to do this shit ourselves.” And as a group, some of them joined the study. So we had to really up our game as far as explaining what the shit was and not allowing people to slip into talking about cliche shit. And trying to make them understand that this is some shit that will teach you to think with precision.
So we’re not only doing that, but we’re teaching them how to run a meeting, just simple stuff. Your turn to chair next week. You’ve got to know what a minority view is and that you may be right, but if you hold a minority view, you got certain shit to do. How to function in an organization. We had to make all that part of the curriculum.
Material: Because these women were part of organizations where they were behind the scenes playing a support role, but not necessarily learning how to chair a meeting?
Butch Cottman: And even if people learned how to chair a meeting, people were abusing it, people who were veteran activists was exploiting them. So they had some anger about that. And their understanding of the problems that an organization is supposed to solve, and the issue at the center of it is how you supposed to give leadership, how to give principled leadership in an organization, that was very poorly understood. So talking about how to run a meeting, how to understand the contradictions, how to make an agenda where those contradictions are represented and people are forced to grapple with them—all was shit that we tried to study. And a lot of the time we spent talking about what we would all call personal problems. A big part was they were so unused to expecting their voice to be heard, to expecting their interest to be represented effectively that, that even in our circle, they had to be literally pulled off the sidelines. And “Excuse me, next week, you will have to chair the meeting. So now this is Sunday. Wednesday you and I gonna talk, so that you have some understanding of what your concerns are. And so that you don’t be terrified when next Sunday, you have to chair this meeting.” And there was a lot of that that had to be done.
Material: And it was successful? Women developed and started chairing meetings, became more vocal and opinionated and able to articulate their own ideas and assessment and analysis?
Butch Cottman: To some degree. Yeah, I think they would say it was successful. Now, the problem with that is that the world was changing at the same time. So jobs they had, roles they had, all that shit was in flux. Because you’re talking about the mid-’70s to early ’80s now. So the situation they may have been in 1973 to ’74 might have changed completely by 1980. So I’m sure some of them would say they got stronger and more confident and able to see themselves in a different light in the world.
Because the world changed, a lot of them got out of politics completely. Maybe they was in this because their man was in this, and, well, in 1980, they might have a different man, or different experience and decided to give up on politics. And that happened a lot. A lot of working women were glad. “I’m so glad you don’t want to do that shit no more. I’m so sick of those damn meetings.” They didn’t necessarily dislike me when they would say that, but they disliked that life. They didn’t see where it was taking them: when you in America, you need a job, your kids need to go to school. “I need you to be working because I want to send my child to private school.” Well, one might want to send his child to private school, the other might have an ideological problem with that. “I chose to be in public schools, how are we going to make public schools work better?” And she’d be like, “I don’t hear that shit. I just got to worry about my child.” There was a lot of that going on at home.
Material: That leads to another question I had, which is that way back when you were still in the Army, you read On Protracted Struggle and you said it read like a Baptist sermon. But I also remember you talking about in UP, that people were working themselves to the bone night and day—as you say, working-class jobs at night, or maybe during the day, and then political work at night. And you would bring up in meetings, how are we going to sustain ourselves?
Butch Cottman: I brought up in one meeting. At its most dynamic, in United Progressives, everybody was expected to have a job and everybody was expected to handle their finances. You know, buy a little house, do something, manage yourself, manage your relationships so that people didn’t have negative shit to say about you, so that you weren’t getting evicted or whatever. You were expected to have actually a grownup’s life.
Material: And the organization helped with that or no?
Butch Cottman: The organization helped with that, and you had to account to the organization for that. So yeah, if you needed a house, the organization would help raise money, help you save money. The woman I was with, Willa Mae, she was well known to be good at bookkeeping. I mean, I had like a couple friends that Willa Mae saved their money when they was trying to save money for a down payment for a house. And it’d be like, if Willa Mae got your money, that was your ass—you was not going to touch it. And when you came time to make a settlement, Willa Mae would cut you a check. If you asked Willa Mae to manage, well that shit was managed to death.
Material: But you had people in the organization that were good at specific things and you helped each other in that way?
Butch Cottman: Yeah. Even if they weren’t good at it, they did the best they could. Lord knows I wasn’t, but we’d do stuff like, if you’re trying to raise money to buy a house or get a down payment, we had parties, old time rent parties. And if you trying to raise money for your settlement, and there were another half a dozen of us, we’d all commit to tithe. We all gonna put $20 a month or $100 a month or whatever we could towards your settlement, and I don’t remember anybody complaining about it. If they had complaints about it, it was secret, but it was seen as an obvious benefit.
Material: And the flip side being, you had to keep your shit straight and be accountable to the organization?
Butch Cottman: I don’t know if it was the flip side, but it was certain that was an expectation of you anyway. And other people who were outsiders were impressed by it. I remember when my brother’s girlfriend was like, “I didn’t know people lived like that anymore.” But rationalizing it as political activism, that part fell largely to me because, once again, I was, for the most part, the leader of the study. In other words, what did this accomplish other than to get her a house? What did this accomplish? I’d explain how if we can get her to do this for herself, we can get the neighbors to do it, we can get the lady with them six children that’s terrorizing the neighborhood to buy that ramshackle joint she’s renting. And lighten her burden and make an ally of her and her kids. Trying to make that shit useful and sensible to people and practical was a big part of the study.
I was working at night, and a big part of the reason I was working at night was so I could study at night. Because part of that time I was working in the day too, working for the school district. But working at night and working at a youth facility, once the kids was asleep at night, my time was my own, and I could sit up and read and that was a big help for me. Because all this time I’m trying to understand, the classics of Marxism-Leninism—I mean, I’m in a meeting trying to explain to people the labor theory of value. Fuck if I know what I’m talking about. But the labor theory of value, and price, wages and all that kind of shit. So I’m developing as a Marxist.
Material: Through having to lead this group?
Butch Cottman: But also trying to hold our group together when the world is changing outside of me, and I don’t have the tools for that. Oum left our group and joined MOVE,16 and that was really hard on me. Butch Simmons left Philadelphia without saying anything to us about it. Bought a house in South Jersey, moved out of North Philadelphia, into the house in South Jersey and wanted me to come and maintain a friendship with him and his wife and kids, independent of political work, and I wasn’t gonna do that. You know, cause I’m like, “Why you didn’t talk to us about any of this?” Well what it boiled down to was he was just tired of radical politics. He had been in three organizations in the time I knew him. He’d been in the group that’s been in TV now, Joe Wallace’s group in Florida, was in the African People’s Socialist Party in college. Then he’d been in African People’s Party, which is Max Stanford’s group in Philadelphia, and he’d been forced out of that cause he’d been in leadership and there was a leadership fight. Then he’d been part of us, come into the United Progressives, just as United Progressives was collapsing, you know, so his wife was tired of this shit as well. Even though they stayed good people, you know, right until they both died.
Material: So you were in a meeting and you asked this question about how people were going to sustain that level of political work. You saw the world was changing.
Butch Cottman: I was in a meeting—it was a meeting of the whole assembly of United Progressives—and I asked, “How are you going to continue to do this work at 50 years old, when this work is so daunting now?” Because people were working jobs, raising families, sending their children to school, doing organizing work in the evening, doing fundraising stuff on the weekends, having fundraising parties, doing electoral activity. If you was supporting or doing something, then the whole organization was supposed to turn up. You were literally on seven days a week. If you took a Sunday off, you didn’t have any trouble finding anybody, because everybody was home in bed. It wasn’t like we’re going to run to Dorney Park17 with the kids, no, people were just done. So I asked that and nobody answered. Nobody had no answer. Years later, people told me they remembered that question.
Well, no, people didn’t have an answer in the meeting. People had an answer in life because people just, the minute a crack appeared in the leadership—there was fissure between Oum and Melvin and Emmanuel Freeman and them—there were probably like a dozen people who just jumped ship. A dozen people out of the 35 or 40 members of the core organization, just: “I’m out.” No explanation. Just stopped showing up. The larger organization, the Northwest Action Coalition, which was essentially an electoral organization that supported campaigns, turned out people for election day and raised money—that organization transformed from mainly a volunteer organization of militants, of which there were hundreds in those days, to an organization of people who had a stake in electoral activity because they had jobs and their interests in it and they had ambitions themselves.
So it changed radically. It didn’t go out of existence. It became the organization that they don’t acknowledge now, which elected Mayor Parker.18 The press don’t know no better, so they talk about this northwest organization, but this started out as NWAC, the Northwest Action Coalition, which was created by the United Progressives to do the electoral work of electing principled candidates for office. When you’re running on a shoestring and need lots of volunteers and lots of people with commitment—and I’m talking about people used to pool their money to rent hotels so they could pay somebody to watch their kids while they worked, on election day and the day before. You would have women working, two days before election day and making sandwiches and getting the literature packets together and doing all that shit so that on election day, the hundreds of people who were in NWAC could turn out, to get out on the polls and do that shit for free. Nowadays, people won’t even discuss it for free, because they don’t see that as having no movement. For instance, it was a big issue in this Kamala Harris thing. Philadelphia’s got a reputation for turning out grassroots organizations and doing elections, so Harris’s people come here and everybody in the world knows she’s got a billion dollars campaign fund, but they come here and want to know who’s gonna work for free.
And my friend was fielding them phone calls, every day up until 2, 3 days before election day. And, of course, he’s cussing and raising hell, “The fuck makes you think people gonna do this shit for free? When people all over America know y’all got $1 billion. And y’all should have contacted us a month ago. You knew this shit was a mess a month ago. Why?” That’s the same conversation they’re having now. We used to have the same conversations then, but for a different fundamental reason. Because then, what we would be arguing about would be, yeah, we got a reputation for doing this work, but we want somebody at the center, sitting with y’all when y’all are making decisions. That was a hard part for them to get their heads around. Young people weren’t supposed to want that.
Material: So in terms of the idea of protracted struggle, no one had an answer for you at the time. And then the world changed. I remember one time when we were talking about this, you were saying that there were many people in the organization who were convinced, the revolution was going to happen imminently, and that was part of the reason why they didn’t have to think about protracted struggle.
Butch Cottman: Or that wasn’t part of their idea of protracted struggle. Their idea of protracted struggle was next month or next year, not 20 years from now or 30 years from now.
Material: Can you talk a little bit about how the world changed? I remember you’ve talked in the past about how the crack epidemic hit the neighborhoods in the early ’80s and decimated the neighborhoods. Can you talk a little bit about how you saw things changing and how that impacted the work that you specifically, but also your organization, had been trying to build for so long.
Butch Cottman: Well. The world changed, but it wasn’t all drugs and murder.
The civil rights movement and the Black Liberation movement opened a lot of stuff up. And the kind of people that were activists and the organizations that I was a part of and on the fringes of and had knowledge of… satisfying your career aspirations began to make a lot more sense than being a Black militant in the political wilderness. So, for instance, people who were stalwarts and reliable people in organizations, just based on the work that we had done and the work going on in the larger world, suddenly had career opportunities.
I remember one guy wanted to be a professional photographer. Another one, Lamar Williams, wanted to be a filmmaker. I don’t know if he ever made a film, but he went off to pursue that. And I know the two women I knew him to be involved with, one of the biggest things in their relationship was helping him make a career as a filmmaker. People got something as simple as a job at SEPTA,19 which, you have to understand what the world was like in 1970, 72, 73. You know, one or two Black bus drivers and subway drivers. People got a job at SEPTA, which means they had an actual job for the rest of their life. They had a pension, they could get a mortgage. They didn’t need the movement for that.
People who had been teaching, working as substitutes. Suddenly somebody was forced to look at their resume and realize, “Oh, he’s got some administrative credits.” So they out of the classroom and then they’re a school principal or vice principal or something like that. So they left the movement for those kind of opportunities. Those opportunities broke out all over the spectrum, with the possible exception of doing industrial labor, doing the kind of shit that I was doing because I didn’t have no other skills and no other credentials. But even I, with a little luck might have gotten a civil service job. And then I’d have had a job with a pension—I’d have been at the low end, but that wasn’t what I wanted. For my sanity’s sake, I had to do something to make the world better. I’m trying to stay sane. I’m trying to stay out the penitentiary, which was real work for me. Just like some people left the movement for the church and for the mosque, because they were trying to stay sane. They were trying to make the world make some sense to them. And trying to have some peace of mind. I stayed in the movement for those reasons.
So, there was that and then there was the sociopathic shit. There was the drugs and criminal shit that was emerging in the neighborhoods at the same time. There was much more access to electoral life. People who may have in 1965 or ’70 come into a radical organization, could now get elected to an organization, to public office without us. Dwight Evans, Pennsylvanian congressman from Philadelphia, was one of those people. Could get elected to public office, could have a career in politics on a public payroll for the next 30 years. And he wasn’t the only one like that. Hardy Williams20 the same way, and there were others.
But the undercurrent of Black radicalism didn’t go away, because we still had two Black political conventions here. The struggle against Frank Rizzo and the forces against him called the Black People Convention. And that thrust me back in the center of stuff like that. Just working the convention. I wasn’t deliberately, “I’m going in and taking over.” Just people see me show up for the meetings and give me shit to do and I found myself at the center of the convention movement, which puts me at the center of the foundation of the National Black Independent Party. That was 1979, 1980. Which, there was a national constituency for that, but there was just no prepared national leadership. I mean, the national leadership was a mess. They were very good at traveling around the country and raising the banner of a national Black independent party. That this was the party that was called for before by the Black Assembly. But then when it came down to working through the contradictions of how you build a national organization with all these different tendencies from around the country, and how do you get it to survive this initial period? They wasn’t prepared for that. And so that didn’t last but for about five years.
Material: What you’re describing is that the real material gains that the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Liberation Movement forced upon the society then change the material conditions by which you can organize a revolutionary party and movement. And I think that kind of change has only become more exaggerated since those times. And I think that is why that is, I’ve seen in almost every imperialist country I’ve been in, people struggling with, how do we as people who think of ourselves as communists or revolutionaries or Maoist or whatever, who want to change the world… How do you do that in these material conditions? And I don’t know if you have any insight about that.
Butch Cottman: Oh, always do! Not worth a damn…. Well, for me, the problem hasn’t been how do you do it? Because that’s a problem for everybody. The problem has been, who do you get to work through this with you, that has the patience and the introspection and the personal discipline to work through this with you, to assemble of group of people around you to do this? And, to do that same thing that we had to do in 1974, which is, what are the kitchen table politics that require a revolution to solve? What do you have to do to win people to doing and being to make the world better, even a little better? And how do you assemble a group of people that’s willing to work it through over the long run? To be there at that kitchen table in the end?
Every time I see Bernie Sanders on TV, I think of when Bernie Sanders was a college runner. Bernie Sanders is three, four years older than me. But when I was in high school, track and field was a big sport in Philadelphia. Track and field had the kind of following in the Delaware Valley that say basketball has now. And the indoor season was so important that kids like me were hookying21 school to go to the indoor track meet. Bernie Sanders was one of the four or five top milers in the country. And believe it or not, then he had reddish brown, flops of curly hair. And his running was just like his politics. He wasn’t the fastest one ever, but he was the most dogged. If Bernie was behind you, you wasn’t going to break him. But you better not falter, not a step. I mean, he was fun to watch because he was not gonna to quit. He wasn’t gonna stumble. He wasn’t gonna get tired. But if you got tired, if you would stumble, that was your ass.
Material: So we gotta do politics like Bernie Sanders ran the mile?
Butch Cottman: If we going to succeed in this environment, I mean right now we got fascists in the White House, but we also got opportunity. Bernie Sanders spent the last 10, 15 years teaching us how to make an issue out of politics. He talked about this Luigi Mangione shit, in 2010, 2012. I loved it when he stood up on Fox TV, talking about, “Excuse me! Come on here. Who loves their insurance company? Raise your hand, if you’re actually crazy about your insurance company.” And this was a Fox TV audience, and they didn’t have shit they could say. Because he knew insurance companies ain’t shit. And he got a dozen reasons for making a case for universal health insurance, for single payer health insurance. So much so that he forced it onto the national agenda. Now, of course, and I thought it was an important lesson, Obama took the playbook from what’s this guy who just retired from politics, Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts took and created welfare for insurance companies and then called it, you know, publicly supported welfare. But still kept the insurance companies from ripping off tens of thousands of people.
And Luigi Mangione got tired of that shit and said, “Here, take this motherfucker.” But Bernie Sanders opened people’s eyes. That was some shit that the Communist Party USA didn’t have enough sense to do. In other words, what are the things that people are angry about, seem to be angry about? What are the things that make ordinarily sensible people a Trump voter? What are class politics in this era? I’m not trying to endorse Bernie’s personal electoral aspirations. I’m trying to endorse Bernie’s understanding of class politics in this era. And what it means to do, I mean, because the trade unions ain’t really doing shit, in terms of a militant confrontation. Now this shit with people striking at Starbucks. Yes, they zillionaires, but if Starbucks goes out of business today or tomorrow, and some of them go without coffee. . . [what’s the consequence?]
I struggle with my daughter about that shit every day. She gotta get in the car and go someplace to get her special coffee. And I’m like, baby, we got coffee in the house. I said, “Well, what we gotta do for you to save money?” And I mean, we poor. But my point is, there’s so many issues, much more significant than that, and that the Bernie Sanders approach should be the approach of a national movement, should be the approach of a popular left.
We ain’t Lenin, this ain’t Russia. The country would have to collapse in a way that right now is unimaginable, to create an environment where a Leninist clique could take over. And it’s America. This ain’t feudal Russia. When the shooting starts in America, everybody got a gun. So it ain’t like your Bolshevik clique or your long lost regiment from the czar’s army is going to take over the city and take over the railroads. What they’re going to do is get trapped in the railroads and every fucking civilian that’s got a gun shooting at them. What I’m saying is we could have a coherent left at least as dynamic as the French left. The one thing the French left has not forgotten is that they need a mass base. When I saw those damn farmers dumping that shit in front of parliament and setting it on fire, I said, “Lord have mercy. That’s the level I wanna be at. Here take this motherfucker.” I can just imagine what it smelled like. Where you come from with 1,000 pounds of shit in the back of your tractor. How angry you guys would be and how many enablers do you have to have a thousand pounds of shits in the back of your tractor. You drive 200 miles to Paris, you confront the national police on the steps of parliament, dump that shit in front of them at their feet and set it on fire.
That’s kitchen power carried to a revolutionary level. In other words, “We tired of this shit and we got the power to do something about it.” We don’t have no scenario like that in here in this country. Trump might give it to us, he might make a mess of things sufficient to. . . but still leadership would have to surface. Organizations would have to surface. I’m not aware of any.
Material: It’s a mess. That’s the thing, some people say it: this isn’t czarist Russia or this isn’t feudal China so we can’t use the same practices. But people are still trying to do the copy paste, if not from the red guards in China, then from the Panthers, like we gotta recreate this sort of dynamic and there’s so little, one, ability to really assess what is actually happening right now for people in a relevant way, and, two, to have some creative thinking about what to do about it.
Butch Cottman: Well remember now, Mao wasn’t an instant winner. It wasn’t like, let’s all go over to Mao’s house, he’ll tell us what to do!
Material: No, he tried some shit and failed.
Butch Cottman: Yeah, yes, he did. He wasn’t always in the majority, the people didn’t always vote for his shit. And were like shut the fuck up.
Material: But then they all got slaughtered.
Butch Cottman: Had to get worse. Yes. But at the same time it was getting worse in Germany, there was a hugely successful, communist party in Germany and Austria, you know, in France at the end of the First World War, but they didn’t win, and we gotta figure out, well, what was it they didn’t get right. You’re right. There’s going to be some cutting and pasting and you have to be lucky enough to get a leader that’s a genius. A Mao would not only have to emerge, but he’d have to survive.
When Lenin died, he left the worst possible scenario for an emerging Soviet Union with both Stalin and Trotsky. Just Stalin was meaner and crazier and more ruthless. But Trotsky wasn’t far behind. There would be no Red Army without Trotsky. There would be no socialist state without Trotsky. So I’m saying is, as backward as Russia was, the formation of the Soviet Union was touch and go.
America’s backward, but it’s a peculiarly American backwardness. I don’t want to live to see a shooting war in America, cause it’s going to be a bitch if it comes to that. But I would love to live to see a vibrant left contending for the people’s voice and contending for power. And, you know, either socialism or barbarism. Either a vibrant left is going to have to emerge or a barbaric right is going to consolidate itself and figure out what to do. They gonna have an answer for poor people and Black people and brown people. They making it clear now, “We’re gonna put all you illegal immigrants out. We’re gonna catch you motherfuckers eating our cats and dogs and run you outta the country.” I mean it’s crazy. And now what I’m amazed at is how rotten civic education is in America, that you could even sell people some shit like that about eating cats and dogs.
Material: So we’ve been talking a long time, but I wanted to ask, if you were running your study group now, how would you provide the materials for people to understand their own issues in this context, to make the abstract shit relevant given the world around us now?
Butch Cottman: When the study group was alive and well, we had a reading list. Was it any use to anybody other than me? I could not tell you. But I can dig it up for you. I haven’t had but maybe one person come to me and say, you know, “I really learned from you. I read some of that stuff that.” I had one person come to me to say, “I really benefited from what you taught me.” And she ain’t tryin to do no militant shit, and she a tech entrepreneur. And like she said, “I know you said change yourself to change the world, and I’ve been trying Mr. Butch.”
And I didn’t have the presence of mind and say, “Thank you, JC, I’ll keep on struggling.”
- Gulf of Tonkin incident—An incident where the US’s secret military operations in the northwest part of the South China Sea was discovered by the North Vietnamese, which triggered a confrontation initiated by the US.—Ed., Material (as all following).
- Barry Goldwater.
- A traditional wooden boat found in Asia.
- Charles Wilson.
- Meaning, it was completely illogical or out of the blue for him to get promoted.
- Close with him.
- Civilian life.
- Strick Trailer manufactured trailers/containers for trucks/trains.
- Illegal bars that sold alcohol.
- The Pacesetters were an offshoot of James Boggs’s organization out of Detroit.
- Amira Baraka.
- John Conyers, House of Representatives 1965–2017.
- Richard Gordon Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana 1968–1988.
- Northwest Philadelphia.
- Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
- A “back to mother Earth” communal organization with members of African descent, originally founded as Christian Movement for Life.
- An amusement park in the greater Philadelphia area.
- Cherelle Parker, Philadelphia Mayor since 2024.
- The public transportation system in Philadelphia.
- Pennsylvania state senator 1983–1998.
- Not going to school.