It Is Not Enough To Survive: The Young Patriots Story
Author Jesse Montgomery in conversation with Amy Sonnie
Presented in collaboration with Laborfest
Saturday, July 18, 2026 | 4 - 5pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
$10 Suggested Donation (reg. museum admission) OR free with (discounted) advance book purchase
Jesse Montgomery’s new book, It Is Not Enough To Survive: The Young Patriots Story, chronicles one of the New Left’s most evocative and enigmatic anti-racist organizations composed of poor white Southern migrants who helped found Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. TLM & LaborFest host the author in conversation with the Bay Area’s own Amy Sonnie for a close look at the YPO, how its history resonates with the Tenderloin’s, and what its legacy can teach us about the white working class’s political power (and peril) past and present.
It Is Not Enough To Survive (UNC Press, 2026) is a new book by Jesse Montgomery that tells the story of the Young Patriots Organization, a Chicago-based radical group made up of young white migrants from Appalachia and the South who helped found Black Panther activist Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. Formed in the late 1960s, the YPO grew from a local street gang into a powerful political and social force in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, where it fought against police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, the establishment of survival programs, and working-class cultural organizations.
In this first stand-alone history of the YPO, Jesse Montgomery presents the group as one of the New Left’s most enigmatic anti-racist organizations—one inspired by the moral and political power of the civil rights movement and the street corner socialism of the Black Panthers but also one that embraced regressive Southern identifiers, such as Confederate flags, that belied its liberatory message. Though the YPO’s existence was short-lived, its story helps us to reimagine radical unity in the face of dislocation, political oppression, and the brutal incentives of racial capitalism. As Montgomery argues, its work to cross racial and class lines and build coalitions for the greater good is a symbol of the America that could still be.
The milieu that created the YPO has several direct links to San Francisco and the Tenderloin by way of the radical student movements of the ‘60s and Oakland’s Black Panther Party. But more broadly speaking, the aims, discourse, and challenges of the YPO should resound in the Tenderloin. Our neighborhood, like the YPO’s Uptown Chicago, has been characterized by its dense population of embattled tenants, transplants, immigrants, and refugees struggling on the margins (or just outside of) the working class and perennially fighting against forces of urban renewal.
TLM and LaborFest, San Francisco’s annual month of grassroots labor programs, welcome Montgomery to San Francisco to share this underknown history. He’ll be in conversation with the Bay Area’s Amy Sonnie, a radical librarian and fellow media scholar who co-authored (with local Labor Studies legend James Tracy) Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power, a book that helped open the field for Montgomery’s scholarly focus on the YPO.
About the Speakers:
Jesse Montgomery is a visiting assistant professor of English at Berea College in Kentucky, where he teaches courses on American literature, Appalachian studies, and contemporary media. His writing has appeared in n+1, Popula, Full Stop, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies; his book It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story was published by UNC Press in May 2026.
For over two decades, Amy Sonnie has worked at the intersection of media, libraries, education, and non-profit management. She is the author of two acclaimed books on social justice movements, Revolutionary Voices and Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power, and is a co-founder of the Center for Media Justice. She lives in Oakland.