Ron Camacho, The Organizer – The People Issue 2024

Ron Camacho, 69—artist, sometime organizer, “ex-gangbanger, ex-alcoholic, with a lifetime in the struggle,”—is one Chicago’s greatest living history keepers. He was never going to have a small life. Ron’s mother Louise (Lou) was Ojibwe, and, along with Ron and her other children, was enrolled in the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota. His great-great-grandfather, George Bonga, was the first Black man born in Minnesota and served as the official witness to the treaty signing that created the reservation. 

 Ron’s biological father, Valentine (Tony), was Mexican American. A white man named Louie was Ron’s stepfather. As Ron grew up, Louie was abusive to him, seemingly because Ron wasn’t his blood. Eventually, to protect her son, Ron’s mother divorced Louie and returned with Ron to Uptown, where they had lived earlier in his childhood. Uptown was then a poor and working-class neighborhood as racially and ethnically diverse as his own family.

Through the mid 20th century, Uptown was sometimes called “Hillbilly Heaven” after the number of white families who were migrating there from Kentucky, North Carolina, and the rest of Appalachia. Simultaneously, in an effort to shirk their treaty obligations, the federal government initiated a program in the 1950s to bus Native Americans from their reservations to cities across the U.S., aiming “to weaken reservation populations and assimilate them into mainstream society.” One of those cities was Chicago. Uptown, with the affordable housing that drew in hillbillies, Black Great Migration families, and others, became the beating heart of the city’s Native American community. 

As a young adult in the late 70s, Ron joined the Intercommunal Survival Committee (ISC), a group of mostly white activists organizing Uptown’s white poor on behalf of the Black Panthers. The ISC’s headquarters was on Wilson Avenue, which was then territory of the Wilson Boys, a gang of young white men from Appalachia. Despite not being white, Ron was one of the Wilson Boys: like others, he was told to join or leave the neighborhood. Whether because of his personality, his mixed-race background, or a honed survival skill, Ron was adept at building and maintaining relationships across race lines. His resourcefulness is one of the reasons the ISC recruited Ron to join their efforts. As a person of color, he offered a perspective they didn’t have, but as a gang member who knew how to survive against the law, Ron sometimes engaged in dangerous work . During the following decades, while many others in the ISC went on to work as lawyers, alderpeople, and other city workers, Ron spent years in prison.

I don’t know why I got political. Sometimes I think I have an ear for things other people don’t. In Minneapolis, my stepfather, Louie, was very abusive to me. I didn’t understand until I was about eight and I started taking punishment for all of my siblings. Everything was cool until my curls started growing out. 

My ma tried to make peace between me and Louie. She got him to become a scoutmaster, fed his ego. He could command the room. One day, he took us scouts to sing Christmas carols at the penitentiary. That was a hip thing; he and I had compromised on something. Us kids were scared–this was the big house! But then, you know, we’d sing our little jingle bells, and then the house just come down, and us little boys were in shock with the noise. [Laughs]

I must have been 12 when my ma and I moved into the fourth floor of the Leland Hotel. In 1967, it no longer had the piano in the lobby, but it was still kept up. One couple worked the desk. The woman was stately, a grand ol’ gal in big earrings. You knew she knew allllll the stories. From the fourth floor, I could look right there, over the el structure going over towards Lawrence. It was me and my ma against the world.

When I was 13, the [1968] DNC happened. I had already experimented with LSD. I liked thinking about these new ideas, like protests. I remember seeing Wild in the Streets. It influenced me. After that, I got a military shirt [laughs] and bell bottoms. Oh man, we was after bell bottoms. Later, Mike James would use [the term] “rising up angry” from lyrics in a song in the movie. [James, a Chicago organizer and artist, cofounded Rising Up Angry, a radical white working-class organization active on the north side in the 60s and 70s; Rising Up Angry was also the name of the newspaper the organization published.] 

Before I was involved in ISC, there was the Native American group. There were seven of us in Menard [a state prison in southern Illinois]. I was 21 or 22. Seven [Native Americans] in the whole joint, five of us from Chicago. A couple of us knew each other, so it was easy for us to start working together, and we copied other Indigenous religious movements going on at that time. We could meet once a week, and that was our freedom of religion. We put in a grievance that we had a right to our own thunderbird medallions. They had just won in other states already, other districts, that you could grow your hair long if you were Indian. That’s when we hit them with freedom of religion, and we won.

It was me and my ma against the world.

When I got out, how I got connected to Slim was through Randy Lockhart, one of the Boys, who went off into the military. [Slim Coleman, a lifelong radical activist who organized to help elect Mayor Harold Washington, was also a member of the ISC.] Slim basically said of me, “Try and organize that brother, he knows everybody.” Randy was in the committee a year or two before me. After I got out of jail in ’77 or ’78, we talked..

Big D’s family was from Alabama. They had been in Uptown for a couple generations, and they were just a prominent patriarchal kind of family. D was still in the joint. We sent Keep Strong magazine [the ISC’s newspaper] to everyone in the joint. Big D wrote back a letter to the editor with cuss words about the Black Panthers. The gut reaction was, “Panthers? Nobody gonna be bossing me about nothing.” I edited it, and helped a letter exchange between Big D and Slim. Slim wrote a rebuttal, explaining it wasn’t just for the Black Panthers, it was for everybody. And just before me, the committee did a Christmas food giveaway from the stage of Aragon Ballroom, and that worked too. Food distribution doesn’t know color. Big D concurred that programs for the people were good, and they started taking down rebel flags in bars.

Alan Mills [of the Uptown People’s Law Center and a former member of ISC] hit the ground running when he joined. I don’t remember any other newcomer so eager to get into the thick of it, so confident, and without any battle trophies yet. He was younger than I, and he wasn’t scared of me. 

When I moved in with the ISC, it was dissolving into the Heart of Uptown Coalition. I was the youngest male. I had been the youngest Wilson Boy when I joined, when we were told, “Either join, or don’t get caught in the hood anymore.” After Randy left the ISC, for the committee, I basically got shoved into the role of chief security along with some other men, because I knew all of the Boys on the avenue, I’d just left everybody on good terms, and I had spent the least time of [the Boys] in jail. I joined the ISC because, when it came down to it, when the party cleared, there was still good things happening. They had a food co-op going on; everybody let down their defenses to go get cheap food. They had the first kind of—they called it “welfare defense.” You didn’t have to go stand in line down at that welfare office, let people intimidate you and put you on hold. We could send somebody down there with you, help take you through that. We had some heroes there, so devoted to defense, that I wholly expect that the welfare application process in Chicago now is a result of what guys [in ISC] like Walter Tunis did, down there arguing all of these points. 

I could organize meet and greets with the other Indians in their apartments. The other thing that happened was we started a youth program. Now, half the kids would see me and think, “Oh, we’re gonna have some party,” but nah, we’re gonna play softball! We’d get a couple diamonds at the lake. I really didn’t do a lot of the hands-on coaching, but I was a supervisor—other members did the paperwork. And the thing is, without realizing it, we had taken on a couple Black teams into the white. And the Latinos were part of one softball team. 

Joining the ISC gave me a new respect in the neighborhoods. Instead of the gang, I was doing something good. Sometimes it was like, “I’m a part of the furniture. Where are you gonna put me? I’ll be up in a corner.” It was part of the most dangerous times of my life. Looking back, in one way, I do get to say, “Hey, my way worked too.” But in another way, I know that I suffered so much that I didn’t have to. I really thrashed myself, and I don’t know how to take that out of my memories. There was positives outside of myself, but internally, I had demons to deal with. 

For a while, I hung around. I [was] still, in a pinch, the go-to guy to help with trouble. But for the most part, you were gonna find me in a pine box, if I kept drinking at that rate. I don’t know if there was any other way for me, but it was my choice. I had to go on all the rides. I coulda worked for the city, but I turned it down. I was asked to leave the org in ’82 by Marc Kaplan, because of my drinking. Still, when I was in the joint, Marc [Northside Action for Justice organizer and former member of ISC] would bring my kids to visit me. 

Back then, some [ISC members] would check me on stuff I had no right to do. There were good lessons involved. And I loved the kids. We’d have child development, where one parent one night a week would have all the kids, give them enrichment. There was always this knowing, no matter what: “Hey, I help pay the rent so those kids can learn.” A few years ago, when my son died, that generation, they reached out. I was so thrilled they remembered me. One of them reached out [and said] that they used to [sneak] into my room to wake me up. Nobody wanted to wake me up, but I’d hear that little voice (“Rrroooon”) and I’d never get mad. They were good kids, all of them.

My biggest pride is in quitting drinking. I wouldn’t be alive without the ISC. For me, once you put a value on the act of survival, if you can learn early that, “Hey, you’re gonna gain something here, if you don’t get dead.” No matter what, if together, that was as far as we got? Then that’s as good as it was. And hey, that’s OK! But I also got to say, I made the team. I wasn’t blonde-headed, I got curly hair, but I made points, too. 

Editor’s note as of November 18, 2024: this story was edited after its initial print publication for clarity and to add information culled from an additional interview with Ron Camacho.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.