Community Activism in San Francisco

 “White Knight,” by Henry Hitz, 2015

This is an unpredictable left-wing novel about San Francisco and environs, the high-profile assassinations carried out by Dan White and the tragedy of the People’s Temple mass suicides in November, 1978.  It centers on community organizer Barney Blatz, who is deeply involved with all these people, and through a few careless comments, thinks he encouraged these two disasters. 

A member of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PL), Barney and his wife Linda Jean quit the Party after the local leadership is expelled for going against a national Party edict.   What happened is the national Party demanded the local start a rent strike at a public housing project, Geneva Towers, after serious fire threats.  This even though most of the rent is provided by Section 8 vouchers and non-payment would endanger the resident’s right to live in the Towers.  

Then Proposition 13 passes in California in June of 1978.  This results in an additional burden on the Towers. It leads to the defunding of the local kindergarten facility in the Towers by the School Board.  A group of residents, including Barney who is a teacher there, object and organize to keep the school open.  They are successful for a time, running the school on their own. Their fight to keep the school open involves getting money - appealing to the somewhat suspect People’s Temple and the charismatic Jim Jones, the vagaries of councilperson Dan White, the capitalist Bank of America, friendly Mayor Moscone and others.  For Barney and Linda Jean it is a far cry from their prior work with PL.  But after some victories, they lose and the school is forced to shutdown due to lack of funds.

The WHITE KNIGHTS

Barney is the only ‘whitish’ person in the Towers and this is a sub-theme.  Linda Jean, his wife, is darker.  For this he gets baited and this is part of why the book is called White Knight – although there are other reasons.  He’s a bit of a white knight trying to organize a poverty-stricken community.  Dan White, the future killer of Mayor Moscone and Councilperson Milk, actually saves a family from a Tower fire.   His last name is White, another so-called ‘white knight.'  ‘White nights’ was the name given by the People’s Temple for their suicide practices.  And the ‘White Knights’ are a rumored group of People’s Temple vigilantes that probably don’t exist. 

The book illustrates the somewhat unstable personality of Barney, who zig-zags through infidelity, gay sex, paranoia, macho, belligerence, carelessness and drugs, all the while trying to ‘do the right thing.’  It almost makes you wish he was still in PL.  He and his wife buy a muddy patch of rural land as an escape.  His idealist ideas about education conflict with the harsher circumstances some children grow up in.  He’s mad at his wife for not standing up to him.  Barney’s family celebrates black nationalist Ron Karenga’s Juneteenth after an argument. He says stupid things sometimes, especially one remark he makes to Dan White and one to a tough guy named Mike, who ends up in Guyana with the People’s Temple.  But at the same time, his heart seems to be in the right place.  The book uses a font change to show Barney’s internal thoughts.

Dan White Gets Off Easy

COMMUNITY

Part of the book is drawn from Hitz’ personal experiences at a very trying time in San Francisco for someone politically active.  Hitz himself was a grade-school teacher for 35 years and probably a member of PLP for awhile, as was I.  It is a good picture of community organizing – its pitfalls and strengths, dealing with flawed humans and a political system that gives no quarter.  The People’s Temple was popular in the Towers, so not being friendly to them would be a problem.  Bourgeois black people show up from the School Board, as do petty criminals just trying to get by. 

When all is said and done, the Geneva Towers were a community. Each month for years the capitalist owners pocketed $200K from the U.S. government while letting the Towers fall apart.  At the end, what happened?  The cover of the book shows the 1998 demolition of the Towers in Visitacion Valley, San Francisco after the residents were thrown out.  White got an ‘involuntary manslaughter’ jury decision based on his Twinkie defense, even though he planned the murders.  A large number of proletarian black people paid with their lives for being part of a religious cult, no matter how ‘communistic.’  Now gentrification in San Francisco is rampant.  And people like Barney were damaged in the process.

Ultimately a dark story, but worth reading.

Prior blog reviews on San Francisco fiction, city issues and activism, use blog search box, upper left:  So You Say You Want a Revolution? (Levin/Silbar); Last Man in the Tower (Adiga); The Daminificados, (Wilson); Rebel Cities (Harvey); Cade’s Rebellion (Sheehy); How to Kill a City (Moskowitz); Capital City (Stein); Passage of Rebellion; Revolution in the Air (Elbaum); Darlingtonia; There, There; Clandestine Occupations.

Thanks to John Levin for the gift of this book!

The Kulture Kommissar

January 22, 2021