[ Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality
— but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives
rise up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a
relentless war for racial and economic justice. ]
[[link removed]]

IVORY PERRY, THE FORGOTTEN CIVIL RIGHTS HELL-RAISER  
[[link removed]]


 

Devin Thomas O’Shea
January 15, 2024
Jacobin
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality —
but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise
up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a relentless war
for racial and economic justice. _

Ivory Perry addressing a civil rights demonstration in front of the
St. Louis police headquarters on September 16, 1965, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch / Missouri Historical Society

 

At every inflection point in social struggle, ordinary people emerge
on the front lines of protests. Some are celebrated for generations as
heroes, martyrs, and icons. But more often these leaders, uninsulated
by economic and cultural privilege, pay an enormous price for bravery,
and are forgotten by subsequent generations. Among the elderly poor,
one occasionally finds a once-fearless activist, now living in modest
obscurity, with only old war stories to show for it.

One forgotten fighter is Ivory Perry, who was in and out of
homelessness in St. Louis over the years during which George Lipsitz
interviewed him for his biography _A Life in the Struggle: Ivory
Perry and the Culture of Opposition_
[[link removed]].

For Lipsitz, the problem with traditional protest scholarship is that
activists are required to be exemplars of bourgeois morality,
“striving to make the public realm conform to the standards of their
private lives.” In reality, organic leaders like Perry are often
both politically effective and personally complex. Perry was born to a
sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. Like many poor black men of
Perry’s background, he acquired a long arrest record — and not
just for his political activism, though that too. In addition to
homelessness, a dishonorable discharge, and incarceration, Perry
experienced depression, drug use, and psychiatric issues that
ultimately ended his life in tragedy.

But through it all, Perry waged a relentless war for racial and
economic justice. For decades he could be found in the streets of St.
Louis, raising hell in his signature straw hat. Perry wasn’t
perfect. He was an ordinary person dedicated to transforming society
through racial and economic justice. Perry fought in the most
dangerous parts of the South and Midwest, and his life story deserves
to be remembered and learned from.

“Above All, Tell the Truth”

Perry was born on a sharecropping farm in Desha County, Arkansas, in
May of 1930. “Perry was just two years old when his mother tied an
empty twenty-five-pound flour sack for holding cotton around his neck
and brought him to work alongside her in the fields,” writes
Lipsitz. The family earned around $1 per day, and no matter how many
cotton bales the family picked, Ivory’s mother, Pearl Perry, heard
the same story: “You almost got out of the hole this time; try again
next year.” Though organizations like the Southern Tenant Farmers
Union
[[link removed]] attempted
to improve the lives of black farmers, the situation remained dire.
The Perry family moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1943, seeking
relief.

Despite dire poverty and the entrenched racism that made equality seem
unthinkable, the end of slavery opened utopian pathways in Perry’s
mind.

In Pine Bluff, Perry encountered Miss Jones of Merrill High School,
who used to drive her car up and down the main street watching for
students sneaking into juke joints. Miss Jones would walk right into
the Strand or Vester theaters to search for students skipping school
and drag them out on the spot.

Perry admired Miss Jones for her honesty. She was a strong center
around which community life revolved. “If it weren’t for Miss
Jones,” Perry told Lipsitz, “I’d probably be dead now. She
taught me respect for people and a respect for truth — that your
word is supposed to be your bond.” Perry would not always live up to
Miss Jones’s example, but he always took it seriously.

Pearl Perry took her son to church often, but Perry was skeptical.
“These whites doing lynchings, they were Baptists too,” Perry
remembered thinking. “And I couldn’t figure out, if they was such
good Christians, why they were killing innocent people?”

“This was a person who was born very close to slavery,” Lipsitz
told _Jacobin_, “as thorough a dictatorship as you could imagine.
And he was taught that there is always something you can do about
that.” Despite dire poverty and the entrenched racism that made
equality seem unthinkable, the end of slavery opened utopian pathways
in Perry’s mind. His family and community were poor and oppressed.
Instead of waiting for his eternal reward in heaven, “I want to get
my reward in this world,” he decided.

Ivory Perry in a classroom. (Missouri Historical Society)

In 1948 Perry joined the military, one of the only career paths
available to him. He hoped to leave American racism behind but found
that Arkansas followed him overseas. Lipsitz writes, “Perry saw the
words ‘[n-word] go home’ scrawled on walls wherever white GIs had
been, and he resented the publicity given to white units when
victories by black troops went unreported.” Black soldiers who fell
asleep on sentry duty were charged with “misconduct in the face of
the enemy,” while white soldiers faced a lesser charge of
“sleeping on duty.”

During the war, Perry got frostbite, and was shot twice by the enemy.
On his own side, he was assaulted by white soldiers. “I remember one
night I was in Korea,” Perry recalled, “and a white soldier called
me a [n-word]. And we got into it. . . . I got the best of him and he
was bleeding like I don’t know what.” The white soldier repeated
his offense over and over. “And I said to myself then, ‘Now this
is a die-hard racist. He’s gonna die a racist. Now he’s over here
fighting too and I’m trying to protect him because we’re in the
same outfit together.’ But that kind of did something to me.”

Perry was drawn to activism because he wanted more agency than was
ordinarily afforded to a poor black man on the fringes of a racist and
highly unequal society.

In interviews for _A Life in the Struggle_, it took time for Perry to
admit that he was found guilty of insubordination and possession of
drugs during service. Ivory claimed he’d purchased a coat with a
small bag of heroin already in it. He was court-martialed and served
time in the stockade before receiving a dishonorable discharge.

It was hardly an auspicious beginning to his decades of political
activism. But Perry was not drawn to activism because it affirmed his
virtue. He was drawn to it because he wanted more agency than was
ordinarily afforded to a poor black man on the fringes of a racist and
highly unequal society.

The War Comes Home

Returning from Korea, Perry was struck by the United States’
hypocrisy — a process that radicalized many black servicemen
returning from World War II
[[link removed]].
His time in battle had left deep psychological wounds. “Every now
and then I still have a dream,” Perry told Lipsitz. “I hear kids
crying, babies creaming. You know, we had some real stomp-down racists
in the Korean War, officers. I done seen them burning houses up on
ladies having babies. We used to tell them, ‘Captain, there’s a
lady in there giving birth to a baby.’ He still burned the house
up.” But his service in America’s wars guaranteed him neither
safety nor respect at home.

In the early 1960s, Amiri Baraka pointed out the fundamental
connection between the Korean War and the emergence of the modern
civil rights movement. Black Korean War veterans like James Foreman,
Bobby Seale, and James Meredith entered activism after their
experiences in the war, as did Perry when he arrived in St. Louis —
a city every bit as racist as Arkansas, only less predictable.

“At least in Arkansas you knew what you could do and what you could
not do,” Perry said. In St. Louis, Perry found that the goalposts of
acceptable behavior for black people moved constantly; punishment was
severe, and often unexpected. But in the 1950s, the city swelled with
industrial jobs, and a massive influx of black workers increased the
likelihood of unrest. That friction created a new generation of
activists.

‘From Monday to Friday, he was just another laborer, but in the
Civil Rights Movement he could take concrete actions that addressed
the main hurts of his life.’

Perry took jobs that were typical for black St. Louis residents of the
time: working in warehouses, driving taxicabs, spray painting,
welding, blasting, steam cleaning, making sewer pipes at Dickey-Clay,
painting electrical equipment at General Cable. And the police dogged
him every step of the way. “Ivory Perry acquired a long arrest
record even though he had never been convicted of any crime,”
Lipsitz writes. “Underpaid, harassed by police . . . those
frustrations helped drive him into the Civil Rights Movement. . . .
From Monday to Friday, he was just another laborer, but in the Civil
Rights Movement he could take concrete actions that addressed the main
hurts of his life.”

For the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, an organic intellectual is
not a “momentary mover of feelings and passions.” They are not
supported by patrons and universities, and they are not detached from
practical life. Instead, organic intellectuals represent a direct
challenge to hegemonic class rule because they are rooted in, and
deeply impacted by, the economic and political life of their
community. Perry’s community was black people, poor people, working
people, the marginalized, the oppressed. He found meaning in advocacy
for his neighbors. If a single mother needed her electricity turned
back on, Perry would march down to the office and make it happen.

Ivory Perry lies down in front of a police car during a protest
against police brutality. (St. Louis Mercantile Library)

Like Percy Green
[[link removed]],
another St. Louis civil rights leader, Ivory joined the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) and took part in carefully planned
confrontations with power including the 1963 Jefferson Bank Protest
[[link removed]] —
a now-famous action against a citywide absence of black hires for
white-collar jobs. The campaign “brought large numbers of people
from the black community into the Civil Rights Movement,” says
Lipsitz, and the actions won concessions from the bank.

Perry moved between CORE and the more radical Action Committee to
Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), which demanded jobs and
improved economic prospects for black families, not just integration.
Perry walked picket lines in protest of unfair hiring and chained
himself to the doors of utility companies like Laclede Gas.

Amid ongoing racial violence in Alabama, St. Louis activists wanted to
draw attention to Martin Luther King Jr’s planned protest march in
Selma. Perry and another activist named Ernest Gilkey decided to
disable a yellow U-Haul truck at a crucial off-ramp of a St. Louis
highway. In coordination with three other actions, Perry drove the
truck up the off-ramp of a major St. Louis highway, then parked it
diagonally and turned off the ignition. “He left the vehicle and
locked its doors. Gilkey let the air out of the right front tire. When
a taxi tried to pass the truck by driving on the grass shoulder, Perry
threw himself in front of the cab, directly in front of the wheels,”
Lipsitz writes — a true Ivory Perry move. The cab driver slammed on
the brakes, Ivory stayed put, and traffic backed up for hours and
hours.

If a single mother needed her electricity turned back on, Perry would
march down to the office and make it happen.

Perry’s highway protest cost him a $250 fine for disturbing the
peace and thirty days in the squalid jail nicknamed “The
Workhouse.” But as he’d hoped, the news media reported his arrest
and his reasons, and the U-Haul stunt is credited with the impressive
turnout on March 25, when Ivory Perry and nineteen busloads of St.
Louis demonstrators traveled to Alabama to join the march. The Selma
protests pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In Bogalusa, Louisiana, Perry saw some of the most violent civil
rights conflicts firsthand, battling the Ku Klux Klan and a complicit
police force. Black workers and veterans formed an armed self-defense
group called the Deacons for Defense and Justice. “Bogalusa was very
educational,” Perry told Lipsitz, “It showed me another side of
America: violence and hatred that I couldn’t believe could happen
here. But there was also a damn good organization there — CORE
people who could get the community organized and keep it organized.”

Of the Deacons for Defense and Justice
[[link removed]], Perry
said, “I ain’t never liked no guns. See I don’t like killing and
I don’t like violence. You know, I was in Korea, and a lot of people
say guns don’t kill, that people kill. But guns do kill, because if
you don’t have a gun you wouldn’t be able to kill nobody. I know
it takes a person to pull the trigger, but I just don’t like to
spill no blood.”

Community Poison

Perry returned to St. Louis after the summer of ’65 to a charged
political atmosphere. St. Louis was just beginning an economic free
fall that would last decades and impact the St. Louis working-class
black community first and foremost. As the decline set in, Perry lent
his efforts to neighborhood improvement associations and anti-poverty
programs like the Human Development Corporation.

The Watts Riots dialed up tensions with police, and on September 13,
1965, a St. Louis officer put a bullet in fifteen-year-old Melvin
Childs’s back. The boy was fleeing the general area of a reported
burglary. Four days later, police killed nineteen-year-old Robert
Robinson when he fled questioning, and defended their right to shoot
fleeing suspects. Wielding the slogan “Police Brutality Must Go,”
Ivory Perry organized thousands to march on the St. Louis police
station and City Hall that year, protesting the murder of black
youths. All of this took place not far from Ferguson, Missouri, where
the police killing of Michael Brown sparked the first wave of Black
Lives Matter protests in 2014.

In time, just like Miss Jones, Perry became a pillar of the North St.
Louis community. On the Northside, it was known that Ivory could help
with a deadbeat landlord or an eviction notice. And he always kept a
watchful eye on the police, unafraid to take them to task for
harassment and violence.

In 1966, police shot and killed a nineteen-year-old black youth named
Russell Hayes. Hayes was suspected of burglary, and the police said he
was reaching into his back pocket for a gun — testimony that was
obviously contradicted by the fact that the shooting took place in the
courtyard of the police station where Hayes sat handcuffed in the back
seat of a squad car. A few weeks later, a sixteen-year-old white youth
named Timothy Walsh was shot and killed under similarly suspicious
circumstances. Perry organized a joint confrontation with the St.
Louis mayor on behalf of poor white and black families. Both
communities were being terrorized by police.

Perry organized a joint confrontation with the St. Louis mayor on
behalf of poor white and black families. Both communities were being
terrorized by police.

The stress of organizing impoverished people in a dangerous city built
up throughout the ’60s. “People in power blamed him for calling
attention to social problems,” Lipsitz writes. And despite his
popularity in the community and centrality to its political life, he
was also at times controversial among his own people. “Poor people
held him responsible when his tactics failed.”

Malcolm X’s assassination had affected Perry deeply. When Martin
Luther King Jr was assassinated, Perry underwent a nervous collapse.
He feared a race war would engulf America, and experienced auditory
hallucinations of King and Malcolm X encouraging him to keep the
struggle alive. In an episode of mania, Perry was detained and
assigned hospital bed rest. He was diagnosed with nervous depression.

From 1968 onward, despite his mental health troubles, Ivory Perry
continued as a foot soldier for civil rights. He could be found lying
down in front of cars during demonstrations, or mounting the hood with
a bull horn in his straw hat, or organizing tenant strikes for
buildings that violated code. His greatest strength was his ability to
organize people on front stoops and in living rooms, convincing them
to fight back.

“He wasn’t an orator,” Lipsitz told _Jacobin_. “He wasn’t a
role model like the figure of the black preacher. Perry’s role in
the community centered on action.” That included both protest and
advocacy. “I don’t know how many times I was interviewing Perry,
and someone would come up and say, ‘You don’t remember me, but my
mother was raising us, and we were about to have our lights turned
off, and you went down to the utility company and got them turned
on.’” That was how Perry established trust as an independent
radical, tied to his community organically.

Ivory Perry leading civil rights marchers to City Hall in 1965. (St.
Louis Post-Dispatch / Missouri Historical Society)

While out in the community Perry observed sickly children, often with
skin rashes, runny noses, and frequent recurring colds. He noted that
sometimes the children would eat chips of paint, which were sweet to
the taste — and contained lead. Perry brought samples to a
Washington University biologist, and it was confirmed that 95 percent
of buildings in a surveyed area of North St. Louis
[[link removed]] contained
lead-based paint and plaster, despite lead paint being banned in the
1950s.

Ivory Perry’s longest and most successful organizing campaign was
combating the hazards of lead poisoning
[[link removed]] in St. Louis. At first he was insulted
and ignored by doctors and politicians, and spent his own money —
what little he had — on testing and campaigning. Ivory was trusted
by the community, and was allowed to enter houses to assess the
hazard. He petitioned landlords to strip and repaint, and helped
prosecute for negligence when they inevitably failed to comply. The
unknown blight of child sickness and brain damage in St. Louis was
given a name and a cause because Perry agitated, set up testing sites,
and published the names of slumlords who refused to address the
problem.

Ivory Perry’s longest and most successful organizing campaign was
combating the hazards of lead poisoning in St. Louis.

Though a pivotal figure at the beginning of this campaign, Ivory would
never see the full fruit of his efforts. Throughout the ’80s, the
reality of Perry’s situation set in. He was a larger-than-life
community activist — but he was also working-class black man in a
deindustrialized city with a long arrest record and a lot of trauma,
not least from squaring off against white racists and brutal police.

The organizations he championed, like ACTION, were harassed and broken
up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTEL program. He was
beset by legal trouble due to organizing — both in
voter-registration campaigns and in organizing unions. Perry’s
mental health deteriorated further, and he was intermittently
homeless. “He began to see visions of what he took to be future
events,” Lipsitz writes, “and to hear voices warning him about the
dangers facing black people in America.” Perry’s family
deteriorated, too.

Walking the Hell Zone

In 1989, Ivory’s son Reginald had been living with his father for
three years. Ivory had secured his son’s release from a group home
in California, but Reginald was very ill. He had been committed to a
psychiatric ward previously, and had threatened suicide.

Ivory himself was experiencing continued hallucinations while trying
to remain active in local politics, but the situation was a powder
keg. On February 15, it came to a brutal head. “Twenty-four-year-old
Reginald Perry walked into the Union Boulevard Seventh District Police
Station two blocks from his home,” writes Lipsitz, “and told
Officer Willie Mae Anderson at the front desk, ‘I just murdered my
father,’ He placed a blood-stained thirteen-inch-long brown
butcher’s knife on the counter and started to cry.”

Reginald Perry was convicted of first-degree murder. Ivory Perry died
of his wounds.

 

“Ivory walked the hell zone of the decimated inner city to detoxify
a building here, to place a family in substantial shelter there,”
wrote Otis L. Bolden, assistant dean at Forest Park Community College,
after his death. “Many black parents and more black children were
touched in life sustaining ways by him.”

Perry hoped George Lipsitz’s book, _A Life in the Struggle,_ would
cement his legacy as an activist and organizer, despite the chaos of
his life. “What he wanted from me was a bougie, coat-and-tie,
glasses-wearing Jewish intellectual who could write a book that could
go places he couldn’t go,” Liptiz told _Jacobin_. “Be in
college classrooms, be taken seriously by someone reviewing it in the
newspaper, and that would pass along these lessons for someone who
could find them.”

“When I spoke at his funeral, I said he was the most connected,
collective person I had ever known. It wasn’t just that he had a lot
of associates and friends,” Lipsitz continued. It was that Perry was
connected to the to the world and to life through collective struggle.
For Perry, “survival depended upon finding value in circumstances
that others would find hopeless.”

_Devin Thomas O’Shea
[[link removed]]’s writing has
appeared in the Nation, Protean, Current Affairs, Boulevard, and
elsewhere._

_Jacobin [[link removed]] is a leading voice of the
American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics,
and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches
75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a
month._

* civil rights activists
[[link removed]]
* civil rights movement
[[link removed]]
* St. Louis
[[link removed]]
* police brutality
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]