Laura Whitehorn - Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, of which Whitehorn was a member, planned the Hard Times Conference (with WUO support and leadership) as a way to build a national multiracial coalition. The goal was to bring together a multiracial crowd of more than 2,000 people at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago, from January 30 to February 1, 1976. The slogan for the conference was “Hard Times are Fighting Times.”

Even though attendance far surpassed what the WUO and PFOC had anticipated, the conference became a political disaster. Whitehorn was so nauseated by the politics of the conference that she became physically ill in the middle of it. “I hated it more than anything else I’ve ever done, she told Nicole Kief in an interview on October 20, 2002. She began to pull away from the WUO.

By the early 1980s, Whitehorn was active in a variety of radical organizations, in addition to the May 19 Communist Organization, including the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, a radical art group named for Nguyen Thi Binh, the Viet Cong's lead negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks. During this time, Whitehorn worked with subversive movements in Rhodesia, South Africa and Palestine.