“A Force of Potential Revolutionaries” is a social movement history of the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), an organized formation of unhoused people that spanned over a dozen cities and attracted more than 35,000 dues-paying members. The NUH’s founders, all pushed into homelessness by the tectonic economic shifts of the late 20th century, all carried forward their experiences participating in political struggles of previous decades: the civil rights movement, rent strikes, labor unions, electoral fights, welfare rights, Third World Communist formations, urban rebellions, and more. Adapting these tactics to the moment eventually led to the embrace of housing takeovers targeted at vacant, federally-owned land. Demanding and then actively seizing the land, the homeless union enacted a politics of land redistribution that, in many cities, worked. Through the crucible of this organizing, NUH organizers began to understand themselves as part of an international class of landless people whose movement aimed at the heart of urban capitalism: private property.

The NUH reveals a hidden history of unhoused people in the 20th century United States not just spontaneously rebelling but strategically organizing for their right to the land. The NUH points to the importance of seeing land struggle as class struggle, and provokes a re-imagining of the history of the United States through the prism of fights over land – a re-imagining that centers the lives, communities, and politics of Black and Indigenous people in resistance to settler colonialism, slavery, and the ongoing (after)lives of each. The homeless union’s successes – and failures – demonstrate the cracks in the capitalist housing system that movements of the poor today can once again begin to open.