No Fascist USA!

Author introductions and Chapter One of NO FASCIST USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements   AUTHORS’ PREFACES   “Now more than ever, we must unforget the past as the very survival of ourselves and humanity depends on it—from an honest unforgetting of the long history that has led us to this point, to a revaluation of our immediate past.” —Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz “We have to do better.” The words kept falling out of my mouth. I was sitting on the curb waiting for my friend to arrive. “We have to do better.” I wasn’t cold, but I was shaking. Earlier that day I had seen someone stabbed and I was still in shock. It was the summer of 2016, during the final heated months of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, when white supremacists stabbed at least five people in Sacramento, California, less than a mile from where I was born. Months earlier, the Traditionalist Worker’s Party and the Golden State Skinheads—two white supremacist organizations—had been awarded a permit to demonstrate at the grounds of the state Capitol. Their goal was to unite their organizations and create a mass coalition to support Donald Trump and defend the white race. This was before Charlottesville, but here too the F.B.I. tracked the rally and later framed the white supremacists as victims.[1] It seemed like white nationalists were escalating their violent actions on a weekly basis. I grew up drinking root beer and practicing kickflips on skateboards with my friends on the same Capitol grounds where the white supremacists staged their rally, an event that represented the exact opposite of all I held dear. And yet, my decision to go to the rally wasn’t clear cut. I felt critical of how much attention went to street confrontations with white supremacists, and how little went to those who are doing the long-haul work of organizing to create a world where everyone has safety, dignity, and belonging. Slogans like “Nazis get out!” felt insufficient, and at times just as misguided as excitement to “punch a Nazi.” Yet, I also felt frustrated that, in my five years as an anti-racist political education trainer with commitments to build broad anti-racist movements that can win, we had very few strategies ready to confront white supremacy in the flesh. Ignoring the rally seemed like the worst option. Conflicted as I was, I chose to go because I had a group of reliable friends who were committed to keeping people safe and unwilling to concede public space to those seeking to advance a white supremacist agenda. On the morning of June 26, 2016, approximately 300 people arrived at the rally site early with banners that read things such as “Smash Racism” and “From Olympia to Atlanta Antifa Fights Back.” One hundred or more cops in full riot gear were there early too. Hours passed without a sign of the white supremacists. As we waited, people around me passed out free food and water, while others walked the large perimeter looking for signs of the white supremacists. Then the call came. “They’re here! We need people here!” Many of us ran to a strategic spot in attempt to create a human barrier that might prevent the white supremacists from reaching the steps of the Capitol. Within minutes the stabbings began. Witnessing the violence filled by body with visceral, hot rage. But when a knife-wielding white supremacist stood at attention for chants of “Sieg Heil,” I froze. A large group of counter-protestors quickly surrounded the man and began to beat him. Horse-mounted police intervened, ushering the white supremacists into the shelter of the Capitol building, a maneuver never attempted just moments before when the white supremacists stabbed five people. Later that night, reflecting on all that had happened, I realized we had to do better. The next day I began contacting people who had confronted the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and 1980s. I needed to know what they had learned while confronting organized racism and supporting social movements that were fighting for self-determination. I reached out to my dear friend James Tracy and asked him to help make sense of this history. What lessons did they learn, and might we apply those insights and strategies today? Asking and answering those questions together lead us to write this book. —Hilary Moore Berlin, March 2019   I first met members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee in the spring of 1989 when I was a teenager in Vallejo, California. At the time, several white supremacist organizations announced that they would stage an “Aryan Woodstock” white power concert in the unincorporated land between blue-collar Vallejo and Napa’s wine country. In the lead up to the concert, I talked to a woman from the Committee who was distributing copies of the group’s newspaper, No KKK, No Fascist USA. I asked her what it was all about, and in the next five minutes she effortlessly connected a critique of U.S. imperialism, advocacy for Black Liberation struggle, and an invitation for me to join others protest the concert.              None of these subjects were a hard sell for me. The racist crop of skinheads that had long been a part of the area were a source of annoyance at the Punk and New Wave shows my friends and I would attend. My father, a Vietnam Veteran, had unintentionally turned me into an anti-imperialist once he was able to tell me what he had witnessed in the Army. Black Liberation? I was down for that. I had worked as a janitor at an art gallery in town with a former member of the Black Panther Party who introduced me to the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program and shared back-in-the day stories with me as we mopped floors. Most of my friends, adherents of the Gospel According to the Dead Kennedys, thought that white supremacy was bullshit. Two of my friends actually joined fascist organizations during this time. Nevertheless, when I met the woman from the John Brown group, I felt the need to declare that it seemed like the entire San Francisco activist scene only cared about Vallejo, a distressed Navy town, when the Nazi skinheads came around. Much to her credit, she actually engaged me in a serious discussion about how the extreme right functioned as a barrier to solving the everyday problems we faced, and thus why the right needed to be curtailed at every corner. I was convinced enough to attend a few community meetings and demonstrations. As a nerdy kid, however, I was not brave enough to attend the final rally where anti-fascists overwhelming outnumbered the white supremacists. The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was just one part of a larger movement that valiantly mobilized against the rise of racist organizations during the 1980s. I’ve always respected their willingness to go to the wall to oppose the reactionary and violent elements of the extreme right. As a result of studying them with Hilary Moore, I came to admire how the abolitionist spirit of John Brown and Harriet Tubman were honored in their organizing. At other points, I scratched my head at some the choices the organization made. I imagine that it must have been difficult for the John Brown group’s former members and allies to initially trust our requests for interviews. However, every one of them graciously shared with us their memories, analysis, politics, and sometimes their regrets as well. Most expressed that they were sharing their stories in the hope that the next generation of activists might learn from their history. I am extremely grateful to all of them for this leap of faith. As an author, I’m aware that writing history grants a great power to determine emphasis and set forth an analysis. I hope we have proven up to the task. Since 1989, I’ve come to recognize the ways that racism doesn’t need skinheads and Klansmen to wreak havoc and terrorize communities. It has always been alive and well in the everyday, mundane life of the United States—in planning codes, redlining, the educational system, the justice system, policing, prisons. Unlike the 1980s, there exists today a higher level of public consciousness about white supremacy, patriarchy, and power thanks to social movements like Black Lives Matter as well as sustained efforts by public intellectuals like Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore who infuse historical understanding, political resistance, and social vision with insurgent optimism. In the 1980s, the John Brown-Anti Klan Committee was a militant grassroots force which envisioned an entirely different state of affairs than the one we live in now—one where struggle, organizing, and education, succeed in abolishing white supremacy, fascism, and the violent legacies of settler colonialism. Then, as now, it is a future worth fighting for. —James Tracy Oakland, May 2019                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      INTRODUCTION PAST AS PROLOGUE   “For one, when a white man comes to me and tells me how liberal he is, the first thing I want to know, is he a nonviolent liberal, or the other kind. I don’t go for any nonviolent white liberals. If you are for me and my problems—when I say me, I mean us, our people—then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did. And if you’re not of the John Brown school of liberals, we’ll get you later—later.”                                                                     —Malcolm X, 1965   On August 12, 2017, Tiki torches blazed across Linda Evans’s television set, illuminating crowds of white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally. She was seeing the last moments of what began as a demonstration against city’s plans to expel the statue of Robert E. Lee from a local park. Charlottesville had recently changed the park’s name from “Lee Park” to “Emancipation Park.” This was one incident in a long series of battles over Confederate statues in public places.[2] Outraged over the pending removal, 500 white nationalists, many clean-cut and well-coiffed in polo shirts and khakis, marched through the town with torches angrily chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” Like many others, Evans’s first response to the events in Charlottesville was emotional: she felt terrified by the reality that mobs of aggressive white men were in the streets. The scene was all too familiar for Linda. In 1980, she was one of the core members in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, an organization that formed, in part, to fight the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and an assortment of other racist organizations. The events in Charlottesville, for Linda, prompted flashbacks to those frightening times. “Fire at night is what got to me the most, for them to be allowed to march like that.”[3] During every effort Linda had been part of to oppose the Klan, she had witnessed authorities protect white supremacists, including one occasion in Austin when racist white Marines shot at an effigy of a Black community leader. “It was just so clear,” said Evans, “that what we’re seeing today is a continuation, consolidation, and legitimization of the white supremacy we were fighting back then.” No Fascist USA! is the story of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, a national network of white activists who took up the cause of combatting an emboldened white supremacist movement. That movement, energized by a friendly face in the White House—Ronald Reagan—successfully rolled back key gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and unleashed a new wave of racist violence in America. From 1977 to 1992, the Committee established over a dozen chapters nationwide. Its mission was to counter the advance of the far-right and to support a host of revolutionary groups, particularly those organized by Black and Brown revolutionaries. This history provides a glimpse into the challenges that anti-Klan activists faced in an era before the internet made instantaneous critique and flash organizing possible. Despite the different political contexts, many of the strategic questions that anti-racist organizers faced then are equally relevant today: Are there ways of confronting racists and fascists that do not provide them with new opportunities to spread their message? How are alliances and solidarity best strengthened given the shifting and complex relationships between primarily white organizations and organizations of color? How do activists prepare for possibilities of violence and self-defense against groups that always seemed eager for bloody battles? Can forces within the state be trusted to be allies in the fight against white supremacy? Grounded in the idea that white supremacy must be countered and abolished, members of John Brown mounted fierce responses to the Ku Klux Klan when they rallied in the 1970s and 1980s. In their 1980 publication, The Dividing Line of the 80’s: Take a Stand Against the Klan, the Committee described the threat: The Klan, in Tupelo, Mississippi, elsewhere in the South, in northern cities, in prisons and the armed forces, is in open, armed conflict with the Black Liberation Struggle. The Klan, along with I.N.S., has become the border control of the Mexican/U.S. border; it is one of the major armed forces against Mexicano/Chicano peoples.[4] In addition to tracking the Klan’s activities, the Committee sought to expose connections between racist groups and law-enforcement authorities. Ahmed Obafemi, a Black Nationalist activist, coined the name of what would become John Brown’s well-known campaign, “Blue by Day, White by Night.” Here, they publicized Klan members who were working in law-enforcement agencies or held government positions, giving them access to official influence and power. “In 1976,” read The Dividing Line, “Earl Schoonmaker, the head reading teacher at Eastern (N.Y.) State Prison, was exposed as the Grand Dragon of the Independent Northern Klan. A Klavern of at least 35 was forced out into the open by the struggle of Black and Latino incarcerated people.”[5] Given their dedication to outing state authorities’ ties to white supremacist groups, the Committee refrained from requesting police protection while protesting the Klan, and did not lobby local governments to “Ban the Klan.” This also rested on their belief that the state organizes its power through white supremacy. In other words, the role of the police in U.S. society often functions in a manner that is similar to the role of the Klan. A key part of the Committee’s political analysis examined the role of the state in the far-right’s resurgence. Through their literature, they confronted the ways these entities often worked in an interlocking fashion. The Dividing Line, for example, described instances in which state authorities and elected officials directly financed violent far-right organizations (“J.B. Stoner, chairman of the National States Rights Party, under the direction of the Birmingham Police, led a bombing of a Birmingham church in 1958 and was paid $2,000 by police”), supported the Klan in its organizing efforts (“U.S. Senator Robert Byrd was a high-ranking Klan recruiting organizer”), and engaged in violent crimes (“Rowe, [an F.B.I. agent in the Klan] with the explicit approval of the F.B.I., participated in the murder of four black children in the bombing of a Birmingham church, the murder of Viola Liuzzo (a white civil rights worker), and Leroy Moton a Black man”). Building on this history, the Committee also linked the threat posed to society by the Klan with the threat posed by the state, particularly the impunity with it covertly targeted, monitored, and disrupted political groups.[6] A distinguishing characteristic of the John Brown group was its alignment with organizations fighting for self-determination. When Imari Obadele, a leader within the Republic of New Afrika wrote, “Our biggest threat comes from the white civilian armies, the Ku Klux Klan and those other semi-official forces who for one hundred years have done the dirty work of military oppression in the South,”[7] they refined their role, declaring: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee is a national organization that fights the racist violence of the KKK and Nazis, and their underlying cause, the system of white supremacy. We take our name from John Brown, the 19th Century white abolitionist who gave his life fighting against slavery and white supremacy. In the spirit of John Brown, we fight racism, build solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, and support all struggles for human rights and self-determination.[8] How to mobilize white people to fulfill that task was the central tactical question that animated the group. In the process, they encouraged white people to assume risks usually expected of people of color, including the risk of physical harm and public humiliation. The group insisted that it was white people’s responsibility to get in the way of the threats posed by white supremacists. This approach was intended to undermine the age-old norms of white silence, complicity, and active participation in racialized intimidation, coercion, and violence. In this sense, the Committee continued the work of the white Civil Rights organizers who travelled to the South just two decades before. But the Committee’s members were distinctly different in choosing not to view nonviolence as the only strategic option against white supremacy. They also diverged from much of the previous era’s radical optimism by rejecting the idea that long-lasting change would either come from a reformed political system or a unifying conversion to a socialist system. Following cues set by their allies, Republic of New Afrika, they determined that political liberation would involve the revolutionary dissolution of the United States and the subsequent formation of distinct “New Boundaries.” This sentiment was in the ether at the time, reverberating in anti-imperialist struggles and supported by the larger cultural milieu of resistance around the world. Many adherents of this view envisioned a “New Afrika” formed from the Southern slavocracy states with a Black majority: Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. The persistence of such calls was, in part, a reaction to several conditions. One was the intensification of racist terror—including the mysterious murders of two dozen Black children in Atlanta, and the general uptick in the killings of Black people across the United States during the period.[9] The group also embraced the principle of leadership from the oppressed. This meant following the political lead of those most targeted by white supremacists and those who organized to counter them. For the John Brown group, supporting the strategies of those on the frontlines of the fight was part and parcel of the work of combatting racism. The Committee made swift and bold moves to address these issues, conscious of their advantages as white people. This awareness informed how they produced printed materials, conducted outreach, articulated demands, and chose points of intervention.   THE KLAN REINVENTS ITSELF The Committee’s work was sharpened by the Klan’s campaign to rebrand itself. In 1865, the Klan forged an image of itself as protector of the lost Confederacy, a role practiced through violent opposition to the post-war period of social, economic, and government reorganization in the United States known as the Reconstruction Era. From 1863 to 1877, Black communities mobilized to win U.S. citizenship (13th Amendment), protection under the law (14th Amendment), voting rights (15th Amendment), and the right to hold political office. In response to the sudden emergence of Black citizenship, rights, and political power, the Klan formed and used terrorist violence like floggings, mutilations, lynchings, shootings, and arson, all in effort to regain white control of state and federal governments.[10] Of the 265 Black politicians elected into office during this period, thirty-five were murdered by the Klan and other white supremacist organizations.[11] Most of these atrocities, which traumatized Black people throughout the country, were largely tolerated by state authorities and federal officials, as that effort reconsolidated state power through white people.[12] Once state-sponsored racial segregation was codified in the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson, the Klan went into a lull, only to rekindle through a wave of suspicion and antipathy toward immigrants after World War I. Here, the Klan’s violent intolerance widened from Black people to “aliens, idlers, union leaders . . . Asians, immigrants, bootleggers, dope, graft, night clubs, road houses, violation of the sabbath, sex, pre- and extra-marital escapades and scandalous behavior.”[13] This “Second Wave” of the Klan was the largest, with somewhere between four to six million members, in the U.S. during the 1920s. Hiring a public relations team, the Klan became a normalized feature of American life with a semi-professional baseball team, 150 newspapers, and two radio stations. They achieved significant influence in U.S. political life with sixteen senators, eleven state governors, sixty members of Congress, and numerous state municipal elections running openly as Klansmen.[14] In fact, the Klan had become such a deeply embedded feature of American politics that a proposal made at the 1924 Democratic National Convention to oppose the Klan lost by one vote.[15] Few images capture the Klan at its peak better than photographs taken on August 8, 1925 showing 40,000 Klansmen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. demanding stricter laws against immigrants, even though a draconian one had been passed just a year prior.[16] Klan Grand Wizard H.W. Evans, who led the march, had relocated the national offices to Washington two years prior in order to have a greater influence on Congress. The Washington Post effusively described the day as “One of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.”[17] In the 1960s, the so-called “Third Wave” of the Klan worked hard to deploy the trope that they were not against Black people, but rather for white people, white heritage, and white rights.[18] This rebranding allowed the Klan to advance allegations of “reverse racism”— that gains made by Black people would come at the expense of white people. As a result of this view, the Klan in this period pushed the idea that if Black people had a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People looking after their interests, then white people should have a National Association for the Advancement of White People looking after their interests. The Klan made few actual amendments to its original platform. It adapted its communications strategy in attempt to remain appealing to whites in the transformed cultural context of the post–Civil Rights era. It was also the era when the Klan and similar organizations concentrated on infiltrating the military as a method of building power. In Vietnam, Klan-affiliated soldiers burned crosses to celebrate the assassination of Martin Luther King. In 1979, heavily armed Klan members held a recruiting rally outside an Army base in Virginia Beach.[19]   PART OF THE MOVEMENT The Committee used its regular newspaper, Death to the Klan!, to connect people and communities fighting racism. This helped to develop momentum and links that contributed to the decentralized Anti-Racist Action networks from 1987 to the early 2000s. From beginning to end, the Committee emphasized the importance of maintaining strong alliances with people who had gone to prison for their political actions. They did so by helping them maintain active connections to social movements. We began writing this book at a time when racist and fascist networks were once again more visible and on the rise at home and abroad. In order to find effective strategies to out-organize the proponents of white supremacy, it is important to understand the historical forces at play and how they echo through time. The Committee was one of many anti-Klan organizations in motion during the 1980s. Their militant stand called into question many of the assumptions held by others equally committed to the abolition of racism and fascism in the United States. Rather than focusing on the personalities of individual racists, they saw white supremacy as the common element in all the various political, social, legal, and cultural legacies of settler-colonialism. Their 1980 Principles of Unity outlined their beliefs in this regard: The Klan and organized white supremacy are a major way the US has always oppressed Third World people within its borders White supremacy has been a part of every counter-insurgency terror plan that the US has developed. The struggle to free the land of the Black nation has been a fierce life-and-death struggle of Black people for 400 years. The Black nation will win its freedom. The freeing of the land will shake the very foundations of US society; the freeing the land will defeat white supremacy.[20] While there are plenty of parallels with our contemporary situation, there are some key differences. Many members of today’s far right are media savvy and far more capable than their predecessors of assuming a kind of mainstream respectability. On the surface, battles over the removal of Confederate symbols, like those that animated Charlottesville, can seem trivial. However, such incidents are often skillfully exploited as “breakout moments” where white nationalists attempt to energize their networks and propagate their messages to new constituencies. In Charlottesville, one person told reporters, “We are simply just white people that love our heritage, our culture, and our European identity.”[21] The conflicts playing out today over flags, names, symbols, and historical markers are clearly part of deeper social struggles over competing narratives of U.S. history, their meanings, and implications for the future. Today’s far-right...