No Fascist USA!. Hilary Moore
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was to remake the country and the world. They continued to fight—against racism, sexism, class exploitation, and state violence, on behalf of the incarcerated and HIV/AIDS victims—for justice for all people. So, as we face the latest wave of fascist violence, sometimes behind tiki torches, other times behind a badge or a body camera, rest assured that their truth goes marching on.
AUTHORS’ STATEMENTS
“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 FBI tracked the rally and later framed the white supremacists as victims.7 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 incitement 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 three hundred people arrived at the rally site early with banners bearing slogans 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 my 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-protesters 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 protective maneuver that had not been offered to victims, 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 opposing 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 how might we apply those insights and strategies today? Asking and answering those questions together led us to write this book.
—Hilary Moore
Berlin, August 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 the Black Liberation struggle, and an invitation for me to join others protesting the concert.
None of these subjects was a hard sell for me. The crop of racist 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.
To most of my friends, adherents of the Gospel According to the Dead Kennedys, white supremacy never made any sense. 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 far 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 overwhelmingly 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 mat to oppose the reactionary and violent elements of the far 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 initially for the John Brown group’s former members and allies to 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 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 that 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