No Fascist USA!. Hilary Moore
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Tracy
Oakland, August 2019
PREFACE
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.8 Outraged over the pending removal, five hundred 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!”
As with many others, Evans’s first response to the events in Charlottesville was emotional: she felt terrified and outraged 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 of 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.”9 During every effort Linda had been part of in opposing the Klan, she had witnessed authorities protect white supremacists, including one occasion in Austin, Texas, 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 normalization 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 the United States. From 1977 to 1992, the Committee established more than 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 seem 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.10
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 discussed the role of police and prisons, and the names of 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.”11 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 was to examine how the state contributed to the far right’s resurgence, and how they 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 FBI agent in the Klan], with the explicit approval of the FBI, 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 which it covertly targeted, monitored, and disrupted political groups.12
John Brown Anti-Klan Committee co-founder Susan Rosenberg described what set them apart from many of their anti-Klan colleagues of the day. “We believed that the KKK was not the ‘lunatic fringe’ of the racist movement but rather the vanguard of an enormous popular current of white racist sentiment. And we believed that without an active anti-racist movement to both oppose the racists and support Black-led efforts, we could not have a radical or progressive movement in the United States.”13
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 that the “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,”14 the Committee refined its 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.15
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 ostracism. 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