Reviews

No Fascist Usa!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements by James Tracy, Hilary Moore, Robin D.G. Kelley

pink_distro's review against another edition

4.0

this book was pretty interesting! i don't know much about radical organizing in the 80s period (other than a little bit about ACT-UP), and hadn't heard anything about the john brown anti-klan committee, so im grateful for this very manageable history.

i also didn't know about the flare-up of the kkk and klan-like groups that went down in the 80s. it makes historical sense that white nationalist vigilante groups would see more success during the time — given the Black, native, Puerto Rican, feminist, queer, socialist, environmental, etc liberation movements & advancements of the 60s + 70s that they were responding to,,, and the right-wing presence/climate of the reagan government — i'd just never heard about it in history classes or elsewhere. this book gives good coverage of that, and the broader political landscape of the 80s from the perspectives of leftist organizers at the time. this was interesting and is relevant today since many current movements & people have clear ties to formations of that time.

for most of the book they cover the various organizing efforts of local JBAKC chapters and the evolution of the organization as a whole. you get to see each chapter's local conditions and see how they adapt to them, and i thought the authors did all the segments justice without dwelling on any one for too long. the parts about chicago and the SF bay area were my favorite, because the cultural dimension to their organizing (graffiti wars in chicago and building leftist punk scenes to counter fascist punk in SF) was really compelling to me ... also bc im most familiar with those places in my life lol. they also include lots of images of posters, newspaper, literature, art etc of the JBAKC which is always fun and great for sparking new ideas and inspirations.

overall it has some good lessons and is helpful context for anti-fascist (and anti-prison / anti-repression,, which is also anti-fascist) organizing today. sometimes i disagreed with the authors' takeaways as one does, but they (appropriately) don't center their opinions, and more often than not i found their conclusions insightful and thoughtful. not a must-read for everyone, but i loved this movement history!

gaybf's review against another edition

challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

very excited to have resources like this!!! 

here are some quotes I wanted to save: 

• Immigrant workers from Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia populated the burgeoning socialist, anarchist, and communist organizations and were often outspoken opponents of the First World War. The Second Klan emerged against a backdrop of state and federal anti-sedition laws, the Mexican Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a wave of deportations of immigrants accused of subversive activities. In January 1920 alone, some four thousand people were rounded up all over the country, held in seclusion for long periods of time, tried in secret hearings, and deported. 

So we should not be surprised that the Third Klan arose at the height of insurgent movements in the United States, when the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and local police red squads surveilled and jailed key leaders just as prison organizing reached its apex. 

• 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. 
• in response to the Republic of New Africa, 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. 

• Of the 265 Black politicians elected to office during this period (1863-1877), thirty-five were murdered by the Klan and other white supremacist organizations. 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. 
• This "Second Wave" of the Klan was the largest, with the organization swelling to somewhere between four to six million members in the United States 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. It achieved significant influence in the U.S. political life with sixteen senators, eleven state governors, sixty members of Congress, and numerous state municipal elections running openly as Klansmen. (see photo"KKK Parade," aug 8 1925). 
• The Klan made few actual amendments to its original platform. It adapted its communications strategy in an 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 MLK Jr. In 1979, heavily armed Klan members held a recruiting rally outside an Army base in Virginia beach. 
• 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. The tools of the internet and social media allow much broader platforms than ever before. 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." 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 their implications for the future. 
• Any definition of fascism is bound to be incomplete. A good start is offered by Matthew N. Lyons: "Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while promoting economic and social hierarchy. We add that the social hierarchy mentioned here typically includes politics that embrace the genocide and/or intolerance of groups based on their ethnicity and religious background. 
• While the concept of "white privilege" had yet to be popularized, the Committee continued an open-ended analysis that had already gone through several iterations throughout the decades. W.E.B. Du Bois never used the term but theorized in 1935 that white workers gained the illusion of superiority and lost just about everything else in terms of wage, power, and the possibility of their own emancipation. In a sense, his description of the politics of whiteness was the opposite of subsequent understandings of privilege. Depending on their politics, theorists have emphasized the individualistic aspects of the idea or the structural causes. The basis of the theory is simple. People of color in the U.S. are excluded from economic, social, and political access that whites provide for one another. The interlocking system that upholds this inequality is led by elites with the near full participation of less privileged white people, who also get limited access to power. The process of chronic exclusion involves a violence against equality, fairness, justice, and freedom. This violence lies at the core of white supremacy and its legacy from the era of settler-colonialism through to the current period.
• In the 1960s and '70s, Theodore Allen developed these ideas to assert that there was no scientific basis for the category of the white race, and that it was invented as method of class control. He formed this thesis after meticulously searching through pre-colonial records in Virginia and finding no mention of "white" until after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. The rebellion united Black and white laborers against a colonial regime that was seen as coddling indigenous raids on settler colonies. Fearful of what might come after, Allen documented the use of whiteness to confer material and social advantages--privileges--on whites in order to sabotage potential Black-white alliances. Allen described privilege as a "poison bait" that would never allow for working-class power. 
• Cedric Robinson forever changed this debate in the early 1980s with his seminal work "Black Marxism: The Making of Black Radical Tradition." He argued that the roots of racism reach far back into Europe's history, where the "tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate--to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into 'racial' ones." This meant that not only was racism a tool of capitalist elites, but capitalism and racism were inextricably interwoven. 
• Author J. Sakai put forward that, as a whole, working-class white people could never truly be revolutionary due to unbreakable attachments to empire and settler-colonialism. He further argued that the white members of the working-class were not part of the proletariat at all, thanks to their status as settlers, and that the citizenship and labor struggles of groups who later would become white was "nothing more nor less than a push to join the oppressor nation, to enlist in the ranks of the Empire." Sakai's distinction reverberated through the Committee, for they saw white privilege as the means that the state uses to organize its support base. 
• (Analysis of the Vietnam War as a part of a larger system of oppression that reinforced white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. militarism) saw Black, Indigenous, and Latino people living within the United States as internally colonized communities, and imperialism as the main target for radical organizing. 
• Within this vast tilt toward condemnation, many in the radical left saw the Vietnamese resistance, led by a diplomat turned revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, as a living model for fighting imperial powers such as France and the United States. In fact, the struggle of Vietnam seemed to indicate that it was, at least in some ways, possible for a small country to pull out of the transnational economic system. 
• Communication between incarcerated people and activist networks was critical and often stifled. People on the outside focused on finding ways to outmaneuver the isolating structures of prison. During this period, courtroom battles were at the forefront of resistance to oppressive prison conditions, and support from radical Black organizations was instrumental in galvanizing social support and political pressure. For example, the 1969 Panther 21 case was critical in establishing a template for subsequent support campaigns. Outside allies of imprisoned radicals publicized the case, packed the courtroom in support of defendants, and covertly coordinated communication between incarcerated people. When the NYC Police Department charged twenty-one members of the Harlem Black Panther Party with 156 counts of "conspiracy" to kill several police officers and destroy numerous buildings, the holes in the case were quickly revealed under immense public support for those being tried. ... Afeni Shakur, one of two women charged, reflected on the impact of ourside solidarity on the outcome of the trial: "People thought we were good people... they had faith in  us enough to come to trial every day for eight months. So, the jury understood that." In 1971, the jury took only 45 minutes to acquit the defendants, pointing to lack of physical evidence. 
• The question of what it means for white revolutionaries in the United States to support Black Freedom movements and Indigenous sovereignty goes back to the first slave revolts and Native uprisings on the continent. In this regard, the politics of anti-imperialism, and the influence of imprisoned radicals, evolved and further defined these questions during the 1970s. The emergence of political activists such as Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and Martin Sostre in prison shaped the political priorities of those on the outside. Imprisoned revolutionaries also contributed to an immense body of books and pamphlets that defined the political goals of the movement. Whitehorn stressed this point, "I don't think people today understand just how much people in prison influenced and created the ideology of anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement on the outside. This is how it started. The nationalist movement had been attacked by the state." 
• Politicians began to manipulate growing levels of white economic anxiety in an attempt to channel it into antipathy for the emerging Civil Rights movement. This would later be a central component in the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy." Such strategy involved "dog whistle" tactics in which phrases like "law and order" were used as code, understood one way publicly and another way among white supremacists. 
• 1962 Reagan flipped to Republican and endorsed racist Barry Goldwater. The impacts of these shifts were significant and far-reaching. Organizer and author Suzanne Pharr has described this era as the emergence of "modern domination politics" by which the privileged few seek to control the lives of the many. "Very few predicted how fast far-right ideology would move into the mainstream or recognized this political force for the steamroller it was." This steamroller came in the form of the New Right Coalition composed of socially conservative Christians, business elites, and a reactionary, low-income white population willing to vote against its own economic interests in order to remain aligned on other fronts, including law enforcement focus against Black and Latino people. The New Right began mobilizing against such issues as abortion, welfare, equal rights protection, affirmative action, multiculturalism, drugs, crime, and most forms of taxation. ... The New Right perpetuated the Old Right's hard anti-communist doctrine and militancy, and adapted it to the changing times. The New Right also benefited from rising popular anxieties about economic instability and the perceived decline of U.S. power under Jimmy Carter. The political climate of precarity and fear reverberated along racial lines. 
• Julie and Susan hung out with the students and talked with them about what it meant for Nazis to have the right to access public spaces, and which communities have the choice to ignore Klan activity and which do not. They told the students about the Klan rally in Washington that had been shut down just ten months prior by the "Labor/Black Mobilization to Stop the Klan in Washington." There, 5,000 anti-Klan protestors, led by a coalition of Black union groups, had blocked off downtown Washington, where the Klan planned a march. It was touted as a successful test of protecting public space from hate groups in a Black-majority city. The three dozen Klansmen that showed up, did so late and in normal clothes, and were escorted by police to Lafayette Park for a question and answer session with media. This was when the news coverage switched gears and focused on the tear gas being used on the anti-Klan demonstrators, who were throwing rocks at the Klansmen guarded behind the police line. The event received a lot of mainstream coverage, mostly critical of the tactics used by anti-Klan demonstrators. Despite mainstream depictions of overreaction, including coverage in the New York Times, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee claimed it as a victory for anti-Klan efforts across the country. 

Reporters with cameras and curious onlookers gathered to see what would happen. Approximately one hundred anti-Klan protesters arrived, and, despite the warnings from the principal, groups of students from Yorktown High showed up too. A silence came over the crowd as two hundred police arrived, lights flashing, to escort two buses full of Nazis and Klansmen onto school grounds. Once the buses were parked at the entrance, the anti-Klan groups broke into yells: "Cops and Klan Go Hand in Hand!" and "We Don't Want You Here!"

• Statement from the John Brown Committee: The Ku Klux Klan has no right to march. The Klan is a right-wing armed organization dedicated to the violent subjugation of all Black people. Armed fascists have no right to parade through the streets organizing for genocide and war. The fact that the US government promotes, protects, and builds the Klan, and many white people defend the Klan, is not about "free speech," but white supremacy. The Klan is being built today to defend an empire in crisis. US imperialism needs the Klan to organize white people to total loyalty to the system, and to attack the struggles of Black (New Afrikan) and other Third World people for human rights and liberation. From Miami to Georgia to Washington D.C. Black people have stopped the Klan from marching on their cities. Anti-racist white people can follow their example and do the same. All progressive people have a right and responsibility to stop the Klan. The Klan has no right to march or even exist. 
• On a sunny day in Austin in 1984, chanting from 2,500 anti-Klan demonstrators could be heard for blocks. From the beginning, the police presence loomed large with four hundred officers in the streets and SWAT teams positioned on rooftops. Protestors surrounded the seventy white supremacists--some in red and black Klan robes--marching alongside the KKK Boat Patrol formed in 1979 to attack Vietnamese fishermen. The police formed a perimeter around the Capitol building. A wall of riot police in green military uniforms protected the Klan members, who intended to march from the park to the State Capitol and back. The human rights march brought out a broad cross section of Austin, including professors, students, teachers, and punk rockers. People chanted, "we're fired up, won't take no more!" Banners read "Abajo Con el Klan" and "Reagan and Klan go hand in hand." The massive crowd fell silent when Black Citizens Task Force leader Velma Roberts took the bullhorn. "We have been discouraged by people saying we should ignore the Klan," she commanded. "We think silence is consent. And if we decide to ignore the Klan, then they come into our community and march." 
• Eleven activists and one reporter were arrested during the rally. Legal proceedings would drag on for years, punctuated by postponements and new arrests. Three members of the Brown Berets--Paul Hernandez, Maria Limon, and Adela Mancias--were charged with "resisting arrest" despite the nationwide release of video showing Hernandez and Limon being beaten by police without provocation. Hernandez believed that he was specifically targeted due to his work helping victims of police brutality file formal complaints against cops. The Task Force supported this claim, "The A.P.D. has been known to selectively target and brutalize East Austin community activists and members of their family because of their political beliefs. This police brutality is usually covered up by the Internal Affairs Division of the A.P.D., whose standard procedure is to find any accused officer innocent. The officer is then encouraged to file [perjury] charges against the victim. The situation on Sat. Feb 19th was no different."
• In 1983 the Committee argued in "Death to the Klan!" that defending the First Amendment rights of white supremacists served to fracture the anti-Klan movement by positioning those who engaged in confrontational anti-Klan activity as "anti-democratic." They wrote that this dynamic enabled white supremacists and state authorities to use "anti-democratic" charges as leverage to criminalize a wide range of groups, including Black and Brown movements for self-determination. 
• What made Chicago ripe for racist organizing? In the 1970s, a 10 percent decrease in the white population and a similar increase in the Black population contributed to white racial anxiety. The 1983 election of Harold Washington, the city's first Black mayor, dismantled some of the political patronage system that had governed the city for decades. A year after his election, the Save Our Neighborhoods/Save Our City coalition, a collection of white neighborhood groups, created a list of demands articulating the anxieties of those who never anticipated a Black mayor in Chicago. This coalition, consisting of more than a thousand white people, insisted that its efforts had nothing to do with racism. As a way to soft-peddle their objections to Chicago's limited residential integration, they focused much of their anger on the real estate industry. 

Severe segregation in Chicago helped catalyze an anti-racist presence in the city. In particular, the neighborhood of Uptown, sitting between Lakeview and Rogers Park, was always contested territory in Chicago's desegregation wars, and it continued to be so throughout the 1980s. Known as "Hillbilly Harlem" or "Hillbilly Heaven," in the 1950s and '60s Uptown had attracted Southern white migrants who came to the area in search of work. In the early '60s and '70s left-leaning groups such as the Young Patriots Org, Rising Up Angry, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee organized working class whites in solidarity with groups such as the Illinois Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords Org. ...encouraging all to join the movement against white supremacy.

- The Austin chapter of the Brown Berets officially formed in 1973 in response to police beatings of Latino people, including Gilberto Rivera, who was attacked while leaving a fundraising event for the Mexican American Youth Org, which was starting a political party, Raza Unida. At the time, increasing racial tensions were deepened by a spate of police violence in communities of color. Among the most notorious incidents was the 1979 case of Gril Couch, a Black man who was killed by two white police officers in plainclothes after an argument over a boombox. In response, Austin's left began a campaihn to establish a Citizen's Police Review Board. 
1983, the FBI raided the Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School and Puerto Rican Cultural Center. The crackdown in Chicago came in a long line of efforts against the movement for Puerto Rican independence. According to Howwie Emmer, the convictions in the preceding years made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out joint work. "Here we were saying we were in support of armed struggle, but those who were actually carrying it out were all in prison." While continuing to support the revolutionary Puerto Rican movement, the increase in racist incidents in Chicago provided the Prairie Fie crew with an abundance of reasons to bolster support for the Black community. Rather than return to Cali in 1985 they formed the Chicago Chapter of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. 

• In the late '70s and early '80s the state response to graffiti contributed to the proliferation of surveillance tech and the criminalization of communities of color. By focusing on racist graffiti, the John Brown group demonstrated that it was willing to address everyday community concerns while at the same time exposing the racial dimensions of a "graffiti war" that mostly targeted young people of color. They decided to organize a broad-based front. Building the Coalition to Stamp Out Racist Graffiti, the John Brown Committee successfully brought together a diverse array of groups from Chicago's left, including pacifist orgs, labor unions, and neighborhood and student groups. 
• In time, the influence of the neoconservative Thatcher years increasingly politicized the bands and pushed them into solidarity with oppressed groups. Surprisingly, some of rock's old guard moved decidedly to the right during this time. Superstar David Bowie told Playboy magazine that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. "Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.... You've got to have a far-right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up." That year musician Eric Clapton drunkenly declared from stage that Pakistanis needed to leave the United Kingdom. Combined with a series of racist attacks, including the high-profile 1976 slaying of Alab Ali, a garment factory worker, it was clear that the far-right's presence in the U.K. could not be ignored.

The Anti-Nazi League organized the first "Rock Against Racism" concerts. Thru the U.K. concerts featuring punks, skinheads, and reggae artists opened a powerful cultural front against social intolerance and racism. [...] The politics of both Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Communism found their way to the U.S. During the Reagan years, the punk rock subculture in North America was a mostly left-wing affair, so much so that it seemed like a matter of genuflection for a band to have an anti-Reagan song. 

• Dan Sabater, a founding member of RUSH, was a working class skinhead who often found himself at odds with the middle-class sections of the left. "The left's lack of recognition of anti-racist skinheads gave the right carte blanche to hijack the subculture. But I think that's a general problem on the left--not engaging people unless they are perfect. Not engaging people with contradictions that must be worked out. Not engaging people unless they fit some desired ideological bill. Easier to stick to college students and stay in the comfort zone. Which leaves anyone outside that to get eaten by wolves."
• MDC (Millions of Dead Cops, b.Austin) became the band most identified with the John Brown group's politics. A line from the band's song "Born to Die" was adopted by the organization at its best-known slogan: "No Cops, No KKK, No Fascist USA!" The band directly promoted the group and invited the organization to table at various shows, including Central American solidarity benefits and the Rock Against Reagan tour. 
• "We practiced in the attic, and it was a huge space. At one of these shows the son of Tom Metzger, the Nazi leader, showed up with some of his skinhead buddies. We were upstairs, and someone grabbed me and told me they were spray-painting swastikas on the house (Big Blue). Som we bolted downstairs and started wailing on them. We did them substantial damage. Threw that kid down two flights of stairs." 
• "Too often, our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they 'succeeded' in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remained pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to struggle for change." - Robin D. G. Kelly
• The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee lasted 13 years, enjoying a longer life than many radical left-wing orgs in the United States. By the early '90s, the group's membership slowly waned as members moved onto other projects, began families, or pursued careers deferred by lives spent on the front lines. There was no dramatic end, written summation, or even a final meeting to call it quits. As the org wanted, the political activism of its members continued in new directions throughout the next decade and beyond. 
• By the end of Reagan's second term, more than 61,816 people had died from the AIDs epidemic in the United States. False rumors that AIDs could be transmitted through mosquito bites or casual contact with infected people created a climate of fear and increased stigmatization of both the disease and LGBTQ people. 
• In the California prisons, Linda Evans co-founded an organization called Pleasanton AIDs Counseling and Education (PLACE). With the help of Judy Greenspan, PLACE modified Alison Bechdel's comic book Dykes to Watch Out For and turned it into an educational poster with HIV/AIDs information in the dialogue bubbles. The club gained permission to accompany women to receive HIV test results and provide peer-based counseling. 
• Former John Brown member Nancy Kurshan and husband at time Steve Whitman gave presentations to challenge the liberal assertion that prisons were attempting to rehabilitate people. They argued that prisons instead served to subordinate and control communities of color. They correlated the rise of mass incarceration as a government response to the rebellions of the '60s and '70s, particularly uprisings by Black people. 
• The Marion Lockdown Committee published a book, "Can't Jail the Spirit," that explained the political prisoners were those "who have made conscious political decisions, and acted on them, to oppose the U.S. government and who have been incarcerated as a result of those actions. These actions are taken in response to economic, social, and political conflicts within our society." They pointed out that prisoners of war were people who were members of oppressed nations who believed that their nations were at war with the United States or were building toward such a war.
• White supremacists are not outliers living off the grid in rural areas; they are organizing all around us and serve in the military, in the police departments, on prison staffs, and in the offices of elected officials. [...] Today, more far-right groups have entered the White House to provide counsel on federal policy than ever before. Similarly, more far-right politicians hold office than ever before. In 2018, the number of hate groups recorded in the United States rose to 1,020, an all-time high. The number of white nationalist groups grew nearly 50%, from 100 to 148. And, in 2018 alone, the "alt-right" was responsible for killing forty people in the U.S. and Canada. While the Trump administration was far from the only cause of this spike in activity, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that approximately 6% of the 198 million people living in the U.S. "have beliefs consistent with the racist right wing worldview, meaning that they broadly believe that politics should promote white interests above those of other racial groups." 
•  A key strength of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was the intense level of solidarity the organization developed, both among members and with other anti-imperialist organizations. Such relationships can be an activist org's greatest asset. In the absence of traditional resources like material wealth, solidarity is power, and the Committee was able to accomplish much because of members' dedication to one another and the vision of liberation they had in common. 
• The ways previous movements practiced the defiant pose of non-cooperation are relevant today because activities of all kinds--including those committed to Black Liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Palestinian human rights, Indigenous sovereignty, peace, animal rights, freedom of the press, and ecological sustainability--continue to be targeted by federal grand juries. In 2016, a federal grand jury convened during the height of nonviolent protests targeting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in an effort the Water Protectors Legal Collective called "a broader effort to criminalize Water Protectors and to unfairly target individuals in an effort to divide the movement." 
• Another notable strength of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was the organization's commitment to "no-platforming"--actively disrupting racists and fascists from publicly promoting their ideas. This confrontational approach emerged in response to white supremacy's record of atrocities inside the United States, and its connection to fascistic violence throughout the world. If white supremacists' history of perpetrating atrocities was intolerable, then messaging and platforms used for propagating narratives validating those histories and acts of violence should also be considered intolerable. 

As a tactic, no-platforming has been rooted in the idea that ignoring fascist and racist formations, no matter how small, does not prevent them from growing. [...] On multiple occasions, white supremacists have walked away untouched from serious criminal charges by successfully arguing their right to free speech was violated. 

• Given the numerous examples of far-right gatherings escalating into violence against marginalized communities, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee considered disrupting such events as a legitimate form of augmenting the security of targeted populations. Given the long history of police and legal systems supporting white supremacists, the Committee never expected authorities to protect communities of color from the threats posed by the far right. Instead, the Committee went to locations where white supremacists were demonstrating in order to directly support communities threatened by the gatherings, "The public needs to see a voice of opposition. We were showing that there are white people who are against what [the Klan and other white supremacist groups] stand for," D.C. member Julie Nabov asserted. "We were showing a clear opposition to having a public building used for white supremacy." 
• Working with youth in terms of their own cultural spaces and forms can be a powerful method to increase education, organizing, and resistance to the social intolerance and racial violence of the far right. 
• Historically, revolutionaries in movements on the left have received harsher sentences than racist militants on the far-right. Leftists are detained more often in isolating and inhumane conditions, and more are prosecuted as groups or movements, rather than as individual offenders. (ex 1980-1984 Greensboro, NC)
• (The Committee) often focused its attention on abolishing white supremacy solely, rather than attempting to do so while also confronting white working-class willingness to serve the interests of the wealthy. The Committee was dedicated to reaching out to working-class sectors as potentially valuable anti-racist groups, but not ready to organize these populations to revolt against the economic injustices imposed by the wealthy. Bob Boyle explained that they were simply not prepared to incorporate working-class issues into their programs and campaigns.  

tscott907's review against another edition

4.25

This was a long, challenging, but ultimately very important read. In 2020, I'm trying to read more nonfiction and antifascist literature, and this was a well-researched, interesting, and often sad read. I recommend this book for absolutely anyone who is interested in the history of fascism and fighting fascism — I received a free copy of the e-book from City Lights bookstore. Check it out!

michellehogmire's review

challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0