LITMIR.BIZ

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In this sense, the Committee continued the work of the white civil rights organizers who had traveled to the South just two decades before. But the Committee’s members differed from these predecessors because they did not 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 come from either a reformed political system or a unifying conversion to a socialist system.

      Following cues set by their allies, Republic of New Afrika, they envisioned 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 supported a “New Afrika” being 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.¹⁶

      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. Its members made swift and bold moves to address these issues, conscious of their advantages as white people.

      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 such as floggings, mutilations, lynchings, shootings, and arson, all in an effort to regain white control of state and federal governments.¹⁷ Of the 265 Black politicians elected to office during this period, thirty-five were murdered by the Klan and other white supremacist organizations.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

      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.”²⁰ 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 U.S. political life with sixteen senators, eleven state governors, sixty members of Congress, and numerous state municipal elections running openly as Klansmen.²¹ In fact, the Klan had become such a deeply embedded feature of U.S. politics that a proposal made at the 1924 Democratic National Convention to oppose the Klan lost by one vote.²²

      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.²³ 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.

      KKK Parade, Washington D.C., August 8, 1925. Photograph by Herbert A. French. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

      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.²⁴ 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 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 Martin Luther King Jr. In 1979, heavily armed Klan members held a recruiting rally outside an Army base in Virginia Beach.²⁵

      PART OF THE MOVEMENT

      The John Brown Anti-Klan 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 are 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 of the land will defeat white supremacy.²⁶

      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.”²⁷ The conflicts playing out today over flags, names, symbols, and historical markers are clearly part of deeper social

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