Jun 12, 2020

No Fascist USA!

The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements

H. Moore and J. Tracy

Hosted by Amanda Joyce Hall

Summary

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements (City Lights Publishing, 2020) by Hilary Moore and James Tracy recounts the stories of fearless organizers and activists who created an anti-racist social movement that fought against the normalization of white supremacy during the 1970s and 1980s. As white allies to contemporaneous Black-led movements against police brutality and incarceration, environmental racism, and government surveillance, organizers of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee supported Black activists’ revolutionary calls for Black Liberation and self-determination. Committee members developed a militant practice of anti-racism that targeted the resurgence of white supremacist terrorist groups and racist cops under President Ronald Reagan and a conservative dispensation that implicitly sanctioned anti-Black violence. The national network aimed to confront and expose Klan members and white supremacist organizations at a time when these groups sought to surreptitiously grow their base and influence in social, political, penal institutions by penetrating prisons, local school councils, and youth culture. In recalling this history of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, Moore and Tracey present an important example of anti-racist coalition building that enlisted white people to do the work of abolishing white supremacy while supporting the demands of Black activist organizations. Hilary Moore is an anti-racist political educator and teaches with generative somatics. She works on the Leadership Team of Showing Up for Racial Justice, and is the author of Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis (PM Press, 2011). Her newest book is Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis—And What We Can Do About It (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Brussels, 2020). James Tracy is an author, organizer, and an Instructor of Labor and Community Studies at City College of San Francisco. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Amanda Joyce Hall

Amanda Joyce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. She's on Twitter @amandajoycehall.

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