Recovering Black Antifascism

Keith Gilyard

The Black Antifascist Tradition:
Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition
By Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024, 280 pages, $24.95 paperback.

AT A WRITERS conference in Brooklyn during the 1980s, the novelist John A. Williams explained to his audience the inspiration for Clifford’s Blues, his novel about an African American musician imprisoned in Dachau.

Williams had seen a photograph, surprising to him, of a Black man in a concentration camp. His agent cautioned him to be sure about what he had seen if he intended to write a realistic story. The advice spurred Williams to conduct research and learn about Black prisoners in Nazi Germany.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, authors of The Black Antifascist Tradition, would not be surprised by a picture of a Black man in a concentration camp. In an engrossing history of Black antifascist struggle, they firmly assert that the essence of fascism is anti-Blackness. They state, “there is no Fascism anywhere that is not also anti-Black.” (8)

This proposition will seem counterintuitive to those who think of fascism, or at least the capital F version, as a repressive, authoritarian, far-right, nationalist, sexist, ethnic-cleansing, genocidal, European formation (both oppressors and victims) associated with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

Hope and Mullen, however, argue carefully from archives that procedural antecedents of those regimes, as Hitler was certainly aware, lay in racial capitalism and in the language and methodologies of anti-Black oppression developed in the United States during its slavocracy and the subsequent reign of Jim Crow.

The American ruling class hard-baked a form of fascism into the laws of the land. These included slave codes, the loophole in the 13th Amendment that permits slavery as criminal (often meaning racialized) punishment, court decisions legalizing segregation and suppressing democratic participation, and anti-miscegenation statutes.

Lynch Law Rule

Hope and Mullen view Ida B. Wells-Barnett as a paradigmatic figure because of her crusade against lynching and lynch law, the tolerance and fostering of extrajudicial violence to discipline Black bodies and Black labor in the post-Reconstruction U.S. south.

Wells-Barnett’s influential pamphlets Southern Horrors and Red Record, published in the 1890s, argued and documented the fact that the rampant lynchings were often enacted on the pretense of curbing or punishing Black criminality, especially rape. But the real motive usually was to terrorize Black people and dispossess them of their labor and wealth in service of a white ethnostate.

Wells-Barnett posited that white people had committed fewer attacks during the era of enslavement because of the economic value of the enslaved. She noted that after that period thousands of Blacks had been lynched without trial.

Wells-Barnett also connected lynching to sexual violence and the insecurity of white males. In addition, she was anti-accommodationist, opposed gradualism, advocated armed self-defense, promoted women’s causes, and possessed an international perspective concerning antiracist struggle.

Operating without terminology that later came into vogue, she was nonetheless a forerunner to the Black antifascism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Thyra Edwards, William Patterson, and numerous others who, over the first half of the 20th century, built on her pioneering work and endeavored to “anticipate, analyze, destroy, and replace” what Hope and Mullen term Anti-Black fascism. (4)

A Black Antifascist Project

The authors point to an array of activists across the African diaspora, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harry Haywood, Thyra Edwards, Saleria Kea, James Yates, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, William Patterson, Claudia Jones, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Some stressed anticolonialism, some pan-Africanism, some communism.

Regardless of competing or overlapping ideologies, their ideas and actions coalesced into a Black antifascist project. Their collective aim was to combat a system of colonial violence largely inflicted on the global south by the global north, a system that was part and parcel of racial capitalism.

Fascism in Germany, the authors note, horrified much of the western world because those observers saw domestic application of the repressive violence directed against colonial “others.”

Rallying points for the Black antifascist coalition included Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and the “Double V” Campaign during World War II.

In the Black imaginary, antiracist struggle in the United States was inextricably tied to resistance to colonialism, ultra-authoritarianism, and genocide unfolding overseas. Black men volunteered to fight in Italy, though virtually none made it there. On the contrary, Black men such as Yates served in Spain. It wasn’t Ethiopia, but, as some soldiers expressed, it would do. Similarly, approximately one million Black U.S. soldiers embraced the concept of Double V: Victory over fascism abroad. Victory over racism at home.

During the postwar period, the Civil Rights Congress, spearheaded by William Patterson, prominently furthered Black antifascism by way of the We Charge Genocide movement.

The organization understood, as Hope and Mullen explain, that Blacks were a primary target and thus should be a primary line of defense against fascism and the destruction of national, ethnic and religious groups: “the Negro was the American Jew under the Nazis, the bellwether group for the potentiality of a permanent Fascist order for all.” (120)

In the face of the oppression and slaughter of Black people, Patterson along with Paul Robeson presented the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations near the end of 1951. The document was in the spirit of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the UN adopted in 1948.

The Cultural Front and Beyond

Political organizing evolved alongside what Hope and Mullen term a Black Antifascist Cultural Front. Robeson proved to be a key inspiration, especially after his tour of war-torn Spain, during which he performed for Republican troops near the battlefront.

Langston Hughes, a forerunner to contemporary embedded correspondents, sent articles home from Spain. He could also be considered the poet laureate of Black antifascism by virtue of his numerous poems calling out fascism by name.

Other antifascist artists, operating with different degrees of directness, included Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Burroughs, Franklin Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, Ollie Harrington, Jackie Ormes, Ann Petry, Grace Tompkins and Richard Wright.

Much Black Antifascism in the 1960s and 1970s tapped into the Black Power movement and foregrounded armed self-defense in conjunction with radical organizing.

Robert Williams loomed as a central figure because of his militant work as president of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. He also attracted attention because of his monthly newsletter, The Crusader, which he began publishing with his wife Mabel Williams in 1959.

Williams characterized American racism as fascism, a line of analysis he continued while in exile in Cuba and China, and he stressed how anti-Blackness and a profoundly racist state apparatus (police, courts, prisons, schools) were sutured to the success of capitalism and the concomitant exploitation of the working class.

Williams influenced the Black Panther Party as they settled into an antifascist rhetorical groove by the end of the 1960s. Panther leader Huey P. Newton began to deemphasize Black nationalist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist formulations and develop his theory of revolutionary intercommunalism, a more expressly antifascist concept.

Fred Hampton, the most high-profile Black Panther leader in Chicago said, as noted by Hope and Mullen, “Nothing is more important than stopping Fascism, because Fascism will stop us all.” (142).

A watershed in antifascist organizing was The United Front Against Fascism Conference convened by the Black Panther Party in Oakland in the summer of 1969. Attendees represented a host of New Left organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, Women for Peace, The Red Guard Party, The Young Lords, and the Asian American Political Alliance.

At the time of the UFAFC, the seeds had already been sown for additional antifascist tendencies that flowered in the 1970s — the Black Liberation Army, for example, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a mostly “Black and Brown transgender and gender-nonconforming organization” founded by Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Bubbles Roe Marie in 1970, directly resisting state repression. (174).

Johnson and Rivera had played key roles in the Stonewall Rebellion. They saw fascism as a specific threat, as did the Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ community in general. (Clifford Pepperidge, the prisoner in Dachau, was also homosexual.)

Current prison abolitionism can also be traced back to that period. In fact much of the abolitionist theorizing came out of prisons, as inmates in facilities such as Folsom and Attica considered themselves to be confined to the “fascist concentration camps of modern America.” (185, 187)

Important abolitionist voices today include Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, as well as groups such as Critical Resistance, We Charge Genocide, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

Overall, Hope and Mullen have written a stellar book and rendered a vital service. Stories about many of the referenced freedom fighters have been often told. However, to reframe much of their effort, whether anticolonialist, pan-Africanist or communist, as Black antifascism may provide conceptual clarity for activists both old and new. It affords for the most part a less complicated language.

Moreover, firmly positing the centrality of anti-Black racism to fascism is the most solid theoretical move they can make because racial capitalism is what the ruling class wants to uphold in America.

Every patriarchal, natalist, anti-reproductive rights, anti-union, anti-Critical Race Theory, anti-democratic gesture operates toward establishing the order in which corporate profiteering can be optimized. Hope and Mullen know and convey this well.

Slight blemishes exist in a decidedly marvelous study. The prose is a bit jargony in spots — Intersectional Abolitionist Antifascism. (193) I have to try that on the street. And there is slippage concerning a factual matter or two.

For example, Robert Bandy was not killed by a white cop in Harlem in 1943, as the authors report. A cop indeed shot him, but Bandy received a superficial wound to his arm or shoulder. The rumor that he was killed is what sparked the uprising.

 Concerning disturbances, I expected to see mention of the Peekskill Riot of 1949, an event in which Robeson and Patterson were targeted, that made the specter of fascism on home soil seem real to many.

I also thought I might encounter, as part of the material on the prison industrial complex, discussion of the activist pushback against large prison corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) and Wackenhut Corrections (now G4S Secure Solutions).

The Black Antifascist Tradition is nonetheless an invaluable work. Hope and Mullen want their offering to provoke grassroots people to become antifascists. This reviewer would like to see them get their wish.

January-February 2025, ATC 234