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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 in racialized intimidation, coercion, and violence. 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 struggles over competing narratives of U.S. history, their meanings, and their implications for the future.

Today’s far-right networks include many middle-class and wealthy participants, and their coalitions are complex. Neo-Nazi groups (Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, National Socialist Movement), followers of web-based far-right platforms (The Daily Stormer, National Policy Institute, Nationalist Front), white supremacist groups (Ku Klux Klan, Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, Identity Evropa), and various armed militia groups (Oath Keepers, 3 Percenters, Virginia Minutemen Militia, Light Foot Militia)²⁸ are often able to subordinate their differences in the interest of building a unified movement.

Today’s anti-racist and anti-fascist organizers face the same challenges as their political ancestors in terms of building and maintaining diverse coalitions. Typically, those willing to confront white supremacists in the streets include students, clergy, and local community members. In Charlottesville, national organizations such as the broad, chapter-based Showing Up for Racial Justice, and Redneck Revolt, which advocates armed self-defense, worked to find common ground on the frontlines. Strategies to confront white nationalists are mixed. For instance, some groups in Charlottesville were determined to remain nonviolent under any circumstance, and sang songs like “This Little Light of Mine” to counter white nationalists’ chants of the “Our Blood, Our Soil!”²⁹ Others came prepared to defend themselves in the event that they or other counter-protesters were attacked, and arrived equipped with face-masks, first-aid plans, and shields.

The confrontations in Charlottesville ripped open many of the tensions simmering just under the surface of the anti-racist coalitions. Internet pundits and media commentators suggested that the violence could have been avoided had counter-protesters remained peaceful or chosen to not directly confront the racists. Professor and theologian Cornel West, a well-known adherent of nonviolence who was present in Charlottesville, had a very different take: “Those twenty of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists who approached, over 300, 350 anti-fascists. We just had twenty. And we’re singing ‘This Little light of Mine,’ you know what I mean?”³⁰

The role of the police comes into question. In Charlottesville, the police stationed around the corner did nothing to prevent white nationalists from using sticks to severely beat DeAndre Harris, a twenty-year-old Black man, in a parking garage. As the police “stood to the side and did not try to prevent” skirmishes, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascists, injuring nineteen people and killing Heather Heyer.³¹ President Donald Trump weighed in on the violence by saying, “I think there is blame on both sides.”

In addition to the president, plenty of news outlets were also unwilling to pick sides. Adam Johnson, an analyst with the nonprofit watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, studied six national newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Washington Post—in the month following Charlottesville. According to Johnson’s report, these papers “published 28 op-eds or editorials condemning the anti-fascist movement known as antifa, or calling on politicians to do so, and 27 condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or calling on politicians—namely Donald Trump—to do so.”³² Johnson’s study concluded that while most “both sides” columns added a qualifier clarifying that there was no moral equivalency between antifa and neo-Nazis, this framing could not help but imply that there was. And a few explicitly argued, yes, anti-fascism was just as bad as fascism.³³

When alt-right leaders spread racist messages at college campuses nationwide, those who opposed them often argued bitterly against each other over tactics and strategy. What role should militancy play when confronting the far right? Should those who espouse a rhetoric of racial subjugation and genocide be given platforms to spread their views and enlist new recruits? To what degree are the state and commercial media complicit in spreading the messages of the far right?

These are old questions that harken back to another time when the far right was on the march in the United States—the 1980s. Then, as now, far-right aggression was emboldened by a friend in the Oval Office. And during Reagan’s time, the Klan was not the only racist organization on the scene either. The Aryan Nation’s recruitment efforts targeted those influenced by Christian Identity teachings and the view that a race war was imminent. The White Aryan Resistance cleverly operated within youth culture in a concerted effort to expand its ranks with young people. The National Association for the Advancement of White People used a polite middle-class veneer in an attempt to make notions of white supremacy appear more approachable. The era leading up to Reagan’s election saw increased collaboration between traditional patriotic racist organizations such as the Klan, and neo-Nazi groups advocating armed revolution against the U.S. government. This resulted in the “Nazification of the Klan,” the formation of the “United Racist Front,” and increased outbreaks of violence such as the Greensboro massacre that took place on November 3, 1979.

Fascist movements have played a role in U.S. politics since the 1930s. In Right Wing Populism in America, Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons describe fascist activities as building “national, racial, or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies.”³⁴ While most fascist organizations have not had the direct access to state power that other right-wing groups have historically enjoyed, they still have played a pivotal role in influencing U.S. politics. Even when such organizations have been in a lull, their fascist tactics, cultural cues, and ideology have been able to influence forces across the political spectrum, including dominant discourses.

The call to uphold the rights of white people was notably popularized by Klansman David Duke in the attempt to rebrand the Klan’s image in the late 1970s. In his revival of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, Duke gave the Klan’s agenda a new face. He described his group as “primarily a white rights lobby organization, a racialist movement, mainly middle-class people.”³⁵ This preceded the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which codified a precedent for “reverse racism.”³⁶ This marked a shift toward retrenchment in the courts, and created alliance-building opportunities between street-based reactionaries and mainstream politicians.

Today’s white supremacist networks build upon the rhetorical foundation laid by Duke. A 2017 report by Daniel Kreiss and Kelsey Mason in the Washington Post argued that the right reinforces racial affiliation as a basis for political power. Inequality, in the white nationalist imagination, has little to do with economics or the distribution of rights and resources. As Duke did, today’s far right argues that white pride does not equal white supremacy. This allows proponents to sideline discussions of structural inequalities and trumpet the idea that people naturally prefer the company of their own group. Kreiss and Mason argue that, despite the fact that, “the alt-right seemingly eschews white supremacist language, at least in some public forums, to broaden the movement’s appeal, its racially pure vision of a white America is as racist, exclusionary and anti-democratic as that of the segregationist ‘authoritarian enclaves’ of the Jim Crow era.”³⁷

CONTESTED HISTORIES

No Fascist USA! is a collection of stories from the underexplored history of anti-fascist activity in the United States. The book follows the formation of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, its dedication to movements for self-determination, and its confrontations with organized white supremacy in the streets and within the state. Chapter One traces the deep shifts in the political terrain of the radical left in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It begins in New York with political prisoner support networks and the John Brown Book Club, and examines the impact of Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur’s escape from prison and the Greensboro massacre. Chapter Two explains how Reagan’s election gave the green light for racist vigilante mobilizations and raised the stakes in the politics of confrontation for the Committee and groups across the country. Chapter Three maps the Committee’s place in relationship to the larger anti-Klan movement. Chapter Four explores the evolution of the organization’s approach by examining the deployment of cultural politics from both the left and right. Chapter Five traces the paths that key activists took after the dissolution of the Committee. Chapter Six offers lessons for continuing the fight against organized and structural white supremacy today.

Narratives about any part of dissident political history of the United States will always be contested. This is especially the case when such narratives affirm efforts to sabotage white supremacy or to confront empire, or do not conform to fixed notions of nonviolence. There are many worthy books about the political family from which the Committee sprung. The best of the bunch tend to avoid the one-dimensional portrayals of activists either as sainted revolutionaries or as misguided and dangerous insurgents. We have attempted to live up to their examples. If any insight on this history is to be successful, it must explore the real-world motivations, politics, assessments, and context of the people it examines. This has pushed us to rely on interviews with veterans of the Committee and to grapple with their contributions and failures. Any direct quote from a member or their associates represents the viewpoint of the speaker, not that of all of the former members. It also caused us to examine the gaps between what activist organizations like the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee thought would come of their actions and what eventually transpired. We walked away from our long conversations with them in awe of their courage, appreciative of their theoretical work, and sometimes perplexed by their strategic choices.

Researching this history was surprisingly easy in terms of gathering archival materials. Those involved wrote extensively and debated publicly, making their case in published statements, graphic flyers, and booklets. Many of the people we interviewed who were in the Committee, or close to it, have continued to organize.

The materials we used to research this history all have strengths and biases. We studied the Committee’s own newspapers to understand its positions, campaigns, and organizational evolution. We conducted more than four dozen interviews, many with former Committee members, some with those who worked with them, and some with those who were critical of the group’s approach. We examined commercial newspaper coverage of major events to which the Committee was responding. We read declassified FBI documents, including accounts from undercover agents. We scoured toolkits generated by a variety of organizations within the anti-Klan movement of time.

Throughout this book, we have attempted to define words and terminology close to the way radical activists in the 1970s and 1980s did. The meanings of words change over time as they are tested through debate and social struggle. No one definition of any of these terms was ever universally accepted. We define white supremacy as a system that delivers economic and social advantages to white people at the expense of people of color. This system is multi-layered and includes practices and advantages delivered to those who do not personally subscribe to ideas of racial superiority. The particular type of white supremacy discussed in this book is that propagated by the far right—those who actively organize and promote racial subjugation. While those of the far right always keep the option of violence on the table, they also incorporate other tactics, electoral and otherwise, to advance their agenda. Conversely, anti-racism is shorthand for the political project of undermining or eliminating both individual racism and systemic white supremacy. Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of racism is particularly useful in expanding the endgame of systemic white supremacy: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”³⁸

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.”³⁹ We add that the social hierarchy mentioned here typically includes politics that embrace the genocide and/or intolerance of groups based on their ethnicity or religious background. In academic circles, the racial aspect of fascism is often debated, with some positing that fascism doesn’t need to be racist in order to be fascist. That debate can be held elsewhere. For the purposes of this study, we could not find a single fascist organization active in the United States during the 1980s that did not embrace genocide and expulsion. We also point to the value of understanding fascism adjectivally, rather than as a noun, to help understand its adaptive nature. In other words, an arguably democratic government may display fascistic behavior without being considered a totalitarian government.

The 1980s also saw what the Committee described as the “Nazification of the Klan”—a process by which sectors of the white supremacist movement jettisoned notions of working within the United States system and committed themselves to the overthrow of the government. In this book, the terms racism and fascism can seem to be used interchangeably, especially when taken from a movement publication or in a direct quote from a participant.

Throughout, we hear activists refer to “the state” and denounce “state violence.” We think of the state as the sum total of the dominant legal, social, and cultural institutions. By this definition, state violence is violence carried out or implicitly sanctioned by these institutions. As we will read, the concept of state violence is often complicated by implicit or explicit collaboration with or tolerance of non-state violence. For example, the line between state and non-state racists is easily blurred when law enforcement does little to protect communities of colors from Klan-like organizations, or when elected officials appear to signal tolerance of such actors.

Closely related to this is the concept of imperialism, the process of a nation or state extending domination over another. As we will explore, fighting imperialism was a core part of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s ethical and political mission. The group believed that descendants of colonized people living within the United States belonged to distinct nations within nations. This meant that national liberation and self-determination were the main solutions to imperialism here and abroad. Self-determination in the traditional sense refers to the right of a people to determine their own future and allegiances free of outside interference from a colonial or occupying force. During the time period covered in this book, it also describes the right of oppressed people (or nations) to separate from the larger governments and establish new sovereign nations.

Given the clear rise of white nationalism today, parallels to the resurgence of organized racism experienced during the Reagan years are chilling. We hope that readers with anti-racist commitments will draw their own conclusions after looking at the projects and perspectives of those who were willing to lay on the line almost everything—even their own freedom—in the service of abolishing white supremacy.