We’ve Done It Before
Every day people have been fighting fascism for a long time — and we can do it again.
In the summer of 1932, thousands of World War I veterans pitched tents in Washington, DC. They called themselves the “Bonus Army” and were there to demand the bonuses they were promised a decade earlier-- and had not received.
It was the height of the Great Depression and things were rough. Many veterans in the encampment were accompanied by their families-- men, women, and children. There were over 40,000 people in there all and all.
President Hoover ordered for the camp to be removed and, when the veterans did not leave, sent the US Calvary to evict and burn the veteran’s camp.
A few days before the destruction of the camp, a popular military figure, Major General Smedley Butler had given a speech to the veterans, rallying them and announcing his support for their cause. Butler had already served 34 years in the military, fighting in the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Banana Wars.
Several veterans were killed during the removal of the encampment and Butler became a public critic of Hoover. He declared himself a "Hoover-for-Ex-President-Republican" and threw his support behind Roosevelt and -- with his popularity and followers -- helped FDR win.
Butler's influence became clear. Veterans across the country looked up to him and would follow his lead. He was touring the country and giving speeches, recruiting members for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and, as he called it, "trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class."
And then a bunch of Wall Street bankers tried to recruit Butler to lead a fascist coup.
In the fall of 1934, Butler was approached by Gerald MacGuire who worked at a prominent brokerage house. MacGuire explained that there was a group of businessmen (including JP Morgan) who believed that Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda and proposed regulatory reforms were “socialist” and would cut into their profits. They wanted Butler to lead an army of 500,000 veterans to remove FDR and establish a fascist state that benefited big business and the corporate class. The businessmen began to provide Butler with written speeches he should give to get veterans behind the plan.
They had the money, they had the troops, they had the plan -- and they thought Butler was the right man for the job. But what they didn’t think would happen is exactly what did… Butler told on them.
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was created to investigate Butler’s claims of a plan to overthrow the democratically elected president and install a business-friendly dictatorship. After four months of investigation and testimony, the committee released its report to the US House of Representatives. While the New York Times and politicians--- and certainly Wall Street bankers-- everywhere insisted the coup was a hoax (fake news, if you will), the committee determined that they had “received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country… There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
Of course, none of the fat cats implicated in the attempted coup were ever prosecuted, and much of the committee report was redacted. It wasn’t until 2007, for example, that a BBC investigation found that Prescott Bush, the father of President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush, had been one of the wealthy businessmen involved.
Major General Butler went on to be an outspoken critic of fascism, war, imperialism, and capitalism. The year after he was approached about the coup, he wrote War is a Racket, condemning the imperialist and capitalist motivations behind the same wars that had made him a beloved hero.
A Constant Struggle
I never learned about Smedley Butler and this attempted Banker’s Coup in school and I’m going to guess neither did you. It’s easy to cast the incident aside as just that-- an incident, an aberration, a quirk of history, a fleeting fantasy of the ruling class.
But it wasn’t a quirk. It’s just one example of the many times that we have been threatened by fascism in the United States.
That said, it’s also one of the many times we have stopped fascism in its tracks.
As Donald Trump has announced his incoming billionaire crony cabinet and as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has cozied up to the White House, the fascist banker coup has been on my mind.
Perhaps we don’t learn about the plot because the bankers were unsuccessful at installing their plutocratic fascist state. But I’m curious about it precisely because it didn’t happen-- because it was thwarted by Butler and his friends.
After Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, there was much talk about how “our systems held.” While it is largely true that our institutions did their job and democratic elections were held in 2022 and 2024, the truth is that we need more than the machinery of government to defend ourselves against fascism.
Throughout our nation’s history, it has been everyday people who have held the line against fascism. We have done this on many fronts, not just through elections or through checks and balances. It’s happened in big cities like Chicago and San Francisco, and small towns like Whiteville, North Carolina. And most importantly, it's been done by people who didn’t wake up thinking they were going to have to defend their community that day but went to bed as antifascists that night.
Learning from Our History
If there is one thing that we as a nation have had to learn again and again, it is that democracy is not a sure thing. Democracy is a choice and a process; it has to be worked at and tinkered with like an old truck. A multiracial democracy, one that can expand and include and widen its reach, moving with changing people and times, must be actively worked for by its citizenry-- a practice that immigrants, women, queers, and Black and Brown people can recite by heart. Democracy is not, as perhaps we have been told, our birthright but it is ours to achieve.
We suspect we are living in unprecedented times today-- and we very well may be. The Trump/Vance campaign was run on authoritarian talking points-- they minced no words about who they are after and what they plan to do. Understandably, it is frightening and concerning to the most of us. It can feel uncertain as to what we need to do.
I assure you, however, that the muscles we are being asked to flex in response to this authoritarianism are muscles we have used before.
As Smedley Butler discovered, American democracy has always been under threat from fascism-- this has rarely been a foreign threat, but instead something fermenting from within. I live in the American South, where the reminders of chattel slavery and Jim Crow surround us. Here, we know what people, driven by wealth and greed, whipped up into hysteria and given ideological rationales for their worst behaviors, can do.
Like Smedley Butler and the Bankers Plot, we mostly didn’t learn in school about the frequent acts of antifascist resistance that our neighbors committed. In the din and drone of our contemporary news cycle and online lives, we also can easily miss present-day antifascist wins. But these moments -- sometimes thwarted coups but more often acts of everyday resistance-- should be learned from as we prepare for the next four years.
Community Resistance
With their spooky, but truly ridiculous, white hoods and legacy of terror, the Ku Klux Klan operated as a protofascist organization for over a century in the United States (it still scantily exists today, but mostly as a gaggle of washed-up racists with no power ties or numerical might behind them). But in the 1920s, the second iteration of the Klan was undeniably huge. Membership was easily in the millions, with Klansmen in every reach of society and government.
We know of the horrors committed by the Ku Klux Klan in the American South during Reconstruction-- the murders, the assaults, the cross burnings, the terror. The Klan of the 1920s was also violent, committing lynchings and terrorism. But at the same time as fascism was taking root in Italy and Germany, it was becoming a mass nationwide nativist movement and dangerously mainstream. In the summer of 1925, for example, over 50,000 Klansmen marched in their white robes through the streets of Washington, DC.
But as widespread, dangerous, and powerful as the 1920s Klan was, resistance to the Klan was even larger.
In 1923 Carnegie, Pennsylvania, was a bustling Pittsburgh suburb. Like many small towns that skirted industrial centers, new immigrants had been moving to the area to work in the local steel mills and related industries. Most of these immigrants were Catholics from Ireland, Poland, and Italy and they settled In Carnegie alongside Jewish merchants and Southern Blacks who had migrated north to work in factories.
This growth drew the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, which peddled nativist propaganda and embraced anti-semitic and anti-Catholic stances. In the summer of 1923, the Klan organized a recruitment drive and march in Carnegie as a show of force and intimidation.
Klansmen came into town from throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland in droves, as many as 25,000 by some estimates, and gathered on a farm on a hill right above Carnegie. There they burned a 50-foot wooden cross and strung up lights to emblaze “KKK” menacingly above the city. It’s said that they swore in 1,000 new Klansmen in one day.
That night, the Klan tried to march into Carnegie (which, in their buffoonish obsession with all things “K,” they referred to as “Karnegie”). A few thousand Klansmen made their way towards the city carrying torches. However, they were stopped at a bridge where local residents had parked cars as a blockade. Many townspeople had climbed up onto the top of the bridge and they pelted the Klansmen with rocks and debris as they tried to surge forward. The Klansmen did make it into town, but a full-fledged riot broke out. It was clear that the people of Carnegie would not allow Klansmen to exert their dominance in the city or claim it for their own. At least one newly minted Klansmen was shot dead, and the others fled the city-- many dropping their guns and weapons to be collected by locals and saved in case the Klan ever tried to come to Carnegie again.
As brave as the town was, Carnegie was no anomaly. Town after town, community after community, organized physically to prevent the Klan from claiming territory. In the 1950s, the third incarnation of the Klan (after the second Klan had collapsed under fraud scandals, they later regrouped to defend segregation in the South) was heavily focused on the Carolinas. South Carolinian Klansman James “Catfish” Cole had honed in on rural Robeson County, North Carolina -- a multiracial community of Blacks, whites, and Lumbees. In 1956, he had hosted two cross-burnings in Robeson and was planning a larger Klan rally at Hayes Pond.
On the night of the rally, Cole gathered his fifty or so followers in a leased cornfield outside the town of Maxton for the rally. But they soon learned that they were surrounded by hundreds of Lumbee in the dark. Someone shot out the single light bulb in the field, and in the darkness, the Lumbee shot at the Klansmen and forced them to flee. Catfish Cole himself had to hide out in the swamp until someone came to rescue him. He was later convicted for inciting a riot.
These examples of towns resisting fascist organizing are not limited to rejecting the KKK. In 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey, fascist Blackshirts marched into a Black working-class neighborhood chanting “Viva Mussolini.” Neighborhood residents weren’t having it: They lodged a three-day street occupation and shut down the fascist's planned events. More recently on August 11, 2017, when alt-Right and fascist groups descended on Charlottesville, VA, thousands of Virginians worked to drive them out-- this on the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Lewisham, when 500 British neo-Nazis were prevented from marching through a Black borough of London when over 4,000 local residents blocked their way.
This has happened so many times, that we might declare it a tradition.
As much as attempts at fascist organizing are part and parcel of the American experience, the good news is that running them out of town seems to be a part of our DNA. In 2021, when the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front -- dressed in their khakis, ball caps, and white masks-- targeted Philadelphia for one of their propagandistic marches, local residents immediately recognized the threat. When the fascists got out of Uhaul trucks and began chanting their slogan “Reclaim America!,” Philadelphia bystanders immediately worked together to shout down and then chase the Nazis back to their vehicles.
Patriot Front hasn’t tried to return to Philadelphia since.
Naming What is in Front of Us
I don’t know who was in the crowd that shouted down and chased off Patriot Front. I don’t know if they consider themselves antifascists or not. The best I can tell, they were people who were out and about, having coffee with friends or maybe heading to the store, who recognized the danger and -- with the strangers around them-- decided to act.
We spent a lot of time during the 2024 election cycle handwringing and trying to decide if we could call Trump a fascist or not. Trump’s former Chief of Staff, Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, minced no words when he said Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist” and when Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist, old, tired debates were kicked off when it is okay or not okay to call someone a Nazi.
I get it. I’m a writer and make my living from words and how I use them. Imprecise finger-pointing can cause a chaotic distraction from precise threats. But we can’t not engage in the conversation; in the attempt to describe what is before us. When the first assassination attempt on Trump happened in the summer of 2024, the Right was quick to blame the Left for its rhetoric. The Left capitulated and left-leaning PACs and nonprofits suspended their political communications and the Biden campaign suspended their campaign ads. The Right did not, creating a communications vacuum in the days after, and within the week Trump supporters were wearing bandages on their ears as if the assassin had been aiming for them.
I don’t know what the right thing to do in those circumstances would have been, but I do know in a country where hate speech is considered free speech and where the world's richest man has bought an entire platform based off that principle, we need to make sure people are still able to say what needs to be said. We must be able to identify -- and most importantly isolate-- authoritarian rhetoric and ideology away from the regular back-and-forth discourse and from the exchange of competing ideas that is core to democracy. Unlike conservative, republican, liberal, progressive, socialist, or libertarian thought, authoritarian politics cannot coexist with other ideas-- to succeed, fascism requires the elimination of all other ideas.
We know that our country has a long history of lies and evasion. We know there have been numerous governmental cover-ups and we have culturally forced entire communities into the shadows. But that is not all we are. We also have a solid history of truth-telling in our country. From the abolitionist press of the 1800s to the fearless reporting of Ida B. Wells, to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the Greensboro Massacre, we have also done the work of correcting the record, documenting truths, and setting things straight.
This truth-telling labor has largely been done by radicals, however, those in power have also sometimes felt the need to name the threats before us. In the 1940s, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, Vice President Henry Wallace spoke out against American fascism. “The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” Wallace wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1944 in an essay titled “The Danger of American Fascism.”
“His method,” continued Wallace, “is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist, the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public, but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the Fascist and his group more money and more power.” (Read his full essay here)
Research and Exposure
Historically, the press has had a complicated role in both aiding and blocking the rise of fascism. Publications worldwide, including here in the United States, struggled with seeing the threat Hitler posed. The Cleveland Press observed that “the appointment of Hitler as German chancellor may not be such a threat to world peace as it appears at first blush” while the Christian Science Monitor surmised that the new Nazi regime was providing “a dark land a clear light of hope,” It took years for journalists and editors catch up to what was going on.
Others were clear-eyed and loud about dangers in their communities and didn’t wait for consensus to name the threat. A small-town newspaper editor in Tabor City, North Carolina, named Horace Carter had started The Tabor City Tribune in the 1940s to cover local politics, society news, and the weather; the paper also had a full page of trade advice for farmers. However, after the Klan paraded in their vehicles through the town in 1950, he began writing about and editorializing about the Klan’s crimes and violence.
Carter teamed up with Willard Cole, the editor of a paper in nearby Whiteville, and together they published hundreds of articles and editorials about the Klan, exposing their activities, naming their leaders, and even getting into aback-and-forth editorial fight publishing the letters of Imperial Wizard Thomas Hamilton and their responses. While Carter and Cole were boycotted and threatened, their refusal to allow the Klan to operate without comment in plain view, as had been the custom of the past, slowly immobilized the Klan from spreading its terror in the local area. Carter and Cole's papers later received a Pulitzer for this work.
Hamilton and some of his associates were prosecuted for their crimes thanks to the tireless crusade and documentation by the local papers. In 1953 Cole published a letter he received from Hamilton who was now in jail: "All my friends everywhere should disband the Ku Klux Klan ... I am through with [it] and believe all my former associates will best serve themselves and society as a whole by taking a similar stand."
In Chicago in the 1930s, two reporters for the Chicago Daily Times-- brothers John and James Metcalfe-- infiltrated the German-American Bund, spending six months undercover. The Bund was a pro-German, pro-Nazi fascist organization that was growing in size and influence through the 1920s and 30s just as Hitler was consolidating power in Germany. The Bund presented itself largely as a social organization, hosting summer camps and family-oriented gatherings, but as the Metcalfe brothers exposed in a 13-part series for their paper, the Bund was also organizing paramilitary troops, teaching Hilter’s philosophy and organizing for antisemitic and fascist policy in the United States. Their reporting led to an official investigation of the Bund and its later demise, although it was soon replaced by the American Nazi Party and various other off-shoots, a few of which remain today.
Journalists today are continuing this tradition of exposing the players and mechanisms of hate groups and fascist movements. Phill Williams of Nashville’s News Channel 5 began reporting on far-right extremists when neo-Nazis started showing up with Franklin, Tennesee mayoral candidate at official events. Since then, Williams has reported on the activities of hate groups and nationalist groups in the state and uncovered their networks and even connections to law enforcement. As a result, he has been harassed, threatened, and doxxed. "Journalists like myself have a choice: surrender to the fascist mob that wants to intimidate the truth-tellers – or rededicate ourselves to doing what’s right no matter the cost,” he recently wrote as part of a reflection on the surprising turn in his career. Other journalists doing similar work know that being threatened is part of the beat, but that their work can help people make sense of the emerging fascist movement around them.
You don’t have to be a journalist to do this work, of course. One of the key features of contemporary American antifascist work has been the rise of internet sleuths and reporters. Individuals and teams of amateur researchers have been investigating and documenting emerging fascist movements in order to disrupt their organizing and growth. While the majority of this work is done online, some researchers are infiltrating local far-right groups in real life. Federal prosecutors have secured over 1,000 convictions for the attack on the US Capital on January 6th, with many more arrests. A significant number of those arrested have been identified with the help of online tips from so-called “sedition hunters” who track and identify bad actors. Many others have been turned in by their own friends and family.
This research and exposure-- known as doxing- has been used to pressure law enforcement to take the threat of fascism seriously and has proved useful when police seem unwilling or unable to investigate crimes committed-- such was the case in 2018 when antifascist researchers were able to identify Proud Boys who were part of a serious violent assault, leading to their arrests. Other researchers expose local neo-Nazi networks to deter them from recruitment and organizing in their hometowns.
The journalists, writers, internet sleuths, and researchers who expose authoritarians, their networks, and their organizing are doing double duty: They are not only helping to identify rising authoritarian threats but are also isolating fascist beliefs and fascist leaders from mainstream political discourse.
We Go Where They Go
If we wait for consensus that what we see emerging in front of us is fascism, it might be too late to act. But what we can do now is agree that fascism is our shared enemy, worthy of being fought.
When we think about Nazi Germany, we frequently start at the end-- at the obscene horror, of the world war it took to end it. We think about the thousands of concentration camps, the utter destruction of people and culture, the maniacal dictatorship and cult-like following. But Hitler’s reign was decades in the making-- from his Brownshirts instigating chaotic street brawls to marginalize their enemies and his early Beer House Putsch that landed him in prison. Before he was a dictator, Hitler and Hitlerism were years in the making-- and during those years, there was debate as to what, exactly, the world was looking at.
Some people, however, rang the alarm bell loudly and clearly. Some people took action from the beginning-- when they first saw the warning signs and, perhaps, even before they were certain of what it was they were looking at. As Hitler ascended to power, protesters around the world mobilized a broad antifascist resistance movement without first establishing any consensus on just what did and did not count as fascism. They threw up blocks to his power at every opportunity they could and created safety networks to move those being persecuted out of harm's way. It is impossible to know how much stronger Hitler -- or Mussolini or Franco -- would have become if it weren’t for the thousands of small antifascist roadblocks and rabbit snares set along the way.
Making it impossible or even just difficult for fascists to organize is a tactic that we have historically used in the United States to stop or slow their accrual of power. In the late 1980s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a multiracial group of young skinhead punks called the Baldies formed to harass and interfere with the racist skinhead organizing in their city. The Baldies wanted their city to be a “Nazi free zone” and would actively disrupt white nationalist organizing, physically remove anyone associated with white nationalist organizing out of punk shows, and engage in street fights with the White Knights. As they drove the neo-Nazis out of Minneapolis, the Baldies then expanded beyond their city. They gathered information about where the white nationalists were going to march, rally, attend a show, or even just have a party, and they would go to that town in advance and alert community members to the fascists’ plans. In short, they wouldn’t let the White Knights or any other neo-Nazi group take root in any community.
The Baldies helped launch a larger network that spread across the country called Anti-Racist Action. The ARA motto was "We go where they go" meaning that they would confront far-right activists in public spaces and would actively remove their recruitment materials -- posters, flyers, stickers-- to stymie the racists' recruitment efforts.
ARA helped introduce the concept of non-platforming: Refusing to allow fascist propaganda to spread into the mainstream. Groups have achieved this by doing everything from covering up racist or fascist graffiti to physically preventing neo-Nazis from being able to take the stage at events. This strategy has continued into our contemporary movement, with large “we go where they go” mobilizations shutting down multiple speaking engagements by far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017 and forcing white nationalist Richard Spencer to cancel his college speaking tour in 2018.
Over the years, the ARA grew in size and, eventually, outside the subculture of the skinhead scene. ARA worked with churches, unions, and other local organizing groups to grow their responses against fascism. While the politics, ideologies, and even desired outcomes were often disparate, these groups worked together recognizing fascism as a common cause and unique threat.
Creating a Popular Front
Disrupting fascist organizing and, in particular, turning out en masse to demonstrate cultural opposition to their ideology pulls on a tradition of creating a popular front against fascism. Originating in Germany and Spain in the 1930s, people of all backgrounds and ideologies created broad coalitions united around the central tenet of opposing fascism, no matter whether or not other views align. Huge, diverse coalitions were created against the common enemy, so that a unified resistance to fascism could be lobbed from all corners of the population, from workers to clergymen to small business owners to far-left radicals to centrists to veterans.
Using a broad, mass coalition to show up to drown out or outnumber fascist groups is a tried and true tactic. In 1939, when the German American Bund held a swastika-emblazoned rally of 20,000 Nazis at New York’s Madison Square Garden, over 100,000 anti-fascist protesters gathered outside. The New York Times reported that while the Nazis gathered inside the arena, “a loudspeaker in a second-floor window of a rooming house at Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue began blaring a denunciation of Nazis and urging, "Be American, Stay at home". The voice came from a record which was timed to start playing automatically.”
Part of being American, of course, is not staying at home– but instead letting your opposition to fascism be known. In 2017, only days after the murder of Heather Heyer by the Far-Right in Charlottesville, 40,000 Bostonians turned out to counter a small group of fascist protesters attempting to march under the banner of “free speech.” The fascists were forced to disband early. Other creative, non-street-oriented measures have been taken to impede fascist organizing. The Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco recently ran an online campaign to “adopt a Nazi” with over 2,100 people donating to the Southern Poverty Law Center for every Nazi that showed up at local events.
We Keep Us Safe
While there has been nearly no time in United States history without a brewing fascist threat, it has not always been so entangled with power as it is right now. Fascist language, policy, and talking points are being pushed at all levels of government from school boards and state houses, all the way to the presidency.
Local hate groups and neo-fascist groups pose a threat to their immediate communities and should be exposed and shut down-- pulled up from the root, as it were. However, the threat that accompanies fascist ideology moving into these seats of governmental and corporate power is exponentially more dangerous.
But organizing and keeping people safe in times of rising entrenched fascism also has a precedent here. Churches have a long history of providing sanctuary during times of upheaval and persecution dating back hundreds of years. Churches-- along with complex networks of abolitionists-- were significant to the Underground Railroad from the late 17th to the mid-19th centuries. Sanctuary movements re-emerged in American churches in the 1960s, protecting conscientious objectors and draft resisters during the Vietnam War.
In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the States from war-torn El Salvador and Guatemala; most applied for asylum but only 5% of cases were approved. This left individuals and families stranded with no place to turn. The Reagan administration additionally began to increase workplace raids looking for economic migrants to deport.
In 1980, two Tucson, Arizona congregations-- one Presbyterian, one Quaker-- began to provide legal and humanitarian assistance to these refugees. After two years and realizing that none of the people they were helping were going to be granted asylum, Rev. John Fife decided that Southside Presbyterian would openly defy immigration law and offer sanctuary for Central Americans. This started what is now referred to as the “Sanctuary Movement” and over 500 churches across the United States joined in to harbor and protect immigrants-- individuals, families, and children-- from deportation.
Two decades earlier in Chicago, Illinois a group of women found another way to protect their community from the overreach of government and dangerous policy. In Illinois at the time, abortion was considered a felony homicide, yet up to a million women were seeking illegal abortions annually during the 1950s and 60s-- with hundreds of women dying complications each year.
In 1965, Heather Booth helped a friend connect with a doctor for an abortion and soon other women were contacting her for similar help. With so much need, Booth and her friends formed the Jane Collective to help connect women in need with medical care. Over time, the collective members learned how to perform abortions themselves, reducing the cost for low-income women and women in dangerous situations. It is estimated that during the years they were active, Jane Collective provided over 11,000 abortions.
Whether providing services denied by law or providing protection from government persecution and unjust laws, from gay bars creating safe spaces to the Green Book helping Black folks travel safely during Jim Crow, there’s barely been a decade in our history where people weren’t organizing and collaborating to resist fascism and keep each other safe.
Imagining a Better Future
I went to high school in North Carolina-- part of my high school years were spent in Raleigh, the rest in Winston-Salem. In between those two cities is another city- Greensboro, where I live now.
I learned, of course, about the Civil Rights Movement in my history classes. I learned about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. But while the sit-in movement was mentioned in my textbook, I don’t remember anyone telling me that it was four students in Greensboro, just a tad older than me at the time, who had started it all. An adult now-- and a parent of a teenager--I can’t help but think what a missed opportunity that was to show me and my classmates how regular people, like those four A&T students, with no special skills or background, had organize for change…right in my own backyard.
The oversight -- or perhaps deliberate exclusion-- of the persistent and righteous struggle against authoritarianism and facism waged by everyday Americans from our popular knowledge has left us feeling helpless and adrift as we stare down oligarchy, authoritarianism, and fascism again today. But it’s likely that every community, every city and small town, has this radical and resilient history-- it might be a good time to pick up some books, visit a local history museum and talk to some old-timers. Dig in.
But just as we leave these radical acts out of history, we often leave them out of our future as well. The stories we tell about our current situation and the future are usually dystopian and apocalyptic. We frequently imagine our future to be a hellscape punctuated by climate disaster, war, and, yes, authoritarianism. But what if another world is possible? What would it look like if we told stories of us winning, once and for all?
The people of Carnegie and Hayes Pond, of Jersey City and Whiteville, Minneapolis, and Tucson dared to believe in that different future and, while not perfect, we have been able to live in it thanks to them.
And now because they did it, we must and can.
