blindpig
07-27-2016, 07:14 AM
“DEATH TO THE KLAN” AND ARMED ANTIFASCIST COMMUNITY DEFENSE IN THE US July 26, 2016 Facebooktwitterredditpinterest
Originally posted to It’s Going Down
By Alexander Reid Ross
As fascist groups and the Klan gain new ground through the insurgence of white supremacist organizing amid the Trump campaign umbrella, antifascist and anti-Klan mass mobilizations have drawn more thousands of participants from Seattle, Washington, to Stone Mountain, Georgia, to Sacramento, California. Yet these altercations often turn violent, with unprepared protesters often suffering stabbings and beatings. It is instructive to look back on the recent history of antifascist and anti-Klan movements in the US to better mobilize effectively against the rising tide of white supremacy within local communities, thus pre-empting fascist groups’ ability to build forces.
The Legacy of Greensboro
The “Death to the Klan” slogan emerged prominently during the 1970s, while the Knights of the Klan spread throughout the US, leading to a further expansion of other Klan groups like Invisible Empire. The Klan’s new wave of organizing played a significant role in Southern communities like Greensboro, North Carolina. A left-wing group called the Communist Workers’ Party organized militant, anti-racist opposition to the Klan in 1979. For those organizing around community defense today, the legacy of Greensboro looms large. Its history offers important reference points for mobilizing against the rising insurgency of racist violence, both political and social.
The CWP (then the Workers’ Viewpoint Organization) spun off of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as part of the New Communist Movement of the 1970s. Their practice of organizing within textile unions yielded positive results both in workplaces and against racism in the broader community. However, the emergent Klan presented a significant challenge to their organizing. In July, the CWP “took the fight to the Klan” in the neighboring town of China Grove, disrupting a Klan-organized viewing of The Birth of the Nation and burning a confederate flag outside. Klansmen drew on the protesters, but stood down. The CWP opinion on the action was that of a huge “psychological victory.”
https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/EP-150729904.jpg
KKK members arm themselves with weapons at a protest.
The sense of urgency surrounding community defense grew stronger, and the CWP became increasingly militant, emboldened by their successes. On November 3rd, 1979, the CWP called for a demonstration entitled, “Death to the Klan.” Their propaganda declared, “We invite these two-bit punks to come out on Nov. 3rd and face the wrath of the people.” They circulated an open letter to the rival Klan leaders stating, “We are having a march and conference on November 3, 1979, to further expose your cowardness, why the Klan is so consciously being promoted and to organize to physically smash the racist KKK whenever it rears its ugly head.”[1]
An FBI informant embedded in the Klan phoned the district attorney’s office with new information. A coalition of racist groups uniting as the United Racist Front planned to launch an armed assault on the demonstration. The informant implored the attorney general to rescind the permit for the Death to the Klan demonstration, but the warning went unheeded. Three days before the rally, the informant went to the police station with the same information, but again met a dismissive response. The police told the informant to stay away from the bloodshed, and he replied that the Klansmen would identify him as an informant if he did. “The next time I ask you do to something,” he retorted, “I’ll bring a bucket of blood.”[2]
http://youtu.be/5oxh5-hq6mc
As the protesters gathered with placards on a remarkably warm day for November 3rd, they burned an effigy of a Klansman, and chanted “Death to the Klan!” Local Neo-Nazis drove to the anti-Klan protest in a nine car caravan together with Harold Covington’s National Socialist White People’s Party. The United Racist Front caravan was joined by at least two FBI and police informants. When they arrived, several cars slowly cruised past the protest as members of the CWP chanted “Death to the Klan” and challenged the passengers to come out of their cars. A blue sedan followed by a yellow van parked less than fifty yards away from the protest. The passengers got out, took sidearms and rifles out of the trunk, and opened fire for about a minute and a half. Two CWP members and three march participants were killed by the Klan on that day, which would go down in workers’ history as the Greensboro Massacre.
The community was horrified, but also partly confused. Despite knowing in advance about the attack, police had taken a lunch break and were nowhere by the scene, raising suspicions as to their intentions. Reeling from the massacre, the group’s leadership fell under heavy criticism, not only from the police and mayor, but also from other radicals. One group called Concerned Citizens wrote the following harsh critique:
It was utterly stupid and irresponsible for the Workers Viewpoint Organization [CWP] to challenge the Klan and to invite them into the Black community in the way that they did. It was totally irresponsible for them, having dared the Klan to come, to take no effective measures to protect and defend not only themselves, but the community where their demonstration took place. These adventuristic and irresponsible actions not only allowed the murders of their own people to take place but endangered innocent people, including children and old people. Their statements and actions since are almost insane. They seem only interested in avenging the murders of their own people and portraying what happened as a fight between them and the Klan. They have refused to work with anyone to build a broad response by the entire Black community, which is what is urgently needed.[3]
https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Greensboro_massacre_march.jpg
March organized after the Greensboro Massacre.
Concerned Citizens insisted that by promoting themselves as anti-Klan fighters, the CWP effectively moved the spotlight away from the general harassment of the Black community by the Klan, and placed it on themselves. In a withering analysis, the Amilcar Cabral/Paul Robeson Collective joined the Greensboro Collective in declaring, that the “most striking” lesson learned “is the damage ultra-leftism does to the mass movement. The actions of the CWP after November 3rd were nearly as effective in preventing the masses from taking militant action as the CWP’s actions before November 3rd had been in achieving their murders.” The collectives continued, “[The CWP] were amazingly able to achieve a situation by the middle of the week after the Massacre, where they were seen by the masses as almost as big a danger, if not bigger, than the Klan.” The text resolved that, “Ideological preparation without self-defense would be criminal on the part of revolutionaries and suicide for black people.”[4]
The criticism for the CWP had been harsh, and perhaps inflamed an already traumatic time. They would, however, pave the way for better methods of anti-Klan organizing, building on the CWP’s courage as well as their faults. Although an FBI informant and an ATF informant took part in the organizing of the attack, and the assailants were caught on video, no convictions came. One of the participants in the attack, Frazier Glenn Miller, would later join the network of an infamous white supremacist terrorist group known as the Order between 1983-1984 and kill three in a shooting outside of a Jewish recreation center in 2014. The year after the Greensboro Massacre, Neo-Nazi Harold Covington narrowly lost the Republican nomination for Attorney General of North Carolina. In perhaps the only silver lining of the atrocity, the aftermath of the Greensboro massacre led, in part, to the disintegration of the insurgent Knights of the Klan, since national leader David Duke looked at the violence as anathema to his political career, which he would pursue in Louisiana to varying degrees of success.
much more....
https://itsgoingdown.org/death-klan-armed-antifascist-community-defense-us/
Originally posted to It’s Going Down
By Alexander Reid Ross
As fascist groups and the Klan gain new ground through the insurgence of white supremacist organizing amid the Trump campaign umbrella, antifascist and anti-Klan mass mobilizations have drawn more thousands of participants from Seattle, Washington, to Stone Mountain, Georgia, to Sacramento, California. Yet these altercations often turn violent, with unprepared protesters often suffering stabbings and beatings. It is instructive to look back on the recent history of antifascist and anti-Klan movements in the US to better mobilize effectively against the rising tide of white supremacy within local communities, thus pre-empting fascist groups’ ability to build forces.
The Legacy of Greensboro
The “Death to the Klan” slogan emerged prominently during the 1970s, while the Knights of the Klan spread throughout the US, leading to a further expansion of other Klan groups like Invisible Empire. The Klan’s new wave of organizing played a significant role in Southern communities like Greensboro, North Carolina. A left-wing group called the Communist Workers’ Party organized militant, anti-racist opposition to the Klan in 1979. For those organizing around community defense today, the legacy of Greensboro looms large. Its history offers important reference points for mobilizing against the rising insurgency of racist violence, both political and social.
The CWP (then the Workers’ Viewpoint Organization) spun off of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) as part of the New Communist Movement of the 1970s. Their practice of organizing within textile unions yielded positive results both in workplaces and against racism in the broader community. However, the emergent Klan presented a significant challenge to their organizing. In July, the CWP “took the fight to the Klan” in the neighboring town of China Grove, disrupting a Klan-organized viewing of The Birth of the Nation and burning a confederate flag outside. Klansmen drew on the protesters, but stood down. The CWP opinion on the action was that of a huge “psychological victory.”
https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/EP-150729904.jpg
KKK members arm themselves with weapons at a protest.
The sense of urgency surrounding community defense grew stronger, and the CWP became increasingly militant, emboldened by their successes. On November 3rd, 1979, the CWP called for a demonstration entitled, “Death to the Klan.” Their propaganda declared, “We invite these two-bit punks to come out on Nov. 3rd and face the wrath of the people.” They circulated an open letter to the rival Klan leaders stating, “We are having a march and conference on November 3, 1979, to further expose your cowardness, why the Klan is so consciously being promoted and to organize to physically smash the racist KKK whenever it rears its ugly head.”[1]
An FBI informant embedded in the Klan phoned the district attorney’s office with new information. A coalition of racist groups uniting as the United Racist Front planned to launch an armed assault on the demonstration. The informant implored the attorney general to rescind the permit for the Death to the Klan demonstration, but the warning went unheeded. Three days before the rally, the informant went to the police station with the same information, but again met a dismissive response. The police told the informant to stay away from the bloodshed, and he replied that the Klansmen would identify him as an informant if he did. “The next time I ask you do to something,” he retorted, “I’ll bring a bucket of blood.”[2]
http://youtu.be/5oxh5-hq6mc
As the protesters gathered with placards on a remarkably warm day for November 3rd, they burned an effigy of a Klansman, and chanted “Death to the Klan!” Local Neo-Nazis drove to the anti-Klan protest in a nine car caravan together with Harold Covington’s National Socialist White People’s Party. The United Racist Front caravan was joined by at least two FBI and police informants. When they arrived, several cars slowly cruised past the protest as members of the CWP chanted “Death to the Klan” and challenged the passengers to come out of their cars. A blue sedan followed by a yellow van parked less than fifty yards away from the protest. The passengers got out, took sidearms and rifles out of the trunk, and opened fire for about a minute and a half. Two CWP members and three march participants were killed by the Klan on that day, which would go down in workers’ history as the Greensboro Massacre.
The community was horrified, but also partly confused. Despite knowing in advance about the attack, police had taken a lunch break and were nowhere by the scene, raising suspicions as to their intentions. Reeling from the massacre, the group’s leadership fell under heavy criticism, not only from the police and mayor, but also from other radicals. One group called Concerned Citizens wrote the following harsh critique:
It was utterly stupid and irresponsible for the Workers Viewpoint Organization [CWP] to challenge the Klan and to invite them into the Black community in the way that they did. It was totally irresponsible for them, having dared the Klan to come, to take no effective measures to protect and defend not only themselves, but the community where their demonstration took place. These adventuristic and irresponsible actions not only allowed the murders of their own people to take place but endangered innocent people, including children and old people. Their statements and actions since are almost insane. They seem only interested in avenging the murders of their own people and portraying what happened as a fight between them and the Klan. They have refused to work with anyone to build a broad response by the entire Black community, which is what is urgently needed.[3]
https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Greensboro_massacre_march.jpg
March organized after the Greensboro Massacre.
Concerned Citizens insisted that by promoting themselves as anti-Klan fighters, the CWP effectively moved the spotlight away from the general harassment of the Black community by the Klan, and placed it on themselves. In a withering analysis, the Amilcar Cabral/Paul Robeson Collective joined the Greensboro Collective in declaring, that the “most striking” lesson learned “is the damage ultra-leftism does to the mass movement. The actions of the CWP after November 3rd were nearly as effective in preventing the masses from taking militant action as the CWP’s actions before November 3rd had been in achieving their murders.” The collectives continued, “[The CWP] were amazingly able to achieve a situation by the middle of the week after the Massacre, where they were seen by the masses as almost as big a danger, if not bigger, than the Klan.” The text resolved that, “Ideological preparation without self-defense would be criminal on the part of revolutionaries and suicide for black people.”[4]
The criticism for the CWP had been harsh, and perhaps inflamed an already traumatic time. They would, however, pave the way for better methods of anti-Klan organizing, building on the CWP’s courage as well as their faults. Although an FBI informant and an ATF informant took part in the organizing of the attack, and the assailants were caught on video, no convictions came. One of the participants in the attack, Frazier Glenn Miller, would later join the network of an infamous white supremacist terrorist group known as the Order between 1983-1984 and kill three in a shooting outside of a Jewish recreation center in 2014. The year after the Greensboro Massacre, Neo-Nazi Harold Covington narrowly lost the Republican nomination for Attorney General of North Carolina. In perhaps the only silver lining of the atrocity, the aftermath of the Greensboro massacre led, in part, to the disintegration of the insurgent Knights of the Klan, since national leader David Duke looked at the violence as anathema to his political career, which he would pursue in Louisiana to varying degrees of success.
much more....
https://itsgoingdown.org/death-klan-armed-antifascist-community-defense-us/