The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition
by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen
Haymarket Books, 2024
[Publication date: April 2, 2024]
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From
London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives
Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood
fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and
to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition,
scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations
of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight
against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the
prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black
Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance
of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black
people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.”
Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism
has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take
hold long before others understood this danger.
The book
explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod
Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire,
and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the
Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among
others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope
and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have
also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
REVIEWS:
"The Black Antifascist Tradition gives us the materials we need to face an uncertain future. The book gives us the possibility of hope based on histories and trajectories it maps and recovers. This remarkable book documents how those who began the struggle against anti-Black racism were always already 'pre-mature antifascists.'"
—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Speaking Out of Place
"As we confront, arguably, the greatest assault on our already severely limited form of liberal democracy, The Black Antifascist Tradition is essential reading for not only diagnosing the problems that we face, but rather for providing us with historical tools to fight ascendant fascism and right wing authoritarianism in the United States. Drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler to anti-lynching campaigns and the 'We Charge Genocide' movement, Hope and Mullen offer a powerful lens onto the Black Radical Tradition that moves the discussion of fascism from a narrow focus on interwar Europe to the transnational questions of racial apartheid, settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. Beautifully written and cogently argued, this book is a must read for this moment. I can’t wait to assign it in my undergraduate and graduate classes." —Donna Murch, author, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is a primer on the history and legacy of over a century of Black antifascist activism. This timely collection introduces readers to the political organizing, theoretical interventions and world-making of some of the leading change makers and theorists of our times. This book is the missing link between present and past that is so urgently needed as a new generation confronts a new manifestation of old problem. A must read and infusion of hope." —Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine, Associate professsor of African American Studies and History at Wayne State University and author of The Revolution has Come: Black power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
"The Roman slave empire ruled by punishment and death, flogging, and beheading. The bundle of rods with a protruding axe blade—the fasces—were both means of execution and emblem of sovereign power. Ever since, incarceration and systematic premature death have remained the foundation of fascism. The Black Antifascist Tradition is an absolutely needed chronicle showing how Black people lead antifascism. It begins with Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Red Record against lynching in the early twentieth century and concludes with the new abolitionism against the carceral and death-dealing state in the twenty-first century. In between are the essential campaigns by the thinkers an actors of Pan-Africanism (1930s), Double Victory (1940s), We Charge Genocide (1950s), Black Power (1960s), and the anarchist antagonistic autonomy of our times, which have fought for life and for our commons." —Peter Linebaugh, author, The Magna Carta Manifesto
"From
the sophisticated understanding of law as an agent of fascism
articulated in the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to
the abolitionist theorization of fascism as both a theory of
anti-Blackness and a structure of oppression by scholar-activists such
as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis; and with explorations of
anti-colonialism, antiwar movements, and Black Power along the way, The Black Antifascist Tradition offers
a careful history of Black thought and art by way of a celebration of
the exquisite threads of antifascism woven inextricably into the Black
Radical Tradition. Hope and Mullen detail the ways the Black Radical
Tradition has not simply always been antifascist but that it has been
powerfully, effectively, originally responsible for formulating
antifascist analysis and strategy." —Micol Seigel, author, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police
"The Black Antifascist Tradition is
a handbook a century in the making. It is a historical synthesis of how
the forerunners of anti-colonial struggle, Pan-Africanism, and Black
revolutionary theory and practice identified and confronted fascist
emergence and organization from a local to an international scale and
across the formative epochs. Richly detailed and thoroughly researched,
this highly accessible and readable text is also wide-angled and
multi-layered in scope--adeptly interconnecting people, places, events,
and actions with their resultant insights, observations, and practical
formulations. This book is the complete exposition of Black antifascist
thought, and a necessary guide for the antifascist struggles of
today." —Justin Akers Chacón, author, Radicals in the Barrio
"Jeanelle
K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen have written the definitive history for one
of the most important, and least discussed, pieces of the antifascist
movement. Weaving together historical analysis, trenchant critique, and
future visioning, this is one of the most important books on antifascism
ever written." —Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
"The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition is
a dazzling work of reclamation and admonition that simultaneously
reaches into the folds of past and future to make an urgent, formidable
case that fascism, capitalism, and anti-Black violence are profoundly
interconnected. Hope and Mullen give voice to activists and
intellectuals of two centuries with compelling clarity. They have
produced a volume providing an astute and knowledgeable guide to a
complex legacy with which every partisan of 'freedom dreams' needs to
critically engage." —Alan Wald, author,Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade
"Through the dialectic of 'Anti-black Fascism' and the 'Black Antifascist Tradition,' Jeanelle Hope and Bill V. Mullen expertly convey how African descendant antifascists in the United States and beyond developed a unique interpretation of the fascist threat through their experience of, and fightback against, Jim Crow, Euro-American (settler) colonialism and imperialism, and policies and practices of white supremacy. A stunning work of historical recovery, political analysis, and critical interpretation, The Black Antifascist Tradition reads guerrilla intellectuals like Ida B. Wells and Ruth Wilson Gilmore into the tradition of Black Antifascism, highlights prominent Black Antifascists like Aimé Césaire and George Jackson, and recovers lesser-known critics of Anti-Black Fascism like Thyra Edwards and Lorenzo Kom’boa Irvin. In doing so, it not only makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Black radical tradition (or the Tradition of Radical Blackness), but also paves the way for deeper and more serious study of antifascisms emanating from Black realities. In our current moment of naked acts of genocide, intensified racialized police and military violence, and the bold resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism, Hope and Mullen, and the freedom fighters they examine, remind us of the long and rich praxis of resistance on which we can—and must—build. Everything is at stake."
—Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing
"In The Black Antifascist Tradition,
Hope and Mullen unearth a distinct and underacknowledged lineage of
Black antifascist organizing, from Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the
anti-lynching movement to Black Lives Matter and the struggle for police
abolition. Drawing on the contributions of past and present thinkers
and activists, this book offers an essential overview of the ways that
Black radicals have understood the relationship between fascism and
white supremacy and organized to confront both. The book introduces
readers to a history of Black internationalist and antifascist
organizing, including lesser-known campaigns by Black soldiers during
the Spanish Civil War and the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against
Fascism. In so doing, the authors raise provocative arguments about the
existential violence Black people experience even under 'normal'
conditions of capitalist exploitation, underscoring the role of
anti-Black racism in anticipating the rise of fascism long before its
formal ascent to power. Importantly, Hope and Mullen show how resisting
the conditions that threaten Black life in particular has produced
strategies that are equally relevant to struggles against violent,
anti-democratic movements everywhere. By broadening our horizons around
what counts as antifascist organizing, The Black Antifascist
Tradition insists on the inseparability of antifascism from the struggle
for Black liberation." —Haley Pessin, coeditor, Voices of a People's History of the United States in the Twenty-First Century
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jeanelle K. Hope
is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at
Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California,
and a scholar-activist, having formerly been engaged in organizing with
Socialist Alternative, Black Lives Matter-Sacramento, and various
campus groups, and as a current member of Democratic Socialists of
America. Her work has been published in several academic journals and
public outlets, including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia Journal, Black Camera, Essence, and The Forum Magazine. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Bill V. Mullen
is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is a long-time
activist and organizer. He is currently a member of the editorial
collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural
Boycott of Israel, and is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist
Network. His other books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
