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.
