a Klan meeting. The actual KKK meeting was being held in the room next door.
Witnesses testified that Marine Klan members regularly distributed recruiting materials and emblazoned the words “nigger sticker” on their knives. The American Civil Liberties Union represented the Klan in court, prompting the resignation of thirty-five people. Finally, the Marines arrested and transferred one Klan member, Corporal Daniel Bailey, in a last-ditch effort to quell the racial tensions. The events at Camp Pendleton intensified anxieties that the Klan, and other white supremacist groups, were infiltrating the armed forces in preparation for an impending race war.44 This incident contributed to the sense that the Klan, while increasingly marketing itself as a nonviolent cultural institution, was still a paramilitary vigilante group that was allowed to operate within the shadow of state institutions.
Around this time, Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert, two veteran activists living in upstate New York, received Khali Siwatu-Hodari’s letter. Working to bring young white radicals into support organizing for incarcerated people, Judy used her position as a professor at State University New York at New Paltz to build contacts. Together with formerly incarcerated people who were now students, they formed the Inside-Outside Prison Coalition, a campus-based group that leveraged university resources to support people incarcerated for their political actions. The group produced flyers about the plight of political prisoners, organized fundraisers, and screened films about state surveillance, the targeting of activist groups, and the rebellion at Attica State Prison. They also visited incarcerated people during frequent trips to Naponach and other New York state prisons. New Paltz students on parole were the first to introduce outside activists to Siwatu-Hodari, a member of the Black Panther Party and president of the NAACP chapter in the Napanoch prison. These connections were instrumental in creating the conditions for the founding of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. For instance, Bob Boyle, originally from New York City, was an early member of the Inside-Outside Prison Coalition. He was studying at New Paltz and worked on political prisoner cases through the National Lawyers Guild.
Prison support work in upstate New York began mingling more intentionally with the work in New York City. It wasn’t long before Boyle connected with Lisa Roth, a New Yorker who had worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at her high school and later the Students for a Democratic Society. Roth helped form the group Friends of Assata and Sundiata,45 which was at the forefront of radical organizing. She recalled how, at this time in the late 1970s, the movement was forced to grapple with the realities of imprisoned comrades. “By the early to mid-seventies many former members of the Black Panther Party were in prison throughout New York. So many of us who got our start doing anti-racist support work for the Black Panthers ended up doing support work for incarcerated people.”
Even the most committed activists had trouble understanding the implications of Siwatu-Hodari’s letter. Could staff throughout the New York prison system be members of the Ku Klux Klan? They were skeptical. Roth admitted, “Our initial response was that the prisoners meant that the guards were really, really racist. They couldn’t possibly mean that they were members of the Klan. But they struggled with us and urged us to research the situation.” Siwatu-Hodari’s letter made clear that prison support activities such as running errands for people inside were not an adequate response to the threats posed by the Klan. “We were pushed to respond,” remarked Pam Fadem, a founding member of the Committee, “The Klan was burning crosses in the prisons, beating people. We were pushed to respond by Black leadership.”
The support network in New York City was taking off around the same time. To explore how best to respond to the fact that so many leaders were imprisoned, Pam Fadem, Lisa Roth, and Alan Berkman formed the John Brown Book Club, a study group that met in Roth’s living room. The commingling of the Inside Outside Coalition and the Book Club gave rise to the official formation of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.
“Our main strategy was to bring white people into contact with the Black revolution and allow them to be changed by it the way we had been,” explained LauraWhitehorn, who joined the group after it formed. All of the founding members had participated in the early Civil Rights and Black Power movements through organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group decided to bring these threads together—political prisoner support, anti-Klan work, and rigorous study of liberation movements. The choice of John Brown as a namesake struck a defiant pose. For them, it signaled that the era’s liberal white agenda fell far short of the work that needed to be done to abolish white supremacy.
Throughout the history of the Black Freedom movement, the reliability of white allies was constantly tested. An early emblematic rift was the controversy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Civil Rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer brought sixty Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) activists to contest the seating of their state’s Jim Crow delegates to the convention. The all-white Credential Committee yielded a mere two atlarge, non-voting seats while keeping sixty-eight other old-guard delegates in their positions.46
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This drove home a sense that the government, established political parties, and many white allies would be unreliable—and if pushed, hostile—to the goals of Black Freedom movement. The MFDP refused the deal and walked away.47 Writing from solitary confinement in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his frustration with moderate white clergy who denounced his nonviolent direct-action tactics. King wrote: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”48
In this context, adopting the name John Brown intended to indicate the lengths the group was willing to go to in order to abolish white supremacy. In 1859, Brown led a group of twenty-one people in a raid on Harpers Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia. Brown’s goal was to seize weapons and catalyze an abolitionist war against white enslavers. The U.S. Marines, led by soon-to-be Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, defeated Brown’s militia. In his last speech before being executed, Brown appeared to be at peace with his decisions: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so, let it be done!”49
John Brown, circa 1859.
Reproduction of daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Harpers Ferry was the culmination of Brown’s lifelong commitment to end racialized slavery in the United States. A decade prior, he had helped Black people in Massachusetts form a self-defense organization to counter the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When the fate of Kansas as a free or slave state was undecided, Brown’s small group of guerrillas attacked and killed many pro-slavery settlers. There were some who reached the conclusion, as Brown did, that only principled militancy could undo white supremacy. Yet there were others who believed that a more peaceful legal fight was a better way to end slavery and place the nation on a road to greater equality.50
In the long arc of racial justice organizing, people have held many views about John Brown. Black activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee initially cautioned white people who traveled to the South to avoid emulating Brown and
