Malcolm X held up Brown as exactly the type of white person the movement needed: “If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves.”51
In their first act as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, members discovered that Klan leader Janice Schoonmaker was serving on a local board of education and that there was a Klan Youth Corps campaign to recruit in East Coast high schools. The Committee’s research involved connecting names of active Klan members to towns, and identifying what, if any, roles they played within public institutions. Once they had a scoop, they looked for ways to publicly expose Klan members. As Whitehorn described it, “We had a list of names of the Klan guards in the different prisons. We made posters with their names with the intention of going to the small towns they lived in in upstate New York to expose them.” Members regularly drove the two hours between Napanoch and New York City in order to gather information.
The group’s early research culminated in the publication of their first pamphlet. In it, they publicized thirty-five prison guards that incarcerated people exposed as active members or sympathizers of the Klan. Digging deeper, members of the group traveled to Albany to locate the incorporation papers of the New York Klan. They printed these papers, exposing the Grand Dragon of the New York Klan, Earl Schoonmaker (married to Janice), had been a prison teacher and the head of the Napanoch chapter of the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association.52 Following complaints from a white female prison employee who alleged that she was threatened and harassed for showing sympathy to incarcerated Black people, Schoonmaker had been investigated, and in December 1974, he was suspended from his job. In 1975, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the prison, but this did very little to tangibly improve prison conditions. Despite the disciplinary action and widespread attention in the press, including coverage in the New York Times, violence continued at the prison. Activists behind bars were often placed in solitary confinement, assaulted, and harassed.
The Committee worked to publicize the demands of incarcerated people to immediately remove Klansmen from their jobs at Napanoch. During the summer of 1977, incarcerated people took over a cellblock to protest Klan-instigated brutality, a rodent-infested mess hall, and the use of rotten eggs in their food. Court records showed that about fifty incarcerated people overwhelmed several corrections officers and took thirteen hostages. Felix Castro, the imprisoned leader of the Latinos Unidos organization, was credited with negotiating the return of prison staff and later faced charges of instigating the uprising.53 When news broke that Klansmen were planning cross burnings in the local Klan unit, or “Klavern,” at Pine Bush, New York, the group decided to investigate Schoonmaker more closely. To get more information about his role, Whitehorn agreed to go to Schoonmaker’s house posing as a journalist. She wore a wig. “I sat in his house asking him questions, ready for him to reveal something we could use, but it was nothing that surprising,” she recalled. “He hated Black people, Jews, and the Catholics.” On multiple occasions, Laura Whitehorn, Terry Bisson, Lisa Roth, Nancy Ryan, and Afeni Shakur all piled into Laura’s van, driving two hours north to attend the deposition.
Incarcerated people at Napanoch continued to demand that Klansmen working at the prison be fired. John Brown members met with them regularly, as they were increasingly concerned about the threats they faced for challenging the white supremacists. Here they learned that prison guards associated with the Klan had received clearance by the administration, and several had received promotions. Some guards maintained their jobs and retaliated against activists on the inside with intimidation tactics and harassment. One guard wore his Klan robe inside the prison and burned a paper cross in front of the cells of the incarcerated Black men.
At this point, the John Brown crew decided that bringing more people into the fight was needed, to increase prison support work and fight white supremacists in prisons. They also focused on educating people about the connections between police brutality at home and the role of empire in suppressing populations in Third World countries. Their first pamphlet, Smash the Klan!, opened with the letter from Siwatu-Hodari and outlined important details of the pending case against the prison. It also offered fact sheets and contact information for getting involved. The pamphlet stated:
We have known about Earl Schoonmaker’s Klan affiliation for 3 years. We have had lists of violent acts against prisoners at Napanoch and other prisoners. These are not unrelated to the atrocities which have characterized the Klan’s 100 years of racist terror. Exposure of the Klan’s whole history and strategy is a responsibility that must be shared by all honest forces in this country.
With this tangible anti-Klan material, the group made its initial attempts at conducting public outreach in white communities. First, members went to supermarkets. “It wasn’t particularly strategic, but that is where we thought we would find white people we could talk to,” remembered Boyle. In addition to free Smash the Klan! pamphlets, they offered “Death to the Klan!” T-shirts for $3.50, and buttons for 60 cents.
Never taking an official position on the role of white working people, they often completely missed the opportunity to organize around labor and economics. When shoppers stopped by their table in Brooklyn, members tried out conversations with white people who weren’t already part of the movement. Bob recalled talking to a working-class white woman when she approached the table.
“She had three crying children, she was carrying her stuff, maybe she was a single mother, maybe not. And here I am going to law school and telling her that she is privileged and if she didn’t support Black Liberation, something was wrong. This was the line. We couldn’t talk to this woman from where she was coming from, that she worked all week and was dealing with the kids and had to do her shopping, was probably living in a three-story walk-up. It wasn’t getting anywhere.”
While the concept of “white privilege” had yet to be popularized, the Committee continued an open-ended analysis that had already gone through several iterations throughout the decades. W.E.B. Du Bois never used the term but theorized in 1935 that white workers received positive psychological wages based on their skin color. These invisible wages created a diabolical bargain in which white workers gained the illusion of superiority and lost just about everything else in terms of wages, power, and the possibility of their own emancipation. In a sense, his description of the politics of whiteness was the opposite of subsequent understandings of privilege. Depending on their politics, theorists have emphasized the individualistic aspects of the idea or the structural causes. The basis of the theory is simple. People of color in the United States are excluded from economic, social, and political access that whites provide for one another. The interlocking system that upholds this inequity is led by elites with the near full participation of less privileged white people, who also get limited access to power. The process of chronic exclusion involves a violence against equality, fairness, justice, and freedom. This violence lies at the core of white supremacy and its legacy from the era of settler-colonialism through to the current period.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Theodore Allen developed these ideas to assert that there was no scientific basis for the category of the white race, and that it was invented as a method of class control. He formed this thesis after meticulously searching through pre-colonial records in Virginia and finding no mention of “white” until after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The rebellion united Black and white laborers against a colonial regime that was seen as coddling indigenous raids on settler colonies. Fearful of what might come after, Allen documented the use of whiteness to confer material and social advantages—privileges—on whites in order to sabotage potential Black-white alliances. Allen described privilege as a “poison bait” that would never allow for working-class power.54 Cedric Robinson forever changed this debate in the early 1980s with his seminal work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
