particularly the impunity with which it covertly targeted, monitored, and disrupted political groups.12
John Brown Anti-Klan Committee co-founder Susan Rosenberg described what set them apart from many of their anti-Klan colleagues of the day. “We believed that the KKK was not the ‘lunatic fringe’ of the racist movement but rather the vanguard of an enormous popular current of white racist sentiment. And we believed that without an active anti-racist movement to both oppose the racists and support Black-led efforts, we could not have a radical or progressive movement in the United States.”13
A distinguishing characteristic of the John Brown group was its alignment with organizations fighting for self-determination. When Imari Obadele, a leader within the Republic of New Afrika, wrote that the “biggest threat comes from the white civilian armies, the Ku Klux Klan and those other semi-official forces who for one hundred years have done the dirty work of military oppression in the South,”14 the Committee refined its role, declaring:
The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee is a national organization that fights the racist violence of the KKK and Nazis, and their underlying cause, the system of white supremacy. We take our name from John Brown, the 19th Century white abolitionist who gave his life fighting against slavery and white supremacy. In the spirit of John Brown, we fight racism, build solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, and support all struggles for human rights and self-determination.15
How to mobilize white people to fulfill that task was the central tactical question that animated the group. In the process, they encouraged white people to assume risks usually expected of people of color, including the risk of physical harm and ostracism. The group insisted that it was white people’s responsibility to get in the way of the threats posed by white supremacists. This approach was intended to undermine the age-old norms of white silence, complicity, and active participation in racialized intimidation, coercion, and violence. In this sense, the Committee continued the work of the white civil rights organizers who had traveled to the South just two decades before. But the Committee’s members differed from these predecessors because they did not view nonviolence as the only strategic option against white supremacy. They also diverged from much of the previous era’s radical optimism by rejecting the idea that long-lasting change would come from either a reformed political system or a unifying conversion to a socialist system.
Following cues set by their allies, Republic of New Afrika, they envisioned that political liberation would involve the revolutionary dissolution of the United States and the subsequent formation of distinct “New Boundaries.” This sentiment was in the ether at the time, reverberating in anti-imperialist struggles and supported by the larger cultural milieu of resistance around the world. Many adherents of this view supported a “New Afrika” being formed from the Southern slavocracy states with a Black majority: Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. The persistence of such calls was, in part, a reaction to several conditions. One was the intensification of racist terror—including the mysterious murders of two dozen Black children in Atlanta, and the general uptick in the killings of Black people across the United States during the period.16
The group also embraced the principle of leadership from the oppressed. This meant following the political lead of those most targeted by white supremacists and those who organized to counter them. For the John Brown group, supporting the strategies of those on the frontlines of the fight was part and parcel of the work of combatting racism. Its members made swift and bold moves to address these issues, conscious of their advantages as white people.
THE KLAN REINVENTS ITSELF
The Committee’s work was sharpened by the Klan’s campaign to rebrand itself. In 1865, the Klan forged an image of itself as protector of the lost Confederacy, a role practiced through violent opposition to the post-war period of social, economic, and government reorganization in the United States known as the Reconstruction Era. From 1863 to 1877, Black communities mobilized to win U.S. citizenship (13th Amendment), protection under the law (14th Amendment), voting rights (15th Amendment), and the right to hold political office. In response to the sudden emergence of Black citizenship, rights, and political power, the Klan formed, and used terrorist violence such as floggings, mutilations, lynchings, shootings, and arson, all in an effort to regain white control of state and federal governments.17 Of the 265 Black politicians elected to office during this period, thirty-five were murdered by the Klan and other white supremacist organizations.18 Most of these atrocities, which traumatized Black people throughout the country, were largely tolerated by state authorities and federal officials, as that effort reconsolidated state power through white people.19
Once state-sponsored racial segregation was codified in the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Klan went into a lull, only to rekindle through a wave of suspicion and antipathy toward immigrants after World War I. Here, the Klan’s violent intolerance widened from Black people to “aliens, idlers, union leaders . . . Asians, immigrants, bootleggers, dope, graft, night clubs, road houses, violation of the sabbath, sex, pre- and extra-marital escapades and scandalous behavior.”20 This “Second Wave” of the Klan was the largest, with the organization swelling to somewhere between four to six million members in the United States during the 1920s. Hiring a public relations team, the Klan became a normalized feature of American life, with a semi-professional baseball team, 150 newspapers, and two radio stations. It achieved significant influence in U.S. political life with sixteen senators, eleven state governors, sixty members of Congress, and numerous state municipal elections running openly as Klansmen.21 In fact, the Klan had become such a deeply embedded feature of U.S. politics that a proposal made at the 1924 Democratic National Convention to oppose the Klan lost by one vote.22
Few images capture the Klan at its peak better than photographs taken on August 8, 1925, showing 40,000 Klansmen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., demanding stricter laws against immigrants, even though a draconian one had been passed just a year prior.23 Klan Grand Wizard H.W. Evans, who led the march, had relocated the national offices to Washington two years prior in order to have a greater influence on Congress.
KKK Parade, Washington D.C., August 8, 1925. Photograph by Herbert A. French. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
In the 1960s, the so-called “Third Wave” of the Klan worked hard to deploy the trope that they were not against Black people, but rather for white people, white heritage, and white rights.24 This rebranding allowed the Klan to advance allegations of “reverse racism”—that gains made by Black people would come at the expense of white people. As a result of this view, the Klan in this period pushed the idea that if Black people had a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People looking after their interests, then white people should have a National Association for the Advancement of White People looking after their interests. The Klan made few actual amendments to its original platform. It adapted its communications strategy in an attempt to remain appealing to whites in the transformed cultural context of the post–Civil Rights era. It was also the era when the Klan and similar organizations concentrated on infiltrating the military as a method of building power. In Vietnam, Klan-affiliated soldiers burned crosses to celebrate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1979, heavily armed Klan members held a recruiting rally outside an Army base in Virginia Beach.25
PART OF THE MOVEMENT
The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee used its regular newspaper, Death to the Klan!, to connect people and communities fighting racism. This helped to develop momentum and links that contributed to the decentralized Anti-Racist Action networks from 1987 to the early 2000s.
