The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition

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Description

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.

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 worldand to everyone.

, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectualsfrom Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complexhave 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, Walter Rodney, 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

Author Bio

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.