Black Antifascist Tradition

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.

• IntroductionChapter 1: “Premature” Black Antifascism: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law,” and the Conspiracy of Anti-Black Fascism Chapter 2: Communist, Anti-Colonial, and Pan-African AntifascismChapter 3: Double V: Anti-Fascism and World War II Chapter 4: Legal Antifascism: The We Charge Genocide CampaignChapter 5: Black Power Antifascism Chapter 6: For a Black Antifascism: On Anarchy, Autonomy, Antagonism, and Abolition Chapter 7: Abolitionist AntifascismEpilogue: The Modern Global Fascist Echo Chamber and BLM-ANTIFA

"With an academic precision and an accessible tone, Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen’s history of the Black Antifascist Tradition, a coherent and timely lineage of thought and action against the far-right, helps to cohere one of the least studied and yet most historically relevant traditions in left-wing activism. The book emerges, in part, from Hope’s essay in my 2022 anthology No Pasaran and Mullen’s co-edited (with Chris Vitale) volume The Anti-Fascist Reader, which itself focuses on much of the canon of the Black Antifascist Tradition. Here they weave together a political position that stands distinct from much of the white and European focused antifascist canon, a viewpoint that sees fascism as baked into the Western structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy. We trace through the years of fighting lynchings and the Klan, the creation of self-defense squads in the 1950s and 1960s, the Black Panther Party and the Unite Against Fascist conference, Black anarchism of the 1970s-1980s, all the way to Black Lives Matter and antifascist organizing today. If any book on antifascism was missing, this was it." —Shane Burley's best books of 2024, for the Maiseh Review"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