[We have three different kinds of allies: potential, problematic
and proven. They all have the most important word in there: ally. But
we need different strategies for each because we’ve got to unite all
of them against the actual fascists.]
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‘DON’T LET THE CHAIN OF FREEDOM BREAK AT YOUR LINK’  
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Loretta Ross and Scot Nakagawa
July 6, 2023
Convergence
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_ We have three different kinds of allies: potential, problematic and
proven. They all have the most important word in there: ally. But we
need different strategies for each because we’ve got to unite all of
them against the actual fascists. _

March through Greensboro, NC protesting the acquittal of neo-Nazis
and members of the Ku Klux Klan who shot and killed five anti-Klan
protesters in the Nov. 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre, (image via
Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0)

 

_Smith College Professor Loretta Ross and 22nd Century Initiative
Director Scot Nakagawa have both engaged for decades in the fight
against the far Right. In this conversation they look at the lessons
that  Ross’ work with the__ National Anti-Klan Network_
[[link removed]]_ hold
for the present; how the landscape of the Right has changed; and how
we should orient ourselves to the present. Convergence Editorial Board
member Marcy Rein edited the transcript of their hour-plus dialogue._

SCOT NAKAGAWA: Loretta, I think of you as one of the architects of
the framework that is being used by social justice advocates and
democracy reformers through the work you did with the National
Anti-Klan Network and even earlier. Could you talk a bit about that
history and what lessons you draw from it, and not just from the
successes but from the mistakes you made?

LORETTA ROSS: The National Anti-Klan Network (NAKN, later renamed the
Center for Democratic Renewal) dates back to the Greensboro massacre
[[link removed]] of November 1979 in which
five anti-Klan protestors were murdered. An interracial group of
people, including Rev. C.T. Vivian, Anne Braden, Rev. Mac Charles
Jones, and others, decided that there needed to be a watchdog agency,
a civil rights organization that kept its eye on hate groups. The
popular conversation at the time was that during the presidency of
Jimmy Carter the Klan was in retreat and hate groups didn’t matter.
Every time there’s a Democratic president, somebody wants to spin
that narrative. But these organizers begged to differ — particularly
because the people caught on videotape murdering those leftists were
all acquitted, and it turned out that the FBI and the local sheriff
had provocateurs in the crowd in amongst the Klansmen.

NAKN’s purpose was to monitor and report on hate groups and the
threat that they posed — the Klan and what then was revealed as the
neo-Nazi movement. When I came on as program director in 1990, my
particular responsibilities were to help communities and individuals
deal with the consequences of the far Right’s activities. If they
marched through a town or committed a hate crime or whatever, my job
was to parachute in and help local people come up with an effective
response. We wrote a handbook called _When Hate Groups Come to Town_
[[link removed]],
giving people what we found to be effective responses.

We also wrote a number of smaller pamphlets about dealing with
homophobia and talking about the intersection of white supremacy and
law enforcement. The latter was called “They Don’t All Wear
Sheets.” Three years into my term, I became the program/research
director after the research director, Leonard Zeskind, received a
MacArthur “genius” grant and retired. That meant dealing with a
bunch of people who infiltrated hate groups and reported on them. That
allowed me to do a weekly report of what hate activity occurred and
what hate crimes happened, those kinds of things, and to try to plot
the trajectory of their future activities. I was the only Black person
and the only woman at the time managing such an opposition research
department.

One of the things that I’m rather proud of was our 1994 report
called “Women’s Watch.” There was such increasing violence
against abortion clinics and everybody else who was running a research
department at an anti-hate monitoring group was denying the overlap
between the anti-abortion violence and the racist and anti-Semitic
violence. I believe that they were the same people because the tactics
were too similar and some of the same people we monitored in racist
activities were showing up at anti-abortion protests. Others were
saying, “They’re borrowing tactics from the white supremacist
movement,” and I’m saying, “No, they are _part_ of the white
supremacist movement; they don’t have to borrow anything.” 

In terms of mistakes, I guess the most obvious mistake would be not
anticipating the prevalence of white supremacist ideology in the
religious Right. That wasn’t something that we were particularly
monitoring. And it’s something that Political Research Associates
[[link removed]] took on: Jean
Hardisty, Chip Berlet, and Fred Clarkson recognized it and spent a lot
of time monitoring the religious right and their shift to the hard
right. But at CDR, we did not focus on that.

The Right makes its connections

SN: You also did mention how the far Right, the white supremacist
Right, and the Christian nationalists appear to be merging. But that
wasn’t as evident way back then, right?

LR: Not in the ‘70s. That was still the beginning of the Reagan
Revolution. And what they badly named the Moral Majority started
deciding to become much more highly political, entering into electoral
politics, and that happened with the organization of Ronald Reagan’s
campaign during Carter’s administration.

SN: It seems to me like NAKN, because it had the base it had (rooted
in the Civil Rights Movement), did something really important in
publishing for their membership. Things like the publication Mab
Segrest [[link removed]] authored,
“Quarantines and AIDS” –– which came out right on time at the
height of the AIDS pandemic –– had a powerful effect in helping
people to see how different groups were connected to each other. It
showed how the attack on gay men’s sexuality was related to the
attack on abortion and affirmative action, all the different things
that we were seeing playing out in that period. I felt like the
Network played a really critical role in helping us who were members
of it to pick up those threads and to start to see what was happening
locally in a much bigger context.

LR: Of course. I don’t know about you, but my jaw dropped when I
read Nancy McLean’s _Democracy In Chains_
[[link removed]],
and then realized that this many-headed hydra we’ve been fighting
had congealed in the 1950s, and here we are 70 years later just
catching up to that level of coordination while we’re playing
Whack-a-Mole with all these different issues, and they have
intersected these issues long before we knew the role of the Koch
brothers and all of that. So it really does feel like we’re often
playing Whack-a-Mole, when in fact they have a court date and cogent
plan for deforming or deconstructing democracy.

SN: In 1991 we had Russ Bellant’s _Old Nazis, the New Right and
the Republican Party_
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there were all the publications by Political Research Associates…
We’ve been getting these warnings for so long. Why do you think we
haven’t responded?

LR: Well, part of it is capacity. Every time there’s a Democrat in
office, we end up with all the foundations de-prioritizing the
anti-fascist work and then they have to ramp it up all over again when
a Republican gets elected. We could point out at least a dozen
organizations that have folded because of this yo-yo funding. Now
we’re down to three. It’s not a little foundation world thing:
It’s all the white liberal perception. They are so eager to put
white supremacy, the ideology, behind them that they want to declare
it prematurely dead over and over again.

SN: That is such a good way of putting it. So the way that I remember
this history is that in 1979 the Greensboro massacre happens. That’s
an important inflection point. By the 1980s, there’s a Northwest
imperative when the white supremacist movement starts to rebrand
itself and move organizers and resources into the Pacific Northwest,
pivoting toward youth organizing through neo-Nazi organizing and to
white nationalism. Strategic realignment, basically.

To try to build a new constituency, they come up to the Northwest. The
murder of Mulugeta Seraw
[[link removed]] happens
in 1988. And then we learned that Muguleta Seraw’s murderers were
actually connected to a national organization. They weren’t just
local racist skinheads: They were connected to the White Aryan
Resistance which was headed by a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard
named Tom Metzger. And that was the opening for the Southern Poverty
Law Center to come in and sue on behalf of the Seraw family, because
there was an entity you could sue that did collaborate with them and
encourage them and train them. And that lawsuit was successful. Then
there are other somewhat successful efforts to try to unseat them.

But the backdrop of all of this is FBI overreach at Ruby Ridge, in
Waco, Texas, targeting the white separatist movement and what was
becoming white nationalism. Then the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
happens in retaliation for those violent overreaches. And the movement
is forced underground. They get put to the top of the FBI watch list
and are forced to start to reorganize themselves as an underground
movement. Many people think that once they were underground they
disappeared.

Then we start to view the issues as more national: We start to be less
concerned about the grassroots Christian nationalist movement because
the election of George W. Bush mainstreams them. That precipitates
this huge defunding of an entire sector of organizations that were the
watchdogs, that did the vigilance work, and also organized communities
to try to create a permanent countervailing force against what we
thought was a permanent right-wing insurgency.

But then Barack Obama is elected president and the movement starts to
explode in number in these online spaces until Donald Trump comes in
and runs against the phantom Black president who can’t run again and
calls the white supremacists into action as he starts to realize the
power of being a disrupter. All those things seem to be leading to the
present moment.

LR: Absolutely. And there would be one other thing that I would add
to that brilliant analysis and that’s the role that the Aryan
Nations played, and Richard Butler because of the unifying gatherings
he offered. At one time the Klan and the Nazis didn’t speak to each
other because there were too many former World War II people in the
Klan who fought Nazis and didn’t see them as their natural allies.
Richard Butler played a significant role in bringing the Klan and the
Nazis together including the Church of the Creator people (COTC) led
by William Pierce (author of the _Turner Diaries_ that influenced
Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma federal building) and others
who really worked hard to build unity within the white supremacist
movement, just like they tried to do with Charlottesville in 2017.

SN: Yes. Now we’re facing a really sad set of circumstances. And I
think you’re right about that liberalism –– at least as an
ideology in the United States –– insulated people from the sense
of what was actually happening. They kept thinking about us as facing
an outside invading force as opposed to something endemic.

Stop fighting each other and build power

LR: Exactly. One of the sayings we have in the civil rights movement
(which I always feel a little silly about quoting because I’ve never
actually been in the civil rights movement — the closest work I did
was the National Anti-Klan Network, and in the years before that, I
was in the women’s movement) but anyway, we say that we have to
convince people today that they are not the entire chain of freedom.
The chain of freedom stretches back toward your ancestors and forward
toward your descendants. Your job today is to make sure the chain
doesn’t break at your link. That’s all you need to focus on: Not
letting the chain break at your link.

SN: Speaking of the present and those of us who are attending to our
links, what are your key recommendations for now? What do you think
this long history taught us? What are we going to be doing?

LR: Mobilize, mobilize. That’s one reason that I’m so passionate
about the calling-in culture, because it’s a well-known truism that
the Republicans organize for power and Democrats organize to fight
each other. I want to keep us from fighting each other so we can make
sure we get the power necessary to keep the Republicans out of office
and quash this neo-Nazi threat.

I live in Georgia and I want to call this “Stacey land.” Because
we are where the states can be tipped blue. With Governor Brian Kemp,
we know what it feels like to have the fucker who’s the referee of
the election run for office. The only way Republicans stay in power in
our state is by cheating. We don’t need a blue wave. We need a blue
tsunami! It’s not just enough to go to the polls yourself. You got
to bring 10 people. Everybody you talk to, whether it’s a grocery
clerk bagging your groceries or some random taxi driver, you ask
everyone if they are going to vote. We must include this in our
everyday conversations. That’s what Stacey [Abrams] has done for us
in Georgia; politics is never just a casual thing. It is a movement, a
participatory democracy movement, that we’re building in this state.
For every election. That’s the dominant conversation, at least in
the Black community.

But I was really impressed with the last elections we had, not only
2020 but 2022 as well. Of course, the governor shut down polling
precincts all through the Black community for various spurious reasons
to suppress our votes. But when I came back to Georgia to vote in
2022, I couldn’t even find a place to vote because the lines were
wrapped around the fucking buildings almost three times. I mean,
we’re talking about massive lines as if people were giving away
money. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a state where you
experienced that. It’s amazing what that does to your spirit and
your determination.

When I finally found a place where I could vote with a shorter waiting
period, that line was half-white. I’m in the heart of the black
community here, right? I’m not in safe, white, North Atlanta. I’m
in the ghetto part of the Black community with hip-hop music blasting,
people with their pants hanging off their asses, and all kinds of
chicken wings being sold. And half the voting line is white. And they
were patiently determined. I said to myself, “Oh my, oh, here. We
got this. We got this!” You know, I so wish every state felt like
the Black community in Georgia when it comes to voting.

Proven, potential and problematic allies

SN:  You’re going to be at our conference. What’s your message?

LR: Calling in. I think that’s what the Left most needs to hear
right now.

I mean, if I hear another young person telling me, “This is
performative,” I want to stop them. If you see somebody put up a
Black Lives Matter sign, and that’s all you see of them, you already
know the most important thing you need to know about them, because a
Klansman never put up a Black Lives Matter sign! Do your damn threat
assessments better.

We’ve got three different kinds of allies: potential, problematic
and proven. They all have the most important word in there: ally. But
we need different strategies for potential ones, for problematic ones
and for proven ones. Because we’ve got to unite all of them against
the actual fascists. But if we dismiss people because they’re
problematic or unproven, then we weaken our own forces. And if we
missed the potential of the Black Lives Matter sign person, we’ve
shot ourselves in the foot.

In the civil rights movement, they used to say we need to turn to each
other instead of on each other. If you read the accounts of Ralph
David Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, and C.T. Vivian, Hosea Williams, and
all these other people, they used to fight so bitterly behind closed
doors, but they knew how to present a united front once they came out
to confront Bull Connor. The legends have it that even the Selma march
that John Lewis organized, most of the leaders didn’t want him to do
it. But you never heard a word of criticism about him doing it. And so
that’s what we need to learn. You don’t win when you’re trying
to be right, versus trying to be effective. That’s gonna be the big
message.

_Convergence_ is pleased to co-publish this article with _The
Forge_.

_Loretta J. Ross is a visiting professor at Smith College. In the
course of her decades of activism, Loretta became one of the first
African American women to direct a rape crisis center; served as the
program/research coordinator at the Center For Democratic Renewal
(National Anti-Klan Network) and the national coordinator for
the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network
[[link removed]]._

_Scot Nakagawa is a co-founder and co-director of the 22nd Century
Initiative, a national strategy and action hub in the fight to defeat
white nationalism and authoritarianism. Scot is also the founder
of The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook
[[link removed]],
an online newsletter to the frontline of the growing movement to win a
truly people-centered, pluralistic, multiracial and feminist democracy
in the U.S._

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We work with
organizers and activists on the frontlines of today’s most pressing
struggles to produce articles, videos and podcasts that sharpen our
collective practice, lift up stories from the grassroots, and promote
strategic debate. Our goal is to create the shared strategy needed to
change our society and the world. Our community of readers, viewers,
and content producers are united in our purpose: winning multi-racial
democracy and a radically democratic economy._

_Today, our movements continue to grow, but so too does the threat
from the racist, authoritarian right. We believe we can defeat them,
dismantle racial capitalism, and win the change we need by building a
new governing majority that is driven by a convergence of grassroots
social movements, labor movements, socialists, and progressives. 
Join us._

* Racial Justice
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* Greensboro Massacre
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