. . . But What about Antifa?

There are many, of whom I am one, who see a menacing movement toward fascism in this country. (See my 7/20 article “Is the Fear of Fascism Ill-Founded?”) Any vocal opposition to fascism, however, is often met with the rejoinder, “. . . but what about Antifa?” 

The Antifa logo

Descriptive Words about Antifa

There is much online and in the mass media about Antifa. Some of that material is good and helpful; some is certainly not so good or helpful. I am particularly negative toward what is being said/shown on Fox News and by people such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

There is, though, a good and helpful book about Antifa written by a scholar and college professor. That book is Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (2017) by Mark Bray, who earned his Ph.D. in 2016 at Rutgers University and currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Early in his Introduction, Bray explains that “anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and that has become especially menacing in recent years.”

In particular, Antifa in the U.S. see a real danger in the current presence and support of white supremacists, a movement that seems to be increasing in numbers and influence.

Ten Assumptions about Antifa

In reading/thinking about Antifa, I have come up with the following ten assumptions.

1) Fascism is bad/harmful for any nation and for the world.

2) Opposition to fascism is good/potentially helpful for any nation and for the world.

3) The people most actively opposed to fascism are referred to as Antifa.

4) As in any group/movement, there are “good” and “bad” people in Antifa.

5) Antifa members who use violence and physically harm persons should be denounced.

6) Antifa members who adamantly and peacefully oppose fascism should be applauded.

7) In the 1920s and ’30s Antifa in Italy and Germany were too few and too late.

8) Increasing fascism in the U.S. is a real threat that must be taken seriously.

9) Current criticism of Antifa is often misleading and ill-founded.

10) It is better to err on the side of supporting Antifa than to condone fascism.

What about it, readers? Are any of these assumptions questionable and/or indications of muddled thinking?

Despite Misgivings about Antifa

The proclivity of some Antifa members to use violence is troubling to me. I am more in favor of what they try to do than in how they sometimes do it.

But I think DJT is entirely wrong in suggesting that perhaps Antifa should be branded as a terrorist organization. Just last Saturday he tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’”

That was just before an expected confrontation between Antifa and Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon. Police intervened and there were no serious clashes, but the leader of the Proud Boys declared their Portland rally a success, saying, "Go Look at President Trump's Twitter." 

Suggestions that Antifa is the (im)moral equivalent of white supremacist groups such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, etc. are entirely wrong. The latter are against Blacks, Jews, Latinx immigrants, and other non-whites. The Antifa are against the racism and xenophobia of the groups that have characteristics of fascism.

I agree with what historian Dave Renton says in his book Fascism (1999) and cited by Mark Bray: “. . . one cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it.”

Bray further states, “We should be warier of those who are truly neutral toward fascism than those who honestly espouse their opposition to racism, genocide, and tyranny.”

So, despite some misgivings about Antifa, I fully agree with their opposition to the far-right neo-fascist organizations they actively oppose.

A Tangled Mercy at Mother Emanuel Church

Three years ago on June 17, a white terrorist shot and killed nine African-Americans in the Emanuel African Episcopal Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That tragic event is linked to the early history of that church in an engaging 2017 novel titled A Tangled Mercy.

The Early History of “Mother Emanuel”

Between 1815 and 1818, Hampstead Church was founded in Charleston, South Carolina. Later its name was changed to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and it became the largest African-American church south of Baltimore. Through the years it has been affectionately called Mother Emanuel Church.

Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 was the primary leader of the thwarted slave revolt in Charleston, was one of the church’s founders. Vesey and more than 30 others were executed by hanging on July 2 that year. Soon afterward the church building was burned down.

Mother Emanuel Church was not able to rebuild until after the Civil War. The plans for the new building constructed then were drawn by architect Robert Vesey, Denmark Vesey’s son.

After an earthquake demolished that structure in 1886, the current building, which seats some 2,500 people, was completed in 1892.  

Worship at Mother Emanuel Church on June 21, 2015

The 2015 Shooting at Mother Emanuel

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof went to Mother Emanuel Church and joined a dozen other people in Bible study and prayer.

When the small group began to pray about 9 p.m., Roof pulled a gun from a fanny pack and began shooting those around him. He fatally wounded nine people, including Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor who was also a state senator.

Roof was soon apprehended. He confessed that he committed the atrocity at Mother Emanuel Church in the hope of igniting a race war. Before the shooting, a website showed him posing with emblems associated with white supremacy and with photos of the Confederate battle flag.

As was widely reported, not long after that tragic shooting the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds.

Early last year Roof was sentenced to death. He is now waiting on death row in a federal prison in Indiana. 

There has, for good reason, been fear of Islamist terrorists in the U.S. since 9/11/01. But between 2001 and 2015, more Americans were killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamist terrorists.

Even though it may be the worst act of domestic terrorism since 2001, Roof’s is just one of many terrorist acts committed by white supremacists in the U.S. in recent years.

A Tangled Mercy  

Thanks to Jason Edwards, my friend and former pastor, I heard about A Tangled Mercy, a new novel by Joy Jordan-Lake, a friend of Jason’s since his seminary days at Baylor. Soon after learning about Joy’s book, I began reading it and found it to be quite intriguing. 

In alternating chapters, she told the story of events in Charleston in 1822 and in 2015, skillfully weaving the stories together.

Part of the 1822 story was about one of “the amazing Grimké sisters,” as I called them in a 2016 blog article (see here), and about Denmark Vesey (whom I also introduced in that article).

The chapters about 2015, of course, lead to the shooting in Mother Emanuel Church.

If you are looking for a good novel to read this summer, I recommend A Tangled Mercy. (I chose it as the best of the 23 novels I read last year.)

One of my favorite quotes in the book is near the end: “A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears” (p. 425).

Standing with the Losers

The long, acrimonious U.S. presidential election is over—and with an inexplicable result. The man whose election was unexpected by most and unthinkable by many is now two months away from becoming the 45^th POTUS.

Winners and Losers

Who are the winners and losers of Tuesday’s shocking election? You know how the election turned out for the candidates, but who are the groups of persons who won and lost?

It seems quite clear that the main winners of the election (by how they voted) are white men, conservative Christians, and people with limited education. More than those of other demographic groups, they seem to be the victorious ones.

It also seems quite clear that the main losers of the election (by the voting results) are women, the poor, African-Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people—and probably the U.S. as a whole.

In his infamous statement regarding John McCain (in July 2015, here), the President-elect said, “I don’t like losers.”

It remains to be seen how the new President will treat, or mistreat, my list of losers. Perhaps it will not be as bad as many of us fear. Perhaps it will be a lot worse than those who voted for him think. Only time will tell.

Standing with the Losers

Since my prior article was about voting for justice, I here state clearly that I am standing with the losers that I mentioned above and am committed to continuing work for greater justice for those in each group.

Perhaps it somewhat overstates my stance, but I agree with the following statement which I saw on Facebook early Wednesday morning: 

Speaking of Facebook and one group of losers, LGBT people, here are posts from two Facebook friends. One, a gay college student, wrote to his family members who voted for Trump: “I hope your racist bigotry toward Mexicans was worth risking my livelihood as a gay man. You frankly disgust me.”

Then there is this that Robert, a gay Hispanic man who attends the same church I do, posted on Facebook: “If you voted for Trump . . . delete me from Facebook. . . . . a vote for him is a vote for my destruction as a human being.”

I stand with these two friends—and with other losers in Tuesday’s election. I will continue to advocate social justice for them all, and I hope you will, too.

The Arc Bends toward Justice

On Wednesday morning I read an excellent article on Vox.com: “America is not, it turns out, better than this.” At the beginning of that piece the writer tells about President Obama’s new (2010) Oval Office rug.

There are five quotations embedded in that rug. One is that of abolitionist Theodore Parker as paraphrased by MLKing, Jr.: “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, but It Bends Toward Justice.”

In my book The Limits of Liberalism (see p. 106) I was a bit critical of Parker’s words as they tend(ed) to feed into the over-optimism of some forms of liberalism. Things are not inexorably getting better and better every day in every way.

As the writer or the Vox article acknowledges, sometimes there are “kinks in the arc.” Tuesday’s election was, I fear, a major kink, a sizable setback for justice in this country—and I may not live long enough to see all the negative effects of this election bent fully back to even present-day justice levels.

So, while I am greatly disappointed in the outcome of the election, my disappointment is not primarily that Ms. Clinton and the Democrats lost. My great sorrow is for the losers who will quite likely encounter increased injustice.

The Elections of 1868 and 2016

It is, thankfully, just nine days until Election Day. Earlier in the year this was touted as one of the most important elections in U.S. history. Much of the tension in the presidential election, though, has been erased by HRC’s huge lead in the polls.

However, which Party controls the Senate, and even the House, rides upon the outcome of the Nov. 8 election, so it remains an extremely important election.

As the first presidential election after the Civil War, though, the election of 1868 was perhaps even more important than the one this year. 

Background: Pres. Andrew Johnson

As you know, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was the Vice-President who was sworn into office on April 15, 1865, three hours after President Lincoln died from the assassin’s bullets. 

Johnson (1808-75) was born in North Carolina but lived in Tennessee from his teenager years. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857 and became the Vice-President on March 4, 1865.

Even though he was not opposed to slavery, Johnson did not support secession and thus opposed Tennessee joining the Confederate States of America in June 1861. He was the only senator from a Confederate state not to resign his senate seat.

Johnson, however, was a southerner, and after the war he wanted to protect the interests of the whites in the South and to welcome them back into the Union quickly and easily. 

In 1866 Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill to protect the rights of the slaves who had been freed, but Johnson vetoed that bill.

Even though Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, he still did much to benefit the white southerners and to repress the equality of the freed slaves. As Hans L. Trefousse writes in Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989), Johnson “preserved the South as ‘a white man’s country’” (p. 334).

1868: racist Democrats

Johnson’s main political opponents were not just the Republicans but those who were generally called Radical Republicans—men such as Rep. Thaddeus Stephens and Sen. Charles Sumner. They were the leaders in the impeachment of Pres. Johnson in February 1868.

Johnson was so unpopular that he was not chosen to be the Democratic candidate for President in the 1868 election. Horatio Seymour, a former New York governor, was nominated for the office, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., a former U.S. Representative from Missouri, became the nominee for Vice-President.

In his campaign Seymour advocated a policy of conservative, limited government. He also opposed the Reconstruction policies of the Republicans in Congress. His campaign was marked by pronounced appeals to racism with repeated attempts to brand General Ulysses S. Grant as the “Nigger” candidate and Seymour as the “White Man’s” candidate.

Likewise, V-P candidate Blair used “blatantly racist language” in his campaign speeches, setting the tone for what Eric Foner called (in 1990) “the last Presidential contest to center on white supremacy” (A Short History of Reconstruction, p. 145). 

Thankfully, Grant was elected President.

2016: racist Republicans

It is quite obvious that the position of the two Parties have completely reversed since 1868. This year Donald Trump’s main support, by far, is by white voters—and he has the overwhelming support of white supremacists. (See my June 5 article “Can Trump Make America White Again?”.)

While candidate Trump is not as blatantly racist as Seymour and Blair were in 1868, it seems clear that he and many of his supporters are racists. 

Like 1868, the election this year is partly about the equality of all Americans, and I am glad the result will most likely turn out the same way, against racism, as it did then.

Can Trump Make America White Again?

Although many people (including me) long thought there was no way Donald Trump would become the Republican candidate for President this year, he is now the presumptive nominee and could be the next President of the United States.

There are many explanations for the rise and continuance of Trump’s popularity, none of which are fully adequate. But since the bulk of Trump’s support comes from white Americans, especially angry white men, his slogan “Make America Great Again” is seen by some as his attempt to “make America white again.”

It is clear that he has received the support of, and endorsements from, various white supremacy groups in the country.

Back in November of last year, Huffington Post published an online article titled “Donald Trump’s Plan to Make America White Again.”

Similarly, “Make America White Again?” is the title of an article in The Atlantic in March of this year. The subtitle is “Donald Trump’s language is eerily similar to the 1920s Ku Klux Klan—hypernationalistic and anti-immigrant.”

This is an opportune time to think about the KKK, for according to the African American Registry, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan is said to have been 150 years ago, on May 31, 1866, in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Actually, that was the first KKK, which mostly shut down in 1871. It was reorganized in 1915 and flourished in the 1920s, peaking with perhaps as many as five million members in 1925. Then it began to decline again. 

KKK March in Washington, 1925

In the early 1950s it became quite active once again—especially after 1954 when the Supreme Court declared that the system of segregated schools in the U.S. was unconstitutional.

I have never directly seen KKK activities. It was quite different, though, for James Cone, an African-American who was born in southern Arkansas the same month that I was born in northern Missouri.

Cone writes, “During my childhood, white supremacy ruled supreme. White people were virtually free to do anything to blacks with impunity. The violent crosses of the Ku Klux Klan were a familiar reality” (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 2011, p. xv).

In 2012 ABC News produced a 13-minute program titled “Inside the New KKK.” It featured interviews with people in the Klan and aired their talk about “race war”—based partly on their fear of the black President.

According to that program, there were then about 6,000 KKK members in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that there are now 25 states with KKK chapters, and a total of 190 chapters. Only two are in Missouri and just one in Iowa, but there are eight in Arkansas and 52 in Texas.

The founding of the KKK in 1866 and its early history is excellently told in They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010) by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (b. 1958), an award-winning American author of “juvenile literature.”

Her book on the KKK is well-researched and enhanced by numerous photos from the 1860s as well as a few from more recent times. According to Bartoletti, the original KKK creed maintained that the U.S. “was founded by the white race and for the white race only” and that the words “All men are created equal” meant only white men (p. 45).

Is that part of the meaning of the slogan “Make America Great Again”? While it may or may not be what Trump means by his slogan, that may well be how it is interpreted by many of his supporters—and one reason for his surprising, and somewhat alarming, popularity.