The Black Antifascist Tradition - by Jeanelle K Hope & Bill V Mullen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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

At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition 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 world-and to everyone.

In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals-from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex-have 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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.