Berks County Antifascist Action

09/23/2023

09/04/2023

Two former leaders of the right-wing Proud Boys gang were sentenced Thursday for their actions during the January 6 insurrection, with the judge handing down some of the longest sentences yet for people involved in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. J...

08/30/2023

On this day, 30 August 1948, leading Black Panther activist Fred Hampton was born in Summit, Illinois. Hampton was instrumental in forming links between the Panthers and organisations of working class Chinese people, whites, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in what he dubbed the Rainbow Coalition.
A revolutionary internationalist, he explained: "We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism."
Hampton was a central target of the FBI's COINTELPRO programme, which resulted in him being drugged by an FBI operative, then shot in the shoulder while he was asleep, then shot twice more in the head at point-blank range by Chicago police during an FBI raid in 1969. He was only 21 years old.
Learn more about the Panthers in these books by former members: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/black-panthers

08/02/2023

On this day, 2 August 1939, Walter Altmann and Gunther Mann, two young Jewish refugees from N**i Germany, were deported from the United Kingdom.
They had left Belgium in a 10-foot (3-metre) dinghy, which they intended to row to England, but bad weather caused them to capsize and almost drown in the Channel before they were saved by a lifeboat. Both said they would have preferred to be drowned at sea than return to Germany.
After hearing their deportation order, both men burst into tears. They were returned to Belgium, where they had permission to stay until the end of the month.
It is not known precisely what became of them, although a Günther Mann born on January 20, 1921, was deported from France to Auschwitz and murdered in 1942, while a Walter Altmann, born on May 27, 1919, was imprisoned in a camp in France and his fate is unknown.
Learn more about British treatment of Jewish people and refugees at this time in our podcast episodes 35 to 37 about the 43 group: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e35-37-the-43-group/

08/02/2023

On this day, 2 August 1944, around 4,000 Roma people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp resisted being taken to the gas chambers. The SS swarmed into the Roma camp, but prisoners had armed themselves with sticks and crowbars, and barricaded themselves indoors, fighting the N**is with hands and nails. A non-Roma prisoner who survived described that everyone was fighting, and that "women [were] the fiercest in their fight" as they were "younger and stronger" than the other detainees and were "protecting their children". Eventually they were overcome, and all murdered in the gas chambers in Birkenau.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9169/auschwitz-roma-rebellion
Pic: a Roma prisoner in Auschwitz

08/01/2023

Connected to far-right extremist groups Propatria and Golden Dawn, American extremist Robert Rundo visited Greece at least twice while on the run from U.S. authorities.

07/15/2023

The Longest Walk, a transcontinental trek for Native American justice, ended.

07/15/2023

On this day, 15 July 1954, the right-wing dictatorship of general Francisco Franco amended the 1933 vagrancy law to criminalise homosexuality. The amendment also authorised the detention of all those convicted under the law in labour and concentration camps (content note: sexual violence).
Over the next 25 years, around 5,000 LGBT+ people would be imprisoned – mostly gay and bisexual men and trans women. They were housed in specialist prisons in Huelva and Badajoz, and in a camp in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, and many were subjected to brutal sexual violence, and medical abuse like electric shock treatment.
Most of those prosecuted for breaching the law were working class, and historian Pablo Fuentes told the Guardian that it was "not uncommon to hear homosexuals from the upper classes and the aristocracy speak about the Franco period as a great time."
After Franco's death in 1975 and the subsequent fall of the dictatorship, political prisoners were released, but LGBT+ prisoners were not.
The homophobic law was eventually overturned in 1979, although those imprisoned because of it were not recognised as victims of Francoism and awarded compensation until 2009.
Learn more about how Franco seized power in our podcast episodes 39-40 about the Spanish civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
Pictured: Silvia Reyes, a trans woman who was imprisoned over 50 times.

07/13/2023

Alan Singer is a historian and professor in the Hofstra University Department of Teaching, Learning and Technology. He is the author of New York’s Grand Emancipation Jubilee: Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory (SUNY Press, 2018). 

07/12/2023

In May 2023, when Mauricio Garcia killed eight people in an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, it seemed like just another senseless mass murder similar to innumerable school shootings. But when it came out that he identified as a neo-nazi, outrage spread: calling a Latino that was just too much for many....

07/12/2023

On this day, 12 July 1979, Olive Morris, feminist, squatter and activist in the Brixton Black Panthers, died aged just 27. Born in Jamaica, Morris moved to the UK aged 9 to be with her forklift operator father and factory shop steward mother.
One of her earliest political actions was at 17 when she intervened when police in Brixton, south London, were arresting a Black man for an alleged parking offence. She was racially abused and physically attacked by officers, then arrested, fined and given a three month suspended sentence for two years.
In her short life Morris played a leading role in radical movements in Britain, getting involved with and helping found numerous groups and projects like the Black Women's Mutual Aid Group. She also was critical of the white left and union movement, which spouted rhetoric about "unity". But in reality, at employers like Standard Telephones and Cables, they defended practices like lower pay for Black workers, and scabbed on Black workers' strikes.
About single issue anti-fascist groups, Morris said: “Not a single problem associated with racialism, unemployment, police violence and homelessness can be settled by ‘rocking’ against the fascists, the police or the army… The fight against racism and fascism is completely bound up with the fight to overthrow capitalism, the system that breeds both.” In 1978, she became unwell, and was then diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She succumbed the following year.
You can learn more about racism in the British workers' movement, and how it was fought against and radically altered by the Grunwick strike in our podcast episodes 67-68: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/grunwick-strike-1976/