“Every Labor, Jewish, and Anti-Jim Crow Organization”: The Black Antifascist Tradition in the Classical Civil Rights Era

In May 1960, George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, announced plans to lead “stormtroopers” up from Virginia to New York City by motor convoy for a mass anti-Jewish rally on July 4. In response, a diffuse coalition of Black and Jewish leftists mobilized to challenge the demonstration. While some argued that the city should deny Rockwell a permit, others pushed against de-platforming, especially given Rockwell’s entreaties to the Civil Liberties Union to protect his right to speak. Instead, they called for an antifascist counterdemonstration in the spirit of interwar era, invoking a time when Black and Jewish antifascists clashed regularly with the likes of the German-American Bund and other domestic fascist groups. Among them was the Black radical activist and civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn, who offered a broad call-to-arms, demanding the support of “every labor, Jewish and anti-Jim Crow organization in New York.” Historians have argued for the extent to which antifascism coursed through civil rights and anticolonial movements in the 1930s. They have illuminated the extent to which antifascism became popular vernacular in the Black public sphere during the war, joining the fight against fascism abroad to concomitant struggles at home. They have also shown the extent to which a revival of antifascism shaped Black radical thought and activism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet what of the Black antifascist tradition at midcentury? What strategies and analytical frameworks survived the ravages of the Black and Red Scares? Using the case of Conrad Lynn and his stand against the most dominant figure in postwar far Right U.S. political culture, this paper recovers the Black antifascist tradition of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In turn, it explores the relationship between antifascist action and the direct action civil rights activism commanding headlines throughout the era.