By Shane Burley
“We heard there are some antifa over here!”
The shout came from a group of Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, while they approached a picket line organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in September 2018. While the IWW, a radical labor union that unionized a fast-food chain in Portland, Oregon, and Washington State, is certainly anti-fascist, this was a union action—not an “antifa” protest. But those facts mattered little to the right-wing agitators who had made Portland a flash point in political violence. As the Proud Boys sought to instigate, one IWW member, Sinead Steiner, remembers union activists pivoting in an attempt to de-escalate.
IWW members engaged the Proud Boys in mundane discussions about labor law while other demonstrators began using silly chants to lower the emotional temperature. The method was effective, no one faced harm, and the union action continued. This was not the first time the far right had threatened the IWW, so members knew they needed to walk into any protest with a nimble plan that included employing some form of community self-defense.
As Donald Trump ascended to power in 2016, there was dramatic growth in hate crimes as well as far-right and racist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militias, and other neo-Nazi formations. They stormed U.S. cities, often holding rallies intended to provoke counterprotesters whom they could attack. As a result, there was a rise in left-wing formations, including the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, that say armed community self-defense may be a necessary component of safety, which in this case means protecting activists from racist militants.
The threats that the far right presented to Portland’s left—along with the historical repression of unions by racist foot soldiers—are why unionists were prepared in Portland that afternoon. In the 1910s and ’20s, IWW members, who were called “Wobblies,” invited coal miners and others to join “industrial unions” to win power by organizing as many workers as possible. Meanwhile, mine owners hired “Pinkertons,” private security contractors whose job was to disrupt strikes with force in the 19th and early 20th century.
The Ku Klux Klan, which, like later fascist groups, despised the anti-capitalist and multiracial implications of the IWW, also showed up to crush labor. In June 1924, members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked IWW members in San Pedro, California, injuring 300 members while kidnapping, tarring, and feathering others. To be a unionist, and a leftist, was to be a target.
Amid this rise in brutality and repression, some IWW members created the IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1917 as a separate organization to support activists facing reprisals. Nearly a century later, IWW members in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota—some of whom had been involved in anti-fascist organizing across the 1980s and ’90s—re-engaged the GDC as an anti-fascist auxiliary to the IWW. GDC chapters then popped up around the country, including in Portland, to fight the fascist insurgency and to defend communities against a rash of street violence.
These kinds of threats were nothing new. Historically, wherever working-class social movements grow, fascists see them as distinct threats both because of their politics and the marginalized communities they represent. To guard against this, self-defense projects—organized efforts where people from these communities are trained, and often armed—are formed to ward off these outside threats. Whether the appearance of self-defense squads is enough to scare off fascist attacks or if actual force is necessary to fight far-right militants back, these kinds of formations have been a reasonably common feature of how communities maintain their autonomy during escalating right-wing violence.
At the same time, the police—ostensibly defenders of peace and order—often have links to far-right organizations and rarely keep activists safe from right-wing assaults. For abolitionists who prefer transformative justice to incarceration, police are not the answer to community safety. “To me, community self-defense can be … an alternative to the police and courts, but it would depend on the situation—and for that matter the community,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the anti-fascist One People’s Project and its news website, Idavox. “It means you do as much as you can to handle a situation as a community when one arises.”
Community self-defense has become central to contemporary social movements. Just as their predecessors did, activists today seek a safety model that understands the threats they face and doesn’t reproduce the problems of the justice system.
Deep Roots
Social movements have historically had a self-defense component. Many earlier left-wing political parties or organizations had a militant wing, in which members were trained as a defensive force that could keep their growing membership safe from violent right-wing counterefforts.
In the early 20th century, the Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement involved in organizing labor unions and Yiddish schools around Eastern Europe and Russia, created self-defense squads to protect Jewish communities from racist attacks, known as “pogroms,” which were escalating during that time.
By 1905 there were Jewish self-defense groups in 42 cities, and they were often a collaborative offshoot from various leftist groups. Because many left-wing revolutionaries saw both modern nation states and reactionary political movements as their enemies, they believed they had to take measures to keep themselves safe from both entities.
Much of the postwar left emerged directly out of the need for community safety. Take, for instance, the Black Power movement, which formed in the 1960s and ’70s and considered resilience and empowerment to be central to their work. “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense—and have acted on it,” wrote Robert F. Williams in 1962. Williams was an organizer who took control of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, grew it by hundreds, and chartered it with the National Rifle Association to teach members how to defend themselves against Klan terror.
In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded first and foremost as an organization to monitor and intervene on police violence, a project the party eventually saw as part of a “united front against fascism.” That slogan became the name for the Panthers’ 1969 conference that convened a range of other radical groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1966, Panthers began armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods as a message to local police not to threaten the rights and safety of Black residents. They held rallies when police refused to investigate police killings, such as the 1967 killing of construction worker Denzil Dowell. The Panthers used these opportunities to teach community members how to build armed self-defense squads as both an alternative to the police and a deterrent against police violence. The Panthers inspired other self-defense efforts, including the Lavender Panthers (sometimes known as Purple Panthers), an armed defense group formed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1973 to defend San Francisco’s LGBTQ community against homophobic attacks.
“Something that the Black radical tradition tells us … is that we can’t organize in just one mode,” says Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D., an associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University who studies Black anti-fascist movements. Along with legal pathways, self-defense, and more radical anarchist tactics, Hope points to the myriad mutual aid programs the Black Panther Party organized to meet people’s daily needs, including offering free breakfast to children and running the Black People’s Free Store.
This history creates what Ejeris Dixon described as a movement lineage, whereby she and others come from a tradition of radicals “who have dedicated our lives to our community safety.” This communal resiliency inspired Dixon to co-write “Get in Formation,” a community safety tool kit she created alongside the anti-racist organization Vision Change Win. The guide offers a number of ideas, including how to create effective protest formations.
When people on the right talk about security, it often simply means firearms. But for those on the political left, community self-defense is a much bigger idea. “The most important part of how you frame community defense is to acknowledge that you provide something the state cannot … when you build a culture of community defense around you … you have a lot more protection from violence,” says Lucas Hubbard, communications director for Socialist Rifle Association, which does not advocate for forming militias but does support working-class people learning firearm skills and developing mutual aid networks.
But as Hubbard notes, self-defense projects are only an alternative to the status quo if they match the community’s expressed desires. “First thing you do in providing community defense … is to ask what that means to them,” says Hubbard, pointing to issues like food insecurity and housing access as frontline threats. Community defense could mean developing strong bonds between affected people to better address their needs, employing armed security at queer youth events, or securing resources for those facing eviction, but it is just as likely to involve getting people the resources they need during a COVID-19 spike.
“If you want to help a community, they have to trust you,” says Snow, a founding member of the Asian American self-defense group Yellow Peril Tactical (YPT) who goes by one name. The organization works to demystify community self-defense, including gun ownership and mutual aid organizing, in part by creating an alternative media infrastructure to shift perception about who owns firearms and why.
“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine.
YPT helped create educational programs around responsible firearm ownership and started a podcast, Tiger Bloc, that demystifies disaster preparedness and community defense in terms that avoid adventurism and right-wing cynicism. As Snow points out, firearms themselves are often less important to community safety than, for example, “good digital hygiene” (using security protocols in digital communication and taking measures to remove personal information from the internet), locating good de-escalators to intervene in tense protest interactions, and ensuring demonstrations have trained street medics who can save lives if needed.
Community self-defense is directly intertwined with other social movements because all political causes—and their solutions—are tied with intersecting issues of race and class. Effective safety plans bring together a community’s struggles, identify what creates cracks in safety, and consider all movements to be potential tools for repair.
A True Safety Plan
Because many potential harms and threats are distinct, a complete plan for community safety has to be broad enough to address everything from racist violence to incursions with the police. An expansive vision of community safety does not stop at the most immediate threats but offers some vision of an alternative to existing carceral options.
Vision Change Win’s guide says a comprehensive vision of community safety includes “security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.” It helps to outline the different questions you need to ask about events you are holding, what roles are necessary to keep attendees safe, and how to align every security choice with the community’s values. While police often play similar social roles in repressing movements, they have different legal leeway and require different responses. This is why Vision Change Win’s training focuses on a range of situations, including what to do when police attempt to enter activist spaces and how to de-escalate nonpolice threats.
An example is Vision Change Win’s section on dealing with Rebellion Containment Agents—“less lethal” weapons such as chemical gas or pepper spray that are used by police against protest crowds. While often presented by law enforcement as relatively safe, these containment agents were tied to major injuries during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. The guide instructs demonstrators on how to deal with incoming projectiles, how to care for someone who has been exposed to caustic chemicals, and how street medics and those providing on-site care can make medical remedies from common materials.
In addition to responding to police arrests and ensuring people know their legal rights, community defense also includes strategies to mitigate COVID and other pandemics. Good safety plans take into account both a community’s values and COVID transmission so as not to replicate many of the harms activists are hoping to mitigate.
“I think having vulnerable relationships with people … where if there is somebody in your life you can talk [to] about both survivorship and harm, I think that makes us safer,” says Dixon. This also points to what are often called transformative justice programs designed to, as Dixon describes, “prevent and intervene in violence, and repair and heal from harm without the use of prisons.”
These can take the form of “accountability processes” that combat harm by addressing the behavior, demanding change and the admission of culpability, and supporting both the survivor and the perpetrator in their journey. This kind of vulnerability can exist in many kinds of communities, but especially those that are bonded. “Transformative justice is relying on the relationships … to leverage them into better behavior and accountability,” says Dixon.
These are big, radical ideas—and that is part of the point: Community self-defense is not a singular solution but part of an ongoing project that seeks to address the fundamental unsafety of the society we currently inhabit. Through overlapping systems of inequality and oppression, many people feel isolated, targeted, and forced to face huge hurdles alone. But when members of a community see their struggles as interconnected and their issues as systemic, then modest responses become insufficient.
Community self-defense is a piece of the larger work of building an equitable society, but it will only be truly realized if a larger mass movement confronts the entire system of structural inequity. “You have to believe in something bigger,” says Dixon. “You have to believe in transformation.”
