No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!
Octavia Butler, Parable of Talents
In 1995, Toni Morrison delivered a speech called “Racism and Fascism,” in which she warned her audience about the twin systems that defined their era: the so-called war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration. Fascism can “only reproduce the environment that supports its own health,” she cautioned: “fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.” She described the Clinton-era transformation of public services into private business ventures, the rise of uncontrollable multinational corporations, and moral “panicking” replacing parenting. These politics knew no party since “fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.”
She chose to deliver this searing speech at Howard University — a beacon of Black education and research since shortly after the Civil War and home to generations of activists. To students and faculty, she described how fascism must “pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the mythos of racial superiority in order to naturalize this pathology.” Morrison’s assessment was a “premature” recognition of fascism, to borrow a phrase from Cedric Robinson. So often, it is Black women who have stood against fascist trends before they were recognized as such by others. Today, attacks on education reflect her fears exactly: The right has banned books (including Morrison’s own novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye), censored academic materials, substituted political propaganda for scholarship, challenged tenure, overrun school board meetings with militia members, and diverted tax dollars to private schools. The ultimate goal, for some factions, is eliminating public education entirely. All of this must be understood as the systematic fascist restructuring of education.
As Morrison knew, anti-Blackness is a permanent and defining feature of fascism. While historians often regard it as endemic to interwar Europe, much of fascism’s rhetoric, policy, and strategy has roots in the subjugation of colonies and the Black diaspora. Aimé Césaire, the Martinican anti-colonial poet, argued that fascism grew from the “daily barbarisms” practiced on Black life in the colony. This has meant, at different times, occupation, police surveillance, labor exploitation, political suppression, and genocide. The insidious history of race-making in the U.S. and former colonies animates much of the fascist past, present, and future — whether those policies are enacted upon Black bodies or not. Conversely, when tracing the genealogy of fascism through the lens of anti-Blackness, what emerges is a canon of Black writers, activists, and radicals — particularly Black women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Thyra J. Edwards, Salaria Kea, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis — who spotted fascism long before others did and focused on educational spaces like schools, colleges, universities, and child care facilities as key sites of struggle against it.
As early as 1895, Ida B. Wells-Barnett — educator, pioneering journalist, and anti-lynching crusader — began publicly comparing the genocidal nature of lynchings in the American South to pogroms in Europe and the persecution of Russian Jews. While the term “fascism” would not be used for another two decades, she called the collaboration among white supremacist vigilantes, the state, law enforcement, and elected officials a “conspiracy” to uphold lynch law and ensure the overall immiseration of Black life. Wells-Barnett also documented how Black people were regularly forced to interact with the deeply fascist social and political infrastructure upheld by the state. These interactions were glaring during her time as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Her early publications with the Free Speech and Headlight critiqued segregated schools, calling out pay inequity between Black and white teachers and inadequate facilities for Black schoolchildren. She openly challenged other journalists who spread racist vitriol that cast Black children as intellectually inferior. While often discussed separately, Wells-Barnett’s activism around lynchings and education is inextricably linked — she understood that it was often in schools that young Black people would begin to experience the outcomes of a system rooted in anti-Black fascism. In her autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells-Barnett writes extensively about Black education during the late nineteenth century, particularly about her experience in establishing the first Black kindergarten in Chicago. This groundbreaking work in education reflects Black women’s pioneering organizing and activism to ensure children were afforded an education, but it was also part of a broader struggle against anti-Black fascism that sought to weaponize education. For Wells-Barnett and many of her contemporaries, the creation of autonomous educational spaces was a key anti-fascist tactic that helped meet the needs of Black children in the state’s absence.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett began publicly comparing the genocidal nature of lynchings in the American South to pogroms in Europe.
In response to the rise of fascism in Europe and its genocidal violence, Black activists and writers often drew upon language (“holocaust,” “pogrom”) that would help tie the conditions unfolding in Europe to anti-Black violence (race riots, Jim Crow laws, redlining, disenfranchisement, lynchings, etc.) across the South and in urban areas. Black women like Thyra J. Edwards and Salaria Kea, working within the tradition of Black internationalism, traveled to Spain and Italy to fight fascism on Europe’s frontlines. In a 1938 pamphlet entitled “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,” Kea details her experience providing medical care during the Spanish Civil War. She urges her readers to support the anti-fascist cause: “Surely Negro people will just as willingly give of their means to relieve the suffering of a people attacked by the enemy of all racial minorities — fascism — and its most aggressive exponents — Italy and Germany.”
Edwards, an educator, social worker, journalist, and union organizer, traveled across Italy and Germany from 1933 to 1934 to report on the rise of fascism. Edwards leveraged her network of anti-imperialist, socialist, and labor organizations — including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, France’s Social Workers’ Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the National Negro Congress — to sound the alarm on the dangers of fascism to women and Black people across the African diaspora. Edwards was keenly aware of how patriarchy, natalism, and gender violence were foundational to the fascist project: “No force in the world today so threatens the position and security of women as does the rising force of fascism,” she wrote. “Fascism degrades women.” Upon her return to the U.S., Edwards traveled across the country, fundraising for the anti-fascist cause back in Europe. Indeed, one of her most successful fundraising campaigns took place at the historically Black Hampton Institute — students at the college organized a committee and donated 1,000 cans of milk that would be shipped to Spain along with an ambulance, for which Edwards and Kea helped procure funding. Following World War II, Edwards returned to Europe and settled in Italy. Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime had installed a nationalist and military curriculum, mandated loyalty oaths for teachers, and expelled Jewish teachers and children from schools. Edwards, who previously taught in segregated schools in the U.S., understood that education and social work were essential to healing young victims of fascism. In 1953, she established a child care program in Rome for Jewish child victims of the Holocaust.
From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a period that saw the emergence of Black Power, prison uprisings, and the prison abolition movement, Black women activists like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Ericka Huggins would characterized the rise of mass incarceration as creeping fascism. Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army and a former member of the Black Panther Party, opens her autobiography with a reflection on her 1973 incarceration. She had observed New Jersey state troopers greeting each other with “Nazi-style” salutes and wearing uniforms eerily reminiscent of German and apartheid South African military styles. She wrote that one trooper complained, “If Hitler had won, the world wouldn’t be in this mess it is in today …” and later referred to her as a n—.
Ericka Huggins, another Black Panther Party member, also tied her experience as a political prisoner to fascism. In a letter from Niantic Prison, she talked about the broader implications of American fascism, particularly its connection to corporatism and education during the late 1960s and 1970s:
America is plotting universal imperialism. It will be the same everywhere. First Coca Cola then Oscar Meyer Weiner and then, the troops. The people cannot allow fascist fanatics to continue to deprive us of our human rights. We must organize and form an everlasting United Front Against capitalism … against class distinction, against fascism. We cannot allow concessions from the federal government for the continual harassments and unwarranted brutality of the people. We cannot allow our children be they Black, Mexican, Indian, Japanese, Chinese or White to be miseducated and degraded in America’s school system.
The anti-fascist roots of the era’s most famous political prisoner, Angela Davis, run deep. During the early 1960s, she studied in Germany, assessing how Eastern and Western German governments were rebuilding following the fall of fascism. Soon after her 1969 appointment as assistant professor in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was fired because she was a member of the Communist Party. Following her 1970 incarceration, Davis began writing about American fascism, directly informed by her own experience and camaraderie with fellow political prisoners, particularly George Jackson. She affirmed that “fascist tactics have been employed against Black people [and] Black communities, for centuries” like a “South African-style fascism.” She surmised that American fascism was in an incipient stage — a “protracted social process.” During this period, for Davis, fascism’s grip had largely been limited to the law and penal systems, with mostly Black people as its targets.
Assata Shakur observed New Jersey state troopers greeting each other with “Nazi-style” salutes.
Over the years, Davis became keenly aware that American fascism was growing beyond those realms, with education as a major battleground. In 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr., soon to be Supreme Court associate justice, issued a memorandum entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” (more commonly known as the Powell Memorandum) to Eugene Sydnor Jr., then-chairman of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell decried the state of American society, particularly the youth- and student-led movements of the 1960s. He argued that recent civil rights laws, progress made by labor unions, environmentalist policies and sentiments, the emergence of the New Left, and tightened regulation were all viciously aiding in the assault on American capitalism and corporations. Powell, a former member of the Virginia State Board of Education, called upon conservatives to infiltrate and surveil colleges and universities to disrupt anti-capitalist and liberal politics. He advocated for hiring more conservative faculty to review textbooks that cast conservative values negatively. For over 50 years, the Powell Memorandum has served as a blueprint for far-right and conservative movements, particularly in the fascist reshaping of education. Indeed, one can see Powell’s doctrine as a factor in Davis’ own dismissal from UCLA on grounds of her political affiliation. Powell was also a leading voice on the Supreme Court that helped overturn the University of California’s affirmative action program in 1978. For her part, Davis has spent 50 years building out Black feminist, history of consciousness, and ethnic studies programs in higher education, and her scholarship has directly challenged Powell’s vision and anti-Black fascism.
We’re witnessing the fascist reshaping of education today as the administration dismantles the Department of Education, withholds federal grants, creates new loyalty tests for teachers, and demands crackdowns on student activism. There is a dire need to renew the efforts of Black women anti-fascists, educators, and activists. After the 2024 election, a group of Black women formed an online community, the 92% Club (a nod to the 92 percent of Black women who voted for presidential candidate Kamala Harris), to grapple with the fallout. The politics of the club are encapsulated in a drawing by author and illustrator Navi’ Robins, entitled “Sometimes, I Told You So, Just Ain’t Enough.” Four Black women sit atop the roof of a decaying building, sipping tea and watching as their neighborhood is engulfed in flames. The image has become something of a visual rallying cry for many Black women — but to do what? Despite being keenly aware of the impacts of fascism — hence the image of the world burning — the 92% Club seems committed to staying on the sidelines rather than engaging in a politics of solidarity or radical resistance. These Black women understand fascism’s inherent anti-Blackness and misogyny; now is not the time for them to abandon the tradition of Black anti-fascism.
Like Wells-Barnett, we must continue to tell counternarratives that highlight education inequities and advocate for the funding of public schools. Like Edwards and Septima Poinsette Clark (founder of the radical Citizenship Schools serving Black people in the 1950s and 1960s), we must work to create educational spaces in our communities that prioritize academic learning and foster political education and collective care. And like Davis, educators at all levels must resist the fascist tide that seeks to delegitimize fields of study that are viewed as threats — feminist studies, Black studies, and ethnic studies. College and university faculty must push back more fervently on challenges to academic freedom and policies that aim to further restrict student and faculty organizing. As elucidated within the Black anti-fascist tradition, resisting and combating fascism requires organizing on multiple fronts. Our system of education — from early childhood to graduate and professional programs — is being impacted by the modern fascist movement, and the risks are among the most perilous — the gravest being the dissolution of public education, a true death knell of democracy.
Jeanelle K. Hope is a cultural historian and Black studies scholar. She is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition.
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