Logo for anti-racist group (1992?)

This logo was for an anti-racist group that organized to oppose Klan and neo-Nazi organizing in Dubuque, IA and Janesville, WI in the early 1990s. (One action we took was made somewhat famous by Geraldo Rivera, who got into a scuffle with racists in Janesville.) The idea I had for the logo was to make the R look like a Klansman, with the A stopping him.

ARM made several trips to the Dubuque and Janesville areas, and we worked with local Dubuque residents who had previously organized as a GLBT support group. ARM's membership in Iowa City included a number of members of the Black Student Union on the UI campus, and when we traveled to Dubuque to counterdemonstrate at a Nazi rally, I learned some lessons I've never forgotten.

The first lesson was that one must confront racists. Most civil rights "leaders" in Dubuque favored letting the neo-Nazis have their rally unopposed, and having a picnic across town instead. Fortunately ARM and the local GLBT activists understood that lack of opposition is exactly what racist groups need in order to gain confidence, encourage fence-sitters to join them, and grow.

This was an idea that I had been familiar with through my reading, but it was brought home to me forcefully at the counterdemonstration itself. Actually hearing the Nazi rhetoric and "sieg heils", seeing the uniforms and salutes and marching and signs in a central part of downtown Dubuque, was even more upsetting than I had expected. It wasn't something to be ridiculed and ignored and have a picnic about.

And it became very personal when a young local Black teenager on our side of the fence (which the city had erected to separate the racists from us) suddenly gasped as she saw a white girl she recognized on the other side. The Black girl turned to me in shock. "I know her. I know that girl. She's my friend. How could she be with them, over there?" Her eyes were filling with tears as she looked back at the racists and then turned back to me, looking absolutely lost. All I could say was, "Don't worry. Please don't cry. You have 500 friends on this side of the fence."

This girl hadn't been part of the organized opposition; she had come to the park out of curiosity about what her parents and those civil-rights "leaders" had been telling the Black population to ignore. And later, as ARM members returned to Iowa City, I wondered what that young woman would have thought if anti-racists hadn't organized that counterdemonstration, and she'd been alone when she saw her supposed friend among dozens of racists, unopposed by anyone. Luckily, instead she saw Blacks, whites, gays, lesbians, straights, local people and people from out of town, far outnumbering the pathetic and cowardly goosestepping little group.

The second lesson I learned also gave me indelible proof of the theories of struggle I'd been reading about. The local Dubuque residents were most GLBT people and their supporters. Many of ARM's supporters were Black college students, many of whom had long-held homophobic ideas. But seeing who their allies against the Nazis actually were--seeing gays and lesbians being the most prominent and dedicated of the local organizers in our efforts--changed the Black students' minds to such an extent that, after that successful anti-Nazi rally in Dubuque in May, the Black Student Union marched as a contingent in the Gay Pride Parade that June for the first time ever.

Karl Marx said something to the effect that "struggle is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be defeated except through struggle, but also because only through struggle can the working class rid itself of the muck of ages and fit itself to rule." People learn and change in struggle. They are tested and their ideas are tested. They learn who their allies are. They overcome divisions that we're all taught to believe in--hostile divisions of race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and all the other "muck" used to divide working people so they can't unite and fight back.

All of this made sense to me when I read it, but it was all purely theoretical until I got involved in struggles myself. The anti-racist organizing I helped with in Dubuque and Janesville in the early 1990s proved things to me that I will never forget. It made me an activist for life.