The Popular Front pushed back against signs of fascism in democratic nations. This anti-fascist coalition called itself the Popular Front and adopted the raised fist salute from exiled Germans. Opposition to the Nazis’ atrocities and the creeping spread of fascism across Europe eventually led to a broad-based alliance of communists, socialists, and liberal democrats against bigotry and persecution. The Nazis took power a year later Thälmann and hundreds of his comrades died in concentration camps. In 1932, the RFB rebranded as Antifaschistische Aktion-better known by the contraction antifa. To Ernst Thälmann, leader of the RFB, the fist was a pledge to “protect the friend and fight off the enemy.” But the RFB, founded to guard Communist Party meetings from far-right attacks, battled as much against the Iron Front, the Social Democrats’ street-fighting arm, as it did fascists of the rising Nazi party. In 1926, one of the combatants, a German group called the Red Front Fighters (RFB), patented the clenched fist as part of their uniform and salute.

By the 1920s, street battles were common between workers and the hired guns of employers-and between followers of different political ideologies. “See that, that’s the IWW.”Īlthough that unified position gave the IWW the strength to achieve many of its goals for workers around the world, the workers’ movement faced violent opposition. “Now look,” he said, closing his fingers into a fist. “Every finger by itself has no force,” he said, lifting his sizable hand to the crowd. Haywood, a founding member of the union Industrial Workers of the World, preached working-class solidarity across all races and trades. of a protester brandishing a raised fist occurred in 1913, when “Big Bill” Haywood spoke to strikers during the Paterson silk strike in New Jersey. One of the earliest known instances in the U.S. In 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute from the medal podium at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. political movements reveals how the struggles against racism and fascism have long been intertwined. But the gesture is even older than that, and tracing its winding path through European and U.S. In 1968, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos made the salute famous from an Olympic podium in Mexico City. People have spray painted it on sidewalks and the sides of buildings. Demonstrators use it when confronting federal police in Portland, Oregon. The raised fist has been a staple of protests across the United States as the country continues to grapple with systemic racism. She does it, she says, because the gesture “signifies resiliency and power through every triumph and struggle.” “As a young Black girl,” the San Diego activist says, “that symbolic fist really opened my eyes to the injustices within our country.” This summer, Ahmed has been raising her own fist during Black Lives Matter protests. Huda Ahmed first saw fists raised in protest after the deaths of Eric Garner and Philando Castile at the hands of police.

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