YOUNG PATRIOTS AND REDNECK REVOLT SET TO CONFRONT FASCISTS IN TENNESSEE

This article originally ran in The Real News.

A number of anti-racist groups are expected to show up Saturday in Murfreesboro and Shelbyville Tennessee to protest the “White Lives Matter” rally. The rally was organized by some of the same white supremacist groups who were behind the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August, including Vanguard America, the group with whom James Alex Fields was photographed and whose shield he carried before plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters.

The white supremacists have said that they chose to hold their rally in Tennessee because they thought they could avoid “violent” antifa protesters. But there’s a growing anti-fascist movement in the South. Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club, radical leftists, are trying to counter-organize around class in traditionally white spaces such as gun shows and NASCAR races.

As groups like Redneck Revolt were forming, they were inspired by the Young Patriots, which formed in the 1960s in Chicago to organize people who had moved to the city to escape the crushing poverty and police brutality in Appalachia. They found more of the same in Chicago and eventually began to organize. The Young Patriots worked together with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords to found the Rainbow Coalition.

Hy Thurman was one of the founders of the Young Patriots and a few years ago, he brought the group back. “The reason we went underground, and some still are, was because of the oppression, the brutality, the murders, the threats. We had a couple of our members murdered,” he said in an interview with me and Marc Steiner.

But now was the time to bring the group back. “We feel that right now is the right time for the Young Patriots,” he said, adding that, in terms of poverty and racism, not a lot had changed.

And they had already inspired younger people to go and counter-organize among poor and working-class white people. “We share the same philosophy,” Thurman said of Redneck Revolt. “They stated that they modeled themselves and were influenced by what the Young Patriots had done by working in white communities.”