Interview with Mark Bray
"The first thing to specify is that opposition to white supremacy and authoritarianism in America and around the world goes back centuries to resistance by indigenous populations, resistance to enslavement, and so forth. In the United States specifically, resistance to the Ku Klux Klan and white power violence has taken many forms, many of which did not call themselves anti-fascist.
Among those who have described themselves as such, there were Italian-American and German-American and Jewish-American groups that fought against fascists and Nazis in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, but in its modern form, militant anti-fascism in the U.S. can really be dated to the creation of Anti-Racist Action in the late 1980s, which moving into the 1990s had thousands of members. They focused on tracking down far-right groups but also defending reproductive rights and organizing against the far right in a broader sense. They sometimes toured with punk bands and alternative rock bands to try and promote anti-racist politics among youth. The Anti-Racist Action network declined somewhat into the 2000s, but the modern antifa movement that we see today is really the successor of that lineage."
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