In the late 1960s, Angela Davis and other Black activists asserted that racism was a fundamental component of fascism, and thus fascism became term and framework that Black activists used to describe the federal and state policies and practices that fostered racial inequities or obstructed Black people from achieving justice and equality. Despite the term’s origins in Europe, Black activists, such as Davis, used terms such as “fascism” and “genocide” as both a rhetorical tool and analytical framework which they hoped would wake up and compel the American public to demand an end to policies, both within and outside the American federal and state governmental apparatus. This chapter explores the contours of Black of antiracism and antifascist activism in the 1960s to the 1980s – from struggles against white supremacist collusion with the FBI and local police to assassinate black activists to the fight against state policies, such as forced sterilization of poor Black and Latina women, or the “ghettoization” of Black people in the 1970s.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

With the course of jazz profoundly influenced by the events of the previous decade,examines the 1970s, a time of new growth and innovation in jazz in the GDR. During these years East German cultural critics viewed American free jazz (as exemplified by Ornette Coleman) as an expression of social revolution in the United States, reading it as music protesting grievances and echoing class warfare. By contrast, however, jazz “made in the GDR” became emblematic of an art form in harmony with socialist society. Yet this harmonization was not perfect. This chapter explores how jazz retained its countercultural aspect, despite its incorporation into state culture and its subsequent flourishing, as well as how STASI surveillance of jazz increased given growing traffic between East and West. At various live jazz events in the 1970s, fans described an oppositional atmosphere, revealing a more ambiguous dynamic between individual and state than official proclamations might indicate. In the era of Ostpolitik, performers and audiences found subtle ways to critique the socialist state, even as East German diplomats recruited jazz to showcase socialist Germany on the global stage.