Book Manuscript

Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition (in progress)

Fascism Is Already Here follows Black activists and their multiracial coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s, charting how Black antifascist politics on the ground evolved from popular wartime antifascism, with its attention on the homegrown fascism of Jim Crow, through the chill of the Cold War’s Black and Red Scares, into the theorizing and revolt of the Black Power era with its antifascist analysis of carceral state violence under a veneer of civil rights liberalism.

By doing so, the book shows that antifascism is not a recent phenomenon in the United States, nor is it limited to traditions imported from or modeled on the interwar European Left. Rather, it reveals a long history firmly rooted in Black radical thought and grassroots activism. It also uses Black antifascist analyses as a lens for taking seriously and scrutinizing the specter of fascism within the U.S. political landscape.

Fascism Is Already Here is one of the first comprehensive histories of Black antifascism in the United States. It bridges social, political, and intellectual history, Black political thought, historical memory studies, and scholarship on the U.S. right. The manuscript is based in source material from over 20 archives in the United States and Germany as well as never-before-cited documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In addition to expanding histories of Black radicalism and the civil rights movement, the book also makes contributions to U.S. Jewish history, labor history, histories of the U.S. and global right, and schoalrship on global Holocaust memory. Finally, it corrects the general inattention that scholars of fascism have long displayed to Black theories of fascism and Black antifascist political mobilizations.

The dissertation on which the manuscript is based was awarded the Yale Department of History’s Edwin W. Small Prize for outstanding work in U.S. History and the John Addison Porter Prize, one of th two highest honor for dissertations awarded by Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Peer-Reviewed and Other Academic Publications

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Fascism: A Review of Bruce Kuklick’s Fascism Comes to America,” History and Theory, November 9, 2023.

“‘A Heritage of Fascists Without Labels’: Black Antifascism and the Roots of Civil Rights” in Fascism in America, Past and Present (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

“‘We Should Have Had a Nuernberg After the Civil War’: At the Intersection of Holocaust Reckoning and African American Civil War Memory” in Lessons and Legacies XV: Global Perspectives and National Narratives (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press)

Public Essays, Lectures, Podcasts, and Op-Eds

  • Roundtable: Black Antifascism and the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement

    A roundtable discussion featuring Minkah Makalani, Joseph Fronczak, and Anna Duensing. Moderated by Chad Kautzer. Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 galvanized a grassroots, transnational social movement known as the Hands Off Ethiopia campaign. Around the world, a broad multiracial coalition of antifascist, anticolonial, and antiracist activists engaged in mass meetings, public demonstrations, street fights, work stoppages, and strikes to challenge Fascist Italy’s pursuit of a new Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and Northern and Eastern Africa. The Black Left was at the forefront of these efforts, merging Pan-Africanism, Black nationalism, and the Communist internationalism of the era to make a bold stand against Fascist imperial domination of a free African country. This panel explores the nuances and significance of the Hands Off Ethiopia movement and the broader impact of the Black antifascist left in the interwar period.

  • Roundtable: Antifascist Histories and Models for Resistance

    A Virtual Discussion Featuring Charisse Burden-Stelly, Steven J. Ross, and Mark Bray. Moderated by Anna Duensing. Public narratives about the history of fascism and antifascism in the United States are sporadic, uneven, and often distorted. This is due in part to the failure of state institutions to educate the public about past and present fascist movements, and in part to the successful campaigns of far-right groups to intentionally misrepresent those movements and their opponents. The result is that public understanding of contemporary fascist tendencies lacks the context of their deep historical roots, and those engaged in resistance are deprived of the insights gained by a long and successful antifascist tradition.

  • Op-Ed: "Far-right views in law enforcement are not new," Washington Post, September 28, 2022

    65 years ago this week, Edwin Walker helped enforce Little Rock integration. Then he devoted himself to segregation. In this op-ed for Made By History in the Washington Post, Anna Duensing explores the history of ties between law enforcement, the military, elected officials, and far right white supremacist militia movements.

  • Right Rising Podcast: The Local Far Right, February 2, 2022

    Guests Alexander Reid Ross and Anna Duensing join Right Rising to discuss the local manifestations of the far-right. Along with host Augusta Dell'Omo, Alexander and Anna discuss the broad landscape of far-right activism at the local level in the United States and its influence on school boards, vaccination mandates, policing, and state legislatures. Together, Alexander, Anna, and Augusta dive into the history of local far-right organizing and reveal what it can tell us about current activism. What - we ask - can concerned observers can do to combat this influx of far-right activity in their local communities?

  • “Racism, Fascism and the Jim Crow Military, as seen through the testimony of Leon Bass," February 25, 2021.

    The Fortunoff Video Archive hosted a lecture by Anna Duensing titled “Racism, Fascism and the Jim Crow Military, as seen through the testimony of Leon Bass.” Anna’s research focuses on antifascism in the civil rights movement and Black radical theories of fascism in the US. In this lecture, she spoke about the African American service members who confronted the Nazi threat, and witnessed the end stages and immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, even as they themselves served in a segregated military. Anna uses the testimony of liberator Leon Bass (HVT-1241) as a focal point in her talk.

  • "How are antiracism and antifascism related?," January 21, 2021

    Anna F. Duensing, who studies antifascism within the Black Freedom Struggle, explains for Activist History Review’s “Coup Q&A” series how Black radical thinkers in the past characterized U.S. racist state terrorism and mob violence as fundamentally fascist. She recommends you also read Alberto Toscano’s recent piece on thus subject. Boston Review.

  • “An American Organization, A Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies Of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, The National Renaissance Party, March 17, 2020

    In this essay for the Gotham Center for New York History Blog, Anna Duensing chronicles midcentury clashes between the Congress of Racial Equality and a New York-based neo-Nazi group called the National Renaissance Party.