No Fascist USA!. Hilary Moore

radical strands of the movement. If unity was the goal, then Hard Times failed. The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee criticized what they believed to be an effort to submerge anti-imperialism and racism into class-only politics and challenged the conference leadership to explicitly embrace women’s struggles. This perspective was shared by the members of the John Brown Book Club who were in attendance. A year later, at a conference, Prairie Fire finally split in two, with the May 19th Communist Organization (named after the joint birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X) organizing on the East Coast. Both organizations would eventually promote John Brown Anti-Klan Committee chapters across the country.

      “There really was a sense that the movements from the 1960s and 1970s had failed,” recalled Laura Whitehorn. One of the ways activists adapted to this massive political shift in the late ’70s was to double down on their commitment to movements for self-determination. The concept of self-determination was rooted in Malcolm X’s assessment, following his return from Mecca, that liberation for Black people in the United States involved forming a separate nation.⁶⁶ For Committee members, it was national liberation struggles that animated their political imagination. As China Brotsky, a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Committee, explained: “National liberation movements were setting the world on fire, at the very moment we were formulating our politics—between American Indian Movement, and Puerto Ricans, the FALN in New York, the Panthers, and Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chicano, and Mozambique. For us, it was completely normal and logical.”