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Through this course and independent research I have learned ways in which Art Educators can help support anti-racist values and further the Black Lives Matter Movement. The article that taught me the most and I will be carrying with me is Dr. James Haywood Rolling, Jr.'s Black Lives Matter: An Open Letter to Art Educators on Constructing an Anti-Racist Agenda.

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Rolling_Black Lives Matter_ An Open Letter to Art Educators on Constructing an Anti-Racist Agenda

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A woman raises her fist while comforting a grieving man at the place in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed in police custody. The gesture has become a sign of "resiliency and power," according to one activist.

Photograph by Alyssa Schukar, Redux

Huda Ahmed first saw fists raised in protest after the deaths of Eric Garner and Philando Castile at the hands of police. "As a young Black girl," the San Diego activist says, "that symbolic fist really opened my eyes to the injustices within our country." This summer, Ahmed has been raising her own fist during Black Lives Matter protests. She does it, she says, because the gesture "signifies resiliency and power through every triumph and struggle."

The raised fist has been a staple of protests across the United States as the country continues to grapple with systemic racism. Demonstrators use it when confronting federal police in Portland, Oregon. People have spray painted it on sidewalks and the sides of buildings. There are even emojis.

Raising a fist in protest isn't new. In 1968, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos made the salute famous from an Olympic podium in Mexico City. But the gesture is even older than that, and tracing its winding path through European and U.S. political movements reveals how the struggles against racism and fascism have long been intertwined.

One of the earliest known instances in the U.S. of a protester brandishing a raised fist occurred in 1913, when "Big Bill" Haywood spoke to strikers during the Paterson silk strike in New Jersey. Haywood, a founding member of the union Industrial Workers of the World, preached working-class solidarity across all races and trades.

"Every finger by itself has no force," he said, lifting his sizable hand to the crowd. "Now look," he said, closing his fingers into a fist. "See that, that's the IWW."

Although that unified position gave the IWW the strength to achieve many of its goals for workers around the world, the workers' movement faced violent opposition. By the 1920s, street battles were common between workers and the hired guns of employers-and between followers of different political ideologies. In 1926, one of the combatants, a German group called the Red Front Fighters (RFB), patented the clenched fist as part of their uniform and salute.

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To Ernst Thälmann, leader of the RFB, the fist was a pledge to "protect the friend and fight off the enemy." But the RFB, founded to guard Communist Party meetings from far-right attacks, battled as much against the Iron Front, the Social Democrats' street-fighting arm, as it did fascists of the rising Nazi party. In 1932, the RFB rebranded as Antifaschistische Aktion-better known by the contraction antifa. The Nazis took power a year later; Thälmann and hundreds of his comrades died in concentration camps.

Members of the anti-Nazi Red Front Fighters give the clenched fist salute in 1928. The German group patented the gesture but other anti-fascists used it anyway.

Photograph by Fox Photos, Getty

Opposition to the Nazis' atrocities and the creeping spread of fascism across Europe eventually led to a broad-based alliance of communists, socialists, and liberal democrats against bigotry and persecution. This anti-fascist coalition called itself the Popular Front and adopted the raised fist salute from exiled Germans.

The Popular Front pushed back against signs of fascism in democratic nations. In 1936, anti-fascists resisted when the British Union of Fascists attempted to march through Jewish neighborhoods in London. As many as 100,000 dockworkers, children, workers, and members of the Jewish community stood shoulder to shoulder with fists in the air and turned the fascists back.

The events that brought the raised fist back to the United States as a symbol of the fight against racial oppression began earlier that year in Spain. Armed and supported by Hitler and Mussolini, Catholic nationalists and fascists attempted to depose the democratically elected Popular Front government, launching the Spanish Civil War. Some 45,000 anti-fascist volunteers hurried to fight with the Spanish Republicans in the International Brigades, including 2,800 Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade celebrate their arrival in New York in 1938 after fighting for the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War.

Photograph by Bettmann, Getty

The Spanish Republic took up the raised fist salute as "a greeting of solidarity with the democratic peoples of the world, " according to Mary Rolfe, an American volunteer.

Among the Lincoln Brigade members were 90 Black soldiers. Back home they'd faced a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, dehumanizing Jim Crow laws, and the harshest impact of the Great Depression. In Spain, they commanded white troops and were received as heroes. (Jim Crow laws created 'slavery by another name.')

"Divisions of race, creed, and nationality lost significance when they met a united effort to make Spain the tomb of Fascism," wrote Salaria Kea, a Black nurse, in her memoir. "I saw my fate, the fate of the Negro race, was inseparably tied up with their fate."

By 1937 the Lincolns were commanded by Oliver Law, a communist from Texas who'd served as a buffalo soldier in the U.S. Army, where as a Black man he hadn't been eligible for an officer's commission. With the Lincolns, he was elected as much as selected, said Steve Nelson, the brigade's political commissar. "When soldiers were asked who might become an officer-ours was a very democratic army-his name always came up."

In Spain, Law said, "I can rise according to my worth, not my color."

Female communists march past the German consulate in New York City in 1938 to express support for the Loyalist faction in the Spanish Civil War. The German government supported the fascist side in the conflict.

Photograph by FPG, Hulton Archive/Getty

The anti-fascists lost the civil war. Law died leading his men against a machine gun, and the members of the Lincoln Brigade returned to the United States, where they were hounded by the FBI for their leftist politics. But the Lincolns had not forgotten what they learned about unity and strength in Spain, and continued using the raised fist in protests and poster art.

For the Lincoln Brigade veterans, the civil rights movement was another battle in the same anti-fascist war. They desegregated swimming pools, ran NAACP chapters, registered voters, and set up medical outposts when the American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz. Their militant anti-racism fit the militant anti-racism of the Black Power movement, and the clenched fist became its symbol. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale raised their fists to exhort members of the Black Panther Party. Smith and Carlos raised theirs in the Black Power salute during the Olympics in 1968.

Now the gesture is firmly embedded in anti-racist protests. Celebrities from Damian Lillard, point guard for the Portland Trailblazers, to John Boyega, star of the recent Star Wars movies, have employed it on the front lines of demonstrations. The present-day antifa as well as other social, political, and labor movements still use it, too. (Hear from those calling for racial justice in Washington, D.C.)

As Kea witnessed in Spain, anti-fascism has always been about anti-racism. When Thälmann raised his fist in Germany or Law his in Spain, they might not have been able to imagine Lillard doing the same in Portland or Boyega in London or Huda Ahmed in San Diego. But their message was the same-that we can defeat tyranny when we stand together.

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The history of the raised fist, a global symbol of fighting oppression

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The forceful salute is intertwined with some of the 20th century's most tumultuous events, including conflicts with fascism.

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"In 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute from the medal podium at the Olympic Games in Mexico City."

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As a white woman, I have to recognize my own privilege and placement within a society with systemic racism. I realize I have benefitted from this system my whole life and am continuing to educate myself on being a better ally and anti-racist. Even this assignment was very informative for exploring visual culture as an aspect of the movement I never considered deeply.

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George Floyd was killed in police custody in May of 2020. The video of the incident went viral across social media platforms and news outlets, sparking the biggest surge of the Black Lives Matter Movement to date. His death was represented in phrases such as 'Justice for George Floyd' and 'I Can't Breathe', recognizing not only his own murder but the continual oppression and violence against many Black Americans at the hands of the police.

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When searching for an image of George Floyd to compare alongside Adrian Bronan's art, I found there were very few photos of George Floyd. Instead the google search came up with hundreds of portraits, memorials, protest signs, and statues memorialzing and remembering George Floyd as a pivotal figure for the Black Lives Matter movement.

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How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody (Published 2020)

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The Times has reconstructed the death of George Floyd on May 25. Security footage, witness videos and official documents show how a series of actions by officers turned fatal.

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I first discovered Adrian Brandon from Instagram and found his posts were widely shared. This accessibility to powerful art and images was and still is highly impactful on the momentum of the BLM movement.

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Tamir Rice // 12 Yrs Old

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George Floyd // 46 Yrs Old

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Breonna Taylor // 26 Yrs Old

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Aiyana Stanley-Jones // 7 Yrs Old

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"This series is dedicated to the many black people that were robbed of their lives at the hands of the police. I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color. Tamir Rice was 12 when he was murdered, so I colored his portrait for 12 minutes.

As a person of color, I know that my future can be stolen from me if I’m driving with a broken taillight, or playing my music too loud, or reaching for my phone at the wrong time. So for each of these portraits I played with the harsh relationship between time and death. I want the viewer to see how much empty space is left in these lives, stories that will never be told, space that can never be filled. This emptiness represents holes in their families and our community, who will be forever stuck with the question, “who were they becoming?” This series touches on grief and the unknown."

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Adrian Brandon is a contemporary artist baised in Brooklyn. In his own words, his mission as an artist is to "cultivate greater understanding around the Black experience, in hopes that we can move forward together guided by love and unity".

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Following the horrific murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, protestors worldwide have taken the streets to demand justice.

Protestors in UK cities including London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Manchester have been heard chanting, "I can't breathe," the words Mr Floyd was filmed saying as he died while being restrained by a police officer.

Black Lives Matter has said: "We are doing this to place pressure on the American government and show that this is a worldwide issue."

The protestors were seen with raised clench fists, a symbol that has become intertwined with the Black Lives Matter movement that has emerged in response to the disproportionate police brutality experienced by people of colour.

What is the history of the black power fist?

The raising of a closed fist as symbol of black power has a long history.

At first it was not exclusively used in relation to people of African descent, but by marginalised groups worldwide experiencing any form of oppression, to reject discriminatory behaviour.

The brandished fist was a rebuff of unjust authority and an act of collective resistance.

When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to challenge police brutality against the African American community, the black power fist was repeatedly used as a symbol of black liberation.

Photos and video footage of the Black Panthers saluting each other with raised fists at conventions, meetings and rallies solidified the symbol as synonymous with the fight for black civil rights.

In an iconic moment at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Games, the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who both received medals, each donned a black glove and raised their fists while the national anthem played during the medal ceremony.

The United States Olympic Committee said the pair had violated "the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States", but later Mr Smith declared it a "human rights salute".

In reference to the subversive gesture, Mr Carlos wrote in his book The John Carlos Story: "Hey, world, the United States is not like you might think it is for blacks and other people of colour. Just because we have USA on our chest does not mean everything is peachy keen and we are living large."

Years later, when the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 - after spending 27 years in jail - he raised a fist in triumph alongside his wife.

The black power fist has also been adopted by allies of the black community, including feminist activist Gloria Steinem and politician Bernie Saunders.

Why is it the black lives matter logo?

The Black Lives Matter movement campaigns against violence and the systemic racism directed towards black people, and was co-founded in the summer of 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

The raised clenched fist isn't the only symbol brandished by the movement, but it was adopted following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.

The unarmed black teenager was shot dead by white police who claimed he was acting in self-defence, and the black power fist was used to represent the "hands up, don't shoot" pose.

It's been used ever since both in social media posts and at rallies, as a symbol of resistance and defiance, and was created as an emoji in 2015.

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The meaning and history of the Black Power fist used by Black Lives Matter

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Following the horrific murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, protestors worldwide have taken the streets to demand justice. Protestors in UK cities including London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Manchester have been heard chanting, "I can't breathe," the words Mr Floyd was filmed saying as he died while being restrained by a police officer.

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The raised fist has been used as a symbol of defiance and solidarity against racism and marginalization continually throughout history. The symbol has most recently become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement across the nation through protests, activism, politics and social media. Easily spread and copied, the symbol is widely recognizable to many.

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Black Lives Matter (BLM), international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Black violence, especially in the form of police brutality.