In my late-teens I met Sid and Clara Solomon. Sid was a publisher and painter, Clara was a brilliant pianist and thinker. Both were life-long anarchists.
In the back room of his tiny Queens apartment Sid told me of how they were part of an international group of Jewish, Italian, and Spanish radicals that smuggled guns to the Spanish anarchists who were fighting Franco and the fascists in Europe. Clara told all who she loved of her travels as a young woman, hitchhiking and crossing the northern border to meet up with Emma Goldman.
Sid and Clara told me these stories in whispers over sixty years after the events had passed. Any decent and just society would honor their contributions alongside Black Panthers and AIM members who fed and defended their communities, feminists who provided abortions underground, queer and trans peoples who threw the cops out of their bars, landless peasants and unhoused peoples who reclaimed land and homes, and many, many others in struggle.
When authoritarians on the Right and Left demonize "Antifa" they vilify our elders, our comrades and community members, and ourselves. This shall not stand, they shall not pass.
Anti-fascist, now and always!
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