By Paul DeRienzo
The January 6, 2021 pro-Trump raid on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. is being touted as a once-in-a-lifetime assault by right‑wingers of the drunken head-basher variety, attempting to take control of the central government to bring a nightmare of Handmaiden Tale high school drop out rule to America. The horn-headed, pelt-wearing wannabe Viking white boys thought they were cool until a cop popped a bullet into protester Alisha Babbitt’s neck inside a Capitol staircase, a rendezvous with reality.
The FBI has arrested more than one hundred, who face long jail terms as they discover that a federal misdemeanor or felony is a lot heavier and expensive to defend against crime than violating an ordinance in small-town America. Reality weighs hard on the ignorant.
The talk that this was a rare event, while accurate, isn’t entirely true. I was at the scene in 1982 when left wing radicals made a play to forcefully seize the Reagan White House. It was a riot.
The occurrence came shortly after a bloody attack by the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] on a group of communist anti-Klan radicals in Greensboro, North Carolina, in which five of the communists were killed and several others seriously wounded. Anger against the Klan’s brazenness was palpable among the left, when the Klan added to the rage by announcing a March on Washington, D.C.
In 1925, the KKK was a huge organization, with millions of members nationwide. Its organizers had already begun playing down the KKK’s roots as a southern terrorist group aimed at Blacks and were reinventing themselves as pro-Christian and anti-immigrant. The KKK of the 1920s sparked the imagination of white, conservative America in ways similar to Trump today. It was no surprise back then when 35,000 Klansmen marched on the nation’s capitol.
After World War II, the Klan morphed back to a more openly racist configuration, aimed against the civil rights movement. Its followers tended to hide from plain sight, emerging here and there to support Alabama Governor George Wallace or attack civil rights workers. It was an unusual event when, 57 years after the first KKK march on Washington, Arkansas Klansmen and Knights of the KKK chaplain Thomas Robb announced that 200 members would hold their own commemorative march on Washington.
It came to a head on November 28, 1982, the day after Thanksgiving.
The violence started when anti‑Klan demonstrators began throwing stones and bottles and attempted to break through police lines to assault Robb and the small group of Klansmen who actually showed up.
I attended on a YIPPIE! bus, leaving from 9 Bleecker St, then the Yippie HQ with Aron “Pieman’ Kay, the staff of “Rock Against Racism,” a Yippie- connected traveling concert featuring anti-racist performers, and a variety of anti‑fascist enthusiasts looking to protest against the organized racists.
When we arrived in D.C., hundreds of angry multi-cultural protesters were already there, some openly frustrated that the Klan was nowhere to be seen, having been kept away from the protests by cops.
I joined a group of protesters heading along 15th Street from Constitution Avenue toward the White House. Suddenly I got a whiff of tear gas, not the usual mild protest variety, but the melt-your-eyeballs type that really hurts. The group I was with ran into a Nieman Marcus department store and, as salespeople swept the expensive stuff off the counters, we reached the bathrooms, washing our faces of the caustic chemical.
As I came out, I was surprised to run in to my much more button down brother, who, it turned out, held a post-college job as a floorwalker at that department store. We both laughed and he briefly joined the protest.
I lost him as we headed out and back to the White House. It was for the best, considering what happened next. As our group made the turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue, we were passed by a couple of hundred communists associated with the then very confrontational maoist Progressive Labor Party [PLP], angry and chanting, with red flags flying. I was across the street as they passed the driveway to the White House, and then, on some sort of signal, they rushed the grounds.
I watched from the street in shock as, within seconds, a phalanx of black-clad cops in gas masks emerged from nowhere. They marched in formation toward the protesters, who were battling the guards on the White House lawn. The cops hit back with volleys of tear gas, driving the protesters back toward H Street.
The cops withdrew and the PLP folks, a multiracial group known for their strict Stalinism, attacked a second time, pushing even further on to the White House grounds. The cops hit back and drove the force to Lafayette Park, where other protesters joined in ripping paving bricks from park walkways, raining them onto police. It was the most dangerous thing I ever saw in my life - somehow nobody was killed, though some cops were slightly injured and 35 people were arrested.
A brief riot spread throughout the night, a few windows broken, a few street fires. By the next day, it was like it never happened.
My buddy, our bus driver, was hit over the head. He recovered, and we made it home the next day after a night at the Yippie HQ in a rented brownstone on Capitol Hill.
Most progressives thought the PLP was kind of stupid to risk injuries and shift the focus from the Klan to the rioting protesters. You don’t hear much about the group anymore, as the left focused more on the failed attempt by the “Rainbow Coalition” to get Jessie Jackson elected president in 1984.
But as I watched the
Trumpoids bum rush the Capitol on January 6th, it brought
back memories of when the left were the invaders.
