Fires on the Radical Right and Left: The Past Has Become the Present

If history is cyclical, we are turning back the clock about 100 years. 

The KKK was a menace then. It actively intimidated blacks, Jews, immigrants and Catholics. New York could not outlaw the KKK, but passed a registration law that denied the group secrecy rights. The law required members of any group that demanded an oath as a condition of membership (except labor unions) to file copies of the group’s “constitution, bylaws, rules, regulations and oath of membership, together with a roster of its membership and a list of its officers for the current year.”’ In Bryant v. Zimmerman, 278 U.S. 63 (1928), George Bryant, a member of a KKK branch called the Provisional Klan, was arrested for failing to comply with the registration requirements of the law.

He argued that he and his group had a right to secrecy, and that they were being treated unequally relative to other private groups. These were powerful arguments. 

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled that New York’s “Klan” law was constitutional. Why? Because the Klan was known to engage in acts of unlawful intimidation and violence.

The ruling is valid today—but some white supremacy groups stop short of violence and intimidation. They espouse pernicious ideas about racial separation and exclusion. (Others act violently.)

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Neither students nor faculty were involved in the violence at U.C. Berkeley. But whoever lit the fire and damaged property, their actions resemble the radicalism of socialists and anarchists a century ago. 

Like today, people with liberal viewpoints were lumped together with violent agitators in “syndicalism” laws in the early 1900s. These laws made it illegal to advocate violence. They were aimed at socialist and anarchists. 

In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that a common type of syndicalism law violated the Constitution. In this case, the law wasn’t applied to a socialist agitator—it was applied to a member of the KKK. 

Brandenburg invited a Cincinnati television to a Ku Klux Klan rally on a farm. The TV crew’s film showed 12 hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms, gathered around a burning cross. The film captured derogatory utterances against blacks and Jews. Brandenburg was fined $1,000 and sentenced to a minimum of 1-10 years in prison.

The Supreme Court overturned the conviction, stating: “We are here confronted with a statute which, by its own words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action.”

The lesson? Extremists on the right and left have a right to advocate for violence. Once they take specific actions to injure, harass, intimidate, destroy property and the like (or planning actions), they have crossed the constitutional line. It's a fine line today, when many people are already highly agitated and easily provoked to act on a harmful impulse.