On Thursday, May 9, 8AM, RISD SJP Organizers sent President Crystal Williams and Provost Ghadessi an email: “We hope you are doing well. In line with our conversation three nights ago, we strive to maintain clear and open communication with you. Please find a PDF of our annotations of your email attached below. We hope to hear from you soon and talk with you in person about RSJP student representatives presenting a divestment proposal in front of the Board of Trustees and initiating a vote on divestment. We remain steadfast with our de-occupation until our demands of disclosure, divestment, establishment of a student oversight committee, and condemnation of the genocide in Gaza are met.” Both never responded to the email.

At 11:41AM, President Crystal Williams issued an email to the RISD students de-occupying the second floor of Fathi Ghaben Place (20 Washington Place) and bcc’d all RISD students, staff, and faculty. She stated: “The barricades on the second floor of 20 Washington Place violate multiple Rhode Island Fire Codes. We need you to create a means of egress and ingress by 12:00 p.m. We are sending RISD facilities and maintenance staff to help you create a means of ingress and egress that is in compliance with Rhode Island state law.” She announced, “Fire Marshals are waiting to ensure that means of ingress and egress are in evidence.” Students earlier had communicated with Public Safety officers to facilitate the moving of Furniture Students’ projects through the barricade, but President Williams and Public Safety denied that offer.

At 11:51AM, a De-occupier emailed back: “In order to facilitate safe egress, we will not further resist facilities from entering and clearing the barricades.” The email was never responded to. At 12PM, after De-occupiers told Public Safety officers that they themselves dismantled a barricade for egress, Public Safety officers continued to push through and dismantle all of the barricades and remove the chairs and tables to the first floor. Over one hundred students, faculty, and community members gathered around the building, specifically at a side entrance on South Main St. Protests continued with chanting and drumming as the head of RISD’s Public Safety Department and other officers blocked the 100+ students and faculty from entering the building. While inside, Public Safety officers pushed at least 3 De-occupiers and student protesters down the stairs.

At 1:30PM, approximately 30 students entered the building and reunited with the De-Occupiers inside the building. All students and De-Occupiers exited the building safely and joined the students, faculty, and community members rallying outside the Waterman St. Entrance. After all exited the building, at 1:43 PM, President Crystal Williams issued another email to the RISD community: “Facilities and maintenance staff have helped clear ingress and egress, and we thank the students for allowing us to ensure that we operate safely..”

Williams then went on: “Now, we are notifying students on the second floor of the following:

They may vacate the space by 2:30 pm and undergo a restorative justice process. This process is designed to be fair and just, ensuring that all parties are heard and respected. Students will be responsible for returning the space—including all furniture, walls, projects, bathrooms, etc.—to its original state by tomorrow (Friday) afternoon, meet with students and faculty whom their actions have immediately negatively impacted, listen to the impact of their actions and engage in respectful dialog, and reimburse those who have spent personal funds on no longer viable projects as a result of the occupation. If students vacate by 2:30 p.m. and the above restorative justice conditions are not met, students will be held accountable under the current conduct codes.

If students do not vacate the space by 2:30 pm, we will proceed with expulsion from Rhode
Island School of Design.” Students announced the threat of expulsion to the rally of now over 300 students, faculty, and community members to outcries of “shame!” The rally and strike still continues with drumming and chanting outside Fathi Ghaben Place (20 Washington Place). The De-Occupying students have communicated with President Williams and agreed to the “restorative justice” process in lieu of student conduct proceedings. This all comes after Monday, May 6, when 21 RISD students and community members began a sit-in at the Providence Washington building and refused to leave until their demands were met. Students, faculty, and community members participated in teach-ins by RISD and Brown faculty, art builds, dabke dancing, and picketing throughout the day.

RISD SJP demand RISD President Crystal Williams:

1. Provides total fiscal transparency of RISD’s investment portfolio;
2. Commits to a holistic divestment from companies, corporations, and institutions that are
   implicated in sustaining Israeli Apartheid;
3. Establishes a student oversight committee for future investments;
4. Publicly condemns the Israeli Occupation of Gaza as a genocide.

Faculty from the Theory of History of Art and Design, Teaching and Learning in Art and Design, Graphic Design Department, and the Sculpture Department have issued statements in support of the students and their demands.

At the rally today, one student protestor reiterated: “This is not the end.” RISD SJP stands by the legacy of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, who was Narragansett and African-American and the first female graduate of color from RISD,

“[we] will not bend an inch.”

Tonight is the night of the ram and the truncheon. The arm swinging it wears a Democratic Party armband. Push just a little against the ruling class, and they will band together in a slavering mass of ghouls and devils. We see you; the students and the workers see you.

To the conciliators: you have your choice. Stand with the people or with their enemy. To the ruling class: you have overplayed your hand. Tonight you have shown the students and workers of the cities your contempt, and treated them like the colonies and semi-colonies.

Look to Washington, and see them for what they are: the craven and cringing lackeys of wealthy masters. Look beyond their charade at the skin-and-bone; they are wearing your blood as rubies, they are slurping the marrow of your kin.

But what will their ram bring them? Their truncheon? Their armored trucks and towers? Tonight these cronies give birth to the future red brigades who will prepare on earth the hell that does not wait for them in another world – the hell they so rightly deserve.

Together, we will walk through the inferno to destroy them. They, the parasites who feast on our flesh and delight in our misery; who grow gravid with the wine of our suffering, will know fire, as we will know fire. And when we are done, the world will be the better for burning.

All it takes is a single spark – a single spark to start a prairie fire. They have struck the spark. The fire is burning. It will race beyond their control. The old wood will burn, the ancient groves will be cleared away, and the sun will shine again on a new forest.

The time is coming when we will bring their feast – the feast of two centuries! – to an end. We will drive the ghouls down into the dark corridors of history. Children will grow with only faerie stories of the monstrous exploiters. They will grow knowing them only as myth.

But when those children ask “where were you when the fire was struck” and “where were you when the fire raged,” you will look back and know that you took part. You will be able to say with sorrow and joy, “I was one who helped make this new world, for you.”

On the night of April 30 going into the morning of the first of May, May Day, the New York City police department piled into armored trucks and troop carriers. They went armed with batons and truncheons, with ladders, towers, and rams, to Columbia and CUNY, intent on shattering the resistance to the regime’s war on Palestine. In the nighted hours, before the rising of the sun, it became clear that the war is not the zionist war on Palestine, but the U.S. war. The representatives of imperial law and order stood together and declared with one voice, Democrat and Republican, from the mayor of New York City, the Democrat Eric Adams, to the trumpets of the White House and the Biden regime, that they are the unabashed servants of monopoly capitalism. Together all forces of “order” are lackeys of a single master: U.S. imperialist capital.

At the same time, across the country, UCLA’s encampment suffered attacks by paramilitary zionists: gas canisters, bricks, and lit fireworks were hurled into the camp, sending twelve student-radicals to the hospital. As we would expect, the police in LA stood back and permitted this brutal attack on the camp. Despite the violence, when the sun rose on May Day, the encampment had survived. The UCLA camp holds their ground.

Hours before the troops arrived at Columbia and CUNY, the student encampment at Brown was broken by the cowardice and capitulation of its leading committees, who chose to protect themselves rather than their mission, and broadcast an order to disband after the Brown made them empty promises of hearings on divestment…in October.

It is clear that this concerted effort on the camps was coordinated by a central strategy. We can see the hand of the White House behind the stooped pawns in blue. It is no mystery that Biden’s regime moves the pieces, even while Biden himself sipped warm milk and geriatric vitamin supplements peacefully in his cushioned bed.

In New York City, the NYPD closed off four blocks surrounding the Columbia campus. They marched in columns of armored officers, supported by a fleet of combat vehicles and jail buses, sometimes forcing patrol cars through crowds of students and workers, to approach the gates of the campus. In a crowning irony, student journalists were corralled and penned in Pulitzer Hall so they could not report on the brutality the NYPD were about to unleash on the defenders at Columbia.

Bringing up their siege towers, the NYPD forced entry to the defenders’ fortress at Hind (Hamilton) Hall, smashing through the windows and plowing into the defenders ranks. All told, some hundred or more students and workers at the encampment were arrested and shunted into prison buses to be transported to the city’s decaying prisons and lockups. The members of the encampment, with a high degree of political awareness, knew that despite the raid, they had won. Unlike the cowardly or duped leadership at Brown, they accepted nothing from the university, made no self-destructive bargain. Although they were ultimately arrested, the movement itself is in-tact and they can soon begin their work anew.

The Night of the Ram has shattered the domestic quiet of the empire. Crises are coming at an accelerating rate: between Ferguson and the 2020 June Uprising, eight years passed. Between the June Uprising and the 2024 Student Revolt, a mere four years have elapsed. We will see these crises come faster, with greater effect, and with ever-escalating crackdowns from the parties of law and order.

The bourgeois politicians in the form of the centrist and even the “progressive” Democrats have revealed themselves to the people as mere lickspittles for imperialist capital. They have let loose the dogs of war on their own people, treated the workers and students the very same way they treat the semi- and neo-colonies abroad. Cesaire’s thesis — the barbarization of the homefront with the savagery of the colonial front — has been proven true, even in the eyes of workers unaffected by the student movement.

Moreover, the Night of the Ram will inevitably produce hundreds of new radicals. From the wreckage of Hind Hall there will come the future red brigades, the theorists and armed battalions that will overthrow this unjust society which has, for too long, deserved annihilation. The days of capital are numbered, and the parties of law and order should tremble. The children of the revolution have raised their cry: I was, I am, I will be!

On the night of February 21st 2022 in Providence, Rhode Island, the Red Ink Community Library’s “Red Book Day,” which gathered anti-capitalist forces from around the state in the form of anarchists, socialists, and Communists for a celebration of the anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, was cut short by shrieked racist slurs and sieg heils. It was only forty-five minutes into the reading when a bloc of fascists, adorned with sonnenrads and SS symbols, arrived to bait the Communists and fellow travelers into a physical confrontation. The assembled leftists showed more bravery and self control than the neo-Nazis had anticipated, and when the incident was said and done everybody walked away unharmed. Even so, the boldness and belligerence of the neo-Nazi attack and the fact that they were were not only prepared for, but hoping to provoke an exchange of street violence, reveals the danger their formations pose to organizers in Rhode Island.

It is critical to understand that this is not an isolated incident. Openly-fascist organizing is not new to Rhode Island, just as it isn’t new to any other state in the U.S. Empire. The attack on Red Ink fits neatly not only into the deeply reactionary, blood-soaked history of this settler-republic, but also tracks with an observed uptick in violent right-wing and paramilitary activity in New England generally, and Rhode Island specifically.

Two organizations, Patriot Front, which is a broad fascist organization headquartered in Texas, and NSC-131, a self declared neo-Nazi organization, are responsible for the bulk of fascist activity in Rhode Island. Both are a product of a milieu of new fascist organization that bubbles up from, and finds fertile soil in, a white suburban petit-bourgeoisie that finds itself increasingly subject to downward pressure and proletarianization. On the national stage, Patriot Front has launched a campaign of violent terror and reactionary propaganda against left-wing organizations and marginalized groups across the country. An accounting of all of Patriot Front’s vile acts is beyond the scope of this piece, but notably the organization recently found national attention after 31 of its masked and uniformed members, armed with bludgeoning weapons, knives, and handguns, were arrested in Washington State on their way to attack a local Pride parade. NSC-131 (“Nationalist Social Club,” an intentional nod to National Socialism, and 131 for ACA: Anti-Communist-Action) has a smaller, more regional footprint, operating in New England and based mainly in New Hampshire.

Between them and their partners the Proud Boys, as well as various presumably unorganized fascist elements in the area, a major intensification of fascist activity is sweeping the state. According to the Anti-Defamation League (a liberal organization with dubious politics which nevertheless offers systemic tracking of certain types of fascist activity), Rhode Island saw an increase of 384% in terms of incidents of white supremacist activity as measured by propaganda actions between 2019 and 2021. Propaganda depicting NSC as a white vanguard defending New England against a Black and Jewish “assault” has been distributed in several Providence suburbs and the city itself. According to the Providence Journal, in July members of NSC-131 were apprehended by East Providence police having just posted their racist flyers at the Gordon School on Maxfield Avenue, an institution that teaches children as young as five and as old as thirteen, and which touts itself as a leader in progressive and inclusive education in the state. It should be noted that the local police did not arrest the fascists because of an objection to the content of their propaganda, but rather because East Providence has a law against stapling paper to light posts and because the fascists refused to identify themselves when asked.

The attack on Red Ink is not alone; the local office of Black Lives Matter Providence was also attacked by fascists in December of 2021.

All the evidence points towards a steady increase in right-fascist numbers, determination, and organizational strength. Their campaign of terror and repression against the nationally oppressed, and against LGBT persons and persons of oppressed genders, in Rhode Island demonstrates conclusively that the most violent reactionaries have entered a new phase in the past few years, one in which their forces strengthen themselves and coalesce with ever increasing ferocity and speed.

As Communists, we understand that fascism is but the most naked, most brutal expression of the bourgeois dictatorship. We understand that American fascism traces its roots back not just to the legacy of Hitler and Mussolini, but back further, through the history of the Ku Klux Klan and the genocidal slave regime of the old south; through the settler militias which raped, murdered, and expropriated their way across an entire continent of indigenous peoples. We know that Patriot Front and NSC-131 and all the rest are the inheritors of the legacy of those who, by force of arms and fire and terror, brought down Reconstruction and foreclosed the possibility of a democratic revolution in the Black Belt, plunging millions of ex-slaves back into the most inhuman living conditions and ensuring that the centuries-old regime of white supremacy would continue to rule over the land unthreatened. These forces, working with the support, sometimes open, sometimes cloaked, of the imperialist ruling class, draw their foot soldiers from among the dissatisfied white male suburbanites and put them to work suppressing any movement which threatens the dictatorship of capital and the reign of white supremacy. The more conditions in North America worsen, the more profits dry up, the more the internal contradictions of capitalist society sharpen, the more emboldened these most reactionary of capital’s defenders will become; and, indeed, the more the capitalist bourgeoisie will rely on them to do their dirty work.

The workers, the nationally oppressed, LGBT persons, non-men, and everyone who stands on the side of progress and liberty must stand firm and stand together in the face of the fascist terror. We must turn to community self-defense and self-organization to turn capital’s foot soldiers away from our neighborhoods, our cities, and our childrens’ schools. We must be clear that antifascist street tactics can and do work when deployed by a determined, organized community. This does not mean seeking out and violently engaging the organized fascist right at the first opportunity. Launching ourselves ill-prepared against Patriot Front or NSC-131, challenging them on an individual basis in the streets, or allowing them to bait us into a confrontation that can only happen on their terms, things might satisfy our sense of justice or our immediate desire to engage in the struggle in a real and visceral way, but a rejection of studied tactics won’t make our communities any safer. Worse, when we are unprepared or unorganized and we engage on the terms set by the right fascists, it merely strengthens their resolve and increases their numbers. It is only through superior organization that we can carry the day.

Obviously, we cannot rely on the police to defend us. They support the American white supremacist status quo and many — a great many — individual officers are sympathetic to (or are actually members of) fascist organizations. We must rely on each other, instead. 

Talk to your neighbors, organize open and frank public conversations among those in your neighborhood who reject the encroachment of white supremacists into their streets. Develop plans for neighborhood watches in areas targeted by the fascists for propagandizing and recruitment. Educate yourself and your neighbors about self-defense and first aid. Prepare to send defenders to the Planned Parenthoods and mosques and synagogues and protests and marches and anywhere else the fascists dare to show their faces. Strengthen your connections with your community so that you can stand up against the enemy and teach them that the oppressed masses of this country will not be cowed by the fascist terror.