ABSTRACT
While in Britain the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were mass movements, applying no platform and with the support of hundreds of thousands of people, in the United States in the same moment, different paths were followed. At Skokie in 1977–1998, the American Civil Liberties Union supported members of the National Socialist Party of America when they demanded the right to march. They succeeded in overturning a municipal ban on fascist marches, at the price of antagonising tens of thousands of Jews, many of them survivors of the Holocaust. Their gesture has however been taken by generations of American liberals as proof of the necessity for an expansive reading of the First Amendment, one that would allow free speech even for fascists. A year later, anti-fascists adopted seemingly much more radical politics – promising to physically defeat the right at Greensboro, North Carolina. The resulting massacre ended with several fascists dead and Klansmen and fascists seemingly endorsed by a right-leaning local community.
