The Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), formerly
the Anarchist Red Cross, is an anarchist support
organization.
The group is notable for its efforts at providing
prisoners with political literature, but it
also organizes material and legal support
for class struggle prisoners worldwide.
It commonly contrasts itself with Amnesty
International, which is concerned mainly with
prisoners of conscience and refuses to defend
those accused of encouraging violence.
The ABC openly supports those who have committed
illegal activity in furtherance of revolutionary
aims that anarchists accept as legitimate.
== History ==
The Anarchist Black Cross began as the Anarchist
Red Cross, a breakaway organization from the
Political Red Cross organized to aid political
prisoners in Czarist Russia.
For years, the origin of the organization
was under dispute, but recent documents have
resurfaced that have narrowed down the time
frame.
According to Rudolph Rocker, once the treasurer
for the Anarchist Red Cross in London, the
organization was founded in Russia during
the "hectic period between 1900 and 1905."
Most material discussing ABC history points
to this era as the birth of this group.
The group came into prominence after the 1905
Revolution with the increase of imprisoned
anarchists in Russia.
Due to the refusal of the Political Red Cross
and other prisoner aid groups to support anarchist
political prisoners, Russian anarchists in
Russia and those in exile abroad created the
Anarchist Red Cross to support their comrades
held in Russian prisons.
Each branch of the organization was known
by the region in which they operated (Latvia,
Riga, Odessa, etc.).
Within a few years, the organization spread
beyond the Russian borders to the United States
and England, where exiled revolutionaries
had settled.
By 1905, the group changed its name, dropping
"Red Cross" from the title.
In this era, the group used various names
including: Chicago Aid Fund, Society to Aid
Anarchist Prisoners in Russia, Joint Committee
to Aid Revolutionaries Imprisoned in Russia,
and finally, the title that would remain,
the Anarchist Black Cross.
However, according to Harry Weinstein, one
of the two men who began the organization,
the activities of the group began after his
arrest in July or August 1906.
Once released, Weinstein and others provided
clothing to anarchists sentenced to exile
in Siberia.
Weinstein alleged that the group broke off
from the original Political Red Cross in late
1906 when Weinstein and other anarchists received
no support despite ample donations from the
anarchist community.
Weinstein continued his efforts in Russia
until his arrival in New York in May 1907.
Once there, he helped to create the New York
Anarchist Red Cross, which included such members
as Mother Earth editor Louise Berger.
In 1911, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania chapter
of the Anarchist Red Cross was founded by
Morris Beresin and Boris Yelensky.
=== Black Army ===
In 1918, Nestor Makhno organized new chapters
of the Anarchist Black Cross as an adjunct
to his anarchist Revolutionary Insurrectionary
Army of Ukraine or Black Army in the territories
of Ukraine which they controlled.It was at
this time that the organization's efforts
were shifted from prisoner support to emergency
medical response and self-defense.
With the onset of attacks from Cossacks, White
Guards, pogromists, and later the Red Army,
the Ukrainian Black Cross took on a unique
secondary role preparing city defenses and
organizing the first urban army in Ukrainian
history.
As a city militia, the Ukrainian Anarchist
Black Cross worked alongside units of the
anarchist Black Army, but were never a mobile
force, being primarily based within city environs.
Members wore no formal uniforms, but were
identified by wearing denim overalls and distinctive
armbands.
For a time, the Anarchist Black Cross was
tolerated in Moscow and Petrograd by the Bolshevik
government, though its activities in those
cities were not large in scale.
The Cheka (Lenin's secret police) infiltrated
informers into the Black Cross, who regularly
made reports on the organization's leaders
and activities.
Outside of Moscow, Petrograd, and the areas
of the Ukraine controlled by the Black Army
there was complete repression; anarchist pamphlets
and books were regularly seized, and even
Anarchist Black Cross aid workers were subject
to arrest and detention.
In September 1919, a grenade attack at a meeting
of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party
was used as a pretext for mass arrests of
anarchists all over Russia by Bolshevik Red
Army forces and the Cheka.
Anarchist militants were arrested; even the
Black Army and its general, Nestor Makhno,
was hunted down at the orders of Leon Trotsky,
determined to cleanse Russia of all anarchists
with "an iron broom".
It soon became clear that some kind of anarchist
prisoner aid organization would have to be
created once again to help anarchists in Bolshevik
prisons.
In Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, and many smaller
cities new Anarchist Black Cross and similar
organizations were formed such as the Society
to Help Anarchist Prisoners, devoted mainly
to supplying food to anarchists and other
dissidents on the left.
The work proved difficult, even where food
was easy to obtain, as it would often be confiscated
by Bolshevik Red guards encountered on the
way.
By 1922, even anarchist aid workers in Moscow
and Petrograd such as Senya Fleshin and Mollie
Steimer were themselves arrested by the GPU
on the grounds of "aiding criminal elements"
in violation of the Soviet state security
code.
=== Later years ===
During the 1960s, the Anarchist Black Cross
was reformed in Britain by Stuart Christie
and Albert Meltzer with a focus on providing
aid for anarchist prisoners in Francisco Franco's
Spain.
The reason for this was Christie's experience
of the Spanish State's jail and the importance
of receiving food parcels.
At that time there were no international groups
acting for Spanish anarchist and Resistance
prisoners.
The first action of the re-activated group
was to bring Miguel García García, whom
Christie met in prison, out of Spain on his
release.
He went on to act as the group's International
secretary, working for the release of others.
The group's bulletin became a newspaper—Black
Flag—strongly allied with the anarchist
tradition of revolutionary class conflict.Several
small American chapters merged in 1995 to
form the Anarchist Black Cross Federation
and unify their tactics for supporting political
prisoners.
A parallel organization, the Anarchist Black
Cross Network, was formed in 2001 to pursue
prison issues more generally, with looser
conditions for membership.
Anarchists contributed to the campaign to
free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the jailed journalist
and former Black Panther.
== See also ==
Anarchist symbolism
Louise Berger
November Coalition
Olga Taratuta
Prison abolition movement
== References ==
