San Antonio, TX: Report Back from Confederate Rally In Travis Park

On Saturday, August 12th, comrades representing groups of communists and anarchists in San Antonio as well as many comrades from various radical groups in Austin, descended onto Travis Park in the heart of Downtown San Antonio under the banner of Antifascist Action with the intention to stand in solidarity with the citizens of San Antonio in demanding the removal of the Confederate monument located in the heart of Travis Park. The group agreed to act primarily – as agreed upon with the main protest organizers prior to the scheduled protest – as a defensive force for the larger protest against both the notoriously aggressive San Antonio pigs as well as the contingent of racist pro-confederates calling for the Confederate monument to remain in place.

Almost as soon as the bloc arrived at the park and took up a position immediately outside of the barriers put in place for the protest, SAPD mobilized towards the bloc and aggressively attacked comrades without provocation. The bloc held off the pigs for several minutes, and successfully de-arrested two comrades that the police had attempted to pull from the bloc, one of whom lost his shield in the process. Another comrade who was not associated with or involved in the bloc moved behind the police and was easily surrounded when they turned on him. He was violently taken to the ground by several cops, arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault for coming to the aid of the bloc, though several other uninvolved and unmasked protesters who had witnessed the unwarranted assault on the bloc by the police were not targeted.

That comrade was successfully bailed out later that evening and taken to the emergency room to be examined and treated for injuries and bruises inflicted on him by the police. There was a striking disconnect between cops violently assaulting antifascists, who were armed only with flags and shields, and those very same cops later glad-handing and joking around with racists who were bristling with assault rifles and sidearms. This juxtaposition was not lost on the broadly liberal group, many of whom were baffled to see this for the first time.

Eventually, the bloc was forced to retreat behind the barricades and regroup, on one hand due to the consistent escalation of force by the police, and on the other out of fear for the safety of several unmasked protesters who had joined in on helping the bloc keep the cops at bay, and who were at one point throwing water bottles and liquids at them. In a surprising turn of events, the antifascist bloc was overwhelmingly met with approval by the primarily liberal-leaning protesters, at one point allowing one of the comrades from the bloc to speak to the crowd and make an appeal for a more militant resistance to fascism and white supremacy.

Speakers from several organizations, some relatively radical and others squarely liberal, shared their views, but there was importantly not a single condemnation of antifascist tactics, several liberals even praising the bloc’s presence. The bloc acted primarily as a defensive force for the remainder of the protest event, monitoring the perimeter of the protest and in numerous instances confronting confederate flag waving antagonizers attempting to sneak their way into the protest and scaring them off.

Later in the afternoon, the bloc was asked by the protest organizers and given widespread crowd approval to lead a march through the streets of downtown. No sooner had the march begun that it spilled into the streets, and the bloc was aggressively confronted by the police once again. Again, the bloc was joined by numerous unmasked protestors and held their ground for nearly twenty minutes until the police eventually surrounded all sides.

Two of the march organizers conferred with several members of the bloc, and all ultimately decided to retreat back to the safety of the park given the number of pigs and the relatively low willingness among the broader to march to be arrested en masse.

After returning, food and drinks were passed around, wounds were licked, and the protest crowd eventually dwindled down to the protest organizers, the bloc, and a few dedicated and determined protesters still enthusiastically displaying signs directed at the simultaneously diminishing crowd of pro-confederate protesters. Several bloc members were asked to act as escorts for other protesters as they returned to their cars. The bloc, still with the majority of its members, was the last group to leave. On its departure, the bloc never came into contact, visually or otherwise, with any of the pro-confederate protesters. the bloc was, however, aggressively trailed by a squad of bicycle cops for over an hour, and made light of the situation by toying with the cops with a game they coined “red light, green light” and singing their favorite anti-police and anti-fascist songs as their police escort followed closely behind. After realizing that the police were determined to follow the bloc as long as they remained on foot, the bloc called in the support of other comrades and managed to ditch their tail once and for all, safely shuttled to their vehicles without police presence.

The events of the weekend were certainly met with violent resistance and aggression by the police, who were quite unsurprisingly seen politely engaging in conversation and offering escorts to confederate antagonizers seeking a confrontation just moments after they had violently attacked the bloc without cause, and all throughout the day afterward. Of course, the collaboration of the state and its various institutions with white supremacists is nothing new or shocking, as the nature and evolution of policing in the United States is directly intertwined with the notions of white supremacy that it was founded on.

Policing in America saw its early conception as slave patrols in the south, and as emancipation occurred and transformed -rather than ended – the formal institution of slavery, former slave patrols were formally incorporated into the arms of the state and played a central role in the establishment of convict leasing programs that criminalized former slaves for things as minor as jaywalking and “talking back,” and often sent them right back to the plantations they were supposedly just emancipated from. This relationship of the police to white supremacists continues onward from this point to the establishment of the Black Codes and the era of Jim Crow, and later the Civil Rights Era, the war on drugs, and movements for black liberation today. Policing in the United States has always been fundamentally intertwined with notions of white supremacy, and what we are witnessing in events like the ones that transpired over the weekend isn’t some new attitude of the police towards those resisting white supremacy in all of its forms and those who fall under the boot of its intentions, but rather, an attitude and an alignment of the police with notions of white supremacy that has always existed in various forms, some plain for all to see, others more discreet, and to various extremes throughout the history of the United States.

Because when folks that haven’t been very directly exposed to the oppressive nature of the state apparatus and its various institutions talk about a path of escalation towards a brutal and oppressive state and policing system that is beginning to emerge, black and brown folks that have grown up hearing the stories of those brutalized by the police, have witnessed firsthand and personally been the victims of that brutality, who live in communities that always have and continue to be violently occupied by the police, they just shrug and say, “it’s always been like this.”

We stand in solidarity with those who have and continue to fall victim to white supremacy and all of its upholders and sympathizers, specifically Heather Heyer, a socialist comrade who was martyred in Charlottesville this past weekend by a white nationalist, and we vow to continue in unrelenting action and support of those targeted by white supremacy, fascism, and the state alike, until every last celebration and upholding of notions of white supremacy is destroyed.