Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made a clenched-fist salute to a group of angry protesters not long before they stormed the U.S. Capitol to violently protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win. Hawley’s provocative gesture comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched his hero, President Trump, raising his fist for the past four years.
The fist has appeared as a major symbol of protest and solidarity in virtually every progressive social justice movement in the United States, including today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet despite their regular use of it, the fist salute does not rightfully belong to Hawley, Trump or their antidemocratic supporters. Its real home is with social progressives who have long protested for the extension of democracy, not its restriction.
In the United States, the fist first emerged as a popular symbol of protest in 1913, when “Big Bill” Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), wielded it during speeches advocating for solidarity among workers of various ethnicities and trades.
Speaking at the infamous silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey, Haywood held his hand high and separated his fingers as widely as possible, saying, “Do you see that? Every finger by itself has no force.” The socialist labor leader then brought all of his fingers together in the form of a tightly clenched fist. “See that?” he asked, thrusting his powerful fist into the air. “That’s IWW.”
The clenched fist migrated to the modern Black freedom movement, through activists who had also demonstrated with the militant labor movement. One of the most influential of these was Frank Ciecorka, a white field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who illustrated and co-authored a booklet titled “Negroes in American History: A Freedom Primer.”
For the cover of the book, Ciecorka drew a Black fist rising from the center of other Black hands reaching skyward. Published in 1965, the historic illustration marked the first time a symbolic fist of Black resistance appeared in civil rights literature.
The fist became one of Cieciorka’s favorite drawings. In 1966, he used it for a poster advertising the Delano grape strike organized by César Chávez and Dolores Heurta of the National Farm Workers Association, and a year later, after stylizing the image a bit more, he used it for a poster announcing a Berkeley rally against the military draft.
The Students for a Democratic Society and other leftist groups soon adopted this stylized fist as their own symbol, though sometimes tweaking it for their particular purposes. Cieciorka’s design also appeared in popular publications of the Black Panther Party, whose members often raised their fists to protest political and economic oppression and to demonstrate Black pride and power.
Since then, the fist has appeared as a major symbol of protest and solidarity in virtually every progressive social justice movement in the United States, including today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
Still, many Democratic politicians, including President-elect Biden, have refused to adopt the fist salute as their own, clearing the way for Hawley, Trump and their supporters to hijack it for illiberal purposes—causes that make their fists resemble the Aryan fist that the Anti-Defamation League has rightly deemed a hate symbol.
The time has come for all social progressives to reclaim the fist of solidarity on every occasion we can, wielding it as powerfully as Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the Summer Olympics in 1968 and as freely as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Cori Bush do in their public appearances.
Perhaps more important, the time has come for us to use our fists to pound all those fist-saluting blasphemers into complete submission—peacefully, of course.
This column was edited by the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.