Solidarity for Tinley Park Five is ‘humbling’

The Tinley Park Five are anti-racist fighters who as of June 11 are still incarcerated in the infamous Cook County Jail in Chicago. Jason W. Sutherland, Cody L. Sutherland, Dylan J. Sutherland, Alex R. Stuck and John S. Tucker, all from Indiana, were arrested on felony charges on May 19 for allegedly physically confronting white supremacists meeting at a restaurant in Tinley Park, a suburb near Chicago. The combined bail for the Five is almost $1 million. Their arraignment is scheduled for June 12 at the Bridgeview Courthouse in Bridgeview, Ill.

On June 8, WW managing editor Monica Moorehead interviewed Telly, from the Hoosiers Anti-Racist Movement community, about the Five and political issues related to the case. HARM is in the forefront of building solidarity with the Five. Go to tinleyparkfive.wordpress.com for more information on the case.

Workers World: Can you tell our readers, what is your relationship to the Hoosiers Anti-Racist Movement?

Telly: I’m a founding member of the Hoosiers Anti-Racist Movement and I’m personal friends with all five of the defendants in the Tinley Park Five case. HARM is a decentralized network of anti-fascist groups in the state of Indiana. It has connections and allegiance with the Anti-Racist Action network, but it’s its own thing. One of the main things that’s being portrayed about us in the press is that we’re purely a direct action group, which is not at all the case. We do have a number of people that are willing to participate in direct action, but we have even more people that are in it to do education and to raise money for solidarity actions, and just to build community.

HARM really isn’t as much of an organization as it is just a community of people that have “Anti-Racist” as the title, but unlike some other groups, our focus is not just on racism. We also oppose heterosexism, transphobia, Islamophobia. We’re a pro-equality group, and we’re really trying to fight a lot of different things that are going on in the state of Indiana. Just recently, there was a gay teenager in a high school, who had been just repeatedly bullied over and over and over again. That’s kind of a hot-button issue in the press right now. His parents complained to the school over and over and over and over again, and they did absolutely nothing about it. The child’s mother gave him a stun gun. I mean, it’s not something you can really use to hurt someone too bad, for the most part … but gave that to him to protect himself pretty much in school. He was being thrown against lockers, and it was escalating to violence against him. So he whipped out the stun gun and shot it in the air, and the school board’s reaction to that was to expel the student being bullied. Nothing happened against the people that had been ruthlessly bullying the child for months and months on end. So that’s something that we’re trying to get involved in.

There’s the case of Cece McDonald. Over and over and over again, we see cases where people of color or more vulnerable populations are just completely denied their right to defend themselves. And so we feel like building solidarity with those groups is very important to everything that we’re about. Indiana has a really racist history and it also has a really anti-racist history. There’s been a struggle going on there for over 100 years. The south of Indiana especially was not real happy about being part of the north. There’s a lot of tension over that. However, it was also one of the main channels of the Underground Railroad. So into the 1920s and 1930s, the KKK dominated Indiana politics. There were street battles in the streets of Indianapolis over some of that stuff. This isn’t anything new. Our organization might be new, but this is a struggle that’s been going on in Indiana especially for over 100 years now.

I think that when we look at Indiana as compared to some other regions where there are Anti-Racist Action groups, and more militant anti-racist groups, as compared to Indiana, we’re in a much different situation. If you’re in, say, Seattle, and you wanna claim that you’re part of Anti-Racist Action or you’re down to defend yourself against this violence, it’s not that controversial of a stance.

When people try to form those groups in Indiana, they’ve had groups of skinheads show up at their house with shotguns, letting them know that the next time they threw a benefit show, they were gonna be murdered. We’ve had people that did throw benefit concerts in Indianapolis get stabbed; they just send people in and stab people in the middle of a show. So whereas in a lot of more urban areas, it’s a lot easier to find that little group and to have that connection and that community, by nature in Indiana, because of the gun laws, you really can’t half-ass it. You really have to be prepared to defend yourself against potential violence. So it’s taken on a little bit of more of a militant nature, I suppose, as opposed to some other groups who have focused more on education and fundraising. And that’s stuff that we still do, but in order to do that, we have to have people who are legal to carry firearms, protecting the show to make sure that people don’t come in and just murder the musicians playing at the show. So it’s taken on a really volatile nature in the state of Indiana.

The reaction to the Tinley Park Five, in particular, has been a little bit surprising. I can’t say I’m totally shocked, knowing the nature of Indiana. But about a year and a half ago, in Pemberton, N.J., there was an action against the National Socialist Movement there that was far more brutal, where the Nazis there got beat much worse. It was much more brutal. There was a little bit of backlash against that for sure, but nothing compared to what’s going on now. We have family members just getting daily death threats. People that know that — because where they’re from, Bloomington, is not a super large community — people that know the links between the family from living there, they’ve shared that information with white supremacists and they’re getting death threats on the phone. They’re getting strange calls and strange people driving by their house at all hours of the night.

The white supremacist community has been very big on saying that we’re cowards because we’re accused of attacking a bunch of fascists in a room. They’re law-abiding citizens and all kinds of nonsense like that, but at the same time they’re talking out of the other side of their mouth: we’re law-abiding citizens and simultaneously, we’re also gonna threaten to murder your families. And the mainstream press has really gone with that. They’ve given that voice, which is a little bit disconcerting.

WW: HARM has a worldwide view about fighting fascism and capitalism, so can you talk a little bit about the connections between the significance of the Tinley Five case to what’s going on worldwide, whether it’s in Greece or other parts of the world?

Telly: Usually fascism thrives in an economically depressed environment. That’s just been a historical fact, whether you’re looking at Germany or Italy. It’s usually when people are poor and looking for a scapegoat that xenophobia, racism really starts to organize and become a rallying cry to suppress workers’ rights and to basically advance fascism as opposed to just capitalism.

If you look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s statistics on the number of hate groups in the country right now, they’re over 10-fold, if not 50-fold over where they were 15 years ago. A lot of this is tied to economic factors, obviously. A lot of people see people who dress up in Nazi uniforms and actually speak on Stormfront … they see them as a fringe element. And to a certain extent they are. Most people are not as explicit about their racism and their anti-Semitism; most people are a little more subtle about it. I mean, Fox News walks that line every day. But a lot of things people aren’t aware of, is people like J. T. [Jason Todd - WW] Ready, who just recently went on a murder-suicide spree in Arizona [and] had direct ties to Russell Pearce, who is the legislator who passed the SB1070 bill.

If you look at Greece right now, the neo-Nazi party just got, I think, about a dozen or so seats in parliament. They’re not even trying to walk any line. One of their parliament members just assaulted a woman that was voicing opposition on a talk show — assaulted her in the middle of an interview on TV. So it’s a growing movement. It’s getting more popular and it’s pulling more people in.

And if we look at every single incident where fascism has successfully gained power, the left’s strategy has usually been to just ignore it: It’ll go away. We have better ideas than them. And that’s failed over and over and over again. I studied history in college, and when I would read about Italy in the 30s or Franco’s Spain or Germany during the 30s, the one thing I could never figure out was why did people let this happen? Why didn’t people do something about it? And now that I see the same conditions flourishing in the United States, I don’t want someone 50 years from now reading a book asking why didn’t someone do anything about it. Whether or not we’re successful is irrelevant to me. It just has to be someone has to stand up against it.

WW: With the Tinley Park Five, have you gotten a lot of support from the left?

The Southern Poverty Law Center … I was a little disappointed with their reaction to it. We stand in solidarity with the Southern Poverty Law Center. We think that they’re fighting people on a legal basis is great. Good for them. We don’t think that everyone should be involved in militant action or that’s their strong suit. We believe in education; we believe in legal remedies; we believe in all of that stuff; and we believe that it’s going to truly take diversity of tactics and solidarity amongst the people who practice those tactics in order to be successful in this battle.

I find it very interesting that the Southern Poverty Law Center claims that [militant actions—WW] are counterproductive to the efforts against fascism while their own website admits that the number of fascist groups in the United States has increased 20-, 25-fold over the last 10 to 15 years. So if their way is the only way, and that’s the correct way, why isn’t it working? Are people just not giving them enough money? Is that what they’re trying to claim? And they also claim that our strategy was to build a bigger gang than the white supremacists, which is just absolutely ludicrous. There’s also a lot of confusion amongst different groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center apparently sees absolutely no distinction between Anti-Racist Action, SHARPs, HARM … they’re all the same thing to them.

They said that we were all skinheads and something people don’t understand is the skinhead culture involves that of a diffusion of working-class youth in Britain and Jamaican immigrants. It makes as much sense to be a racist skinhead as it would be to be a racist hip-hop artist … denying it was a multicultural phenomenon that got corrupted in the late 70s and early 80s and split into two very diverse parts. And the Southern Poverty Law Center is correct about that. However, they also decided that the Anti-Racist Action is synonymous with SHARPs, which is not true.

WW: Can you say what SHARP is?

Telly: SHARP is Skinheads against Racial Prejudice. There’s some overlap in some of those memberships, but to claim that all members of Anti-Racist Action are SHARPs is not true at all. Anti-Racist Action is an anti-oppression group that fights against all sorts of oppression. And there’s a lot of misogyny, unfortunately, that exists within the SHARP community. There’s a lot of patriarchy that’s involved — now a lot of that is changing within the SHARP community; a lot of that is evolving to meet more progressive ideals. Historically, the only thing Anti-Racist Action and SHARP have had in common is the fight against fascists. That’s it. And there’s a lot of separation.

So to hear Southern Poverty Law Center be quoted as experts on racism and experts on the anti-racist movement and the anti-movement is just laughable. Half of the information they get, they get from us … from the information that has been obtained by Anti-Racist Action members. So that’s been disappointing. I didn’t expect them to endorse the tactics by any stretch of the imagination, but I also didn’t expect them to completely throw them [the Tinley Park Five — WW] under the bus as well.

One of the members of our community gave an interview [to the Chicago Tribune — WW] and it was very explicit [with the Tribune — WW] about some of the security concerns that are going along with the death threats, and they went ahead and put pictures of the people that were able to make the first arraignment on the front page of the paper. These people have since received death threats, so that’s a little disappointing. The Chicago Tribune is supposed to be a liberal paper, but you know, they’re in it to sell papers. They’re not in it to get a message out.

I have been a little surprised, if you move a little further left on the spectrum, with the amount of the attention that we’ve got in a positive light from you guys [WW], from the anarchist community, from anti-fascists all over the world [who] are contacting us, writing us letters, asking how they can set up a HARM in their area. The idea that people who have never met us are willing to risk life and limb just to show solidarity is really kind of the fuel that has gotten us through this, cause it’s been really stressful on the jail support … not on just doing the jail support, but also filtering through … for every email I get that’s like I need to read this, I have to read 15 other emails threatening to kill me and my family and or the Five’s families.

And so, I’ve been surprised on both ends, both positive and negative, by the press coverage.

WW: You talked about solidarity. When May 19 happened, we asked how can we show our solidarity with the Tinley Park Five. We understand that capitalism, in all its forms, is where the violence comes from every aspect of life. And it’s not just the physical violence, but it’s violence when people have their homes foreclosed, or when a hospital shuts down. We wanted to help others understand why no matter how you feel about the direct action tactic, allegedly, it’s the solidarity that counts, because this is a system that’s all about divide and conquer. So again, if you can tell us why is solidarity so significant, especially in this case, and how can we do more as a movement and especially on the left because how can we expect the masses to understand this if the movement is not strong on this? Cause it’s really our duty to reach out to the movement and help to raise consciousness.

Telly: The solidarity aspect of this has just been absolutely humbling. It’s to me, before all this happened, like jail solidarity meant retweeting some links. It meant sharing a post on Facebook. I was in Indiana not long ago and there was a strange incident where a car drove by the house and took some pictures, then drove away and then stopped right down the block and just sat there for like 10 minutes. So we’re all armed in Indiana. We’re sitting there stressed out. The mailman comes, and what kinda eased the stress is I opened a letter, and there’s a check for $100 from an anarchist group in a different city that we’ve never heard of. And that’s what keeps us going.

So getting those letters apologizing that they hadn’t been able to give $20 yet, but when they get paid they’re going to … how important that is not just from the financial aspect, but just knowing that. Especially in Indiana you can feel pretty isolated when you’re on an anti-fascist tip, so I can’t stress enough how important the solidarity that we have seen from other people has been. Not just us but also to those inside [the Tinley Park Five — WW], when we talk to them, we say, “Guess what happened?” And it’s what’s keeping them in a positive mood and in a good mindset. It’s what’s keeping us from turning on each other and getting paranoid and losing our heads over it. I just can’t stress enough how meaningful that is to both the jail support, the families and to the Tinley Park Five.