One of the earliest known instances in the U.S. of a protester brandishing a raised fist occurred in 1913, when “Big Bill” Haywood spoke to strikers during the Paterson silk strike in New Jersey. Haywood, a founding member of the union Industrial Workers of the World, preached working-class solidarity across all races and trades.
“Every finger by itself has no force,” he said, lifting his sizable hand to the crowd. “Now look,” he said, closing his fingers into a fist. “See that, that’s the IWW.”
Although that unified position gave the IWW the strength to achieve many of its goals for workers around the world, the workers’ movement faced violent opposition. By the 1920s, street battles were common between workers and the hired guns of employers—and between followers of different political ideologies. In 1926, one of the combatants, a German group called the Red Front Fighters (RFB), patented the clenched fist as part of their uniform and salute.
To Ernst Thälmann, leader of the RFB, the fist was a pledge to “protect the friend and fight off the enemy.” But the RFB, founded to guard Communist Party meetings from far-right attacks, battled as much against the Iron Front, the Social Democrats’ street-fighting arm, as it did fascists of the rising Nazi party. In 1932, the RFB rebranded as Antifaschistische Aktion—better known by the contraction antifa. The Nazis took power a year later; Thälmann and hundreds of his comrades died in concentration camps.