The “It Did Happen Here” podcast is an independently produced podcast that documents the fight against racist white skinheads in the 1980’s and 90’s in Portland, Oregon. The 11 episodes feature interviews with many people who worked together in those days and reveal the unlikely collaboration between groups of immigrants, civil rights activists, militant youth and queer organizers who came together to successfully confront neo-nazi violence and right wing organizing in the Rose City.
The podcast talks to three core groups: the Portland chapter of Anti Racist Action; SHARP- Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice; and the Coalition for Human Dignity. In out-and-out brawls on the streets and at punk shows, and in behind the scenes intelligence gathering to expose right wing and white nationalist organizing, the three groups united on their home ground over and over to attack fascists—and they won it back.
1312 Press is delighted to present this zine as a physical, readable version of some of the interviews in the podcast. This zine contains the transcripts from Episode 4, the first Bonus Episode, as well as an interview with a Maximum Rock’n’Roll editor about the magazine’s roll in connecting anti-racist skinheads, punks and community organizers across the country in an era before the internet. These episodes contain interviews with The Baldies, an anti-racist skinhead crew started in Minneapolis, members of Anti-Racist Action (or A.R.A.) in Portland, and Skinheads of Chicago (SHOC), a multi-racial skinhead crew. The people in these interviews reflect on their experiences fighting neo-Nazis in the streets, organizing community resistance to white nationalism, and offer lessons learned for those in the thick of the fight today.
Click here for downloadable zine.
