Margaret fighting nazis in Washington

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https://crosscut.com/mossback/2022/06/meet-woman-who-fought-northwest-nazis

Meet the woman who fought Northwest Nazis

Nearly a century before Patriot Front, Margaret L. Weaver was confronting the forces of white supremacy and intolerance.

by Knute Berger / June 17, 2022

The Spokane area and north Idaho have long been known as a gathering place for right-wing militias and neo-Nazi groups. The recent arrest of a cadre of Patriot Front members accused of conspiring to riot at a Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, is a reminder of the draw the region has. It has long been tagged by white supremacists as the “American Redoubt,” a hoped-for ethnostate in the inland Northwest.

But the area also has produced anti-fascists to counter these efforts. Perhaps the first was a young woman from Spokane who played a major role in what one author has called “the first American uprising against Nazism.” A few years later, she helped lead the first anti-fascist protest in her own hometown.

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She lived in Greenwich Village and emerged as a “powerhouse” activist who “had the courage to face down the ruffians of the International Longshoreman’s Union, which controlled the waterfront in a smash-mouth manner,” according to writer Peter Duffy, author of The Agitator, a nonfiction account of anti-Nazi activism that features the seminal protest in 1935 that Weaver helped plan and execute.

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In July (1935), the German ocean liner, the S.S. Bremen, came to New York flying a massive swastika flag. Maggie Weaver and her pals planned a protest where, disguised as partygoers, they would board the Bremen before the ship left port and tear its Nazi flag down.

And they did.

…more…Spokane…silver shirts…stolen army weapons… death threats to Roosevelt…Margaret jailed for protesting…