A Professor Brought His Guns to Protect Protesters at White-Supremacist Rallies. Then His Troubles Started.

Alex Boerner

Dwayne E. Dixon was sitting on the floor of his home last August playing with his 4-year-old daughter when his phone lit up.

“Noon Klan alert,” read the text from his friend, an African-American independent journalist. “You heard?”

“Yes,” answered Dixon, a teaching assistant professor in the Asian-studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“You coming to help?”

A threat was developing in his hometown of Durham, N.C. There were rumors that the Ku Klux Klan was coming to retaliate against protesters who had torn down a Confederate statue downtown four days earlier. If the rumors of a Klan backlash turned out to be true, Dixon and his friend worried that local authorities would be caught flat-footed like he saw happen during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which had taken place just the week before.

“I’m trashed and haven’t recovered from cville,” Dixon texted, mentally and physically exhausted, “but I’m ready to scramble w a shottie in the car if need be.”

At a time when colleges are sorting through how to handle controversies over violence, racism, and sexism, and as the nation grapples with the limits of the First and Second Amendments, Dixon has emerged as an unlikely figure, one who embraces seemingly irreconcilable extremes. He sees guns and gun culture as a tactic to achieve what he calls “community self-defense” — but in service of issues that are typically associated with the political left. He embraces diversity, and opposes white supremacy, transphobia, and misogyny. But he also seeks to persuade hard-right militia members of their common cause, and he uses their shared interest in guns to do so.

As the situation in Durham grew tense that day, Dixon pondered whether he should go. Deciding that he needed to see what was going on for himself, he packed his AK-47 and nearly 100 rounds of ammo, dropped off his daughter at her grandmother’s house, and drove toward Main Street.

When he arrived, the city seemed to him to be on edge. Armed deputies were escorting courthouse personnel to their cars, two at time. Officers were blocking roads, protecting the street where the statue had been toppled. It looked to him like a major crisis was brewing.

As he drove further into the city, Dixon saw a man on a motorcycle wearing a large Confederate flag on his vest who appeared to be swerving in front of people at a gay bar in a way that Dixon thought was threatening. He grew increasingly worried that Durham would prove to be a repeat of the previous weekend, where a man used his vehicle to inflict fatal damage. Could this be Charlottesville all over again?

Dixon parked his car and took his AK-47 with him. He loaded a magazine, took off the safety, racked it, put a round in the chamber, and restored the safety, he says. Then he stood on top of a red Volkswagen, his rifle pointed down, and tried to rally passers-by around him to form a blockade and defend themselves.

“You’re extremely vulnerable,” he shouted, according to a video taken that day. If someone wanted to attack them, they’d be easy targets. He directed those in the crowd to reroute the approaching traffic and to stand watch in case vehicles headed toward them.

As Dixon checked in with protesters, he found that not everyone was pleased with his presence. A man in a gray shirt asked him what the gun was for.

“Community-armed self-defense,” Dixon said.

“I’m just not sure that’s the look that this thing’s going for,” the man in the gray shirt said.

“I think the Klan already dictated the terms,” Dixon replied, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“I’m just saying,” the man said, “there’s a lot of people back there who aren’t listening to you cause you’re carrying around a giant gun.” But Dixon continued.

Within 30 minutes, a large, improvised march set off down Main Street. The crowd became an odd jumble of protesters sprinkled with a few Confederate preservationists. At one point, a protester, a black woman, stood in front of the fallen monument and did the black-power salute. A man stood next to her doing the Nazi salute. The woman cursed at him and called him a racist, and the man said that she was the real racist.

Although tensions ran high that day, no disaster happened. The Klan didn’t appear in the numbers that Dixon and other protesters had feared. And by the time the makeshift march took place, Dixon was already gone. He had taken steps to avoid trouble, he says: He made sure not to raise his weapon in a threatening manner, and he left before the parade began so he wouldn’t violate a state law against having a weapon at such an event. Later, he remembered waving and smiling at two Durham police officers on bicycles who could easily see that he was armed. They had waved back at him.

It had all seemed to work out.

But less than two weeks later, he was arrested.

‘I’m an Anarchist’

Dixon, 45, is no stranger to guns. Growing up as the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Army, Dixon was taught that they were tools — powerful ones, yes — but still tools.

In his spare time, Dixon helps train people to use these tools for self-defense. He believes that most gun owners are law-abiding, though the militaristic ones and school shooters trouble him. And he’s especially critical of how police officers use their weapons.

Guns are just “another piece of machinery,” he says. But he also sees them as powerful symbols that can help reclaim a history, one that he thinks has been whitewashed. According to the prevailing — and, he thinks, simplistic — view, social and political movements like civil rights succeeded only because of the moral force of nonviolence. But, to him, that obscures the importance of armed revolt in global uprisings. “People love Nelson Mandela,” Dixon says, “but they don’t want to confront the fact that he advocated for armed resistance as a tactic, not as a wholesale strategy, but as a tactic among many tactics.”

His views of history and social change draw on the writings of people like Frederick Douglass, Charles E. Cobb Jr., and H. Rap Brown. His thinking has been shaped by books like Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns, which was published in 1962 and influenced leaders in the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and the Young Patriots, as well as Malcolm X and even Martin Luther King Jr. Williams was a leader of a local chapter of the NAACP and once filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association. He succeeded in creating a group called the Black Guard, meant to help protect the black population of Monroe, N.C., but was later suspended by NAACP officials for his stance on violence.

“If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie,” Williams argued, “it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.”

Vincent Brown, a professor of history and African-American studies at Harvard University who knows Dixon, said that it’s important to maintain a range of perspectives on the role of weapons in struggles for social justice. King, for example, was anti-war — but he was also a proponent of self-defense. King was attacked, multiple times, Brown said. He was no pushover.

Brown sees Dixon’s training as an anthropologist and his cultural background as important to understanding why Dixon does what he does. These factors allow Dixon to visit spaces where he can see how gun culture and political polarization play out. “We first have to understand the world as it is in order to change into the world we want it to be,” Brown said. “He’s one of the few people who’s willing to go out and try and help us understand our own domestic war zones.”

The News & Observer

Dixon is white, but he agrees with many of the claims in Negroes With Guns. While he could be fairly described as a Southern white male gun lover, that shorthand ignores his politics, which he describes as “extremely hard left.”

“I’m an anarchist. I have no sympathies with the Democratic Party,” he said. “I feel my sentiments are shared by a growing number of people, especially young people who feel our system is bankrupt and corrupt.”

Dixon is a member of a group called Redneck Revolt, which also seeks to defy stereotypes. It defines itself as an anti-fascist group with chapters all over the country, some using other names, like the John Brown Gun Club. Dixon estimates that at least a third of the organization is made up of people of color, women, and others with nonbinary gender identities and sexualities, including himself. Dixon told The Chronicle that he’s recently been identifying as both straight and queer.

Redneck Revolt seeks to pay homage to the working man — in fact, it sees the term “redneck” as having been distorted. Its name is a reference to 1921’s Battle of Blair Mountain, which brought together miners of different creeds and colors, wearing red bandanas on their necks, who fought with strikebreakers, police, and coal company sympathizers.

That spirit informs many of Redneck Revolt’s positions, which it sees as necessary during an increasingly turbulent political and cultural moment. Society, the group has written on its website, can no longer “constrain our desire for liberty within the abstract bounds of liberal discourse and polite debate.” Further, “The threat to ourselves and our neighbors, friends, and loved ones is clear and demands action. We have to organize and fight as if our lives depend on it … for indeed, they do.”

While Redneck Revolt is an antifa group that strongly opposes white supremacy, its stance on guns pushes it “way out into the margins of the red map,” says Dixon.

A shared interest in guns helps Dixon and other members of Redneck Revolt engage with some far-right groups that have very different ideas about race, gender roles, and sexual orientation. One example was the American Pit Vipers, a group of what he called “white militia dudes” who Dixon said were persuaded to “turn their guns in the right direction” after talking with Redneck Revolt. The Vipers of South Carolina have been working with Black Lives Matter activists since last August and have continued to organize local rallies.

“One of the key points of intersections,” Dixon recalled, “was us showing up with guns,” he said.

Moral absolutism and what he calls “respectability politics” bother Dixon because he believes they are intended to keep people from taking charge. He agrees with a writer he admires, C.L.R. James, who wrote that “white do-gooders” are in the wrong when they tell other oppressed groups to bide their time and be passive.

“I’m not going to stand by and let others take the pain and get hurt,” Dixon says. “The conflict is real, and the moral high ground is only for those who wish to drown in blood. Instead I ask us to listen to the actions of black and brown folks, queer folks, people who are doing it in Durham and pulling that damn cursed statue down. As far as they are concerned, what they do is well done,” he adds. “And I am with them.”

‘Bullet Magnets’

He was with them in Charlottesville, Va., this past August, where the conflict was very real.

On Friday, August 11, the weekend of the Unite the Right rally, Dixon and other members of Redneck Revolt went to help protect St. Paul’s Memorial Church, near the University of Virginia campus, at the request of the Anarchist People of Color, another anti-fascist group. They’d all heard that a mob of white nationalists had surrounded the church, where a prayer service was taking place.

Unarmed this first night, he and others formed a human barricade around the church, hoping to ward the mob off. While the night ended without incident for Dixon, the next day would be more pivotal. Redneck Revolt’s mission was to protect protesters from white supremacists. Dixon brought his gun, an AR-15. It was the first time he had had his rifle out in the open, he says, not on a gun range.

Without the gun, Dixon is not an imposing figure. Though he sports tattoos and shaves his head, he’s thin — in part, a product of his vegan diet — and wears thick black-rimmed glasses. He is generally soft-spoken. “I’m a punk,” he says of himself. “Believe me.”

Redneck Revolt stayed away from the demonstrations at Justice Park, respecting the wishes of some on the left who worried that the presence of guns would muddy their message. But they still found themselves coming into contact with the Unite the Right demonstrators. Dixon recalls some of them calling him and other white members of the group “race traitors.”

His group had a plan: If things took a turn for the worst, Redneck Revolt would act as “bullet magnets” so others could find their way to safety. Dixon says Redneck Revolt did their best to avoid that worst-case scenario. A group of unarmed “de-escalators” was nearby to try to keep the situation in check.

The day grew increasingly chaotic. Fights broke out. Protesters and alt-right groups were hit with sticks and other weapons, and sprayed one another with mace.

The police were unprepared and ineffective, often failing to intervene in fights or staying too far away from other conflicts, according to a later independent review. After a school-resource officer who had been placed on Fourth Street called for assistance and was relieved of her post because she feared for her safety, no one replaced her. That left a single wooden sawhorse to impede traffic on Fourth Street.

That’s where, later in the afternoon, Dixon and other members of Redneck Revolt say they saw a man, who they later found out was James Fields, driving his Dodge with tinted windows. Dixon saw the car three times that day, but not the face of the driver. At first, he assumed it was an undercover police officer. But the more the car came around, the more suspicious he became.

“One time he paused right in front of me,” Dixon later said of that third and final encounter, “and I waved him off with my rifle” — and with a curse. Sometime later — Dixon estimated it was between 20 and 40 minutes — the driver, Fields, sped down Fourth Street and into a march of peaceful protesters, injuring 19 people and killing Heather Heyer.

“This experience remains one of the most violent and profound of my life,” Dixon later wrote to his lawyers. “I am constantly haunted by that day and specifically by my interactions with the accused murderer, Fields.”

Still, Dixon wrote, “I am sure I and my friends that day prevented major bloodshed at the perimeter of Justice Park.”

‘You Don’t Stand By and Let People Get Hurt’

But Dixon’s presence and choice to bear arms that day have generated blowback from across the political spectrum.

Two months after Charlottesville, he spoke at an event hosted by the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He explained his actions in Charlottesville and Durham to a mostly sympathetic group of students and faculty.

“My heart burns and my nightmares are boundless,” he said. “Where have we arrived at, where I am here to talk about armed anti-fascism, about confronting real, bloody, deadly white-supremacist violence and lethal force?” He wished he were there to speak about his scholarship on pop culture in Japan.

Dixon was also challenged at the lecture, on multiple fronts. Chief among them: Did guns make matters worse?

Some of the first questions came from scholars from Harvard. They said Dixon’s argument for carrying guns to face potential threats, while well-argued, can still be problematic.

Later, Vincent Brown, who was also at the lecture, asked Dixon whether he risked being stereotyped as a “white savior.” People who are not white men might not have been able to take a rifle into Charlottesville or Durham without risking prison time or death.

An audience member raised another troubling point. The person, who identified as transgender, said that they too were at Charlottesville, as a citizen journalist with a camera. They were attacked by someone in the mob of white nationalists who claimed that their violence was justified because Dixon’s posse and other antifa groups antagonized them. Dixon was essentially being asked to consider the idea that antifa and other groups may have made things worse that day.

For starters, he said, his group is not an armed guard for the left, and he’s maintained that Redneck Revolt has members of different social groups, so they’re not all white saviors. This is about being able-bodied, with the tools, skills, and understanding to do what’s right, he told the crowd. He and other members of Redneck Revolt acted with discipline, he said, and not in a “cowboy hypermasculine” way. It’s all in service of his motto: “You don’t stand by and let people get hurt.”

Later, in an interview with The Chronicle, he reflected further on the lecture. “It caused a lot of cognitive dissonance because we haven’t seen armed leftists operate in this way since, what, the Black Panthers?” he said. “Yeah, we added a few more,” meaning the guns, “but we added to a side that could actually benefit from it.”

Charlottesville, he emphasized, was the first time he had his rifle carried openly in public. “I think that’s really significant,” he said. “I don’t come to that decision lightly.”

‘The Lonely Part’

The months after the Harvard lecture sped by. After rejecting a plea deal for his misdemeanor gun charges in Durham, and opting to go to trial instead, his lawyer eventually won his case, and also saw another charge dropped. The charge that had remained was dismissed because it was “overly broad and infringed upon the First and Second Amendment rights to assemble and to bear arms.” Afterward, Dixon said the police were just doing their job. Likewise, he said, “I’m also doing what I thought was my job as a citizen.”

But he wasn’t out of the woods. The day before he won his case in February, two men with a camera cornered him as he walked out of his campus office. The men pushed and restrained him, Dixon said. They asked him if he’d chased James Fields with his AR-15, frightening him into driving into the crowd. Video of the lecture at Harvard had made its way to YouTube and alt-right blogs, and portions of the talk — especially Dixon’s remark that he had, at one point, “waved him off with my rifle” — were being used to fuel conspiracies to exonerate Fields. The implication was that Dixon caused Heyer’s death because he spooked Fields, whose fight-or-flight response took him down Fourth Street. It is an idea that Dixon rejects; he says that it was at least 20 minutes between his final encounter with Fields and the fatal drive.

But in that moment, with a camera trained on him, he wasn’t ready to explain any of this.

A video of the encounter was posted on a site called Big League Politics, whose editor in chief is Patrick Howley, a former Breitbart News reporter who was one of the men asking Dixon questions. They claimed that they “bumped into Dwayne Dixon on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.”

At first, Dixon hid in the bathroom, hoping the men would leave. They didn’t.

He eventually walked out and tried to move past them. “Put that down. Put that down,” Dixon said.

“Don’t touch me,” the cameraman responded.

“I was in the curious and fraught position of fighting both a symbolic war and physical struggle simultaneously,” Dixon wrote in an email to one of his colleagues a few days later. “A poor decision on either front would’ve been disastrous.”

Dixon eventually found someone who helped him get ahold of campus police. In the video, a caption reads “Dwayne Dixon suddenly decides he likes police and tries to hide in another office.”

The cameraman whispered “keep asking,” so Howley kept at it. After another question about whether Dixon was responsible for Heyer’s death, a voice can be heard off-camera: “Gracious sakes, please.”

The video fades then, anticlimactically. Dixon looks down, around, but almost never directly into the camera. He looks like he’s tired of having to explain himself, his desire to help people. He looks like he’s paid a year’s toll.

In the aftermath of the video, a troll-drenched hate grenade exploded in Dixon’s life. He started getting death threats, his home address was made public, and other general and racist threats were made against his mother and his partner, who is Asian-American and an associate professor of studio art at Chapel Hill.

He also saw alt-right blogs about him with headlines like: “Sissy-Voiced D-List Professor Dwayne Dixon Cornered Like A Guilty Rat.” Other messages he’s seen as of late have been violent and homophobic.

“I’ve been facing homophobic violence since I was teen — I’m not stranger to it,” he adds, noting that he’s identified as straight in the past, albeit with some ambivalence. “I’ve been thinking a lot about confronting truths and casting off fear. My apparent hetero-masculinity is already suspect in the eyes of fascists. It’s not that I’m coming out of a closet but maybe changing into something richer and more emphatically linked with my sexual and emotional self.”

Because of how personal the threats have become, Dixon says he feels “scared a lot” and must be “hypervigilant.” It’s exhausting to feel like he’s got to watch his back everywhere he goes. But he knows that others have it worse.

“I know that what I’m experiencing is an anomaly for a white dude,” he says, and laughs. “Black female academics, they’re under that shit all of the time. I mean, they have to prove their legitimacy just to the administration, let alone to the rest of the world, frankly. Black students have to do that all of the time.”

While he stands by his choices, he sees how his gun-toting can easily be misconstrued.

He also wonders how his fellow academics view his activism. “The lonely part is imagining that among my peers I’m an extremist,” Dixon says.

Still, he’s been fortunate compared with other scholars who’ve been embroiled in political controversy. He says Chapel Hill didn’t discipline or censure him. He did receive a letter from his department chair saying that he had to inform the university within five days if he was convicted of his misdemeanor charge.

At the same time, Dixon wonders how much impact a conventional academic can really have. “You can write all the papers you want and go to all the conferences you want,” he said. “We all know that in the academic world that that builds capital, but it doesn’t make a lot of changes. We need to call that out.”

Even with the potential threat of more internet attacks and threats against him, he says he has never asked for anyone’s sympathy. If a Charlottesville or Durham incident were to happen again, he’d be there. He’s accepted the idea that not everyone will agree with that choice.

“I love teaching, I love doing research, I want a world where all those things are possible for all of us,” he says. “But frankly, I’m not interested in preserving a career, or preserving a certain kind of reputation for myself that would come at an ethical cost, especially when it may come at a physical cost where others might suffer while I spectate and do nothing.”

Correction (5/29/2018, 6:40 p.m.): Dwayne Dixon was confronted near his office the day before he won his case, not several days after. The article has been updated accordingly.