The clenched fist has been closely tied to social tumult throughout history, yet the gesture's representation of strength and hope endures
A clenched fist can mean defiance. Unity. Strength. In 2020, it surged throughout the United States in the fight against injustice. But the clenched fist is much older than that moment. Long before it appeared on protest signs and murals after George Floyd’s death, it symbolized solidarity and resistance. In the late 1960s, it was firmly linked to Black Power, most memorably when two Black Olympians raised gloved fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Yet even that defining image drew from a longer lineage, including labor movements and anti-fascist resistance.
Why does this simple gesture endure? Perhaps because it tells a story without words. A hand curled inward suggests resolve, and one lifted upward signals solidarity. Over time, communities have redefined and reclaimed it, layering new meaning onto an old symbol. Within Black history, especially, the raised fist became a visual shorthand for dignity and self-determination. But rather than belonging to one era, the fist moves across generations.
Read on for the story of this iconic symbol, from where it’s been and how it has evolved to why it continues to resonate today.
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What is the history of the clenched fist?
People have probably been clenching their fists for various reasons since the beginning of time. Here’s how the gesture evolved through history, from Europe to the streets of America and beyond.
The clenched fist debuts as a symbol of revolutionary spirit
The first likely appearance of a clenched fist as a symbolic gesture occurred in France during the 1848 revolution, which led to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe, the last reigning French monarch. It was one of several insurrections throughout Europe in 1848. French artist Honoré Daumier is said to have been so moved by the revolutionaries’ passion that he painted The Uprising to depict their fighting spirit.
At the center of the piece was a man with rolled-up sleeves and a clenched fist. In his 2000 book French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism, Lorenz Eitner called it “a daring attempt to give monumental form to a modern political subject of dramatic urgency.”
Europe’s anti-fascist movement adopts the clenched fist
Nearly 100 years later, the clenched fist resurfaced in another time of war. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, the Republican government used it to symbolize its opposition to the fascist Nationalist rebels led by future dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.
The clenched fist stood in stark contrast to the open-palmed Roman salute used by the Nationalist forces. Although the Republicans lost the war, with government officials retreating to France in exile, the clenched fist became a symbol of opposition to fascism as World War II commenced in Europe. BBC writer Jon Kelly noted in 2012: “To this day the clenched fist holding a rose remains the logo of the Socialist International, to which the U.K. Labour party is affiliated, as well as a number of European socialist parties including those in France and Spain.”
The clenched fist makes it to the Olympics
America jumped onto the clenched-fist bandwagon several decades later, and its symbolism became a centerpiece of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. At the time, the civil rights movement of the early ’60s had given birth to the Black Power movement of the late ’60s, and Black Americans were still mourning the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had improved the situation of Black people in the United States, racism and segregation persisted.
When two Black American track athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze, respectively, in the 200-meter sprint, each raised a black-gloved fist on the winners’ platform as a form of protest against ongoing racism and injustice in the United States and around the world. This was truly an Olympic moment that changed history. “[It] was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” Smith told Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
How did the clenched fist come to define Black power?
Smith and Carlos’s use of the raised fist was a symbolic precursor to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s bent-knee protest in 2017, and the reaction was similarly mixed. Although regarded as heroic by the Black community, Smith and Carlos were kicked off the U.S. track team and faced backlash and death threats back home. The outrage was linked to the controversial Black Panther nationalist group, which had earlier adopted the clenched fist (also known as the Black Power fist) as its logo.
“The gesture has a long history as a symbol of defiance and is often associated with both left-wing politics as well as oppressed groups,” Margaret Chadbourn wrote for ABC News in 2016. “In the 1960s, the Black Power movement used it as a gesture to represent the struggle for civil rights.” Although the clenched fist would later be used by other oppressed groups, including feminists, the LGBTQ community, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination and even President Donald Trump during his 2017 inauguration, it will forever be inextricably linked to Black pride and Black power.
How did the clenched fist become a contested symbol?
Although the raised fist is widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity and perseverance, its meaning has never been fixed. Like many powerful images, it shifts with context and is shaped by the moment and the person behind it. That flexibility is part of what makes it so enduring and, at times, so complicated. Here’s how the symbol has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy
In 1963, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the accused gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was led past photographers while in police custody. Amid the chaos of flashing cameras and shouted questions, he briefly raised a clenched fist. Oswald’s motives were debated almost immediately. His raised fist did not suddenly redefine the symbol, but it did demonstrate how a familiar gesture can take on a different tone depending on who uses it and in what moment.
An unexpected attack in Norway
In 2011, far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik raised his clenched fist at the start of the second day of his trial for killing 77 people in gun and bomb attacks in Norway. “In the world’s media, the motion was interpreted as a demonstration that the man who killed scores of people in gun and bomb attacks in July 2011 felt no remorse or repentance,” the BBC’s Jon Kelly wrote in 2012. “If Breivik’s performance was widely seen as a further insult to the memories of his victims and their families, it is because he adopted the iconography of political struggle.”
Appropriation by White supremacists
Breivik’s clenched-fist salute was not created in a vacuum. In the decades prior, some White supremacist groups had already appropriated a version of the raised fist as a “White power” symbol—an explicit attempt to mirror and counter the imagery of Black liberation movements. Organizations that track extremism, including the Anti-Defamation League, have documented how variations of the so-called “White fist” have appeared in hate-group propaganda, and the appropriation of this gesture has continued over the last decade.
When did Black Lives Matter reclaim the clenched fist?
The clenched fist was reclaimed by Black Lives Matter in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. While the raised fist has long represented Black pride and resistance, most famously during the civil rights era, it became central to BLM as the movement amplified global calls for racial justice.
Founded in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin’s murder, Black Lives Matter has used the fist to signal collective power and the ongoing fight against systemic racism. Today, it rises in protests, murals and activism worldwide, reminding us that the struggle continues and standing together still carries immense weight.
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Sources:
- Britannica: “Louis-Philippe”
- National Gallery of Art: “Honoré Daumier”
- Britannica: “Spanish Civil War”
- BBC News: “Breivik: What’s Behind Clenched-Fist Salutes?”
- The Guardian: “What’s in a Clenched Fist?”
- dw.com: “Italy’s Parliament Votes to Outlaw Fascist Symbols, Roman salute”
- New York Times: “Tommie Smith’s Fist Is Still Raised: ‘We Still Need to Fight’”
