Fascists Hate Dancing: When a Rave Becomes a Rally

Ninety years ago, a man named Oswald Mosley tried to march 3,000 Blackshirts through Whitechapel, where about 100,000 Jews lived. He did not get far. On October 4, 1936, thousands of East Enders blocked the route: dockers, Irish Catholics, Jewish tailors, communists, socialists, and a crowd of people who hated the thought of fascists parading past their front doors. The clashes that followed, mostly with police trying to force a path through, became known as the Battle of Cable Street. Mosley's column never got past.Real villains, like movie villains, rarely exit after one defeat. The British Union of Fascists never got its East End march, and the Public Order Act rushed through that winter stripped away its uniforms. It still polled strongly in parts of the East End the following spring, and it took internment and an outright ban in 1940 to finish it.It's tempting to file Cable Street under "one good day." People still talk about it ninety years later for a messier reason: stopping…