Cole Allen, the alleged gunman accused of opening fire at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner over the weekend, has suspected ties to a left-wing activist group organized around racial justice.
Allen’s sister reportedly told the Secret Service that he was part of the Wide Awakes, a progressive revival of an abolitionist organization that formed during the 1860 presidential race in support of President Abraham Lincoln.
Allen allegedly left behind a manifesto that was filled with left-wing rhetoric about the Trump administration.
Who are the Wide Awakes?
Originating within the Republican Party, the Wide Awakes were a youth group of caped crusaders that acted as a security detail for prominent GOP speakers, including Lincoln.
Members of the Civil War-era movement carried torches and donned black capes — to protect themselves from the dripping lantern oil — as they flanked Lincoln, who historians say was appreciative of the torchlit escorts but discouraged the volunteer bodyguards against escalation.
On the day of Lincoln’s election, the Wide Awakes patrolled polling places under the pretense of protecting democracy, while opponents viewed it as voter intimidation. The Wide Awakes were seen in the South more as a paramilitary unit than as a civilian police force.
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Republicans had used the Wide Awakes’ influence as a way of “waking up” young voters and increasing voter turnout among the youth. At the organization’s peak, Republicans touted Wide Awake chapters in each county of every Northern state, with membership growing to more than 500,000 recruits.
The group, however, eventually disbanded because many of its members enlisted in the Union Army.
The Wide Awakes today: a left-wing resurgence
Today, the Wide Awakes champion social justice causes, particularly racial justice activism.
A left-wing revival of the Wide Awakes emerged from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which racial justice activists saw as a racial reckoning.
Black artists behind the abolition-inspired collective say they “sampled and remixed the Wide Awakes,” both as an idea and as a social movement styled in the same struggle.
A mission statement for the Wide Awakes declares it as “a network of like minds who create in the name of liberation, artist sovereignty, and the evolution of society,” aimed at “radically reimagining the future and enabling self-emancipation.” The network’s tagline is “Individually we are asleep, together we are awake.”
One of the thought leaders who helped resurrect the Wide Awakes, a rapper known by the stage name Black Thought, told the New York Times in 2020 that “throughout history, it’s been the young people and creatives and intellectuals and philosophers and — just the visionaries — who understood the power in uniting, and who contributed to the greatest progress. So what the Wide Awakes represent, in my mind, is that.”
Some political scientists credit the modern-day Wide Awakes with coining the term “woke,” a slogan on the political Left signaling that one is informed about social justice issues.
Artists affiliated with the Wide Awakes have adopted the original group’s open-eye iconography to symbolize the new wave of followers’ social awakening.
Other scholars have contextualized the contemporary Wide Awakes movement against the backdrop of protests opposing President Donald Trump.
Manisha Sinha, a professor of American history studying the 19th-century resistance against slavery, wrote in 2020 that “enthusiastic young men organized ‘Wide Awakes,’ street demonstrations in support of Lincoln and the Republican Party, much like the so-called ‘woke’ generation of Americans who have flooded the streets demanding racial justice in the Movement for Black Lives.”
Demonstrations loosely themed after the Wide Awakes popped up in 2020, including a Juneteenth celebration in Harlem, Independence Day rallies across several major U.S. cities, an observance of the 19th Amendment’s centennial passage in Brooklyn, and an anniversary march in Washington, D.C.
In 2018, a small group began staging reenactments of the 1860s torchlight processions for the Remembrance Day parade in Gettysburg, an annual event that commemorates Lincoln’s famous address.
Organizers started developing prototypes for newly reimagined Wide Awake capes, drawing inspiration from the original oilcloth.
Some supporters of the Wide Awakes’ rebirth have expressed hesitance about its aesthetics, especially the optics of torch-wielding vigilantes marching through the streets.
“It looked like maybe a group of guys that I wouldn’t want to run into on the street,” Wildcat Ebony Brown, a Wide Awaker, said in an interview with the New York Times. “White men with torches. I mean, it kind of conjures up feelings of Charlottesville. But then you learn, like, Oh, no, actually they were abolitionists.”
Beyond protesting, the Wide Awakes were involved in canvassing for Democrats during Georgia’s 2021 election cycle.
Leaders of the Wide Awakes created an activism toolkit, which was revised after Saturday’s shooting, that directed its members to volunteer with Fair Fight Action, the political organization founded by failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and to support the Senate bids of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in that year’s Georgia runoffs.
Wide Awakers were instructed to bring “Civic Joy” to polling locations in counties “vulnerable to long lines and voter suppression.”
Carly Fischer, an “impact strategist” for the Wide Awakes, announced at a 2020 roundtable that the movement’s founders are “interested in not just (talking about) electoral politics, but looking at the paradigm of the United States — slavery as the basis of the economic system.”
Allen’s reported connections to the Wide Awakes
Not much is initially known about Allen’s reported affiliation with the Wide Awakes.
Amplifier.org, a Seattle-based arts nonprofit group that produced visuals for the Wide Awakes resurgence project, posted a statement on its website declaring that Allen is not involved with the organization.
“We had never heard of Cole Allen before yesterday and he has never had any affiliation with our organization,” the statement said. “Our hearts go out to those affected by the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
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Allen’s sister told authorities on Sunday her brother often made “radical statements” and frequently referenced plans to do “something” to fix what he saw as problems in the country.
A frequent user of Bluesky, where he often complained about Trump, Allen is believed to have attended a “No Kings” protest in California and once donated to the 2024 presidential campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris.