The Warning from Woodson: It happened here
World War Wednesday: African Americans and the Prelude to the Second World War
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The Americans were informed about what was happening in 1930s Germany. The Anglophone press agencies, and the US Embassy freely operated in Germany in 1938. People knew, if they wanted to know.
The clearest example came on November 9, 1938, when the Nazi regime orchestrated Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass”—a state-sponsored pogrom that left Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues in ruins. All across the German lands, criminality reigned as this falsely “spontaneous uprising” of the German people against the Jews was perpetrated. Despite the Nazi lies it was clear the attack was organized and preplanned. While many White Americans failed to see the parallels between German atrocities and the systemic racism of the American South, Black intellectuals and activists were acutely aware of the danger. White and Black American newspapers carried the story. Black readers were especially uncomfortable as they identified with the peril faced by Jewish Germans.
The sense of urgency and fear was articulated most clearly just a week after the horrors of Kristallnacht, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson issued a stern warning that such targeted violence could eventually be directed at Black Americans and other domestic minorities.
Speaking to a massive audience of 2,000 at New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church for the closing session of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History—which Woodson founded—he pointed to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy as evidence of a global surge in racial animosity. To Woodson, what the Italians were doing to the Ethiopians and what the Germans were doing to the Jews were threatening models that could be reimported in the United States. It was the middle of the Great Depression, the America First movement was openly xenophobic, and racial terror was an ordinary occurrence in the South. If the Depression continued, who was to say that the Southern reactionaries would not look to blame Blacks and the liberal Whites of the North—who were their only source of political allies—for the continued hardship? Or why wouldn’t demagogues whip up old resentments and use lynch mobs to assert dominance and control of the second-class population in order to vent their frustrations on the vulnerable?
What Woodson and others understood is that such hatred did not have an automatic shutoff valve. They recognized that the virulent race-hatred exploding in Central Europe could serve as an example for the United States. Fascism could happen here, in fact, in their minds if fascism meant eugenics, the racial policing of bloodlines and marriages, the threat of sterilizing “inferiors,” racial scapegoating, segregation, a one-party republican system, and the romanticization of a “lost cause,” it had already happened here.
So, Americans would have to be on guard, to defend what they considered the real American way. To African American leaders and their liberal allies, fascism was the ultimate slur: it was un-American. And the determination to make this the accepted viewpoint had consequences for how Americans would fight the war to come.
