When we mentioned to people that we would be doing a course on the connections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust, some of our friends and family asked various questions: “How can you study the two side-by-side?” “What do Nazis and the Holocaust have to do with the South?” From their perspective as white Southerners, they could not see how the horrors inflicted by Nazis could ever intersect with white supremacy in the United States. Many white Americans struggled or refused to make connections between the widespread prejudice against Blacks in America and Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. However, some white Americans recognized the parallels between the two societies. Lillian E. Smith, born and raised in the Jim Crow South, wrote extensively about her experiences growing up and being indoctrinated with white supremacy. She dedicated much of her focus to discuss race, gender, religion, and sex. She understood the significance of studying uncomfortable subject matter because she knew that doing so was the only way to learn and grow from a painful past. In a letter to Horace Kallen in 1954, Smith wrote, “When I want to find something, I write a book. It is my way of searching. Not to give the world ‘answers’ but to find them myself” (How Am I to be Heard? 144). At the same time, Smith understood why so many white Americans, especially white Southerners, struggled to accept that their society was not so far removed from Hitler’s Germany.
The reluctance of white Americans to look at Nazi Germany as somewhat of a mirror of twentieth-century America is not surprising. In her 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream, Smith explains the process through which white Southerners gained the ability to distance themselves from the heavy weight of their conscience in order to let Jim Crow carry on in their communities. They were living contradictions, preaching and believing in Christianity, while refusing to sit alongside their Black neighbors on the church pews. Growing up, Smith “learned it the way all. . . southern people learn it: by closing door after door until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and reality” (29). This very mentality is the reason that white Southerners found it easy to denounce the Nazis, while at the same time they terrorized their Black neighbors. We do not need to look at the Holocaust and Jim Crow as one-to-one corollaries, but we must, as Smith and others did, look at the similarities between the societies from which they originated and which actively or passively participated in physical and psychological violence against Jews, Blacks, and others. As the authors of We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government Against the Negro People, a 1951 petition submitted to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress, point out, “Seldom has mass murder on the score of 'race' been so sanctified by law, so justified by those who demand free elections abroad even as they kill their fellow citizens who demand free elections at home” (3-4).