Education and Confronting the Past

A little over a year ago, I started thinking about the connections between the Holocaust and Jim Crow. I did this, partly, because I planned to do a study travel trip to Poland where students and I would explore these connections, notably meeting and working with Polish students who were studying Southern literature. However, that trip did not materialize, due to a myriad of factors. I thought, at that point, that I would move on to another topic in preparation for a future course or project. Yet, I keep coming back to looking at the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. This summer, I’ve jumped deeper into this topic because one of the students who planned to go to the Poland trip still wanted to do the course, so she we are exploring the connections “Jim Crow and the Holocaust.”

As we were planning out the course, before we ever officially met, the student told me that numerous people asked her about her the purpose of the course. Specifically, they asked why anyone would claim that a connection exists between the Nazi atrocities during World War II and white supremacist Jim Crow atrocities in the United States. Their questioning of why anyone would even take a course such as “Jim Crow and the Holocaust” reinforced a lot of what I have been thinking about over the past few years, namely the information we provide to our students and to the community as a whole.