Hitler, Nazism, Jim Crow, and the United States

In the Spring 1942–1943 issue of South Today, Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling wrote two articles: “Buying a New World with Old Confederate Bills” and “Addressed to Intelligent White Southerners: There are things to do.” Each of these articles confront the connections between the Jim Crow South, and the United States as a whole, and Nazism in Germany and the European theatre. At one point in the former essay, Smith writes, “It is just possible that the white man is no longer the center of the universe. It is just possible that even German nazis, British imperialists, and white southerners will have to accept a fact that has been old news to the rest of the world living for a long, long time.” In the latter essay, Smith and Snelling write about educating children, saying, “We can all begin to train our children now to be, not little Nazis, but democratic world citizens.” Within these statements, Smith and Snelling link the horrors of the Third Reich with the horrors of the United States, and they are not the only ones.

We know that the Nazi regime looked to the Jim Crow South for a lot of the Reich’s laws against Jews and other individuals. In 1992, Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins wrote about the connections between the Nazis and the United States South. They noted, “Like many southerners, [the Nazis] saw African Americans as a major threat to white…