James Baldwin, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust

During my “Jim Crow and the Holocaust” class, I am continually coming across new texts to add to an ever expanding bibliography or work that looks at the intersections between Jim Crow in the United States and the Holocaust in Europe. Recently, I read James Baldwin’s “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” which appeared in The New York Times on April 9, 1967, two-months before the Six Days War and a year before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Terrence Johnson and Jacque Berlinerblau point out that upon its publication Baldwin’s essay received backlash from the Jewish community with Rabbi Samuel Silver, in a 1971 piece about Baldwin’s conversation with Margaret Mead in A Rap on Race, calling Baldwin a “Negro extremist . . . who has allowed his hostility to whites to run into extra-hostility to Jews.” Johnson and Berlinerblau point out that Baldwin’s essay is complex and he is working within both a Black religious tradition and making a pointed critique not of Judaism and of Jews but of Christianity and the role Christianity plays in “racial capitalism.” As they write, Baldwin “wanted to identify white Christianity’s singular role in producing and propagating anti-Blackness and anti-Semitism.”

Throughout his life, Baldwin sharply called out Christianity and white evangelical supremacy. In 1963, as he stood outside the burned out shell of St…