On April 8, 1933, the Journal and Guide of Norfolk, VA, a Black-owned weekly newspaper, ran a cartoon depicting Adolf Hitler in his customary Nazi uniform complete with swastika armband, brandishing a whip in one hand and holding up a swastika on a short pole with the other. Cast against the wall behind is a looming shadow: a hooded KKK figure clutching the same whip but holding up a burning cross instead of a swastika. “Another Klansman,” reads the caption above.
Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for only 68 days at that point, but Black publishers and editors like those at the Journal and Guide, The Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier were already drawing attention to the plight of the Jews in Germany. In fact, although most Black newspapers of that time were weeklies with small editorial staffs and limited financial resources, the Black press would go on to call out Nazi oppression of Jews, publishing hundreds of anti-Nazi cartoons, articles, commentaries and editorials throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. These papers stood out in contrast to mainstream publications. Even The New York Times, then as now the nation’s most prominent newspaper, handled Nazi antisemitism with a soft touch. As recounted in Laurel Leff’s 2005 book Buried by the Times, the paper’s publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, himself Jewish, did not want the Times to be identified as stridently “Jewish” and thereby lose prestige.
The “Another Klansman” cartoon communicated an instantly recognizable message to the Journal and Guide’s readership: Black Americans and German Jews were facing common enemies. Indeed, this little-known chapter of Black-Jewish relations came about because Black America and its newspapers already possessed a sharpened sense of what oppression looked like. Hitler’s hatred of anyone “non-Aryan” was not lost on Black Americans and the Black press. “What was happening to Jews in Europe was very similar to the kind of Jim Crow segregation that Black people were experiencing here in the United States,” says Matthew Delmont, a professor of African-American history at Dartmouth and author of Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers. “The violence against Jews was seen as similar to lynching.’’
Black solidarity with Jews was also a natural outgrowth of the deep respect Black Christians held for the Hebrew Bible, in particular the Book of Exodus, and to the desperate mutual search for allies. “Racism tied the United States and Germany together more than anyone wanted to admit at the time, except for Black newspapers,” says Eric K. Ward, a veteran civil rights activist and executive vice president of Race Forward, a nonprofit devoted to advancing racial justice. “They understood that fighting racism anywhere strengthened the fight against racism everywhere. The Black press at that time, we forget, saw antisemitism and anti-Black racism as part of the same system—a system built to divide, to dehumanize and to justify violence in the name of power.”