Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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spread of Nazi or Fascist thought in the United States. To that end, they contacted
every possible ally, including African American organizations, to help.
But African American agencies had their own reasons to become involved in
the struggle against Fascism, beyond sympathy with the plight of another persecuted
minority. Nazism revealed the vicious and dangerous implications of all
forms of racism, and Black groups moved to exploit white America's expressed
outrage against Nazi atrocities by drawing explicit parallels with race relations at
home. While sincerely opposing anti-Jewish violence and Fascism generally,
Black organizations quite overtly used the political situation to raise their own
issues more dramatically in the public eye. After the U.S. State Department publicly
invited 29 nations to provide havens for German refugees in March of 1938,
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP urged Walter White "most strongly that the
Association take note publicly in some fashion that will attract attention I feel
that this opening is a made-to-order one for us The obvious thing to do is to
dispatch a telegram to the State Department and the President, calling attention
to the plight of the Negro in this country." That day, White cabled Secretary of
State Cordell Hull.
AMERICAN NEGROES APPLAUD ACTION OF UNITED STATES GOVERN-
MENT...IN OFFERING HAVEN TO JEWISH POLITICAL REFUGEES...BUT WE
WOULD BE EVEN MORE ENTHUSIASTIC IF OUR GOVERNMENT COULD BE
EQUALLY INDIGNANT AT THE LYNCHING, BURNING ALIVE AND TOR-
TURE...OF AMERICAN CITIZENS BY AMERICAN MOBS...WHICH HAVE
SHAMED AMERICA...FOR A MUCH LONGER TIME THAN PERSECUTION
UNDER ADOLF HITLER.^
They used domestic issues similarly. When Walter White wrote President
Roosevelt that he was "very much disturbed, as I know you are, at the spread of
anti-Semitism in certain quarters in Washington," he explained that "My reason
for writing you about this is that this ties in with an attempt by certain persons
...to tie in anti-Semitism with prejudice against Dr. Robert C. Weaver [U.S.
Housing Authority]" to block appropriations for public housing serving African
Americans. "Frankly, I don't know what the complete answer is to this tendency
to express anti-Semitism and anti-Negro feeling with housing the victim except
that I would urge that more Administrative support of housing instead of less
would be the best answer." 4 For both Jews and Blacks, then, this earliest collaboration
emerged primarily out of clear and explicit self-interest, albeit a self-interest
that coincided with a broader moral stance.
Jews more than other whites recognized the danger of racism that Nazism
raised. Even while spending most of their organized efforts on the immediate dangers
of Nazism at home and abroad, Jewish organizations did begin to pay attention
to the problems facing African Americans by the late 1930s. The NCJW
added an anti-lynching plank to its platform in 1935, for example, and four years