This is a research paper written by Jenny Guo for her American Studies course at Choate Rosemary Hall during the Spring term of the 2019-2020 academic year.
Due to the limits of WordPress blog posts, the proper footnotes present in the original research paper on this site cannot be displayed on this site. However, all the sources consulted are listed in the bibliography at the bottom of this page.
Note: Due to the nature of this paper, some racial terms used may be outdated. Such terms are partly censored where they may appear. Additionally, racial terms like Black and White are always capitalised in this paper.
Title: A Broken Marriage Between Reformers: How Nazi Anti-Miscegenation Laws Changed Southern White Reformers’ Understanding of African American Rights From 1935-1945
During World War Two, “liberty” was a joke to the many African Americans who suffered similar discrimination to German Jews. On September 15, 1935, Nazis announced the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, collectively known as the Nuremberg Laws. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and outlawed them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of German ancestry. These legislations, which embodied many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology laid the legal framework for systematic persecution of Jews in Germany. Similarly, the United States had discriminatory anti-miscegenation laws, state laws originating as early as 1661 that prohibited interracial marriage and sexual relations. In 1920, anti-miscegenation laws existed in thirty-eight states. What contributed to the creation of these laws in the United States was the myth of African Americans’ desire for racial purity. Southern White people believed that Black people were as proud of their racial integrity as White people were of theirs, and would want equal rights in a world that would remain segregated. Though this concept of African Americans’ desire for racial purity persisted for much of the early twentieth century, the Second World War made the myth of African American indifference to full equality increasingly untenable. Anti-Semitic marital and sexual prohibitions of Nazi Nuremberg Laws, which exposed American anti-miscegenation laws to a comparative critique led to White Southern reformers’ understanding that African Americans desired desegregation as it meant social equality.
Many civil rights organizations functioned within the confines of the Jim Crow system during the early 1930s due to their belief of the myth of Black dedication to “racial purity.” Believing that Black Americans wanted no interaction with White Americans, organizations such as the Committee for Interracial Cooperation, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, and Association of Southern or for the Prevention of Lynching, targeted attaining equal rights, instead of integration, for African Americans. White sociologist Guy B. Johnson explained at the Committee for Interracial Cooperation’s annual meeting in 1935 that political equality did not lead to miscegenation, as “the races can go the whole way of political and civil equality without endangering their integrity.” This idea that African Americans were disinterested in sexual relations or intermarriage with White people helped White reformers make enormous strides in the South before the Second World War. Keeping interracial relations out of the equation eased the way for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare’s legal attack on African American suffrage, and eventually ensured voting rights of all Americans. However, by the mid-20th century, the announcement of anti-Semitic marriage prohibitions of Nazi Nuremberg Laws made this myth of African American dedication to racial purity increasingly indefensible.
The Nazi Party’s assault on Jewish German citizens’ marriage rights provided Black press with the opportunity to give American anti-miscegenation laws a comparative e critique, and shattered the myth of Black Americans’ desire for racial purity. Until Nazis transformed restrictive marriage laws into a hallmark of fascism, it was a theme White Southern reformers considered best avoided, though many left-leaning Black people such as W.E.B. Du Bois have been airing the issue for years. During the war, stories of restrictive Nazi marriage rights permeated the Black press with titles indicating a resemblance to anti-miscegenation laws in America. A Black newspaper labeled a story about the German authorities forcibly separating a non-Jewish man from his Jewish wife “Nazi Virginians Separate Husband from Wife by Court Order.” When coming up with discriminatory Nuremberg laws, Nazis actually studied the legislation of the United States, as America was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world. They were particularly fond of the segregationist laws enacted in the South, and their anti-miscegenation legislations are replications of American ones.
Using this comparison between American and Nazi anti-miscegenation laws, the Black press labeled racism synonymous as racism and hammered home the point that “Nazi Prejudice against Jews is like Dixie’s.” African American civil rights leaders pointed out how the democracy their country was fighting for was not extended to them. Poet Langston Hughes exclaimed, “How long I got to fight/BOTH HITLER-AND JIM CROW” in his poem “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” highlighting Black Americans’ need to fight for liberties both abroad and at home. Some African American writers even argued that discrimination in Nazi Germany was more tolerable than racism in the United States. Crisis, a newspaper published by the NAACP, lectured that the only essential difference between a Nazi mob hunting Jews in Europe and an American mob burning Black men at the stake in Mississippi is that “one is actually encouraged by its national government and the other is merely tolerated.” Hence, Nazi embrace of anti-miscegenation laws made it easier for critics of American marriage laws to portray discriminatory American laws as undemocratic and integral to fascism.
While White Southern reformers insisted that African Americans spurned social equality, the Black press identified freedom of marriage as an essential liberty, and equated it with segregation. Afro-American editors added the right of marriage to the rights of citizenship, stating that “If intermarriage is social equality, we are for it. Free people choose their own life-time companions without any interference from the State.” Freedom of marriage therefore became an essential democratic right in the middle of the war. However, African Americans advocated for freedom of marriage not so they can sleep with White Americans, but to take the first step towards desegregation. Lillian Smith, a social critic of the segregation laws, observed that whenever race relations are discussed, sexual relations move “arm in arm with the concept of segregation.” As restrictive marriage rights was a form of segregation, and became a hallmark of fascism during the war, leading Black newspapers advocated for intermarriage as the quickest way to solve the racial problem. Interracial marriage symbolised not only freedom of marriage, but freedom from segregation. Therefore, an attack on racially discriminatory marriage laws was an attack on segregation. During the war, Black Americans added a fifth freedom–freedom from segregation–to the Four Freedoms denominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hence, the comparison between Nazi and American anti-miscegenation laws during the war made it clear that what African Americans desired was an end to racial segregation, thus shattering the myth of African Americans’ desire for racial purity.
White reformers who previously used the myth of African Americans’ indifference towards segregation to achieve legal rights for Black Americans were now troubled as they could not accept the idea of integration. Though White Southern reformers wanted racial equality, many of them despised the idea of interracial sexual relations. Many White Southern moderate reformers, such as Virginius Dabney, a Richmond author and editor, phrased it, were “uncompromisingly in favour of justice to the Ne— and uncompromisingly against intermarriage.” Southerners did not want to fight for African Americans’ right to sleep with White women, and in turn became the ones who wanted to preserve their racial purity. They believed that once a small crack is made in the walls of social segregation, the walls will eventually be breached. At the same time, they wanted Black Americans to have equal rights. A troubled White lieutenant from the Deep South confessed, “I just want my coloured friend to vote;…I want him to know and enjoy the Four Freedoms. I will work and work hard to see that he–or his sons–gets these things, but–I do not want him to live next door to me; I do not want him to be my house guest; and I do not want him to dance with my daughter.” Therefore, White Southern reformers wanted African Americans to enjoy civil rights without intermarriage. However, how this limited equality was going to come about was a mystery they knew not how to solve.
Unable to accept African Americans’ desire for desegregation, White Southern reformers distanced themselves from reform efforts after the war as they were unable to bring themselves to attack the heart of the racial problem. Many Southern American soldiers who returned from the war’s integrated armies claimed that they did not want to see desegregation where they lived. An American soldier concluded that the White GIs simply could not stand to see a “nice looking White girl necking with a big Black Ne—. We’re not fighting for that kind of ‘democracy.’ We could have it without fighting if we wanted it.” White liberal Mississippian David Cohn tried to analyse this dilemma of the race issue for other Americans in an article called “How the South feels about the Race Problem.” In the article, Cohn argued that social equality in the South is insoluble because the Southerners would not accept interracial marriage, even though anti-miscegenation laws likely means less interracial relations, as Black Americans would be granted the same liberties their white partners have. Similarly, Eleanor Roosevelt, considered an over-the-top radical on the race question by Southern White people, argued that if freedom of marriage and other essential liberties were guaranteed to all people in this country, there will likely be less interracial relations. However, White Southern reformers maintained their stance on racial separation because of their widespread and deep-rooted antagonisms towards racial intermingling. Due to their inability to attack segregation, White Southern reformers ceased to be a potent force for reform during the war. Therefore, instead of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, or the Southern Regional Council, the NAACP took the torch of civil rights after 1945. Sadly, right when the revolution for civil rights was about to start, Southern White reformers retreated to the back lines.
Though Nazi anti-miscegenation laws that gave American ones a comparative critique widened the distance between African Americans and many of their White Southern liberal allies, it marked the beginning of the civil rights movement. The fight for segregation, strengthened by the comparison between Nazi and American anti-miscegenation laws, would continue into the 1950s and 60s. Not only would segregated marriage be attacked, Black leaders also argued for desegregation in education and public transport, in cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Montgomery bus boycott respectively. The civil rights era also brought along most states’ repeal of restrictive marriage laws in 1967 after the Loving v. Virginia decision. Finally, freedom from segregation became an essential right. It only took thirty years after the announcement of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, seventy years after Plessy v. Ferguson, and a century after the end of the Civil War.
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The Big Duck 