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6 Antisemitism and Racism during the War Antisemitism had increased noticeably in Ala­ bama during the years preceding the war, driven by the participation of north­ ern Jews in the Scottsboro trials and the antisemitic rhetoric emanating from Nazi Germany, and such bigotry increased after the war began, especially after the Ameri­ can entry. The ongoing racial activism by dissatisfied Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans, federal antidiscriminatory agencies such as the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), and anxiety over the war exacerbated both racial suspicion and antisemitism in the state and through­ out the South as racial reactionaries quickly pointed to connections between Jews and blacks in either civil rights agitation or interracial endeavors. Moreover, as the Nazi persecution of the Jews increased, transforming into a policy of mass murder by 1941, so too did the awareness of antisemitism in the United States. Although Leonard Dinnerstein notes in his seminal work on Ameri­ can antisemitism, “outbursts of antisemitism were less frequent in the South during the 1940s than they were elsewhere in the country,” such bigotry persisted. Because of this, Dinnerstein observes, “south­ ern Jews watched themselves carefully.”1 Such was the case in Ala­ bama where not only did Jews have to worry about local antisemitic activity, which included a Holocaust-­ denying Catholic priest, but also about the reactions of white racists to Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ can protests against discrimination. Birmingham syndicated columnist John Temple Graves, like Grover Hall in Montgomery, worried over the spread of antisemitism, especially when he believed that it had increased in Ala­ bama and his beloved Southland. In Janu­ ary 1939 he wrote that “lately this writer has been shocked to hear several men who look upon themselves as leading citizens and highly civilized human beings express an unblushing antipathy to certain other men for the sole reason they are Jews.” Graves wrote in his daily column that these men “are unashamed of their bigotry, their stupidity, their un-­Ameri­canism. Consciously or not, they have surrendered to Adolf Hitler.”2 In late 1940 Graves 186 / Chapter 6 spoke to the Layman’s League at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church and made similar comments: “how strange that some of those who are considering themselves most patriotic today and associating that patriotism with a new venting of their hatred of the Jewish people, as if the country about which they are being patriotic was not the United States but Germany.”3 By early 1941 Graves noted that “news that Jew-­ baiting and Jew-­ hating is on the increase in some parts of the South, in­ clud­ ing this one, must be making ­ Adolf Hitler very, very happy.” He called the “Jew-­ baiting” in the South “more un-­ Ameri­ can than anywhere else because there are fewer members of the Jewish race here to make a race problem.”4 Like many white south­ erners, Graves was vitally concerned with race and race relations. After it became apparent that the United States was moving toward war, Graves began to argue more strenuously against domestic crusades during a time of crisis, an argument directed specifically against Af­ ri­ can Ameri­can demands for civil rights. After a reader suggested that Graves’s criticism of “Jew-­ baiters” amounted to a crusade against antisemitism and called on him to cease discussing the matter, Graves responded by declaring, “Reason totters! That a suggestion for a ‘moratorium’ on domestic crusades should call for a halt to standing up for the first principles of America is beyond sense,” apparently not regarding Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ can demands for civil rights as “standing up for the first principles of America.”5 Reasoning and Ameri­ can principles, in fact, had little to do with Graves’s, and most white south­erners’, stance toward Af­ri­can Ameri­cans. Graves’s response simply reflected the willful and intellectually bankrupt disregard that white south­ erners had for Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ can aspirations and rights. Moreover, his use of “race” to describe Jews not only demonstrated the confused incoherence of south­ ern racial ideology but also south­ erners’ lazy thinking regarding the subject, much like their dissonance concerning Nazi and south­ ern racism. Despite Graves’s criticism of domestic crusades, there was no coordinated, indigenous movement at the time—either locally or regionally—to promote greater civil rights for Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans, and apart from the Communists no black leader in the state actively advocated social equality or desegregation prior to the war. White...

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