W. E. B. Du Bois: "A Forum of Fact and Opinion: Race Prejudice in Nazi Germany"

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the best known African-American activists of the twentieth century. During his many decades of writing and speaking, he drew attention to the oppression of Blacks in America and the “colored races” of the world. As a crusader for civil rights, he denounced “Jim Crow” laws and other forms of oppression against Blacks. He also criticized some Black American leaders in their reluctance to challenge racism in the United States. Du Bois played a key role in setting up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, encouraging a sense of pride among African Americans, and promoting higher education.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Du Bois also addressed antisemitism in Nazi Germany.¹ Beginning in 1933, he wrote in The Crisis: A Record for the Darker Races, the NAACP’s monthly journal, to attack the Nazis for their treatment of German Jews.² Like other African American commentators, he also noted that it was hypocritical of white Americans to denounce Adolf Hitler while ignoring the ill-treatment of Blacks in America.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Du Bois witnessed the Nazi persecution of the Jews first hand. After receiving a grant from the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, a German-American organization, he traveled to Germany to research industrial education in 1935–1936. During this period, he wrote the featured article, published in a December 1936 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier. It provides both an eyewitness account of German antisemitism in the Nazi era, as well as commentary on the contrasts between racism in the United States and kind of racial prejudice he experienced in Germany as a Black man.

Scholars continue to debate whether Du Bois himself held antisemitic views and whether his sometimes ambivalent attitude towards Germany’s Jews was common in Black American communities at the time. Like most major thinkers, he held complex and sometimes contradictory opinions on various topics. For example, while he criticized German racism, he expressed great appreciation for German culture, including classic works of opera and philosophy.³ Whatever his views, Du Bois continued to write about the Nazi's persecution of the Jews, and the situation in Germany clearly influenced his views on race in America.

Du Bois’ interest in the plight of the Jews in Europe continued well after his visit to Germany in 1936. During World War II, he published several articles that addressed racism and antisemitism. In the years following the war, Du Bois returned to Europe, including a memorable visit to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.⁴ Witnessing the ruins of the ghetto, he reflected upon the origins of racism—and tried to make sense of the destruction it had unleashed in Europe and the United States.⁵

For example, writing in the May 1933 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois argued, "It seems impossible that in the middle of the 20th century a country like Germany could turn to race hate as a political expedient... The absurdity of it in the case of Germany is too patent to recall. One has only to think of a hundred names like Mendelssohn, Heine, and Einstein, to remember but partially what the Jew has done for German civilization. It reminds the American Negro that after all race prejudice has nothing to do with accomplishment or desert, with genius or ability. It is an ugly, dirty thing. It feeds on envy and hate." "Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois," The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, May 1933, 116–117.

See "Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois," The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, July 1933, 164–165, 165.

Du Bois likely grew interested in German culture as a young Harvard graduate student at the University of Berlin in the 1890s. He made four visits to Germany in his lifetime. His work became known to at least some of the Nazi leadership; Alfred Rosenberg in his widely-published Mythus of the Twentieth Century negatively described Du Bois as a leader in a worldwide revolt against the white race.

See the related item in Experiencing History, W. E. B. Du Bois: "The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto."

For more Black American voices from the Nazi era, see the Experiencing History collection, "African Americans and World War II."

All 14 Items in the American Witnesses and the Third Reich Collection

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