White Devils, Satanic Jews: The Nation of Islam From Fard to Farrakhan

This article explores how the American white far right—including the Christian Front, Christian Mobilizers, and Gerald L. K. Smith—helped shape the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) antisemitism during the 1930s and 1940s. It also examines the strong influence of Harlem’s pro-Axis Black Fuehrers on the NOI during World War II. Nation of Islam and white far-right propaganda were remarkably similar. Both embraced the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, denied or minimized the Holocaust, and were virulently anti-Zionist. After elaborating on the context within which the Nation of Islam created its ideology, the article explores how the NOI, which originally identified whites, Christians and Jews as devils, adopted an almost singular emphasis on Jews as agents of Satan, the Star of David replacing the cross as the symbol of iniquity. Jews were not victims, but Blacks’ major victimizers; never slaves, but dominant enslavers; not progressives, but those who impeded Blacks’ advance. Instead of giving the world Hebrew Scripture, they converted it into the “Poison Book,” from the beginning crafting a “dirty religion,” which blessed the subjugation of black people, and denied God’s promise to the “Real Children of Israel.” These “imposter Jews” concealed that the Hebrew Bible was a prophecy about “the so-called Negroes of America”—the true “Chosen of God”—who would be in bondage for 400 years, strangers in a strange land.

Flirting with the Right

In this chapter, the role of anti-Semitism in the Coudert probe is explored. Of the teachers and staff targeted by the investigation, a disproportionate number were Jewish, prompting critics to argue that the inquiry motives were tainted by anti-Jewish bigotry. The chapter places the investigation in the context of growing racism and anti-Semitism on the streets and in the schools of the city, led by such organizations as the Christian Front and the German-American Bund.

Controversy: Backlash Against the Catholic Revival

The eruption of anti-Catholic feeling that reached its climax around 1950 is best understood as a backlash against what was regarded as undue Catholic influence in politics, public morality, and general social policy. Although it testified in a negative way to the reality of the Catholic Revival, it came as a shock to Catholics who did not think they had given just cause for complaint. Their predominant reaction was an impassioned rejection of the charges against them. At the same time, however, reasonable Catholics wished to mitigate the existing tensions by removing any grounds for legitimate criticism. Hence a more irenic and accommodationist line of thought developed, which, though based on the natural law, set in motion tendencies not fully consonant with the premises of the the Catholic Revival. To understand how these crosscurrents affected the ideological context of Catholic higher education, we turn first to the anti-Catholic backlash. Suspicion of and hostility toward the Catholic church, which had subsided after the Al Smith campaign of 1928, began to reawaken in the mid-thirties. Political liberals, a group which included secular humanists as well as Protestants and Jews, were the first affected. On the domestic scene, Father Coughlin’s shift to an anti-New Deal position in 1935-36 alerted them to the fascist potentialities of his influence. Over the next few years, their fears were reinforced by his growing extremism on the menace of Communism, his increasingly open anti-Semitism, and the sometimes violent behavior of his “Christian Front” followers, especially in New York City. Internationally, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, was the decisive issue. To American liberals, the war was a clear-cut contest between fascism and democracy, and the church had shown its true colors by rallying to the fascists. But most American Catholics, deeply shocked by the widespread desecration of churches and slaughter of priests that marked the early months of the war, saw the struggle as a conflict between Christian civilization and atheistic Communism. They bitterly resented the indifference displayed by American liberals to the persecution of the church in Spain.