A Black Newspaper Drew Hitler as the Klan in 1933

They knew racial terror when they saw it.

Hitler’s drawing on the page 6 of Journal and Guide newspaper | Image Source: USHMM (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

On April 8, 1933, readers opened the Journal and Guide in Norfolk, Virginia. Adolf Hitler stared back at them from the page.

Hitler had been Germany’s chancellor for 68 days. In much of America, he could still be treated as a foreign strongman, a European problem, a man whose danger belonged across the ocean. The Journal and Guide reached for a symbol much closer to home.

Above the drawing sat two words.

“Another Klansman.”

One week earlier, the timing had become harder to miss. The Nazi Party staged a national boycott of Jewish businesses and the offices of Jewish doctors and lawyers. Storm troopers stood at doors and told Germans where they should not shop. The Norfolk paper looked at that new regime and reached for something its readers knew from home.

A new ruler in Berlin looked familiar in Black America.

The full page of the April 8, 1933 edition of Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia) | Image Source: USHMM (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

The Shadow Did the Talking

The cartoon showed Hitler in Nazi uniform, wearing a swastika armband. One hand held a whip. The other lifted a swastika on a short pole. Behind him, his shadow became a hooded Klansman with the same whip and a burning cross.

That was the whole argument.

To Black readers, the hood already meant something. The same was true of the burning cross and the idea of a chosen enemy blamed for a nation’s problems. Black readers did not need the years ahead to finish before they understood the threat on the page.

Cartoons work fast, which made the choice even sharper. Long editorials could be debated. A political drawing arrived before a person had time to pretend the comparison was complicated. The Journal and Guide used one image to say what a cautious paragraph might have dulled.

That is why the cartoon still bothers people. It caught Nazi racism while many Americans could keep it at a polite distance. The point came through in one glance because the paper was speaking to people who knew how racial power announced itself before it became fully official.

Black Editors Had Been Reading This Country for Years

That kind of speed came from practice. Editors had spent years reading America from the side that official language tried to clean up.

The Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American were major institutions in Black life. By the 1930s, the Courier had a national circulation of almost 200,000 and ranked among the country’s top Black newspapers. A paper could travel farther than its masthead. Copies moved through train stations, barbershops, church halls and family rooms.

The work was practical. Black newspapers told readers which court cases mattered, which officials were lying and where jobs might open. A story about a lynching could sit beside a school fight or a labor notice because all of it shaped daily life.

This gave the Black press a different kind of discipline. It had to notice what danger looked like before official America found a polite label for it. When white papers softened a mob attack or treated segregation as a local custom, Black papers had to tell readers what the facts meant.

Editors had no reason to treat racial violence as strange. In a courtroom, order could steer a Black defendant toward a verdict chosen in advance. After a mob had already done its work, a sheriff could sound calm for the newspaper quote. Governors could praise law while protecting the people who broke it. So when Germany began turning race into state policy, Black journalists had a working vocabulary for the danger.

The Comparison Was Already Moving

Other Black papers were moving there too.

In 1933, the Pittsburgh Courier ran the headline “Hitler Learns from America.” The Baltimore Afro-American later called Nazi Germany and the white South “mental brothers.” In another moment, Black writers used the phrase “American Nazism” to describe the oppression Black people faced at home.

Those lines can sound startling now because hindsight makes early clarity look easy. That clarity took nerve in 1933. Hitler was still new to power. Many Americans had room for caution, diplomacy and the lazy hope that the worst parts of a movement might stay contained.

Black writers had fewer reasons to trust containment. A government could target a group and call the campaign national renewal. Rights could shrink through forms, courts, school rules and employment bans. Neighbors could learn to treat humiliation as public duty.

No one in those newsrooms knew the full future. That would be too much to claim. Their point was narrower and stronger. They recognized racial logic while it was still gathering power.

The Same News Looked Different From a Black Desk

Large white owned newspapers did report on Germany. Americans could read about Hitler, Nazi street violence, anti-Jewish measures and diplomatic concern. The story was available in print.

A printed report can still miss the shape of the danger.

Foreign desks could frame German events as party politics. Reports could describe a boycott without asking what kind of country teaches citizens to shun their neighbors. Cabinet changes could draw more attention than the people being pushed out of public life.

Decades later, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s work on American newspapers would push back on the easy claim that Americans simply had no information. What people did with that information mattered more. News can sit on a page while the meaning stays safely blurred.

Black papers often read those events through another lens. Their readers knew what happened when rights vanished one office at a time. A denied job, a blocked school, a separate waiting room or a closed ballot box could look small to outsiders. Together, those rules taught people where they were allowed to stand.

That experience changed the meaning of foreign news. The Black press could connect Nazi racism to American racism more directly because its readers lived with a country that had already made exclusion sound normal.

A Webpage Can Disappear Before People Notice

A recent example shows how quickly people get nervous when public memory starts telling the racial truth. In 2025, the Pentagon’s anti-DEI sweep removed or flagged online material tied to military history. The Associated Press reported that pages involving Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen were caught in the purge. Navajo Code Talker material was also removed before some of it was restored after criticism.

The process had a strange modern detail. Officials told AP that the department relied largely on AI commands to search for keywords across military websites. If a story or photo hit one of those terms, the system added “DEI” into the web address and flagged it for removal. Old public history was being sorted by a search tool that did not understand the people inside the record.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell later said, “History is not DEI.” The sentence became necessary because the system had already treated parts of history like suspicious content.

For ordinary people, this is where memory becomes practical. A teacher looking for a lesson link finds an error page. Students writing about World War II lose the official source their school trusts. Family members searching service records may wonder why one veteran’s story is easy to find while another has to be defended first.

The Pentagon website error belongs in its own category. That leaves a smaller and more familiar question. Who gets treated as political when their history enters a public record?

That is a hard place to stand. Speak too early, and people call it exaggeration. Wait until the archive agrees, and the same people call it obvious.

Sources

*https://momentmag.com/black-press-stood-by-jews-against-the-nazis/*

*https://www.ushmm.org/teach/holocaust-lesson-plans/black-press-newspaper-coverage-of-the-holocaust-history-unfolded*

*https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-boycott-of-jewish-businesses*

*https://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/courier.html*

*https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/book/chw01/chw01_07.pdf*

*https://time.com/5327279/ushmm-americans-and-the-holocaust/*

*https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-dei-diversity-social-media-purge-fb15996733408a8122a97acd3baa6820*