The Effect of the Jewish Holocaust on the Civil Rights Movement in the US
During WWII, the Nazis killed approximately six million Jews in Europe in a genocide
known as the Jewish Holocaust. Over the past decades, there was a close association between the
local search for racial reforms with larger international entities, and this can be clearly
understood by studying how the Jewish Holocaust shaped the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
African-Americans found connections between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow soon after Adolf
Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933 (Webb, 2019). These African-Americans helped
expose the hypocrisy of the Americans (The Whites) that scrutinized the persecution of the Jews
by the Nazis while tolerating brutal discrimination against the black population in their nation.
Immediately after the United States started dealing with the forces of fascism, African-
Americans activists tried harder to highlight their comparison between Jim Crow and Nazism to
show and warn people that the US was disregarding the democratic ideals that it was supposed to
be fighting against. Therefore, to achieve this objective, the African-American activists
continued to conjure the Jewish Holocaust as an effective strategy for promoting racial equality.
For the longest time, White supremacy and racism presented challenges and barriers to reaching
the full potential of America’s democratic ideals. Hence the African-American activists that were
championing the campaigns to fight the problems associated with racial inequality evoked the
holocaust in eradicating inequality through the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
