Basic Black Blog

Remembering the African American Holocaust Survivors

Guest editorial by Rev. Irene Monroe

This week, April 8- 12, marks the 27th annual observance of Holocaust Memorial Week. The week is about remembering not only the 6 million Jews murdered but also remembering the millions of allies, martyrs and victims who survived Nazi Germany’s reign of brutality.

The enormity of the mass slaughtering of Jews that took place— in ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, brothels filled with sex slaves and killing factories— is still being discovered as documents are unearthed. New scholarship revealed that, from 1933 to 1945, there were at least 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe. This represents a staggering increase, far exceeding the original guesstimate.

Thank goodness the stories of the millions of allies, martyrs and victims who survived Nazi Germany continue to be told. On April 11th, City of Cambridge Annual Commemoration of the Holocaust guest speaker is Holocaust survivor Edgar Krása. Krása will be telling his remarkable story of survival. Krása who ran the Veronique restaurant at Longwood in Brookline, MA. was born in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Prague in 1933 with his family.

In 1941, Krása was on the first train to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezín, now known as the Czech Republic, to help set up the garrison city into a concentration camp. Under Nazi control Krása was ordered to set up the kitchen that fed prisoners-of-war, and he worked there until 1944 when he was deported to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, Krása walked in the notorious Death March and survived it by feigning death after being shot.

Missing, however, from the annals of history are the documented stories and struggles of African Americans, straight and “queer.” Valaida Snow, captured in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and interned in a concentration camp for nearly two years, is one such story forgotten.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Valaida Snow came from a family of musicians and was famous for playing the trumpet. Named “Little Louis” after Louis Armstrong (who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, besides himself, of course), Snow played concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and China. On a return trip to Denmark after headlining at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Snow, the conductor of an all-women’s band, was arrested for allegedly possessing drugs and sent to an Axis internment camp for alien nationals in Wester-Faengle.

In pre-Hitler Germany, all-female orchestras were de-rigueur in many avant-garde entertainment clubs. These homo-social all-women’s bands created tremendous outrage during Hitler’s regime. Snow was sent to a concentration camp—not only because she was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time—but also because of her “friendships” with German women musicians. These friendships implied lesbianism.

Although laws against lesbianism had not been codified, and lesbians were not criminalized for their sexual orientations as gay men were, German women were nonetheless viewed as threat to the Nazi state and were fair game during SS raids on lesbian bars, sentenced by the Gestapo, sent to concentration camps, and branded with a black triangle. In fact, any German woman, lesbian, prostitute or heterosexual, not upholding her primary gender role — “to be a mother of as many Aryan babies as possible” — was deemed anti-social and hostile to the German state.

Because Nazis could not discern between the sexual affection and social friendship between straight and lesbian women, over time they dismissed lesbianism as a state and social problem, as long as both straight and lesbian women carried out the state’s mandate to procreate.

Nazi Germany’s extermination plan of gay men is a classic example of how politics informed their science. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code differentiated between the types of persecution non-German gay men received from German gay men because of a quasi-scientific and racist ideology of racial purity. “The polices of persecution carried out toward non-German homosexuals in the occupied territories differed significantly from those directed against Germans gays,” wrote Richard Plant in “The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.” “The Aryan race was to be freed of contagion; the demise of degenerate subjects peoples was to be hastened.”

Hans J. Massaquoi, former Ebony Magazine editor, and the son of an African diplomat and white German mother, in his memoir “Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany,” depicts a life of privilege until his father returned to his native Liberia. Like all non-Aryans, Massaquoi faced constant dehumanization and the threat of death by Gestapo executioners. “Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with ‘inferior’ non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin,” he wrote. Consequently, the Gestapo rounded up and forcibly sterilized and subjected many non-Aryans to medical experiments, while other just simply mysteriously disappeared.

There was no systematic program for elimination of people of African descent in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 because their number were few, but their abuses in German-occupied territories, like the one in which Snow was captured, were great and far-reaching.

After 18 months of imprisonment, Snow was one of the more fortunate blacks to make it out of Nazi Germany, released as an exchange prisoner. She was, however, both psychologically and physically scarred from the ordeal and never fully recovered. Snow attempted to return to performing but her spark, tragically, was gone.

Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes – “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American , queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”

The views expressed are those of the author.

Is there a politically correct way for Tarantino to portray black slavery?

Jamie Foxx as Django and Leonardo diCaprio as Calvin Candie in a scene from Django Unchained. (The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures).

Guest editorial by Rev. Irene Monroe

2013 is making it difficult to avoid one of America’s greatest sins—slavery. We’ve just marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and a plethora of films, documentaries and TV specials are scheduled to address slavery.

One blockbuster hit that’s playing in cinemas now, and is likely to walk away with several Golden Globes and Oscars, is Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

Django Unchained depicts a slave-turned-bounty hunter (Jamie Foxx) who fearlessly treks across the U.S. to find his wife (Kerry Washington) in order to rescue her from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The film is classic Tarantino; this time an homage to the spaghetti western with romance and revenge narrative. Tarantino set the story in the most unlikely of places— America’s Deep South before the Civil War in 1858.

Tarantino is known as the “King of Carnage,” and his films’ aestheticized depictions of violence (which he calls “movie violence”) is both cruelly disturbing yet undeniably entertaining. In giving his view of Django Unchained, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote,  ”A troubling and important movie about slavery and racism…Like Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.”

It is Tarantino’s playfulness set in the troubling historical environment that is still unsettling many Americans. Leave it to Tarantino—he’s challenged us to ask a number of difficult questions:

Is it politically incorrect to depict American slavery in a playfully entertaining way?

Is there a politically correct way to depict American slavery?

While some will contest that Tarantino is being well…Tarantino, and he means no disrespect, others argue that his privilege as a well-respected moneymaking white heterosexual male filmmaker gives him carte blanche to recklessly express his creative juices even if it reinscribes stereotypes that many feel Django does.

But Tarantino pushes his critics back stating his objective in making Django is to stir a conversation about slavery because America won’t. And he takes his making of Django to heart.

“It’s one thing to write on the page, ‘Cotton field in the background while two white characters are drinking lemonade, 100 slaves picking cotton in the background,’” Tarantino told “Nightline. “It’s another thing to plant that cotton and put 100 black folks in slave costumes broiling under the hot sun picking cotton. That can get to your soul a little bit.”

In many African American communities Tarantino’s films got to their souls, too, and it received mixed reviews from a tepid nod to expressions of outrage. And those outraged by the film feel Django Unchained needs to be locked up, bound, buried if not burned because the film uses the inhumanity of slavery as a backdrop and it dishonors those who have suffered under its reign.

Then there’s the liberal use of the n-word in the film which many will find deplorable. When asked about it, Tarantino told Cynthia McFadden on ABC’s “Nightline,” “I don’t think anybody is actually going out there saying that we used the word more excessively than it was used in 1858 in Mississippi. And if that’s not the case, then they can shut up.”

But one critic in particular who won’t shut up about Django is renown African American filmmaker Spike Lee whose gripes resonate for many and were recorded in the New York Times.

I can’t speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee said. “The only thing I can say is it’s disrespectful to my ancestors, to see that film.” Days later on Twitter he tweeted, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

American slavery continues to be a difficult topic to talk about. And it’s avoided at all cost, particularly if not spun to appeal to white audiences.

For example, the Queen of Daytime talk, Oprah Winfrey tried to tackle the topic with her production of the 1998 film  Beloved based on Toni Morrison’s novel by the same name. It was a box office failure. The failure is speculated to be that the film didn’t appeal to white audiences, casting them in a negative light. Some critics contest that the movie was too serious, not entertaining enough, and was mind-numbing to both black and white audiences of all ages. The weekend Beloved opened it was beat out by the horror flick Bride of Chucky.

The 1977 hit television series Roots based on Alex Haley’s novel by the same name was an international success, nominated for 36 Emmys and winning nine. It was intentionally written to win over white viewers.

“Familiar television actors like American (sic) actor Lorne Greene were chosen for the white, secondary roles, to reassure audiences. The white actors were featured disproportionately in network previews. For the first episode, the writers created a conscience-stricken slave captain (Edward Asner), a figure who did not appear in Haley’s novel but was intended to make white audiences feel better about their historical role in the slave trade,” the Museum of Broadcast Communications reported.

Tarantino’s creative rendering of it, albeit understandably troublesome, sheds a disturbing light on our culture’s ability to willingly sit alone in a dark theater for two plus hours watching an entertaining film about American slavery than to voluntarily sit in a lit room face-to-face with each other and talk about it.

American slavery is an American story.  And we all have ownership of it.

Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes – “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.

Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American , queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”