Heather Ashby
University of Southern California – Dornsife College
Department of History
Ph.D. Program
Recipient of Graduate Research Award, 2011
Preliminary research report:
I used the generous grant I received from the 2020 Genocide Research cluster to conduct
research at the Library of Congress at Washington, D.C. and London at the British National
Archives in Kew and the British Library during the summer and fall. Both sites provided
valuable information regarding the activities of Black radicals in Africa, the Caribbean, and the
United States. With the funds I received, I conducted research on how Black radicals within the
African diaspora compared the treatment that people of African descent faced under colonialism
to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Black radicals articulated these connections
in newspapers, conferences, and speeches during the 1930s. This research is part of my
dissertation on radical activism between World War I and World War II.
The primary source material I uncovered supported my hypothesis that we can see the
antecedents of genocide by examining the way Black radicals compared racism and fascism. In
the London, I examined the files of the British Colonial Office, Foreign Office, Home Office,
and the British government’s dossiers on people of African descent. The file on Kenyan
Johnston Kenyatta proved especially fruitful. The British government provided a summary of a
speech Kenyatta gave in Hyde Park in November 1938. In the speech, Kenyatta stated he was
excited to be speaking and participating in a protest against the treatment of Jews in Germany.
Kenyatta would become the first president and prime minister of a newly independent Kenya
after World War II. This particular event underscored the growing fear taking shape during the
late 1930s regarding the political and social situation in Nazi Germany.
The connections between racism and fascism can be seen in the World Congress against
Racism and Anti-Semitism that was held in Paris in 1937. There is little information about this
conference in secondary literature, and it would have gone unnoticed in my research.
Fortunately I was researching the activities of the African American communist Louise
Thompson Patterson. Patterson, who actively spoke out against global racial and economic
oppression, served as a delegate to the gathering. Currently, I am working on acquiring more
information about this event, which would greatly aid my research.
At the Library of Congress, I went through Black newspapers from Africa, the United
States and Europe. I discovered the increasing discussion about the links between forced labor,
racism, and fascism in Black publications over the course of the 1930s, as well as discussion of
the treatment Jewish people encountered from the German government. I examined the South
African newspapers, South African Worker and Umsebenzi, the African American newspaper,
Chicago Defender, and the African diasporic newspaper, Negro Worker. The idea for this
project originally came from the Negro Worker. I noticed that the newspaper covered the rise of
the Nazis in Germany. The headquarters for the newspaper were in Hamburg during the early
1930s. As a result, the editors were able to cover the emergence of the Nazis personally. The
editor, George Padmore, was in the Negro Worker’s headquarters when the Nazis raided the
office and arrested him.
I have additional research to complete for this project before I present my findings next
semester. The documents I analyzed in London and Washington, D.C. have led me to seek
additional archival information. I plan to conduct research in New York and Atlanta to follow
up on leads I discovered in the archives. In particular, I would like to gain more information
about the World Congress against Racism and Anti-Semitism. Furthermore, political
relationships took shape between Jewish and Black activists. I plan to explore these connections
further over the next two months. This will allow me to present a vivid picture that will support
my argument and highlight the ways Black and Jewish activists mobilized together to challenge
racism, forced labor in colonial Africa, fascism, and Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany.
With this project, I hope to demonstrate how an analysis of the writings produced by
people of African descent between World War I and World War II discussing the connections
between Nazi treatment of Jewish people and European and American treatment of Black people
in colonial Africa and the United States can shed light on how and why genocide arose in certain
places and not in other regions during this period.